OLPC:News/2008/Week 23

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the week in review: Week 23, 2008* feel free to comment and update with footnotes and links to the talk page.

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Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat +

^ Overview

• Community: Cambridge plays host to its first Open Jams, bringing local community members together to work on projects and describe them for others to join. The Yale OLPC chapter is formed.
• OLPC Europe: Holger Levsen oversaw the OLPC presence at LinuxTag in Berlin, one of Europe's largest hacker conferences. A project application contest led to 70 of 100 XOs being given away. Christoph Derndofer is visiting through early Wednesday for the bootcamp
• Contributors' program : Over the past two weeks, in addition to the XOs given to developers @ LinuxTag, 50 machines have gone out to developers, and another 65 have begun the shipping process.
• Interns: Alex Levenson started work this week, focusing on setting up a demo machine to highlight the capabilities of the XO. He is publishing images for others to try. Available mentors for smaller summer projects are posting short summaries of their interests and availability on our Profiles page.
• Wiki: a number of parts of the wiki are being actively updated. Cjl and Francesca have been categorizing and organizing lists of deployment countries, activities, and partner organizations. Contributors from Oceania have been highly active over the past week, rapidly organizing pages about their sites and proposing a number of related software and activity projects.
• Open projects :

x Connections

opportunities, people, engagements

• Francesca Slade has been here now for her second week, and has worked on setting up regular Open Jams (the first was last weekend; the second will take place tomorrow)
• In the spirit of a weekly interview of an OLPC luminary, Andriani Ferti shared her thoughts on how she got involved with OLPC and her thoughts for the future
• Jams : Mel is looking for others. This week's Open Jam will have a set of Cambridge-repair-center projects for people who don't come with their own.
• Grassroots unconference : the unconference is off to an early start, with morning visits from the Berkman Center's Charlie Nesson and OLPC Austria's Christoph Derndofer.
• We are looking for likely community ambassadors to help smooth the growth of our developer and other communities.
• Nigeria : Asabe Yabane got to meet with Andy Rabagliatti (of Wizzy Digital Courier and wwwoffle, an offline-synchronization toolchain)

· Artefacts

projects, events, news, materials

• Robertofaga has been working on an RPG-creation tutorial to go with his game creator.
• Repair centers details have been cleaned up, thanks to much work by mchua, nlee, and ccarrick. A small repair center has been set up by mchua, and is being put to use and expanded Saturday afternoon during our weekly Open Jam, with help from femslade. The related Repair draft page is also useful for anyone planning such a center.

  andreatl, nlee and ccarrick also worked on a set of five simple language-free repair photoesays for the most common DIY entries in the repair guide.

• Help for content bundlers : a Content bundle making script was posted by mchua, and has been used by cjl, among others.
• Demo : Alex Levenson has fast full-screen video, touchpad, one-minute activity-creation, and a number of bookreaders working on a demo XO build.

= Fundament

status, deadlines, assumptions, processes

• Next week : the Grassroots bootcamp comes to 1CC -- 10 community members from active local OLPC groups are coming to Boston to discuss best practices for organizing local communities and connecting them with ongoing OLPC trials. The guests will be in the office from Monday through Thursday working on drafting and refining existing guides, materials and support networks.
• Local grassroots office updates : ILXO and ilxo.org. Work planned on XO Accessibility and other projects. Proposed small XO projects : Cambridge Friends School Pilot

+ Priorities

milestones, sequences, first and next

• A rigorous application process for future grassroots gatherings is proposed.
• Processes and priorities being defined include the Repair draft for starting repair centers, the Community ambassadors for liaisons between different parts of our international community, and the Jams description of how to organize and promote a local jam/event.

Calendar

• The grassroots groups are working this week on smoothing out the coverage of upcoming presentations to more equitably cover different fields of interest, languages, and countries. Also scheduling the next year of events - those organized by OLPC groups and those where we have a presence or a booth.
• This week : Grassroots bootcamp (June 9-12); This weekend : Grassroots Jam NYC
• June :

  End of June: Developers are gathering in Boston for a week (including Martin :)

  June 26-27? Chicago meetup

• July:

  iCommons 2008 : Sapporo, Japan

  Wikimania 2008 : Library of Alexandria, July 17-20

• August :

  2d half of Aug: OLPC Croatia is planning a pan-European event in the outdoors

  Week of Aug 17: OLPC HQ is planning a public poster session for its summer projects, and accepting ideas for presentations and lightning talks.

o Reflection

review, updates, analysis, feedback

• Grassroots ideas : Grassroots experimentation
• Weekend-length project suggestions : Open projects