[OLPC-SF] Notes from Saturday's meeting

[Sameer Verma]

We met at 10 am on Saturday, Oct 11, 2008. The conversations were around:

1) OLPC Jamaica: Four weeks of starting up the group. Photos are at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/olpc/sets/72157607392432344/  Wiki at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Jamaica Report coming soon.

2) Tom Daly's experiences in East Timor with FOSS software machines.
Most FOSS machines revert to Windows (pirated, of course) when left
unmanaged. Installation does not imply implementation. How can these
be sustained? Tom works for Sun Australia and has strong interests
with OLPC for East Timor. Tom is visiting the SF Bay Area. We spoke
about various school server placement options, hardware combos,
bandwidth availability, etc.

3) School server activities on platforms other than Fedora. What is
happening? Other distros such as Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE,
OpenSolaris. What can be done? ISP hosting alternative solutions. What
takes up the most CPU cycles? RAM (squid, ejabberd)? Storage approach
- backing up the journal automatically, pushing out updates to XOs via
the school server seamlessly.

4) Meet in a library. Suggestion: SF Public Library. Centrally located
in SF, public, visible. Marketing to the library and visitors. Maybe a
table at a museum (Mel Chua's experience from MIT Museum)?

5) G1G1v2 ideas. Minimoo cards, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. New
ideas: t-shirt that says "Do you XO?" or "Got XO?" InfoCards for
country deployments.

6) Braille request that came from Greg Smith: What kind of devices do
they have? Are we talking about screen readers and magnifiers or
actual USB/Serial braille machines?

7) SF-LUG python classes. As an afterthought, I am throwing this in.
SF-LUG has started Python classes. Asheesh Laroia is teaching some
basics. Given that Sugar has most of the code in Python, it might be a
good idea for some cross-pollination.

That's it for now. Next meeting in November!

Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/