OLPC Boston/Monthly Meet-ups/092708

College Users Groups

Lauren (from BU) and Katelyn (from Harvard) were at the meeting to learn more about OLPC and how students at their respective schools can organize XO Users Groups.

Local School Deployment

A local private school wants to run a small deployment. The XOs will be acquired through G1G1-2008. We discussed how OLPC Boston can help:

• 10 afternoon workshops in early November 2008. Approx 4-6PM. These workshops will not be "official" OLPC events and therefore need sponsorship. OLPC Boston has agreed to sponsor the events. Sponsorship duties:
  • Publicize workshops. Newspaper, local colleges, personal contacts, Boston Linux Users Group (BLUG),
  • Solicit presenters for the workshops. Proposed format for workshops: 1/2 time spent in familiarizing users with Sugar and various activities. 1/2 time spent in demonstrating how activity can be used to engage students in learning about "fill-in-subject-here".
    • Examples: Learn about TamTam and then have a musician lead a group in creating a piece of music. Or, learn about Record then go on a field trip to take pictures of "fill-in-subject-here".
• Physical issues at school. The school wants ownership of pilot to be by the teachers not IT. So these issues have to be resolved by external support.
  • Is there wireless in the rooms?
  • Will they have XS server?
    • Where will hardware come from? User:bogstad tentatively enlisted BLUG.
    • Will the XS use Moodle?
      • Teacher training for Moodle
• Burn and distribute LiveCDs so teachers/students can get comfortable with Sugar.
• Fund raising. The school has many scholarship students, and purchasing the XOs through G1G1 would be a hardship. The deployment will need approx $6k in funds to purchase equipment. Lauren and Katelyn tentatively enlisted the Harvard/BU student Users Group (HUG)/(BUUG) to work on this. Enlistment of the school's PTA was discussed.

Deployment Team

A volunteer deployment team from IMSA will be doing the actual physical deployment in January at the school. They will handle:

• Distributions of XOs (loading activity bundle)
• Pull cable / setup wireless
• setup XS
• power infrastructure

What OLPC Boston is being asked to do

• Keep people in the loop team (IMSA liaison, school liaison, etc.)
• XS team (BLUG? -- sysadmin/IT)
• Business/fund raising team (Lauren from BU Users Group (BUUG) and Katelyn (from Harvard Users Group (HUG) expressed tentative enlistment)
• Make an activity bundle team (work with teachers to determine bundle)
• Edu research team (HUG)
• Repairs team (Olin UG has already agreed to this)
• Documentation team (deployment procedures and workshops)

OLPC Boston future topics

1. mplayer (& other non-sugar apps in 8.2)
2. screenshot uploader
3. wik userpages
4. floss manuals