User:Sj/Log

Editor's Log

archives:1

Links

Creator networks:

• Atelier labs

User needs

Learning how to use your own machine means being able to use normal developer toolchains once you get down to a shell -- having man pages, syntax-highliting editors, and compiler toolchains available or hinted at should be a bare minimum. Learning to hack your system shouldn't require jumping through extra hoops that others would not have to. Alternately, there should be provisions in place to create space for students and teachers to set up services or do development on school servers. This and useful 'view source' keybindings are needed to start breaking into one's own systems and making interesting discoveries.

Bundling up

The first notion of bundle is an executable collection of code and supporting material, along with the objects that it can read or store. Bundles are shared or distributed as a whole; objects they create can be shared or reused individually. There is also a notion of a generic bundle -- a simple way to throw a few objects together and label them, for the purposes of sharing. It may be helpful to have a bundle manager activity, which helps find what exists (rather than the Journal, finding what people have done). Security discussions around bundles have focused on the idea that they are all executable. Generic bundles will likely not fall under this regime. We should think about an intermediate level of security that supports some sort of group stamping by community groups. This would let anyone who wants to use and test and review new activities can play with a reasonable but not completely stable/approved set of activities.

A budding publishing career

Lulu has some delightful collections of books. Some authors publish entire series of free texts on their own; others see using the channel for self-publishing as an art form in itself. My favorite author is currently cedric du zob -- his abstracts and book summaries alone are worth a read, and I fear that actually reading any of his work might ruin my fine first impressions. Sites such as Lulu and Flickr, whose primary purposes are not to highlight free works - but in these cases to provide tools for meaningful self-publishing, or a social sites for storing and sharing photos - have been remarkably successful at attracting collections of free works, all the same. This jibes with my feeling that a focus on freedom is at best of temporary interest, as it is the natural state of sharing and creativity which only seems imperiled while we have a culture that teaches that sharing should only be done with care, or that the way to succeed is to carefully control the use of ideas, and imagines high barriers to creation and distribution.

Notes from the community

15:33, 2 June 2007 (EDT) You can see & comment on / contribute to xoxo, a daily dose of updates from the community. I'm figuring out an initial target list today; items worth contributing include: events attended, package or project milestones, great pictures of or taken by you XO, and anything else of interest related to OLPC that you've started, finished, encoutered, or dreamed in your local community and online. Target length: 2 screens of plain text email. Small photos and images and icons particularly welcome; we could use more around the wiki as well.

King School

A class/project wiki was set up for a group of bilingual students at the King Open School in Cambridge. They spent a week with XOs and produced some neat videos on its camera and personal pages about their experiences. I like the videotaped interviews and presentation the best, but linking the kids' own pages from the sidebar was also a nice idea. (The customized coloring on the embedded video was thanks to Fabiano de Carvalho.)

Week of March 12

Open Library Exchange

Let me know if you are interested in helping with any of the below. OLE: the Open Library Exchange We've been developing the framework for an open library exchange for the many archives and libraries working with OLPC. We have a librarian coming on board to help organize the exchange, and define the metadata that each archive needs to collect and share to make materials easy to find and contribute. To contribute content at the moment, it is best to use the wiki. Suggestions about a proper interface to OLE are welcome, as we are working on this and our distributed object store this month. Curated this week We are focusing on materials in English and Spanish for younger audiences Free Music Project update: The Free Culture society has received many uploaded songs and pieces; check it out and add your own. They are talking to orchestras to record pieces for kids. Free Video Project: Free Culture is discussing launching a video project to parallel the free music project Translation We are looking for translators for the website; you can see the first languages being translated from the Main Page and can add your own language there, and to headers of other pages you want to see in new languages. Idiom Technologies has offered us a free translation server for use with any quantity of material for OLPC. Todd Kelsey and Chase Tingley are setting this up for use with our initial guidelines and instructions; Let me know if you would like to help out with this effort. We are working on a web interface to let people review content they want to see in the core XO and school libraries. The ideal solution would be a good set of browser plugins; a shorter-term solution may use frames and js.

School libraries

The school library will need a portal page, and its own activity-- even if this is browser-based, and doesn't have its own launcher or icon. Eben and I are discussing what the interface will look like; something similar to the journal view that starts up now when the XO launches. It will also need an additional "browse" option under each of the main search menus, since it is hard to search for things that you haven't seen before; this will bring up an overview template for that class of materials. Mockups to come soon, with a database to build to support same.

Game development

We had a dense call today about developing games for the XO -- what the bottlenecks are for smooth development [by kids, in 2d/3d, for making text/arcade-style/story-boarded games]. We talked about how to do something meaningful in a few months, who to bring on board to help out and how to make use of widespread support, and how to mentor students to work on neat small projects over the summer. You can see many of the notes from the day on the game development page; see also games for more ideas. Suggestions of excellent games that work in the browser or in Gnash are most welcome. Sj talk