User:Mchua/Braindumps/Grassroots invitations

Dear OLPC community,

Several events are coming during the month of June that we'd like to invite the OLPC grassroots community to attend and apply to. They are still largely in the rough stages of formation, and input is welcomed as these events rapidly come into being.

1. Grassrootscamp Boston - Cambridge, MA on Saturday-Sunday, June 7-8 2008.

In the tradition of Barcamp, we will be holding Grassrootscamp Boston, an unconference dedicated towards community-organized, bottom-up, user-group, grassroots groups, initiatives, events, structures, and best-practices for all of the above. This is not just an OLPC event! Anyone from any grassroots group, or with interest in ad-hoc organizations, is invited to attend - so forward this out to your friends in LUGs, meetups, co-ops, clubs, and suchlike.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_unconference for more information. If you'd like to help organize the event, please contact Mel Chua at mel@laptop.org.

2. Grassroots Bootcamp - Cambridge, MA from Monday-Thursday, June 9-12 2008.

We're having a grassroots bootcamp and conference from June 9-13, 2008 in Boston, MA. The default location is 1cc, OLPC's organizational headquarters; if the number of attendees outgrows that, we'll find an alternate location. The objective of the bootcamp is to train grassroots group consultants - people who are starting or running their own grassroots groups who can also serve as resources to others who want to start grassroots groups.

There will be sessions for hacking (and learning how to hack) on different areas of the XO's stack and supporting software/infrastructure, discussions of our satellite communities around volunteering, learning, and sugar -- globally and in countries, and much more. Several slots are still open, and we'd like to invite community members to apply.

To ensure a focused and high-quality event for participants, there are prerequistes to participation. In order to make the event accessible to more people of varying backgrounds, we are holding online study groups starting this week; it should be possible for someone with no XO/programming background, no wiki background, and/or no educational theory background to get up to speed within two weeks of intense part-time work. Admissions is on a rolling basis. All materials are provided; attendees are responsible for their own travel and lodging. Scholarships and couchsurfing match-ups are available - inquire about these at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Grassroots_bootcamp, the bootcamp's talk page.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_bootcamp for more details. We hope that others will run grassroots bootcamps in their areas as well; if you're interested in doing so, please contact Mel Chua at mel@laptop.org.

3. Grassroots Jam New York - New York, NY on Saturday-Sunday, June 14-15 2008.

We're running a Jam in NYC for the "final exam" of the attendees of the Grassroots bootcamp. We are still looking for a host organization, but once on is found, we will be focusing on development/deployment of projects from the host organzation that involve software (or hardware) that could work on/with the XO, or projects/deployment that could involve the use of XOs. Secondarily, we will meet with and build connections to NYC-area grassroots groups.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Grassroots_Jam for more information.