[OLPC-Philippines] Awesome OLPC PH SIG booth at Software Freedom Day in Quezon City

Jerome Gotangco jgotangco at gmail.com
Sat Sep 20 09:46:29 EDT 2008


Hi all!

The OLPC PH XO-1 showcase booth during Software Freedom Day is a hit!

Me, Harry, Rowen and Tim had a blast sharing about the potential of
the XO-1, discussing the OLPC project, and showing the various
collaborative and informational activities that can be done. We met
and talked with educators, students, hobbyists, and even press people.
A lot were surprised to see the XO-1, B2 and B4 units and some didn't
even know such existed for education as they are most familiar with
the current 4P offerings by Asus, Acer, etc. but voiced out their lack
of education focus and saw the potential of the XO-1 as a catalyst for
improving curriculum and enriching the experience of education.

There were a lot of questions raised, like the usual:

"How much does it cost?"
"Where can I buy one?"
"Can I run Operating System _____?"
"What are the specifications?"

To some rather interesting ones like:

"How do you see the XO-1 competing against the current crop of
netbooks and UMPCs"
"Can it really achieve its goal of One Laptop per Child?"
"How are you guys involved with this project?"
"Are you selling this in the near future?"
"I'm part of non-profit organization ______, how can we get these
units to be able to evaluate for schools?"
"We evaluated the Classmate PC - it doesn't fit much to what we
requre, we'd be interested to check out the XO-1"

So these questions and more (which I can't recall much), do show that
there is still significant interest in the XO-1 for enriching
education here.

Before we left, me and Rowen discussed on what can be done further to
formalize a group and brainstorm on our mission and vision - we don't
want be a laptop organization for sure as we don't have the manpower,
funding and marketing to do so. A focus on applications via etoys is
the most likely route with the XO-1 as the preferred platform for
development but also opens opportunities for other platforms/operating
systems. Another one is flash but this would require proprietary
plugin-software or, make sure flash applications are compatible with
gnash. These are just some of the things we discussed, but we'll make
sure to start discussing further online. Please feel free to pour in
your thoughts.

You can also check out the pictures here:
http://flickr.com/photos/jsgotangco/sets/72157607386579832/

-- 
Jerome


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