OLPC:News/2008/Week 8

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the week in review: Week 8, 2008* feel free to comment and update with footnotes and links to the talk page.

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Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat +

^ Overview

 Progress is being made in Mongolia with ICDL libraries.
 A strong grassroots community is coming together in Peru, thanks to user:sebastian. 
 Over 50 people came to the first gathering, and about half that number have written into 
 voluntario /at/ laptop asking to help out.
 The community 'zine skips a week, while the OLPC Europe newsletter makes up for it
 Suggestions to properly archive and translate OLPC:News picked up last week; not yet implemented.
 Translations are also requested for the entire FAQ - with one page per question + navigation.

x Connections

opportunities, people, engagements

I met with David Jasmin of LAMS/LAMAP, a pedagogical organization based in France aimed at improving learning and teaching in French schools, on Sunday. We ended up talking for a few hours; and found a good deal in common. He has been trying to make collaborative online authoring projects succeed, in French and other languages, since the 1990s. He feels that these days there are good zero-barrier-to-entry projects and that the older structured projects may find some new life. See the article for more.

The Google Literacy Project is organizing something cool for the Day of the Book. Our Speak activity and related literacy projects have been nominated as one of the projects to feature; we should find out the details and what is entailed soon (next week?).

• Curriki : Lauren and I had a call on Wednesday with their group-liaisons, following my discussions with Peter Levy when he attended our last workshop. I left them with basically a reiteration that we would like an OLPC portal to send people to, an easy way for someone to upload things to same without having to make an account, find the group page, and fll out forms; and a way for group members to review / add metadata to such collections. I hope to hear back next week. Manu is going to test out their Hindi localization, which would be a big step up from available hindi-language sites.

• Health : Arjun organized a health call on Thursday, with Ben Schwartz and a new contributor from BU medical school. Anna Bershteyn is ready to distribute flyers on campuses, but wants a nicer design. Requested : a regular review / processing schedule contributors can fit their work into; a separate rights team to handle rights assessment (this seems to scare many people); contacts with groups who review health-advice for the public, and a policy on not being the first publisher of such advice.

· Artefacts

projects, events, news, materials

NB: feel free to add yourself as being interested in any artefact that shows up; or to create a separate page for it for further discussion

Anthony Asael of artinallofus has offered to help make collections from his massive global project, with 150,000 photographs and 80,000 poems from children around the world. We are discussing how to make the current contribution process — which he personally travels around the world to facilitate — into an activity, or a set of games.

Interested parties: UNICEF, Anthony, sethwoodworth.

New creations :

• The Holocaust Museum is working on another translation of their work.
• Zdenek is rebundling his older collections and updating his dictionary images
• EFK has two programmers working with arjs on scripts to automatically convert their flashes (which rely on popups) to versions that work with Browse

• SocialCalc and Javascript : The SocialCalc spreadsheet is function-complete for its first version; and now only needs to be well integrated with Sugar. Luke Closs have been working on making Javascript a better platform for activity design, and made good progress Thursday with the help of Todd Whiteman, a pyxpcom expert. Daniel LaLiberte, a local Javascript developer, has also offered to help after a shoutout to the boston JS community; he says he can drop by 1CC in the afternoons as needed. Updates to SocialCalc on the wiki. See also Edward Baafi's ideas on Help files.

= Fundament

status, deadlines, assumptions, processes

Testing : Monday will see a number of people in the office for an on-site testing jam, starting with the mesh in various configurations.

Journal : Following Tomeu's updates here on the wiki of the immediate Sugar and journal roadmaps, there may be a parallel set of Journal implementation discussions.

Deadlines

Kliptown : we are preparing the community for a small group of students to get started in early March, through the Kliptown Youth Program. They have their own set of books they want to use, not yet under a free license, but approved by the government for use in this program... Something for our rights team to clarify.

Peru : A lot is going on in the coming month, and we need full translation of the core how-to documents, including the getting started guide and the FAQ, by early March.

Communication

There was a lovely country-teachers thread Asabe started last year that should be picked up again. Perhaps people from the workshop mailing lists could be added to this. All of those groups would be glad for more active contact, with eachother and with us. If you are working with a trial school or group, or preparing to start one, speak up here.

+ Priorities

milestones, sequences, first and next

Content bundle localization : We are working on a localization spec to support pointing to different index pages by language choice and a recommended toolchain for using pootle to manage translations and rebuilding an arbitrary set of content pages from the results. Next week, this process will be sent out for discussion and review by translators; and recommendations for bundle maintainers will be out the week after that. The library-core in joyride will also be updated to include proper localization soon.

Milestones

We are getting closer to revising our contributors/developers program. There are also a number of groups of developers and researchers who want to purchase more than a few laptops for their own work and testing; some community members are developing a proposal for making this happen. See talk:contributors for more.

Sequences

Once we revise our testing framework early next week, we will again need more people to join the test process. Give a holler if you are interested in taking part in this.

[ Ed: we miss Chih-yu... :) ]

o Reflection

review, updates, analysis, feedback

Next week there will be a good bit of review : of library bundling, of wireless, of outstanding bugs, of usability, of the Journal.

As always, please send in any and all feedback; by mail, or via the talk page. --Sj talk 12:48, 23 February 2008 (EST)