OLPC:Xoxo/Archive 1
Contents
xoxo #-5
14:00, 1 June 2007 (EDT), tags: 1CC, music
=== xoxo === this is v -5 of the daily xoxo textfile; to soon become a daily occurrence. please leave your own contributions on the talk page, or leave me a message
=== 1CC === There are many new faces in Cambridge, and now a pretty steady off-hours crew which includes Bernie (who is addicted to videogame music remixes), Joshua Gay (FSF campaign manager, textbook activist, stet demon) Bernie has recently come to Cambridge to work from the office, and has introduced video game music remixes to our jukebox queue.
=== free texts === Joel Thierstein from Connexions and Jessamyn West visited on Friday; good conversations were had around texts and modular materials. CNX has some interesting new Physics modules - checking to see if FHSST has time to integrate with their own work; they've gotten involved with Curriki, so the project is certainly alive. Ben Crowell has an excellent set of "light and matter" physics texts up as well, which mesh nicely with the wikieducator philosophy.
We are talking about a space to list status and qualities of existing free and collaborative text projects - perhaps a rebirth of freetextbookproject itself. Advocates needed for travel in publishing and creative circles.
=== free culture === a Free Culture Cambridge is starting an open space for collaboration, creation, and contribution to open content projects. We're starting weekly gatherings Mondays, at a place to be determined soon; if you are interested in joining, send a note to sj@laptop. Early initiatives will include getting OurStories off the ground, developing swag and materials about free culture spaces and OLPC, and launching searches for suitable spaces in 6 countries.
xoxo #-4
16:52, 2 June 2007 (EDT), tags: day-to-day, lists, wiki
== Saturday == is extremely cloudy! Ryan Trinkle is working on a reference implementation of message passing that could serve as support for a distributed filestore, or a way to exchange queues of requests and responses (for searches for texts, posts to offline fora or wikis, or apps such as meshboard)
== todos == Starting a generic community todo list. Please contribute community efforts that you do each day, or would see done; or things that need doing (like welcoming new users, reviewing RC, blogging). In the spirit of the OLPC planet, there are some blogs starting on this wiki. == wiki and activities == Wiki gardening: Lauren has been adding metadata on the wiki about activities and other projects. If you maintain a project or package, or are working on interface or other designs, please add a page about your work, and a small infobox with source and author information.
Userpages: It is also good to set up a userpage describing who you are and what you do. If you have an XO, you might take a photo with your camera and upload it. Example wikipages: User:Xavi, User:Php5, User:Lauren
xoxo #-3
19:25, 4 June 2007 (EDT), tags: systems, games
=== Game Jam === Games : the Olin Game Jam is coming up. A parallel Jam is planned for Brazil in a few months.
=== xo thoughts === Format: future editions encoded as outlines? Hat tip to Tantek.
=== International === The Korean pages on the wiki continue to grow, many of need translation into other languages. (see Special:Newpages for more.) OLPC Nepal is still looking for summer volunteers... XOs are being used by the youth delegation at the J8 Summit.
=== Library === People working on development projects working on works, activities, and media for the laptops - most people with XOs and others - should register. We're working on providing better community support for these efforts.
=== notifications === Are there parts of the project you'd like to be notified about? Specific applications or events you are following? Suggest a topic to cover, and we will include regular notifications as updates come in. Not quite the same as automatic rss-feed alerts, but close.
=== summer blog === We're setting up a summer blog for the interns and other new faces around the office this summer; also for others working on and with OLPC around the world. keep your eyes peeled for an update soon.
xoxo #-2
16:19, 6 June 2007 (EDT), tags:
Commencement
Message passing, distributed filestore
=== wiki updates === MediaWiki updated; extensions - the wiki has been updated to MediaWiki 1.10. Most modern extensions will now work with just a little effort; leave extension requests on Talk:Wiki. If you have an OLPC portal or intro page on your site, or want to set one up, leave a link or note on [[
=== volunteer projects === Volunteers are wanted for OLPC-related projects in Cambridge, in Nepal (see OLPC Nepal), and elsewhere. If you have tasks that need to be done for your OLPC-related project, are interested in mentoring someone for such a project, or are interested in volunteering yourself, see the request board and add yourself or the project or other offer.
=== wiki community links === Links to related wiki communities, and pages about OLPC there / linked to from here are welcome. Please write in about links you want to see in our interwiki map.
xoxo #-1
18:22, 24 June 2007 (EDT), tags:
=== wiki === You can now upload .svg files. And there's a new empty OLPC Art Gallery. So you can share your icons and other work. Extensions: the Parser Functions have been enabled. Please, handle with care.
=== development tools === Display: 1200x900 isn't currently supported by non-cvs QEMU. Emulating the XO/Help and tips has a recipe to get it using Xephyr. Wondering what your activity looks like under different lighting conditions? There's a new python script which takes screenshots and shows you, sort of. But you usually don't need to worry about it.
=== art === Just a reminder: the Munsell page has a palette with colors of common luminance. But it's small, so we are looking for a better palette.
=== sugar === Things can now be saved to the journal. And activities downloaded to the journal and run. Try it out... === collage === There is a new Sophie activity to test out - a collage activity based on a sibling of Squeak. This is a port of a long-standing project from the Institute of the Future of the Book - please explore and test; also the new EduKT activity, newly minted with rough edges. A related thread touches on Etoys.
=== cartoon building === Avallain is halfway done with a cartoon builder, that lets you load a library of comic assets and put together a strip with balloon text. The comic developer Teshkeel is donating some character art to the project.
xoxo #0
18:22, 30 June 2007 (EDT), tags:
=== Ideas === {{Wikipedia ads}}-like wanted!
=== Recent Changes === This is an experimental report on the Special:Recentchanges. Suggestions are welcome. Several Test Plans have been added to several activities. Some highlights: -- 300 minor edits (37 user space; 30 templates; 26 talk pages) -- 83 new pages (11 user pages, 10 talk pages) -- 37 new files in the wiki (31 images & 6 other files) -- maintenance-wise, 3 pages were moved, 8 deleted, and 9 IPs were blocked
xoxo #1
12 July 2007, tags: wiki, maps, curriculum, rc
=== xoxo #1 === Welcome to the first edition of xoxo, a regular textfile of exciting things happening around the OLPC projects, with summaries of the various community fora. We are currently looking for editors and summarizers (specifically for mailing lists and blogs). Anyone is welcome to contribute by posting new items to these talk pages.
=== bug tracking and fixing ===
Please note any bugs or enhancements or feature requests in trac: dev.laptop.org . Anyone is welcome to
make an account there and file bugs or ideas.
New wiki template {{ticket}} allowing a short way to reference tickets: #1.
=== game and curriculum jams === mchua has been working on plans for game and other content jams this fall in a number of cities. Current jams being planned based on where there are interested organizers (Manila, New York, Sao Paulo), feedback or new cities welcome.
=== laptop map === name.com has been thinking about how to visualize OLPC data and machines, and how to help laptop communities. they've made a google mashup, which can be installed on this wiki via a mediawiki extension : laptop.name.org
=== OBX proposals === After an IRC chat, some proposals were added. The idea is that each box categorizes on orthogonal axis, on one side users can tag themselves as Artists (a category) with a specialty (say Artists icons — another category) and then on the 'consumer' side, activities (or whatever) could tag as Needing/Wanting icon. The categories would have cross-links allowing us to better match things. The idea is to expand to other domains.
=== Recent Changes === This is an experimental report on the Special:Recentchanges for the week ending July 8. Suggestions (and scripting help) are welcome: contact Xavi. Some highlights include: Almost 2200 changes this week (1670 actual editions) -- 580 minor edits (37 user space; 30 templates; 26 talk pages) -- 522 new pages the bulk being -- 30 categories for language fluency, -- 40+ Olpcboxes and Category:OBX templates, and -- 376 in the OLPC Korea branch. -- 68 new files in the wiki (66 images and 2 other files) -- 19 pages were moved, 37 IPs were blocked, and 3 pages were protected (due to vandalism)
xoxo #2
18:22, 13 July 2007 (EDT), tags: cbc, java, intel, col, SoCon, php
as the code freeze deadline draws near (it's now a few hours away), developers break into spontaneous fits of poetry on #olpc-content (read the original poem first) The night is calling me to sleep, but gtk, it made me weep. I've files to code before I sleep. And tubes to code before they're neat.
there are opportunities to help clean up the wiki! beefing up the style guide, improving special:recentchanges and other system messages (eg MediaWiki:Noarticletext), revisiting categorization, and integrating sister wikis (olpcaustria, wikieducator). come by #olpc-content and talk with mitchellncharity, mchua, xavi, and sj. advice, and comments in general, are welcome.
wiki blocking: you can block IP ranges with, e.g., 200.83.4.6/28 (to mask the last 32-28 = 4 bits, so you block 16 addresses) or 203.162.27.90/30 (to mask 32-30=2 bits, blocking 2 addresses) please be very careful blocking ranges or IPs for that matter, particularly given nature of dynamic IPs; don't block ranges for nearly as long as you would a single user, and try to avoid any blocks of longer than a week. [That said, blocked users can see the email of the blocking admin, so you may get email from people unfairly blocked] See Wikipedia's approach to understand the possible results of blocking.
Content jams : user:mackiwg & the commonwealth of learning agreed to co-run a pilot Summer of Content 2007 season with OLPC. final comments welcome on the proposed process
Cambridge Brewing Company : groups from OLPC regularly close them out; festivities followed by wine & dancing earlier this wek. who knew there were so many dancers in the office? Bernie managed to demo screencaps while dancing.
A first round of templating and clarifying content sources for regular content releases produced a page of notes on content packages. this will be revisited next week.
the startpage on the XO browser now has a spanish interface and loads a main page that can search Google and links directly to the Activity Grid for downloading new activities.
There is a new Stopwatch activity. Hopefully I'll have a chance to tubify it before T-2 freeze. If anyone needs (poorly working) drag-around-able pygtk widgets, it has one. Help welcome. :)
xoxo #3
21 July 2007, tags:
=== Curation and bundling === Connexions and Curriki are both preparing regular content bundles, autogenerated from their existing platforms. The World Digital Library is producing bundles by hand from a selection by a set of topical curators. Please note on talk:content bundles and talk:activity bundles how you are handling bundle generation.
=== grids === There are now an Activity Grid and a library grid for code and content bundles available to download. The mime-type scripting for the xo browser that tells it what to do with .xol bundles still needs to be written
=== Mailing lists === The number of mailing lists, and of quiet lists, has been growing. We are making an effort to unify lists, and to summarize them. If you are interested in summarizing a list, contact sj.
=== Summer of Content === A proper Summer of Content 2007 project was put up last week, and is accepting new project ideas and mentor orgs. Please read more about it there and pass it on.
=== Special:Recentchanges more stats === Extracting useful data or numbers from Special:Recentchanges besides being expensive in time and effort, and not particularly insightful of what is actually going on in the wiki. So we're starting a new approach, basically snapshoting some Special:Specialpages between two dates and extracting info. The analysis for week #29 was performed based on two snapshots: 2007-07-12 and 2007-07-21 Please take this results as a-work-in-progress, meaning that it's still a proof-of-concept. Meaning that the format is not very nice but it still shows the most viewed, most edited and most added.
xoxo #4
7 August 2007, tags: mania, summer, textbooks
Wikimania came this week, with collabs on Jamendo and more; and some MediaWiki discussions about how to improve tools used here. Please keep adding requests and suggestions there.
Wikislices and a related project on en:wp are being formed. See the project page there for more. These and other content bundles are being uploaded to the library grid.
xoxo #5
September 27, 11:45 UTC, tags: statistics
Back after a brief hiatus.
Bentham and data tracking : we want to make data tracking a white-box activity, with transparency about what is tracked. Data that partner projects are interested in: Concord projects
the Boston Public Libraries are working out ways to curate digital libraries for schools and at the same time for OLPC. They just launched a digitization project, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Games: Game labs at MIT and Carnegie Mellon are starting term projects with XOs. This Friday there will be XO gaming at GAMBIT (in 5 Cambridge Center), and we are having a weekly game development conference call Sunday at 1500 EST.
Testing : installing activities and bundles; this is getting better formalized.
Jams : OLPCPH Curriculum Jam in Manila - moved venue. See OLPC Philippines for updates
Statistics : see Xoxo/Statistics for the week's wikistat updates.
