OLPC Rochester, NY

a local grassroots group

About

The Rochester, NY interest group is a way for people in the Rochester, New York has_location_country::USA area and surrounding locations to talk about and work together on OLPC projects or activities. This is a page for those interested in volunteering or contributing to the project.

We use a Google Groups group OLPC Rochester, NY to manage member communications. You may subscribe there to receive group announcements.

We also have a discussion thread OLPC Rochester, NY at forum.laptop.org.

To receive updates to this page, log in / create an OLPC wiki user account (at the top rightmost link of any wiki page), then use the 'my preferences' link on your account to enter a private email address and select the option to receive email whenever a page you're watching is changed. Finally, click the watch tab at the top of this page to include it in your watchlist.

OLPC Rochester, NY is

• just beginning to organize.
• open to all interested parties in the Rochester or western New York area.

Event calendar

OLPC XO user's group meetings at the Rochester Institute of Technology - (See the Flyer.pdf.)

The Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT is supporting the OLPC XO Laptop project by raising awareness locally and conducting research and development initiatives.

The Lab and RIT are hosting the user's group. All meetings will take place in B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Building 70, 2nd floor, Room 2400, (See RIT Building 70 Google Map, or campus maps at http://inside.rit.edu/maps/.)

7:00 pm - 8:50 pm, on the 4th Thursday of the month.

Please join us on the following dates:

• 23 July 2009 7:00 - 8:50 pm

  Please note the NEW Room, 2nd Floor Room 2400. This is directly about the Auditorium near the stairwell, and has tables and chairs for a better workshop setting.

Past events

• 25 June 2009 - Teotwawki Net & Disaster Software Discussion

Notes:

1. Project Demo: Teotwawki Net by William Schaub.

   TEOTWAWKI means The End Of The World As We Know It, and the idea is to preserve the type of collaboration we are used to with the Internet in adverse disaster type situations and in areas that simply have no real hope of being connected.

   Bill pulled together some old, reliable and new software to build a self-propagating Usenet from the LightTPD web server, InterNetNews (INN) news server, Suck news transfer service, Web-News news reader, Perl 5.10 scripts to handle UDP broadcasts, and a DokuWiki instance to provide a shared page editing space.

   We had about 5 XOs in the network with either local or remote connections to the Browse interface for the news and wikis.

   Nice demo.

   Bill's system may be a precursor to tools used in the field for collection of data needed to feed a more versatile and distributed Sahana.

2. Project Discussion: Disaster Recovery Networks, Sahana, RIT, XOs by Jeff Sonstein.

   This is a followup to the popular talk, OLPC_Rochester, NY/Event_history/26February2009. We may meet more of Jeff's research group and talk about his collaboration with others.

   Jeff described his goals for designing a more versatile and robust overall architecture for Sahana with this grid:

Software	Problem Domains	Hardware
turnkey ReSTful API Modular Ad hoc	Situational awareness Client registration & management Worker/Agency registration & Coordinators Logistics management	Robust Multiple power sources Quick setup

3. Open discussion: Possibly a Kid's Corner, Math Games, Physics simulators We didn't get to these topics as we were so engaged in understanding the architectural issues presented.

• 04 June 2009 - Sugar Summer planning

• 28 May 2009 - Race Lockout, Rainout

• 25 April 2009 - Mel Chua, Women in Computing at RIT

• 23 April 2009 - More planning for educator involvement

• 26 March 2009 - Welcome to RIT Honors Seminar students

• 26 February 2009 - Sonstein on disaster-recovery networks

• 22 January 2009 - Getting to know you and the OLPC XO 2009 kickoff

• 26 March 2008 - Show & Tell Workshop at RIT

Projects

Usability testing

See the Usability testing class project page for the project description, work documents, and reports.

Other ideas

If you're in the Rochester area and want to work on a project with someone local, post ideas here.

• your idea...