OLPC Rochester, NY

a local grassroots group

About

The Rochester, NY interest group is a way for people in the Rochester, New York area and surrounding locations to talk about and work together on OLPC projects or activities. This is a page for those interested in volunteering or contributing to the project.

We use a Google Groups group OLPC Rochester, NY to manage member communications. You may subscribe there to receive group announcements.

We also have a discussion thread OLPC Rochester, NY at forum.laptop.org.

To receive updates to this page, log in / create an OLPC wiki user account (at the top rightmost link of any wiki page), then use the 'my preferences' link on your account to enter a private email address and select the option to receive email whenever a page you're watching is changed. Finally, click the watch tab at the top of this page to include it in your watchlist.

OLPC Rochester, NY is

• just beginning to organize.
• open to all interested parties in the Rochester or western New York area.

Event calendar

OLPC XO user's group meetings at the Rochester Institute of Technology - (See the Flyer.pdf.)

The Lab for Technological Literacy at RIT is supporting the OLPC XO Laptop project by raising awareness locally and conducting research and development initiatives.

The Lab and RIT are hosting the user's group. All meetings will take place in B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences, Building 70, Golisano Auditorium, Rm 1400, (See RIT Building 70 Google Map, or campus maps at http://inside.rit.edu/maps/.)

7:00 pm - 8:50 pm, on the 4th Thursday of the month.

Please join us on the following dates:

• 26 March 2009
• 23 April 2009
• 28 May 2009

Past events

• 26 February 2009 - Sonstein on disaster-recovery networks

1. RIT Professor Jeff Sonstein spoke on the potential use of the XO in disaster-recovery efforts.
   • He described his involvement with Sahana, a free and open source disaster management system that was conceived and developed in response to the 26 December 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami (Wikipedia history).
   • His team reports their work on the Center for the Handheld Web blog page.
   • Jeff described the ReSTful (Representational State Transfer) software architecture, and his plans to migrate Sahana to this architecture.
   • He then plans to port the software to the XO because of its ability to self organize a network. This will be extremely valuable in a disaster when the Internet is disrupted.

     After the meeting I learned that the OLPC Project will be sending 4 XOs to the Hastily-Formed Network Research Group at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California for testing and trial integration into their disaster Fly Away Kits.

2. Fred Grose demonstrated the Etoys environment on the XO using a VirtualBox virtualization of the Sugar on a Stick distribution of XO software environment.
   • Sugar on a Stick or virtualization is a convenient way to project a running Sugar system on a conference room screen.
   • Fred suggests you explore Etoys by steping through the short tutorials available by clicking the '?' icon in the Etoys toolbar.
3. Bill Hickok gave a presentation on getting started with Python.
   • He reviewed the history of the language and some of its advantageous features.
4. Karlie Robinson handed out some Fedor Sugar Spin LiveCDs for PC and Macs.
   • These are the same image as used in the Sugar on a Stick distribution and can boot on a machine without installing to its disc.
5. The group agreed to support Professor Stephen Jacobs' Honors Seminar on Developing for the OLPC XO (see the Projects section).

• 22 January 2009 - Getting to know you and the OLPC XO 2009 kickoff

• 26 March 2008 - Show & Tell Workshop at RIT

Projects

Professor Stephen Jacobs Honors Seminar, Community Open Source Development with OLPC, XO, Sugar

• A course in collaborative innovation, Honors Seminar Developing for the One Laptop Per Child XO

Usability testing

See the Usability testing class project page for the project description, work documents, and reports.

Other ideas

If you're in the Rochester area and want to work on a project with someone local, post ideas here.

• your idea...