OLPC UK

One Laptop per Child has minimal presence in the United Kingdom. This page is for those who would like to change that.

Existing UK presence

The Sugar collaboration features are primarily developed by Collabora, based in Cambridge.

Daniel Drake, based just outside London, is an OLPC volunteer developer who performed an internship at OLPC HQ in the US (summer 2008). Daniel is interested in founding a UK community but is currently spending most of his time working on OLPC deployments in other parts of the world.

Give One Get One v2 (launched in November 2008) finally enables UK consumers to get their hands on an XO at http://laptop.org/global

Media

The BBC has produced some of the best media coverage of the project, although it is a bit outdated in the present day.

The Racepoint Group, one of OLPC's media partners in the US, has a UK office and a group who assist OLPC by generating media attention in the UK.

Ideas for UK community activities

• Social events
• User support groups
• Repair centres
• Media outreach
• OLPC pilots
• Working with government for OLPC adoption in the UK education system
• Formation of a non-profit/charity organisational structure
• XO demonstrations to potential community members
• Make a logo and website for the group

Next steps

1. Set up a mailing list, as an easy way of reaching out to all interested participants
2. Someone needs to step up and plan/propose some kind of UK-based activity or meetup to get things started. This should then be broadcasted here and on the mailing list

Interested People

Please list your name here if you would be interested in participating in UK OLPC activities. Please ensure that there is some obvious way of contacting you (e.g. put your email address on your user page, and link to it).

Please also list what you can offer to the community. Offers of help from those who can offer resources critical to UK community formation (e.g. venues for events, sponsorship, media contacts, etc) are especially appreciated.

• Alan Bell
• Alan Lord
• Martin Dengler
• Tom Hannen
• Frankie Roberto, London. Proud new owner of an xo.
• Jeff Plante Leeds
• Chris Lawrie, Aberdeen
• Mark Simpkins, London. XO user.
• Shanmuhanathan Thiagaraja, Reading. XO user.
• Dave Lee - Conisbrough, South Yorkshire
• Gani Bhagavathula, Norwich UK. XO User. Experimenting with Ubuntu.
• Louie Christie, London UK. System Admin, Ex-programmer, Youth Worker, Social Entrepreneur
• Daniel Drake