User:Sj/N

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General notes, more ranging and less blog-like than a log. Needs slimming into xoxo editions.
internal links

unsorted

• Indonesian Physics

10 Oct

(from patm)

• collections / active projects / interactive sites /
• retool the lib interface / replace public w something / separate sharing from reading from sharing / vis world art
• vol coord / hrly
• sci fairs / q&a ref desks / contests & quizzes

8 Oct

• ColingoXO
• ويكيمانيا, Alexandria
• Shuguang introduces [Klein], travelling to talk to Indonesia, Viet.
• McFletch needs to be in on the weekly community meetings. Fridays?
• Wikis : XOwiki
• Manuals : GCompris, ToddK, mini-mailing list
• Notes : Weekend, xoxo, int
• Pootle installation
• Community notes : facebook, linkedin links.
• Prototyping : drilldown
• Idents : OpenID for MWiki
• Biology : David Stang's David Stang's zipcodezoo
• Sat Content Management: John Hawker's Sat-Ed (email)
• Documentary video source : tv-links (flash), g video (flash)
• Wikids : wikispaces, wikia (fr, nl), wikibooks (junior)
• Meetings : Team lists, migration of intnotes, categorization
• Web games : crickler
• Field partners : kiva list
• volunteer mgmt : sakai list

  openings : freedomforum list

• doc formats : dita toolchain; simple style [jon ph.]
• Activities : fmt
• Maps : newseum

Translation

• Meadan prop / essays

Video

• Bink

Refs

• schol

from eGran

• wws (odd lic)

comics

• [xkcd] on illustriousness and licensing

2x

• Mag Fields : local stories. wants to hear about olpc licensing
• OLE notes, NES hooks, SiCit review. alison loomis/ch smith and bio. s.am bio professor x3.
• OLPC Chile event; Keller reprise
• L10n process. Meadan, l10nstone, toddk

21 Sep 2007

Wiki

This fall, olpcwiki will cross an inflection point for vandalism and community activity. It will pick up popularity in the alexa markets, to match its support in latin america; and will develop a more multilingual community with real shared-language guidelines.

many offwiki activities will come together on-wiki... doc-writing and drafts, planning, discussions.

Games

This fall the XO will become a viable development platform for game devs.

• We have groups at two US gamelabs writing libraries/games for it (15 ppl at CMU, 5 at MIT GAMBIT)
• It has PyGame and lately GCompris frameworks for developers to use.

Concerns:

• The XO should hook at least one serious commercial developer and at

least one skilled independent; perhaps with subsidy from us or a grant agency.

• Ex: NYC's GameLab wants to make their "make a game" game open source and XO-friendly, but needs explicit funding.

• We should have an open channel with Serious Games leaders; and something resembling a game developers program (perhaps managed by an outside group; we have offers from a few people to do this pro bono)

  We don't want WFP to define our commitment to educational games; and should showcase eToys well here.

Games timeline

By the start of October

top priority -- Don Hopkins and Electronic Arts are finishing up

polishing and QA for a SimCity port, which should be done by the start of October. We should approach EA soon about more serious partnership. Chuck Normann, our contact there, is leaving to start his own company.

second priority -- get someone to set up a game developers program for

the laptop (we have pro-bono offers to do just that).

Two game-development courses will be developing game libraries for the

XO and bringing the results of their work with them to conferences and exhibitions; they could be the vanguard of such a program.

- CMU's ETC program and its Virtual Worlds class (actually 2 groups,

with 4 and 10+ students respectively)

- MIT's GAMBIT program (5 students)

By January a number of groups will be preparing to showcase XO games at the Game Developers Conference. We will have three attendees there who won their tickets in an earlier set of code sprints.

- the above groups
- a Serious Games group through Ben Sawyer,
- Mike Harrison of the World Food Program & Muriel,
- a Second Life team working on an XO interface to their world.
- Coders from present and past Game Jams (Boston, Chicago, Brasil, Asia)

Discovery and libraries

Concerns

• We need better interfaces for finding works created/gathered for OLPC, and for children to browse materials. The World Digital Library interfaces are top notch; they should be open sourced, or the work stemming from those design discussions should be cloned by an open project.

  The WDL is looking for future support from Google, Intel, UNESCO, and the government. We should encourage them from all sides to become more open.

Discovery

• World Digital Library interfaces : in functional alpha (js + python + openlayers + mysql), runs slowly on XOs.

  Actively development up to their showcase deadline at the UNESCO biannual on Oct 17 in Paris. Showing off their work on desktops, XOs and Classmates.

  2 intel reps will be there; Lukasc Matoca and Luigi Piscina or Tony Salvadore. Matt K. is planning to be there; has other reasons to be there as well.

• Global Reference Desk : We have a framework in place to work actively with libraries. The Library of Congress has offered 6 liaisons to help build these reference desks (one in edu/outreach, 2 in asia, 1 in africa, 1 in s america, 1 at the WDL), and has offered 3 desks for interns who want to work @ the LOC this fall.

  NB: great interest here; worthy of more attention.

• International library associations: slow progress with eIFL and IFLA to tie OLPC into their international library events.
• Boston Public Library and the Internet Archive have

• Library of Congress: we have 6 liaisons there (edu/outreach, asia x2, africa, s.america, world digital library) offering their teams' time to OLPC

  as of last week, they are looking for local library connections for us who can both build grassroots support and find local content. Many regions have their own unheralded digital collections.

Curriculum

• General : Curriki & CK12 are developing general texts (around 15 so far)

  Curriki is partnering with us to develop and distribute a full range of k-12 materials in many languages; starting now in english, spanish, and marathi.

Pilots

• India : TutorVista, working with the pilot group

  Ethiopia : MacMillan and Avallain, via GTZ

  Mexico : Curriki, working with university education students

Tutoring, Mentors, Penpals

TutorVista is providing global mentoring and tutoring, and an opportunity to become a mentor (see opportunities, below). Starting in India, but with capacity to expand to all pilot programs in English immediately.

ePals is developing an XO activity to connect schools as penpals. They are interviewing 3 people this week to take on the final sugarization. Should be ready by 1.1, and available around FRS as an activity for classes to download. [classes can just visit their website as well]

Creative opportunities & entrepreneurship

• Mentoring: TutorVista is interested in providing mentor opportunities for children and teachers everywhere who want to join their system. They currently have a pool of screened tutors, but are happy to create a separate group of unscreened tutors using their infrastructure. They have staff in a dozen timezones, though many in s.america and india.
• Translation: Meadan.org wants to create a translation exchange for people to build community reputation as translators and start taking on translation jobs, to facilitate local development in and to motivate language learning in remote areas. They are looking into working with colingo, who are language video templates that anyone can add to from their community.

14 Sep 2007

NextVista.org : Rushton Hurley, Todd Seal (rh, ts at nextvista). Via Mitch. Video learning.

...

10 Sep 2007

containers - a/v, fs, network

firmware

installation - ? activities need to be signed by us in the short-term, and by countries?? in the longer term. both are totally unacceptable as hard security. how can we allow installing unsigned activities without a developer key?

what is the disaster scenario of a stubborn person who insists on installing a dangerous-looking activity?

upgrades - dualboot is an aside

tracking - comm problem with quanta?

anti-theft - client, server

questions

how can we set up dual-boot separate from the 'save last stable os' for upgrade stability?

what are the use cases where you want to run 'web 2.0' apps that will ship your docs to china?

why is it so difficult to imagine a world in which a community of children and teachers want to actively share many of the documents they are creating over time with everyone {on their local network, with the whole world}, not simply when they are actively sharing with a small handful of people?

why should it be difficult to create an activity whose sole purpose is to make things meant to be universally shared? to clarify, aop.

4 Sep 2007

ISIS and game jam brasil

Roberto is finishing work on Isis, which he predicts will be available as a game engine soon. He is also working on a Game Jam for Brasil (still needs a crew, afaik).

WorldWideWorkshop

WorldWideWorkshop has much more active updates on their own wiki than filter up to this one; look there for the latest and for activity. They are eager to have official design tests from eben and others, which are pending.

OmegaT and TM

Sabine Cretella and Kim Bruning are working on a wiki-enabled version of OmegaT for translation efforts. The latest 1.7.1 release supports wiki-reading, but not wiki-writing (waiting on Ilya to finalize a proper MediaWiki API.

WikiCurriculum

Martin Weissman is working on a WikiCurriculum idea; which might need merging with Wikiversity or Wikibooks.

Local updates

see also Xavi's regular statistical updates

• OLPC Ethiopia

Electricity Activity

Bruno Coudoin has built an Electric.activity.xo bundle for the GCompris "electricity" activity. Download it and test it out! (see also their todo on the gcompris wiki).

wiki-todo, Sep 4 2007

• Set up the local Interwiki map
• Install the top few pending Extensions, including Semantic MediaWiki
• Fix old broken wiki accounts (via renaming and the db)
• Add individual templates for Activity overviews, for inclusion in Activity Grid, individual activity pages, and other references to them on-wiki.

tech-todo, Sep 4 2007

• Run sound-format tests as part of smoke testing. What formats work a) via browser, embedded; b) via browser & separate-launch; c) anyway under some activity
• Run video tests for same.
• Add the library mainpage as the new library in latest builds
• Doublecheck .xol installation scripting
• Get activities into Fedora as projects. Kuku was done by Marco.

security-todo, Sep 10 2007

Installation:

• open something in the browser; make sure it installs.
• journal is supposed to install from a USB key, or any other way. magical install on download should be the same way...

  uncertainties here: ik doesn't know how this happens

• the only thing that should be allowed to kick of installations is the datastore. the browser shovesw bundles into the datastore; it should note this and run the install script.

  check with rainbow, say please install this for me

• cs: use journal as defaul twya to download/update activities. befriend chris; you see new versions in his journal; instlaling the latest one means installing that file chris is sharing.

  we haven't cemented activity updates - right now, updates are new activities

  special friends with pre-installed bundles on xo-flash

Spin-up in schools

• Mail : getting a Gmail account
• Registraiton : getting reg'ed in the school student-teacher interface

  Moodle accounts

  Wiki accounts

• other services on the schoolserver[s]
• school-wide

  school gmail cacount, for g! books

  school email account, for group discussions

• library synch : getting the ss library set up
• repository/tiered setup : content tiers, webcache tiers, backup tiers, activation perm tiers,
• security, possibly

  lease config

starting education revolution in a school

For people hoping to start school education projects, I have noticed that they often think the bottleneck is funding, hardware acquisition, and practice with a certain externally-defined set of software tools. In my experience, no school project has ever truly bottlenecked on this until well after they have a team, a solid plan, a group of eager and involved people {teachers, parents, students}, and have done some initial brainstorming. During the 3-12 months that follow, the rest of the above issues can be sorted, including getting XOs if that is essential.

• A potential FAQ for people who want to start raising awareness/funds/planning for an XO project in schools : User:Sj/school-projects

commentaer

sstreet. takalani now za and rw and more? plushes. claymation guys!

wad whitepaper: rationale behind an association. most low price retailers dont provide long term support, pay for it separately, we care primarily about long term success and collaboration.

gm working on multitch acts. overall list review. gtk3 port in q.

stfas
lrn - claud,mel,dav.j.
tch - mart.sam.reub
log - gerd.luiz
sls - giul.serg.julr.olg.lz.sandr.julno.valt.sats
exc - rod.bob.rbto.alxk
act - ram.erka
rls - ddrk.peterr,x
sug - gonz.gary.manquin.x