[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-12-1)

[Jim Gettys]

Weekend

A weekly update of One Laptop per Child December 1, 2008

Give One Get One

OLPC is adding two new donor options this weekend, Give 100 and Give
1000, which allow individuals, groups or companies to send laptops
anywhere in the world. The difference between G100and G1000is not
price-per-laptop but the support that OLPC will offer afterward
(detailed at laptop.org). However, there is a pricing difference for the
50 least developed nations and the rest of the world, a per laptop cost
of $219 and $259, respectively. We also added a mechanism to acknowledge
somebody (with either a physical or electronic card) in whose behalf you
gave a laptop. The general flow between OLPC and Amazon is illustrated
in the attached PDF.

Development

Papua New Guinea: It was a momentous week for the ongoing effort in
Oceania as Papua New Guinea (PNG) embraced OLPC to boost basic education
and economic development in this poor South Pacific nation. In a keynote
speech before a major international conference in the capital of Port
Moresby, the island country's acting prime minister, Dr. Puka Temu, told
attendees that OLPC “will bring enormous benefits,” to PNG. It “will
cover over 7,000 educational institutions from elementary to secondary
schools,” Temu said, and “benefit over 1,160,000 children and 35,700
teachers." 

Several small-scale pilot projects, deploying OLPC-donated machines,
have been underway in PNG since earlier this year.

In his opening address to the 16th session of the ACP-EU Joint
Parliament Assembly - the world's only multi-national parliament with
members from 78 developing nations, plus the EU – Dr. Temu said OLPC
would "transform this country and greatly narrow the digital divide."
Later the same day, PNG's education secretary, Dr. Joseph Pagelio,
announced that PNG would commence deployment with a 10,000-unit purchase
next year. As donor funding comes on line, Pagelio added, PNG expects to
go to sustainable scale with 200,000 XOs in 2010. 

PNG's population is about 6.25 million; about half of whom are under 19.
Eighty-five per cent live in remote highland or island communities where
the main industry is subsistence farming. There are a million-plus
children of school age in the country. "About half of our school-age
children are not in any formal education,” Pagelio said. “Of the rest,
half are in church schools, and the other half are in the state
education system. There is a great challenge to increase access to
quality resources within PNG schools. Our rural schools are especially
disadvantaged by transport costs, lack of infrastructure in
telecommunications and electricity, lack of technical support and of
course lack of funding." 

The announcements were the result of sustained advocacy by OLPC on three
continents in recent months, starting with meetings held in New York in
September between Nicholas, Barry Vercoe, and a PNG delegation led by
Dr. Temu. This was followed by efforts at the European Union in Brussels
by Walter De Brouwer, and finally in PNG itself by Michael Hutak, OLPC
Director, Oceania, who has worked closely with the government this past
week in Port Moresby. 

With a political commitment safe for now, Michael is already planning
next steps. He will convene an informal partners group in PNG next
January to open a dialogue, and build some trust, transparency and basic
coordination. "PNG is huge challenge," Hutak writes, "but with this
announcement we now have a huge chance to tackle its problems." 


Technology

Give One Get One Updates:

Most OLPC employees are now involved in idea generation and execution to
help get the word out for Give One Get One, as well as the new Give 100
and Give 1000 programs. The group at 1CC made a number of updates to the
website, wiki pages, and Amazon storefront to help with the messaging.
Frances Hopkins worked on some specific Give One Get One activities,
contacting various people who have posted OLPC or XO related videos on
YouTube and inviting them to the OLPC group. This group increased to 14
members by the end of the day.

Kim Quirk, Adam Holt, Gustavo Mariotto and Giulia D'Amico planned out
the short term warehouse, distribution and fulfillment for the Christmas
deliveries of international orders. They are also working on the longer
term plans for continued shipments and deliveries. Adam will be leading
the shipping effort from the OLPC-Europe offices to kick the program off
the ground.

Software Development:

The very short holiday week gave the software team time to start
formalizing our goals for the 9.1 software release next spring. Our
chief goal is to remove the major obstacles to wider deployment of XOs
in countries with which we are already working. Consequently, our major
concerns include the area of activation and security management,
improved power management, enhanced localization and translation, and
updating our code base to Fedora 10, which was released this week. We
will also be looking for field input from the XS School Server release
0.5 to plan additional updates required to support our deployability
goals.

Now that the G1G1 kickoff activities are in place we’re working on the
review and deployment of updated Web site technologies, so we can better
continue to communicate the OLPC message online effectively.

Morgan Collett landed the Network Manager 0.7 change to
sugar-presence-service, and worked on general reliability of
sugar-presence-service. He assisted with debugging a tubes problem in
joyride and Fedora, and updated joyride to the latest telepathy versions
as part of the F-10 rebase.

Sayamindu Dasgupta represented OLPC in FOSS.IN, one of the largest
Free/Open Source conferences in India. Apart from giving a talk on Sugar
and other parts of the OLPC software stack, he had a chance to interact
with a large segment of the Indian Fedora community. Sayamindu also
started to look if the traditional Nepali keyboard layout is
implementable in SCIM or not, and helped the Pashto and Dari
localization teams (part of the OLPC efforts in Afghanistan) deal with
changes in responsibility.

We started progress towards 0.6. Douglas Bagnall rebased ejabberd
patches on 2.0.2 and tested things with a Postgres backend, wrapping up
his work for us this season. Martin focused effort and time on initial
design work for lease management facilities and general
Moodle-as-an-education-tool.

Mitch Bradley completed coding the security code for the multicast NAND
updater and is testing it.

This week Erik Garrison bootstrapped a lightweight Fedora 9 system image
for the XO using rinse (the descendant of rpmstrap). Next week Erik will
integrate rinse into the xodist tools [1] so that they may be used to
produce both Debian and Fedora XO images from package lists, assemble a
minimal Fedora 10 system image using rinse and/or mock, and produce a
lightweight Fedora XFCE spin which can be flashed onto the XO NAND and
booted without use of an SD card.

Walter Bender's Sugar Digest can be found at:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-November/010148.html

Networking:

Javier worked with Michail on a design and specification document for a
Mesh Link Manager (MLM). This is the functionality required to properly
manage mesh network interfaces. It is implemented as a set of extensions
to Network Manager. As such, it decouples automated behavior (which is
currently hard-coded into NM in Sugar) from the required network
management primitives, allowing for much greater end-user flexibility.

Learning

Paraguay: Juliano Bittencourt worked with the local team from Paraguay
Educa to deepen their pedagogical model and to prepare their teacher
development program. Educa (Weekend, November 23rd) was created by a
group of three young people, Cecilia Alcalá, Raúl Gutiérres and Miguel
Martin. They have gathered considerable support and donations from local
and international organizations. They also are ably supported by Vicenta
Cano, their education manager. Vicenta has solid experience in the
implementation of projects for the ministry of education, and a long
background in the spread of constructionist ideas in Paraguay. 

Another of Paraguay Educa’s strengths is its highly capable teacher
training group, which unites people from disparate backgrounds, from
technology experts to classroom teachers. Juliano worked with them to
make sure the development program was not exclusively focused on
technology. He also introduced some ideas of what other countries have
done to make the teachers feel more comfortable with the machine. The
first of Educa’s teacher-training programs is scheduled to begin
December 9th.

Juliano travelled to the countryside to reconnoiter Caacupé, where the
first 4000 laptops, donated by SWIFT, will be deployed. Teachers and
school principals there say that one of the main local challenges to
education is the high percentage of students living with someone other
than their parents, who often must leave their children behind as they
leave this very poor community in search of work, often as far away as
Spain. In some schools, 60 percent or more of the pupils live with their
grandparents or even a teenaged brother or sister. This obstacle,
however, may turn out to be an opportunity. The coordinators are
thinking of how to use the situation as a theme for the development of
projects with the teachers.

Cambridge: Samuel Dalembert, the 6-11 starting center for the NBA’s
Philadelphia 76ers, is a devotee of technology whose personal foundation
supports a variety of youth projects. Samuel attended the OLPC country
meetings in May. Recently, he was watching an episode of “House” on
television when he saw a G1G1 spot. Samuel immediately volunteered to do
a commercial for us, too. He will also make sure that XOs are deployed
to support his projects in his native Haiti, the Dominican Republic and
elsewhere, and will encourage other NBA players to get behind OLPC.

>From the Field

Colombia: Claudia Urrea consulted with the Merani Foundation about the
ministry of defense project in La Macarena (Weekend, November 9th).
Claudia put them in touch with Reuben to discuss deployment of these
first machines, and with OLPC-SUR about the Spanish-speaking community
that works with OLPC. Two people - one from the Merani Foundation and
the technical support person from the Marina Orth school – have traveled
to La Macarena to assist the core team from the ministry in setting up
servers and updating the first 200 XOs. 

And in Other News…

G1G1 Australia went live today. Amazon Great Britain has announced it
will begin shipping XOs on December 16th.


-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child
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