[Grassroots-l] OLPC Europe Meeting at FOSDEM (Re: Europe Group

[Holger Levsen]

Hi,

On Tuesday 25 December 2007 12:08, oriol wrote:
> Does anyone around Europe have the possibility to get hands on an XO?

Several people, probably several hundred even :) But Europe is also quite 
big :-)

> I was wondering if there are more European enthusiast out there. If so, it
> would be great to set a European OLPC chapter and learn from each others'
> experiences, as well as explore the possibility to develop...
lots of stuff :)

The idea of a european OLPC association has been discussed at the 24C3 at the 
end of 2007 in Berlin, where at first we had a meeting of german and austrian 
OLPC enthusiasts, which resulted in what is now becoming OLPC Deutschland. 
(More on that at another time...)

One idea of OLPC Europe we had, was to bundle requests and support for 
national/regional european OLPC groups, to help minimize the support burdon 
for laptop.org (so that "they" can focus on bringing laptops to children in 
the developing world). Many european groups face the same issues: how to make 
and get localized keyboards, how to localize the software, how to get 100 or 
200 laptops for a pilot in a school, etc. - OLPC Europe could help here, as 
the many issues are the same for each country. And for sure, there are other 
ideas about what "OLPC Europe" should be...

So I brought up the idea of having a meeting to discuss and launch OLPC Europe 
at this years FOSDEM. FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers European 
Meeting and takes place (since many years) at the last weekend in February in 
Brussels, Belgium. Last year about 4000 developers and contributors attended, 
probably from every european country and a few from further abroad. See 
fosdem.org for more info on FOSDEM.

And despite being past the deadline for submissions, the friendly FOSDEM 
organizer accepted my late submission of an "OLPC Europe" event! :) It is 
scheduled for Saturday, the 23rd of February, from 15:00 to 17:00 in a room 
for up to 70 people. I certainly hope to see you there :-)

When I'm online again, I will setup a wiki page on wiki.laptop.org to prepare 
an agenda for the meeting (and post a followup to announce it) and to collect 
the names of the participants of this meeting. I believe having the 
partipants listed in advance will improve our collaboration even before a 
face2face meeting :-) (Also it's useful to estimate the number of 
participants to see if the room is too big or small.)


Looking forward to see you in Brussels!
Cheers,
	Holger

P.S.: So oriol, if you want to see+touch an XO, come to FOSDEM :-) I'll 
certainly bring mine which since yesterday does dualboot between Fedora & 
Debian ;)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/grassroots/attachments/20080108/fa0b54cc/attachment.pgp