[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-07-22)

[Walter Bender]

1. Walter Bender and David Cavallo spent two days in Buenos Aires with
educ.ar. Meetings were held with local groups on local software and content
development and deepening of thinking on possibilities for learning with
laptops. Walter and David gave a talk to and answered questions from a
group of about 200 people organized by educ.ar.

2. Samuel (SJ) Klein, has joined OLPC as Manager of Content. SJ is
interested in developing collaborative knowledge communities; most recently
he worked on the Global Voices and Net Dialogue initiatives at Harvard Law
School's Berkman Center. Previously he helped launch Idiom Inc., a
Boston-area translation company.  SJ is a strong advocate of the free
licensing of information, and has been actively involved in Wikipedia for
three years, founding the project's first newsletter and translator
network, and organizing this year's international Wikimedia conference in
Cambridge.

3. SJ spoke on a panel at the Boston-area TiE (The Indian Entrepreneurs)
group Friday night at MIT. Fellow presenters were Ram Mehra of the Ekal
Vidyalaya Foundation (ekalvidya.org), and Vikas Taneja, Director of BCG and
an active part of Pratham (pratham.org). The panel was moderated by Raman
Sivasubramanyam of Merrill Lynch. Both Ekal and Pratham have great
collaboration potential, including strong local networks of enthusiastic
and non-traditional teachers. Ekal supports “A People's Movement” of
student teachers who work with younger students, focusing on areas with no
schools, and on teaching good habits, hygiene, politeness, trade skills,
and music. Pratham has developed its own curriculum in 13 local languages;
they are eager to share their curriculum and—perhaps through OLPC—connect
with networks in other states where the other 12 official languages are
spoken.

4. Rebecca Allen is currently designing and directing a project to
transform the XO logo into a three-dimensional computer-generated
character. The character may appear as the laptop is first turned on,
welcoming new users and providing a friendly, helpful presence to introduce
the laptop and its features.

5. Ottawa, Canada, hosts the largest gathering of Linux and free and open
source developers from over 30 countries for a full week each year, with
three events: the Desktop developer's meeting, the Linux Kernel summit
(which is by- invitation only), where issues around the Linux kernel are
discussed, and the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS), which is four days of
talks and hallway discussions. These meetings play a central role in
coordination among Linux projects, since most development not centrally
developed as on other platforms.

Red Hat was well represented: Chris Blizzard attended the Desktop
developer's meeting, David Woodhouse attended both the Linux Kernel summit
and OLS.
David Zeuthen gave a talk at OLS on the Linux hardware abstraction layer
(HAL).

Jim Gettys led a Birds of a Feather session at OLS to discuss OLPC; it was
well attended and there is growing interest in the community on helping
out: people in the audience who have received working hardware has make the
project feel “real” to the software community, and is a great aid in
engaging their interests on problems of direct interest to OLPC.

-walter

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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org