OLPC SanFranciscoBayArea/Community Summit 2010

OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Community Summit 2010

We're still in the planning phases of this event, please consider all details tentative

OLPC San Francisco Bay Area Summit 2010 is OLPC-SF community event designed to primarily foster collaboration amongst deployment teams in the SF Bay Area. We also hope that the event will help in improving the visibility of OLPC and Sugar to a wider group around this area.

The event is a "Birds of a Feather" type event but largely run as an unconference. Claim your session!

Pre-Summit & Summit Dates:
Thur Oct 21 - Fri Oct 22 : optional "Books in Browsers" pre-summit with the Internet Archive: (http://archive.org)
Fri Oct 22 (evening) - Sun, Oct 24, 2010 : OLPC-SF/Sugar/Realness Summit!

Location (tentative): SFSU Downtown Campus 835 Market St. 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103

Note: This location is not the main campus. This is the same building as the new Westfield mall that houses Bloomingdale's. Look for the SFSU banner on Market St. between 4th and 5th streets, right next to Walgreens. Take the elevator to the 5th floor.

Map

Organizing Volunteers

• Sameer Verma sverma@sfsu.edu
• Grant Bowman grantbow@gmail.com
• Hilary Naylor
• Carol Ruth Silver
• Elizabeth Krumbach lyz@princessleia.com
• holt @ laptop dot org

Possible Topics

• How to deal with educational establishment. How to ensure laptops stay with students outside of school? What are effective strategies?

Planning Meetings

Weekly planning meeting August 11

Attendees

Sameer Verma, Hilary Naylor, Carol Ruth Silver, June Kleider

Items discussed

• Event space
  • SFSU Space is booked Sat Oct 23rd.
  • If we get the SF Soma Hub it will be very convenient, at Powell & 5th.
  • If not, the whole event could be at main campus.
  • Friday evening? not requested space yet. Suggestion of other places such as museum or library - more social. Or the Hub? Could be at SFSU Downtown. Have to check policies about food. Possibly pot-luck.
• Website: www.olpcsf.org - placeholder now. Liz is working with Mike Lee (OLPC-DC Learning center) on art work for the site.
• Accommodation: June will to host 1-2 people she knows from Realness. Carol also.
• Concerns about liability: opens SFSU and us to lawsuits. Should not host a mechanism for strangers to find each other. Individuals who know others can of course invite them to stay. Can put a disclaimer on the website about finding places to stay - that is, that we are not facilitating that process.
• Space: SFSU classrooms. Have asked for 4 rooms, one to be over-flow. Last time we had 35 people. In addition we have a lounge area. All classrooms technically equipped. Sameer will enquire about bringing in food and drink.
• Program:
  • Sameer has a student organization to support logistics. Those possible presenters that we know, we can contact personally, and then if they are interested, pass along to Hilary for sorting details. E.g. Bruce B is working in Haiti on solar-power project.
  • Carol: new org founded by Swig, office in SF, creating solar for developing world. Should get them introduced to OLPC. Potential for speed-geek.
  • Hilary: who for Senegal project?
  • Sameer: will get contacts from the 2 SF HSs.
  • Other projects: S. Africa, Afghanistan, Philippines, Senegal, Madagascar, Nepal, Jamaica.
• Schedule: last year sessions were 1.25hr - present for 20-30 min, then questions. Sessions ran concurrently and were not repeated. Most people stayed with the track they started with (education, technology, outreach).
  • Should all the deployments have their own speed-geek session? A lot depends on how many can be represented. A general session such as Carol did last year can include several deployments.
  • Sunday: people coming from bigger deployments, Sugar labs, OLPC.
  • What about the idea that Saturday is local and Sunday out-of-towners?
    • Could create an artifical divide. Have to think more about that question.
  • Out-of-town presenters: E.g. Bernie Innocenti from Sugar Labs can have a tech session. Richard Smith the hardware guy from OLPC.
  • Sameer: last year there were people willing to talk about their experience and their technology, but it was a lot of work to get the commitment. Not a good idea to put potential presenters on the wiki until they are confirmed.
  • Topic idea: how to deal with educational establishment. How to ensure laptops stay with students outside of school. What are effective strategies?
• What about a Friday evening social event at the Hub?
  • June: Will check it out. Booked the space on Sunday 10:30-3, could not choose an earlier time. Will do an inventory re tables and chairs next week. It's going to cost $500. ($400 for 3 hours, $95/hr after that.) If there are no fees for anything else we will be happy to underwrite that. Okay to bring in food. Especially if paying by the hour for the room.
• Target date for website end of August.
• Last year the starting time was 9 and it didn't work, so better to do 10.
• Money: Hilary and Sameer think that charging $50 is too much, will deter people even if there is a sliding scale, and that $10 is too little to be worth the hassle. Most likely the University would not approve. Registration is a good idea. It can be done thru eventbright or similar? Liz is checking that out.

Weekly planning meeting August 4

Attendees

Sameer Verma, Carol Ruth Silver, Elizabeth Krumbach, Grant Bowman, Hilary Naylor, Adam Holt

Items discussed

• Pretty much confirmed for Fri 21 evening, Sat 22 & Sun 23
• Non-trivial costs are involved for using SFSU's Downtown Center on Sunday, but it remains a possibility
• Investigating other locations
• Naming: OLPC SF Community Summit 2010
  • Include related icons on site and during promotion: sugar labs, realness
• Daily structure not strictly split, but loosely:
  • Friday night: Introduction and networking
  • Saturday: Outside SF sessions
  • Sunday: OLPC SF members sessions
• Grant Bowman to register .org/com/net domains
• Website suggested for slicker-than-wiki promotion

Weekly planning meeting July 28

Attendees

Sameer Verma, Hilary Naylor, Carol Ruth Silver, Elizabeth Krumbach

Items discussed

• Dates requested: October 23-24, Saturday is fine, $$ for Sunday, Sameer looking into and will get back to us
• Have an opening/welcome/introduction session Friday evening and/or Saturday morning
• Other options for location: Space on main campus, issue may be transportation there since there are restricted transit options
• Must have registration for head count regarding insurance, still need to hear about charging a fee (discuss token fee? donation?)
• Come up with list of what we will need to pay for.
• Name of the event: OLPC-SF Community Summit 2010
• Goal: More of a "meetup" than a "meeting" - focused on Discussion (collaboration, issues, possible solutions) rather than Decision.
• Do we want "facilitators" for rooms during sessions?
• Find more volunteers for planning and organization.

Kickoff meeting, July 17, 2010

Photos of the white board:

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:20100717_003.jpg

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:20100717_004.jpg

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:20100717_005.jpg

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:20100717_006.jpg

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:20100717_007.jpg

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:20100717_008.jpg

Notes taken by Ben Devine:

Expected Contributions and Take Away

• Evaluate problems
• Report problems
• E-books
• Manage deployment interests: grassroots to ---> Large deployment
• Moodle – Math modules
• Programming workshop (python, sugar)
• Advocacy
• SoaS on Mac.
• Documentation sessions
• Kids using XO session
• FOSS education
• Sugar onto MNCSF.org computers
• MNCSF.org as a resource
• School server on low power
• Problems in rural schools
• Advocacy participation
• Kids from Oakland, CA
• Technology (software, hardware, networks)
• MOUSE, CA
• Deployment Stories
• Deployments Success/failures
• Implementations success
• Best practices
• Failures

Attendees

Attending via Skype

Caryl Bigenho - Southern California projects, Mail list Olpc-socal@lists.laptop.org, Roadshow in a box, XO-1 (9)

• Cherry Withers - Ekindling, 100 laptops in the Phillipines, pilot 4th &5th grades, Squeakland Board Member, E-toys

Attending via Phone

• Sonya Sokolov - Internet math tutoring project, 10 XOs + SoaS in Ghana, 5 XOs in California, Math, Flash based (Flash on SoaS), Ph.D. in Teaching/Design from Stanford.

Attending in person

• Sameer Verma - Professor at SF State University, and organizer, OLPC SF
• Grant Bowman - XO toaster, organization help
• Elizabeth Krumbach - Organization help, Ubuntu community council
• Larry Cafiero - Fedora Ambassador, works with 3 kids as XO testers
• Ben Devine - Student, SF State University. Organization help
• Luis Chavez - MNCSF.org ,Everett middle school and youth workshop
• Robert Howard - Porting XS to ARM. Has several ARM devices at home.
• Carol Ruth Silver - Afghanistan Deployment, Planning
• Hilary Naylor - Oakland Schools, Trainer, amnesty international.
• June Kleider - Madagascar deployment.
• Alex Kleider - Technology, Linux, Python, etc.