[Olpc-socal] OSSIE/OLPC/Sugar Labs Update

[Caryl Bigenho]

Hello SoCal OSSIE (Open Source Software In Education) Enthusiasts!


Info Tech a Great Success
There is a lot of good news coming out of OLPC and Sugar Labs this week, but first let's welcome 14 new subscribers to our list who signed up at last Saturday's Info Tech event at the Los Angeles Convention Center.  This new group includes some really important people in the process of children's learning: teachers, school IT personnel, and interested, active parents!  


Saturday's event was "showtime" for SoaS  at the CUELA booth.  In addition to having several XO-1s and one XO-1.5, we ran Sugar v2 (Blueberry) from a USB stick on an eeePC and a MacBook, proving it really can be done! 

This year's event was sponsored by Target as one of their community involvement projects. Everything was free... even parking and a great lunch!  They said there were about 4000 people there including kids.


You can see some photos of the event here. I wish I had had time to take more (and to see the other booths).


http://bit.ly/9xfTAz


This Week's Big News: 
The biggest news out of OLPC and SugarLabs this week is the official announcement that they are partnering with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to bring 500,000 XO laptops running Sugar (and dual booting with Gnome) to Palestine Refugee Children in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.  
I'll put some links below to the Official Press Release and some of the media coverage.  If you are a developer and are interested in helping prepare the software, Sugar Labs would love to have you join their team of enthusiastic volunteers (most of whom have day jobs too).  http://bit.ly/calRDk


Press release:  http://bit.ly/9T51pe


Selected Media Coverage:
BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10091177.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8651580.stm


People's Daily (China):
http://bit.ly/d5fnGS


PC World:
http://bit.ly/dD3spt


IT World:
http://bit.ly/beYZP6


Boston Globe:
http://bit.ly/bSzRBb


Next time I'll send more local news, but I really wanted to share this big international news story while it was still fresh!


Caryl OLPC-SoCal mailing list Admin.
P.S. If some of you on the list (including new members) would like to join in the testing of Sugar on a Stick on your own computers, send me a note at caryl at laptop.org and I'll help you get started. Almost anything (except the older G4 PowerPC Macs) will work.








 		 	   		  
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