OLPC Europe/Newsletter/Draft

This is a draft for the OLPC Europe Grassroots Newsletter

What is OLPC Europe

OLPC Europe is nothing but than a communication layer and a networking platform. The aim is to make commonication easier, basically between local grassroots, but also with the MIT. This can result in less work for everyone, and in a stronger focus on our common efforts and goals. Good communication has enormous potential for collaboration on projects and general information exchange, and also supports smaller grassroot organisations not to get lost in the mess :) Read more our vision here: OLPC_Europe/Vision

At the moment there are around 20 people volunteering for the basic setup of this platform. Find the people here: OLPC_Europe/Community#Volunteers

Communication

General

• The grassroots list is our home mailing list
• We communicate a lot via IRC in #olpc-europe, #olpc-groups (chat.freenode.net)
• We meet all 2 weeks on IRC, mostly thursday afternoon. See OLPC_Europe/Meetings

Meetings & Events

• We also try to meet in person, primarily at free software / open source events across Europe.
  • We list events where someone from OLPC Europe is participating here: OLPC_Europe/Events
  • The next event is FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer European Meeting) in Brussels, lasting from 23. to 24. February. The OLPC event takes place on Saturday, 23. February, from 15:00 to 17:00.
  • After that, plenty of people will be at the CeBIT 08 in Hannover, which lasts from 4. to 9. of March. The OLPC event here is on Saturday, 8. March, 11:15 a.m. @ LinuxForum

Grassroots Organisations

Status Quo

These are groups, which feel part of OLPC Europe (add yours :)

• OLPC Austria
• OLPC Bulgaria
• OLPC Croatia
• OLPC France
• OLPC Germany
• OLPC Netherlands
• OLPC Russia
• OLPC Slovenia
• OLPC Switzerland

Development

• OLPC Catalonia: Jaume Nualart from OLPC Austria (who is from Catalonia and currently living in Vienna) is giving impulses for the kick-off of OLPC Catalonia. Catalonia is a Spanish Autonomous Community in the north-east of Spain, with Barcelona as capital. The first meetings will take place on march-april 2008, currently collecting people and organizations, mainly from Barcelona. In a few days we will setup a mailing list and also a page in moviments.net. People involved: Jaume, Victor Guillamón and others.

Pilot Projects

• List
• Status Quo
• Future Ideas

Software Projects

Ways to participate

Most projects need a lot more than only programmers. From ideas, content, testing, translating and organizing, ways to participate include helping with documentation, artwork, sound, mechanics, ... One good approach is to first think about what you enjoy doing and what you are good at -- and then on how to contribute with this to a project you're interested in.

Possible first steps

1. Get an overview of current projects
2. Think about which project you'd like to support
3. Get an overview of that specific project
   • visit the homepage
   • download and run the code
   • think about which part of the project you'd like to work on
4. Get in contact
   • say hi in #olpc-europe on irc.freenode.net
   • drop a few lines to someone from the project -- expressing that you are interested in spending some time to the project, and shortly describe your field of interest and your experience. A mail-address usually can be found somewhere on the homepage.

Further projects and ideas can be found here for example: Software_ideas, Developers/Projects, Activities

Bang

• About: A game for very young kids -- they enjoy banging on the keyboard so much -- give some visual (and audio?) feedback -- perhaps with colors and splashes. Maybe using pygame?
• Status: Initial Brainstorm
• Todo: Thinking about and creating the concept

bombski

• About: bombski is a bomberman-like multiplayer game. Fast paced fun, written with very effective pygame code. Short loading times and minimal cpu load will make it a very good experience on the xo laptop. The mesh and/or twisted is used for multiplayer action.
• Status: Name not yet fixed :). Multiplayer on one machine is working quite well. Inputs: keyboard, mouse, joystick are working
• Todo: Get started on the multiplayer / networking side of things
• Help Wanted: Basically, from game design, mechanics and programming to artwork and sound, any help is very welcome!

OpenWRT

• About: OpenWrt is a Linux-based firmware program for embedded devices such as residential gateways. A few OpenWRT developers ported it to the xo-laptop, and it boots from USB key into an X-Server in something like 15 seconds.
• Status: Kernel 2.6.24 is running, but without graphic support -- Preparing to work on geting sugar running on .23.
• Todo: Sugar, Kernel .24 graphic support
• Help Wanted: Developers experienced with X-Server, OpenWRT, and/or other linux distributions.

Segregation

• About: Segregation is a game from the Nordic Game Jam 08, and won the community award for the best game. It's written in pygame and a lot of fun.
• Status: Working stable and well on linux and windows; very slow on the xo laptop. Display size is only 800x450
• Todo: Speed up things on the xo, enlargen the background to the xo display size: 1200x825 (900 - 75 from the Toolbar on the top = 825)
• Help Wanted: Optimizing, Improvements

xo-get

• About: xo-get is a very simple package installer for the xo laptop.
• Status: Currently working very well
• Todo: there is a long list of improvements to make it perfect :) -- especially at the PyGTK user interface side of things
• Help Wanted: Programming and design help would be very welcome