OLPC South Africa
| 2007 status: red | ||||
| red | ||||
Old content archived at OLPC South Africa/Archive
OLPC in South Africa
We have two deployments in South Africa:
- Kliptown Youth Program in Soweto - 100 XOs
- Three schools in Limpopo - 100 XOs - sponsored and deployed by One Here... One There.
These projects were funded by donations from non-profit organisations in the USA, who provided funding for the XOs, school servers, generators and other infrastructure, and provided volunteers to assist with deploying the XOs and training the teachers and children.
The South African Department of Education is not currently involved with OLPC.
Getting involved
Here are some ways to get involved locally:
- Find organisations willing to donate, to raise funds to run a deployment in the Western Cape. Minimum order is 100 XOs through the Give Many program, and someone must take responsibility for doing the deployment - and additional things are required too like access points, internet connectivity, generators, server for the school, etc.
- We are in the process of setting up a local non-profit organisation to coordinate this. Contact us at the email address below if you want to participate in this.
- Work with educators, educational organisations, on the Sugar software (the educational platform used on the XOs) - get them set up with it on say Ubuntu on conventional computers, get them involved in using/testing the software and giving feedback
- Produce local content: Sugar includes a PDF Reader which can be used to display content like text books. Some countries have even scanned existing text books. The XOs may include sections of Wikipedia content which has been reformatted for offline use.
- Translate the Sugar software into local languages.
Or you can get involved in the global project:
- Develop Activities for Sugar
- Test Sugar, file bug reports, contribute to development
You can apply through the contributors program to get an XO for a specific project. If you are interested, first contact Morgan Collett as we may have a pool of XOs to use for OLPC-ZA.
Contact details
You can contact the OLPC South Africa team at olpc.za@gmail.com.
If you want to engage in discussion with everyone interested in OLPC (and related projects) in South Africa, join the olpc-za mailing list. You will then receive copies of mails sent to the list.
Summary
| Primary Language | ,|x|Language spoken::x}} |
| Number of Laptops | Number of manufactured laptops::200 |
| Keyboard Layout | Keyboard::OLPC English Keyboard |
| Build | ,|x|Software release::x}} |
| Date(s) Arrived in Country | ,|x|Has received laptops on date::x}} |
| School Server | ,|x|School server status::x}} |
| Deployment Status | Deployment status::200 XOs |