Useful Links

OLPC_Santa_Barbara

Current news

Good Resource

http://www.olpcnews.com/
Great source of information. Not a branch of OLPC, but a group effort of many individuals working to provide information whats going on with OLPC. Great source of infomration.
But take everything here with a grain of salt, as these are written by different people and sometimes they have their info wrong. For example, in one article it made out OLPC to be doing a 3.5 million dollar project in Africa (which prompted a "where'd they get the money?"), but in reality it was a different organization who just named the effort OLPCorps.

News as of 10/11/09

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/29/nicholas-negroponte-olpc
XO-2 will be open source

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2009/01/29/olpc-20-after-layoffs-one-laptop-foundation-reboots-with-new-focus-and-big-plans/3/
Last month it was predicted that the X0-2 would be ready in 18 months.

http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/production/open_source_hardware_xo-2_laptop.html

There's some speculation that open-source isn't quite what it sounds like, in that it more provides a reference for people to build from (aka a means to copy the XO and do local manufacturing). But I'm not too keen on what that all means really. Can anyone clarify this?

http://olpc.tv/2008/11/18/birmingham-alabama-deploys-15000-xo-laptops/
Video on XO's being used widely in an Alabama town.

http://blog.laptop.org/2009/02/05/q-a-from-xo-camp/
I spotted this on OLPCnews, words from NN himself. If this is accurate, this could explain the removal of small deployments. With that many on backorder and that rate of production, they may have cut smaller orders to speed up large deployments to governments (their area of focus).

Academic

Academic_papers
Has some academic articles done on OLPC, such as evaluations of XO's being used in schools. Not a huge library, but useful nonetheless.

http://www.teachingmatters.org/evaluations/olpc_kappa.pdf
An evaluation done in a Harlem middle school.

Technology Infrastructure

http://www.nextbillion.net/news/experiments-bring-internet-to-remote-african-villages
Article on Google helping set up some internet infrastructure in rural areas.

Resources

http://www.archive.org/index.php
Essentially a huge internet library.
Free access to over a million books, plus things like audio and video. Most items are things that are out of copyright.
Something like this makes library access easier for rural areas.

Indirectly useful things

http://www.joomla.org/
JD showed us this, and we'll use it to create a great website for OLPCsb.