IIAB

This IIAB XSCE content does not reflect the opinion of OLPC. These pages were created by members of a volunteer community supporting OLPC and deployments.

Welcome to the School Server Community Edition (XSCE, or http://schoolserver.org), a global project where volunteer professionals are taking the One Laptop per Child movement into a new decade, enabling quality learning among the world's poorest children. Commercial support for our free software is available for those who need it, at Activity Central and through freelance consultants as necessary. Most important, you're invited to contribute your talents to kids' schools worldwide, in any way you find meaningful!

Our Product

The school Server Community Edition provides communication, networking, content, and maintenance to schools and classrooms. In everyday usage the school server provides services which extend capabilities of the connected laptops while being transparent to the user. These services include:

• Classroom connectivity – Similar to what you would find in an advanced home router.
• Internet gateway – If available, an internet connection is made available to laptops.
• Content – Tools to make instructional media available to their schools and classrooms.
• Maintenance – Tools to keep laptop updated and running smoothly.

Get started by downloading and installing the latest: XSCE 0.4 Release Candidate 1 was released August 24, 2013.

Or consider the earlier full release of XSCE 0.3 released June 6, 2013.

Our FAQ

If you are anything like me, you are already losing interest in lofty, often jumbled, and ambustion prose of the wiki. If so, please jump to the Frequently Asked Questions (and answers!) from our global community.

Volunteer contributors keep our FAQ fresh thanks to organic input from folks just like yourself, always welcome!

Our Project

The School Server Community Edition is a community-based project developed and supported by volunteers from around the world.

Our heartbeat is our weekly call at 2PM NYC Time, Thursdays. At the call we review decisions made the previous week and make plans for the next week. Please see the Agenda for a history of past topics or to add a topic for a future week. Please email Adam Holt (holt @ laptop.org) so we can coordinate the logistics necessary to add you to the call.

Our cadence is our quarterly sprint. Every three months we meet for a week long face-to-face work session. At these sprints we work like crazy to get our features complete so they are ready to make the feature freeze which happen just after a sprint. All are welcome in our community, however, if you are the sort that likes to stand on a soapbox and preach... you might be asked to step outside :)

If you can not make a call or sprint, please send us your questions or concerns via fax :) Seriously, in addition to the old-fashioned channels, we made use of typical open community tools.

Join our IRC live chat immediately directly on the web by entering our channel #schoolserver -- or, if you prefer, any IRC chat software can be connected to irc.freenode.net to join that same channel. A Meetbot instance logs the channel strictly only during meetings (currently being held on Tuesdays at 1600 UTC / 1200 EDT), more info in the #Our IRC bots section below.

Our mailing list is at server-devel. Teachers and new contributors especially, are strongly encouraged to ask questions! Please also join the Pathagar mailing list if you're interested in digital libraries within the many schools and communities worldwide (1) lacking broadband (2) unable to afford pay-per-view ebooks (3) wary of advertising/manipulation of our youngest citizens.

Deployment/learning realities are inherently political (how do we nurture teachers/kids/parents, in the face of often monopolistic power from government/corporations/unions/religions, each trying to help) and as such please consider our 35+ person "xsce-devel" Google Group, where all active contributors are invited to join by sending a short paragraph about your experience and XSCE ambitions (holt @ laptop.org). Humanitarian/implementation conversations on civic deployment realities are sorely needed at every level, but the history of OLPC has shown that schools are inherently political places, not always best served by the very "male" traditions of open source mailing lists. In short, educators are too busy for another flame war. As such we seek a more friendly balance, by including more educators' and female voices, thanks to the organic interplay between public and private community spaces.

Our bug tracker is at https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce.

Our technical and user documentation, while crucially evolving at an early stage, can and should be critiqued and refined by all.

Our IRC bots

The #schoolserver IRC channel hosts two special non-human guests: a build bot and a meeting bot.

xsceBOT is just an announcer for the XSCE repo Buildbot, running from the same box, its only capabilities being those described at IRC-Bot help, related to notifying build results. The human responsible for this bot is Santiago Collazo (listed below in the Community section)

xsce_meeting_bot is a MeetBot instance, running on the XSCE build server, and has logging capacities which are strictly enabled only when a user in the channel uses the #startmeeting some_meeting_name command, and until an #endmeeting is called. This command outputs some status lines making clear that a meeting is being held, and also changes the channel topic to reflect the fact that logging is in progress, adding the name of the meeting and the currently discussed topic. When the meeting ends, logging stops, the collected minutes are posted at the XSCE project public tracker for future reference, and the standard channel topic is restored. You can learn about the meeting commands the bot understands at Meetbot manual, with the only relevant change being that a meeting topic is not optional but mandatory. This bot responds also to another useful command, not logging related, in the form of rm ####, with #### being an issue number from the XSCE tracker. The output of this command shows the description and status of the issue, the person it's assigned to, and a direct link to it. The human responsible for this bot is David Rodriguez, listed below.

Our Ecosystem

The School Server ecosystem is fascinating. There are hundreds of similar projects around the world. Each work from slightly different perspectives. If you are interested in the project... but don't quite 'feel it,' please consider one of the following projects.

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server
• BRCK.com by Ushahidi
• http://SMEserver.org since 1999, based on CentOS
• http://eXeLearning.org being enhanced by Mike Dawson, for Nokia phones
• http://LibraryBox.us by Jason Griffey & All (map shows 25 locations)
• http://internet-in-a-box.org by Braddock Gaskill
• http://LocalFi.org by Caryl Bigenho, Sebastian Silva & All
• Sugar Network by Aleksey Lim
• BeLL Ground Server on RPi, by http://OLE.org
• Pathagar Bookserver by Sayamindu Dasgupta, now maintained by Seth Woodworth & All
• Library For All, apparently for Haiti but is there Creole content?
• Library-in-a-box by Libraries For All.
• LibraryBox
• PirateBox
• eGranary Digital Library
• VillageTelco by Terry Gillett et. al.

Our Community

Our community is made up of people just like you. If you are interested in the project please reach out to any of our members to learn more about us.

• Jerry Vonau (SW architecture)
• George Hunt (configuration, GUI, low-power HW)
• Tim Moody (documentation, testing, Puppet/Ansible auto-distribution & config mgmt)
• Anna Schoolfield (testing, content/ebooks curation platforms)
• Anish Mangal (integration, offline cloud)
• Rodrigo Hartmann (security, GUI, maintainability, intl languages)
• David Farning (software engineering tips)
• Alex Kleider (bookserver eg. Pathagar)
• David Rodríguez Álvarez (web design)
• Rubén Rodríguez (Linux/Trisquel advisor)
• Adam Holt (documentation, community coordination & outreach)
• Professor Sameer Verma (free/open advisor & user)
• Sridhar Dhanapalan (video) & many more!
• Nitika Mangal (QA Manager in India)
• Santiago Collazo (Sysadmin, Ansible)
• Kartik Kumar Perisetla (Sugar developer, Delhi, India)
• Mike Dawson (advisor on SME Server technologies, Mideast, Afghanistan)
• Seth Wolfwood (Pathagar ebooks library)
• Braddock Gaskill (Internet-in-a-Box)
• Bernie Innocenti (free software advisor)
• Mikus Grinbergs (XO-4 & similar hardware testing)
• John Gunkel (IT configuration)
• Ajay Garg (webdav 1-to-many collaboration)
• Miguel González (performance testing)
• Aneesh Dogra (Pathagar digital book library)
• Andi Gros (Pathagar books' metadata: where & why?)
• Terry Gillett (Village Telco, wireless integration)
• Tom Gilliard (CentOS testing)
• T.K. Kang (testing, Asia outreach)
• David Leeming (Oceania/Pacific deployment realities)
• Craig Perue (Jamaica/Caribbean project management)
• Mitch Seaton (deployment realities, Philippines, Australia, Madagascar)
• Bastien Guerry (OLPC France, Lisper, philosopher-in-chief!)
• Xavier Carcelle (OLPC France/Madagascar, backup testing)
• Daniel Drake (deployment scalability, based out of Nicaragua)
• Samuel Jacob Klein (open educational architectures, Wikipedia community relations)
• James Cameron (Quozl, keeping us all honest!)
• Kevin Mark (live tech support, on the #schoolserver channel at http://webchat.freenode.net)

Our Future

Now's the time to bring together the upcoming XSCE 0.4 version, with our July 8-12 Hack Sprint near Winnipeg in Canada, and final release expected in September 2013.

Do try some of the latest RPM builds, at your own risk of course: http://xsce.activitycentral.com/repos/xsce/devel.

Or you can use the repo definition http://xsce.activitycentral.com/repos/xsce-devel.repo.

Learn more about the long term goals at XSCE Vision.

Our History & Inspiration

How did XSCE's design evolve? Progress only makes sense when we learn from the past...

Nov 2013 Agenda

v0.5 hack sprint culmination, expected Nov 13-15 in Malacca, Malaysia, in conjunction with OLPC Basecamp 2013 (Nov 16-18) whose enlivening blog lays clear our humanitarian commitment.

Oct 2013 Agenda

v0.5 hack sprint crystallization, expected Oct 21-23 in or near San Francisco, following SF's Summit (Oct 18-20), and in conjunction with the Internet Archive's great Books in Browsers Summit Oct 24-25!

Sep 2013 Agenda

v0.4 release expected. Haiti implementation of 0.4 at two schools, for the new school year.

Aug 2013 Agenda

XSCE 0.4 RC1 released August 24. Prep for final release! Haiti implementation late Aug and early Sept. Utilite and/or TrimSlice custom hardware early prototype shipping to beta experimenters.

Jul 2013 Agenda

v0.4 Sprint July 8-12, 1hr north of Winnipeg. v0.4 spec gaining precision, bringing stability & configurability to most XOs, x86, 64-bit Fedora, RPi? Pathagar bookserver & Internet-in-a-Box integration also expected.

Jun 2013 Agenda

Version 0.3 released! Prep July sprint! Volunteers can buy XO-4 Touch Laptops if they will help test XSCE & http://internet-in-a-box.org etc.

May 2013 Agenda

Very successful Toronto-area Sprint May 8-13,with Braddock Gaskill all the way from LA! 0.3 RC1 unleashed May 14; RC2 May 28? India prototype installed.

Apr 2013 Agenda

Prep v0.3 May sprint. Los Angeles interfacing with Caryl Bigenho's http://localfi.org and Braddock Gaskill's http://internet-in-a-box.org.

Mch 2013 Agenda

Boston meetup Mch 1-4 with Sameer Verma, Anish Mangal. Early pre-field test connects an orphanage from Haiti.

Feb 2013 Agenda

Toronto/Waterloo area Sprint Feb 6/7 to 10/11.

Release of XSCE 0.1 Stable and 0.2 Coming.

Jan 2013 Agenda

Proposed Core Spec and Priority Tuning.

Dec 2012 Agenda

Jamaica implementation sprint (delayed).

Nov 2012 Agenda

Centred around Toronto area hack sprint Nov 10-18:

Expand testing+UX with Anna Schoolfield, Tim Moody & Seneca College students' packaging with York Univ/Seneca College Professor Chris Tyler.

Meet with Anish Mangal and Nathan Riddle near Detroit etc to discuss wider community integration.

Oct 2012 Agenda

Working w/ Alex Kleider's model classroom @ http://olpcSF.org/summit & http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012.

Sep 2012 Agenda

Toronto area hack sprint Sept 16-23, incl public demo Saturday Sept 22.