User:Mchua/Projects

These are ongoing projects. For a more immediate slice of what I'm working on, see User:Mchua/Weekly updates.

• Writing Developer tutorials for various parts of the stack.
• Rewriting the Accessibility portal, followed by Internships, Summer of Content, Peripherals, Health, University program, Review squad, and a refactor of OLPC Chicago.
• Compiling material for the first edition of the Weekly zine (particularly Education/Research materials).
• Getting up to speed on TeleHealth Hardware in the hopes of getting equipment to prototype with soon.
• Working on Support gang
• Laying the groundwork for a full-time OLPC office in Chicago this summer.

• Jams

• Working on resources and a framework for future content Jams of different types. Writing the woefully neglected How To Run A Jam cookbook.
• Health Jam - Seattle, spring 2008
• Game Jam Chicago - summer 2008

• Testing

• Starting a program for Review squads of young testers and teachers to give feedback on our content. Now recruiting.
• Learning-by-documenting with Test issues (creating portal at Community Test)
• Battery testing under different conditions - see Battery Results
• Update.1 testing (with the intent of creating a walkthrough for testing future builds)
• Tests/Suspend Resume - add directions
• Test Group Release Notes - restructuring, making easier to navigate
• Clarifying different upgrade/activation paths and what they do. See changing mfg data.
• Alpha-testing and documenting Test automation by Mitchell, see X Window System event scripting and code here - intended first application is school server load testing (Australia?)

• Wiki cleanup

• Metacontent - Finding information can be tricky. Let's try to fix that.
• Metapresentations - Compiling a review/summary of presentations on Laptop demonstrations and Presentations. Can you help?
• Metawiki - Doing clean-up as per the Style guide whenever I can
• Being a sort of wiki welcome wagon and helping out newcomers. Let me know if you're interested; we could always use more people to help show newbies around.

• Grassroots groups I'm actively involved in

• OLPC Philippines
• OLPC Indonesia
• OLPC Taiwan

• School chapters I actively mentor

• Olin university chapter
• Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter.

• Wiki pages I created/maintain

• Participate
• Wiki getting started
• Wiki cleanup
• Style guide (Actually started by SJ in response to my newbie wiki mistakes.)
• How laptop delivery works and How laptop delivery breaks
• See my Contributions for more.

Back burner

• Developing the Summer of Content program, which had a summer 2007 pilot and needs to be picked up again when everyone has time. Also see Summer of Content.
• Together with Andy Pethan, I am working on the design of Bounties for awesome, a system of collecting open content problems, encouraging work on them, and moderating rewards for progress on their solutions. Not entirely OLPC-related, though.
• The Classrooms for Free Culture project would be a good follow-up to University program.
• Make an .xo package of Mutt for Email? Maybe with the zenburn theme.
• A photo tutorial of XO disassembly - Seth's pictures are a good resource.
• OLPC-related research could be aggregated using http://researchblogging.org and other tools - or a similar system might be a good way for students to collaborate on documents, perhaps?

Someday

Projects and ideas I'd like to do, or see done, but haven't committed to yet. Usually the missing part is a collaborator, knowledge, resources, or just plain old activation energy and free time. If you'd like to take one of these projects (the important thing is that they happen, not who makes them happen), collaborate with me on any of them, offer support, or just talk and brainstorm about related ideas, please contact me.

• OLPC webcomic
• Rosetta Stone clone in Pygame (Update: An IMSA student is now doing this as her research project.)
• Front-end for music composition (GUI for Lilypond? Something to translate between TamTam and Lilypond?)
• "Heathkit" style build-your-own peripheral kits for the XO (solder your own gamepad, etc)
• Intro to electrical engineering through taking apart & developing for the XO
• Ad Libris, a lightweight metadata structure spec for the Library. (Update: This may have been taken up by OLE Nepal, but I can't tell from their descriptions yet.)

Past

• Was one of the coordinators of the first OLPC Game Jam (and indeed, the first OLPC Jam), Game Jam Boston June 2007. We even got on TV.
• Helped out at Free Content Jam Taipei and represented OLPC at Wikimania, including (loosely) staffing the "XO station"
• Co-ran a week-long OLPC project camp with Scott Swanson at IMSA in Jan. 2008
• "Unofficial cat-herder" (read: instigator) of the first OLPC Chicago meetup at Google Chicago in Jan. 2008.
• Was at the Olin hackathon in Needham, MA on Feb. 16, 2008
• Was at the NYU OLPC Jam on Feb. 23, 2008, but spent most of it working on open-source fabrication with Smari, although some hacking on XOs did get done.
• Co-coordinated the Story Jam New York in Manhattan, March 28-30 2008. The ambassador from Ecuador even came to record stories!
• Co-coordinated the Health Jam - University of Washington, April 18-20 2008. There was an article in the student paper about the event.
• Linuxfest Northwest - ran the OLPC track with Iain Davidson.
• Participated in the Community Jam in Cambridge, MA at the Cambridge Science Festival. Edward Freedman and Pat Greninger organized the event, and Diane Serley led a disassembly party.