OLPC:News/2008/Week 30

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the week in review: Week 30, 2008* feel free to comment and update with footnotes and links to the talk page.

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^ Overview

• Local repair centers are increasing their activity, including one in Paris, run by OLPC France, and the one in 1CC -- three people came by this week to fix parts of their machines, including eidolon from IRC and Kat Gunion from Vancouver.
• Summer projects are being presented and midterm milestones assessed. Speech synthesis is being tested for full integration into Sugar, email and typing tutor projects are underway, and vision processing is improving performance week by week.
• A late summer gathering is being planned for August 28-31, 2008. Save those dates -- we will be building games and activities, testing materials, holding an XOlympics, and planning for an international gathering at the end of the year.

x Connections

opportunities, people, engagements

Calendar

• July 23-25 : Scratch conference @ MIT - in attendance, Cynthia, Bert Freudenberg, femslade, and many XO-philes.
• OLPC community mini-conference, August 2008
• End of July: Thailand learning workshop : Julia Reynolds is helping organize a learning workshop in Thailand this coming week, which will see educators and attendees from across Asia gather for part of the week.
• August 3: OLPC India Day -- a day of talks and celebration of OLPC in India is being held; user:arjs and user:manu are helping pull this together.
• August 23-28: OLPC/Sugar documentation sprint : a doc sprint is planned for Austin the last week in August, hosted by Anne Gentle. Details are being finalized, with a few sponsors and attendees already confirmed. The goal will be a complete updated set of user and developer docs for 8.2.0, with an eye towards being included in the recommended customization keys when it is released.

Regions

• France - OLPC France had a busy week, with members presenting at three conferences, and a repair jam attended by 10 people most of whom learned how to effectively disassemble and repair XOs while working through the problems of 8 broken machines.
  • The OLPC France idea competition continues through the end of August; winning ideas receive fame and perhaps a new XO, and all will be broadcast and discussed among the community, which will hopefully lead to first implementations for many of them.
• Ghana - The OLPC Mesh Project in Ghana is proceeding with a group at Princeton, including M. Fiuczybski; Xavier Carcelle's roommate was recently in touch with people working on the project.
• Countries -- Information about all of our countries is being updated; we could use a few more

· Results

projects, events, news, materials

Recently:

• Wikimania 2008 was held in the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Many groups in attendance wanted to start OLPC-related projects, to set up local interest groups or to facilitate contributions from students and developers in their organizations.

  At the library : Sohair Wastawy, chief librarian, and Lamia Fattah, head of their children's library, are planning a small installation for the children's section -- a set of 6 rooms that are restricted to children under 12 (there is a small waiting area for parents) and library staff. They have 60 to 100 children in the library during most days in summertime, for up to eight hours each day.

  A number of individual developers were interested in helping in their spare time. The Library employs 2000 staff, many of them working full or part time on digital initiatives and development. Most of their in-house development is open source, and their works freely licensed. In particular, people working in their accessibility lab on the DAISY Quran project for the blind wanted to make sure their work was usable on XOs, and offered help with producing Arabic .

  In the universities :

= Basics

status, deadlines, assumptions, processes

Summer intern projects:

from last week:

• Assim deodia:
• Vision Processing - Massive performance improvements... Nirav Patel
• Speech synthesis - integration of Python parser library, code at googlecode: Hemant Goyal
• Rajan Vaish - v1.0 uploaded of Atlas America.
• Email activity - progress is slow but happening. Shikhar Bhushan
• Daniel Drake's weekly update
• Tarun Pondicherry's Weekly Update: Educational Blogger Project

  Server running with all core features

• User:Femslade - Semantic data for countries and testing
• User:Sethwoodworth - Docs update

+ Priorities

milestones, sequences, first and next

o Reflection

review, updates, analysis, feedback