[PyCON-Organizers] 2009 volunteers, etc.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 3:49 AM, Jeff Rush <jeff at taupro.com> wrote:
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>  > On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 2:30 AM, Cosmin Stejerean <cstejerean at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >> I'd like to take our video recording to the next level and be able to
>  >>  stream all the talks live next year. I volunteer to make sure this
>  >>  happens.
>  >
>  > I'm all for that. We should see how much of those feeds we can get to
>  > schools in the OLPC program.
>
>  There are not as yet that many schools in the OLPC program, as I understand
>  existing XO deployment maps.

Yes, there have been only a few hundred thousand units made, and I
don't know how many delivered. Orders seem to have reached a total of
750,000 or so over a five-month period, so by next year I would expect
to see at least 2 million in use.

>  And those students need to understand english
>  along with programmer lingo and often some knowledge of the software domain,
>  e.g. to appreciate a talk on what's new with Django you need to know what it is.

We'll have to ask the target countries how their student's English is.
Bear in mind that some countries mandate 12 years of English in
school, so we are going to see with some frequency the typical 12-year
old whiz-kid hacker who is also fluent in English. I'm assuming
children of various ages with six months or more of Python and the
Internet. I don't know how much of Django they will know about, but
they will know the OLPC, Sugar, Pygame, SciPy, and lots of other cool
stuff according to their interests. Some of them will be doing Web
development, database, e-commerce, Wikis, interactive electronic
textbooks, and so on by next year.

Wikibooks already features a textbook on education written by students
at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education.
We intend to cover the whole range of school subjects and more.

>  > I would also like to open up the coding sprints to the world. Physical
>  > presence is not necessary.
>
>  An interesting idea - I would like to hear some concrete ideas how exactly
>  you'd go about doing this.  How do sprint coaches maintain support, how do
>  people team up, how do remote folks join into a spontaneous whiteboard
>  discussion, how do they share in the learning that happens over lunch?

I'll put that to the Devel list, which everyone in pycon-organizers is
welcome to join. We are already planning for pair and group
programming over mesh, with shared code view and the ability for two
or more programmers to edit code at the same time. This is just the
same as the other shared activities on the XO, such as Write, that use
Telepathy. A multilingual Python IDE for the XO has been proposed for
GSoC, and should be in quite usable shape by next year's conference.
It will be possible to arrange for sharing over the Internet using a
jabber server at PyCon.

We could create a testbed right now just by setting up a jabber server
and sending out invitations for people to try sharing Write, Paint,
Record, and other activity sessions. We will need a Wiki page at
http://wiki.laptop.org/ and one on the PyCon Wiki as well.

Teleconferencing using the XO's built-in camera is doable in Record at
a reasonable frame rate, except that it isn't currently set up for
continuous transmission. I'm pretty sure that Mary Lou Jepsen can come
up with a clip-on wide-angle lens for under two dollars for group
sessions. We can have the video and audio on one XO, and shared
programming on some number of others. Or whatever.

>  At PyCon we don't yet have reliable audio/video transmission facilities with
>  cameras available in most sprint rooms, nor a common/cross-platform
>  "whiteboard" software tool.

Collaboration is built in to XOs. We'll see how much of it we can provide.

>  Sprinters also sometimes get version control or
>  bug tracker accounts but you don't want to give those out anonymously over the
>  net.

OLPC lets pretty much anybody sign up to Trac, and we have processes for git.

> You'd need some way to identify the set of participants, their
>  roles/skill levels and a way to virtually "tap" one on the shoulder to get
>  some help, in such a way that they can easily see your remote screen and talk
>  to you.

IRC sets the floor for this. XO collaboration can support considerably
more, if we agree on what and get down to it.

>  I've never seen anyone actually implement such a futuristic vision of
>  collaboration, although many of us want it to happen.  Sure we have various
>  flavors of vnc, IM and VoIP but nothing universally easy to use and running
>  everywhere.

Collaboration is the essence of the OLPC education program, and of
course on a fixed hardware platform it is easy to deal with software
distribution in a uniform way. Much of what we are talking about here
has been done, much is already in the OLPC roadmap and in development,
and we can discuss the rest. XOs are designed for security and
identifiability, with public keys factory installed, so that should be
manageable. We may have to create a new certificate authority for the
children or something of the sort, and get teachers and administrators
to sign the children's keys.

All of these tools will run in Sugar on Linux and other platforms, not
just on XOs.

I have, of course, another motive for these suggestions. Once we
establish collaborative distance programming on the XO, we can port it
to all the other platforms in a native form, not just in Sugar.

>  -Jeff
>
>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay