[OLPC-Philippines] Sugar, OLPC and eKindling at Y4IT and Software Freedom Day

[Jerome Gotangco]

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since my last email, but I just want to share what
we've been up to lately.

Last Thursday (Sept. 10), Ryan (Letada), Sandeep, and myself were at
Y4IT (http://y4it.up.edu.ph) and had a 40 minute presentation
primarily about Sugar, then moved to OLPC and introduced eKindling to
around a hundred students at the UP Film Institute. We talked about
the relevance of Sugar as a learning platform and a technology
project, not to mention that it is an open source project with a
thriving user and developer community. After showing how Sugar works,
we showed a real-use case with the OLPC XO-1 machine (letting it fall
as well) and Sugar on a Stick (SoaS). Ryan and Sandeep gave an
overview of what we are doing at eKindling and the presentation was
generally lauded. I have to admit, the XO-1 laptop still has charm
despite its age which only shows that there is still an audience to
reach out to.

On Sept. 19, we will participate at Software Freedom Day happening at
the National Computer Center in Quezon City. Here's the official info:

"Bluepoint Linux Users Elite (BLUE) in cooperation with the Commission
on Information & Communications Technology-National Computer Center
(CICT-NCC), University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU),
Ateneo de Manila University Department of Information Systems and
Computer Science (DISCS), and Bluepoint Foundation will celebrate
Software Freedom Day with the rest of the world on September 19, 2009
at the National Computer Center, University of the Philippines,
Diliman, Quezon City."

Magie Antonio of Bluepoint was so gracious to invite us again to be
part of SFD. Last year's booth was a very successful one and we intend
to expand further by separating OLPC and Sugar by doing demos of the
OLPC XO-1 machine and Sugar on a Stick. We currently have 2 functional
OLPC XO-1 laptops for display as well as a prototype B2 unit to let
people see the internals of the machine. For SoaS, I will bring a full
sized laptop and perhaps add another Mac to show how it can run on
other operating systems.

If you would like to help, please let me know!

-- 
Cheers,

Jerome