Summer of Code/2007
One Laptop per Child
Certain OLPC Summer of Code Projects
User stack
We're looking for several exceptional students who are willing to spend their summer in Boston, working within the user stack team, building the architecture and the application suite which will be the children's primary mode of interaction with the laptop. This suite currently consists of the E-book reader, a wiki notebook, and e-mail and IM clients.
None of these are traditional applications like the ones we're used to; the OLPC environment poses unique and extremely difficult problems to solve. The development will be done in Python; for more details about what caliber of participant we're looking for, see the original internship announcement. If you're planning to apply for this position, please follow the instructions in the previous link and send a resume to Ivan before submitting a proposal through the SoC system.
In return for your outstanding skills, we're offering the ability to work on an incredible software project, on an unprecedented scale of deployment, with extremely bright people, and right out of OLPC's Cambridge offices. It'll be a wild ride -- jump in.
Proposed (possible) OLPC Summer of Code Projects
networking
Include mesh routing (such as http://www.olsr.org) to the OLPC laptop. Analyse and simulate scalability and performance issues. Contact: aaron@lo-res.org
Educational Content
HIV/AIDS Education
Create educational games to help children learn about HIV prevention and AIDS. We want content for children of all ages, simple to use and easy to understand. Collaboration with international AIDS organizations is recommended. Possible partners include the Nkosi Johnson AIDS Foundation in South Africa.
Proposer : Kpi 10:10, 2 May 2006 (CET)
One dictionary per child
Nutshell: Multilingual Wiktionary & Wikidata customization for the laptops/servers.
The Multilingual Wiktionary project is picking up steam, and will have some active functionality in a few months. A version of this [and of the underlying wikidata implementation] customized to work with the wiki-based reader software already on the laptops/servers should be produced. This would be combined with a parallel content project to produce a 100-language dictionary (with miminal swadesh/other word lists in a further 200 languages) that could be included with every server; and a subset of the same which could be included on each laptop.
Proposer : Sj 04:00, 2 May 2006 (EDT)
One encyclopedia per child
Nutshell: Wikipedia & Wikimedia Commons customization for laptops/servers
The idea of a "one encyclopedia per child" project to create a condensed snapshot of Wikipedia content suitable for all OLPC laptops (not just the servers) has been floated on this wiki, and on Wikipedia itself. There is an important software component involved -- the culling of statistics about what articles matter, and the scripted export of Wikipedia content (perhaps only part of each article) into a suitable format, both require work and consideration. On the statistics front, a variety of statistics should be gathered (by link-popularity, reader popularity, seminality in Wikipedia's internal-link network, centrality in its field, ...) and analyzed. On the scripting front, scripts should be developed to strip/modify external links; to pull out the first sentence, paragraph, or other subsets of longer articles; to properly reformat or remove image or media links; to properly handle templates and other wikitext features which may not be supported in the native reader.
As for handling of images and media, some work might also be done to better produce and store compressed thumbnails of content, so that a variety of such content may be included. Some form of temporary local caching of requested media, pulled from the nearest server, or of media sharing across machines on a mesh network, could also be useful.
Proposer : Dr. Ian Geoffrey Kennedy* (general idea), Sj (the specific proposal above) 04:00, 2 May 2006 (EDT)
- * see User:olpcme, possibly Dr. Kennedy on this wiki