The XOcamp 2 miniconference in Has location city::Cambridge Has location country::USA, is scheduled for January 12, 2008 to January 16, 2008

FUDcon will be Jan 9-11 See: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConF11. XOCamp will be the week following, Jan 12-14 and it will have tracks for technical and community events. Thursday and Friday that week (Jan 15 and 16) will be reserved for other meetings and wrap-up sessions for the organizers.

The purpose of the XOCamp is to review status of code, specifications and features for the 9.1.0 release. See: 9.1.0. In addition the Camp will help us frame our long-term software development effort.

Subject Matter

Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but are not limited to:

Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews of available feedback
Learning priorities and tools needed to support them
Technologies, applications and software design proposals
Process and infrastructure proposals
Current and needed research

Agenda

This is a proposed agenda : please feel free to edit and improve it!

Monday January 12, 2009 : Technical meetings (See proposals below)

Tuesday January 13, 2009 : Technical meetings (See proposals below)

Wednesday January 14, 2009 : Technical meetings (See proposals below)

Thursday January 15, 2009 : Open for meetings and wrap-up sessions for the organizers.

Friday January 16, 2009 : Open for meetings and wrap-up sessions for the organizers.

Technical Track

Propose talks below and list your name below talks you'd like to see. Other talks are being proposed by email to devel@lists.laptop.org, so feel free to propose there instead (or as well).

To add a proposal, please use the following format:

: '''TITLE''' - description - presenter [if you have one in mind]
:: more description, if needed

Title - please make this as short as possible while being precise.

Description - this should be 20-100 words long. Please leave longer descriptions on a separate page dedicated to the subject.

How much time is needed

Who can lead the discussion

What preparation and materials should be created (e.g. presentations, code samples, other). Post them here.

User Requirements - 2 hours

Who is the user and what do they want?

Summary: Overview of top concerns from deployment leads, students and teachers. An aggregated look at the top items requested. An in depth look at the motivation of a few specific requests. Time permitting, can include a discussion of how to turn user feedback in to actionable requirements. Can include a detailed "use case" explaining the technical environment and social context of a target school.

The Medium Is The Message, using the XO in Teacher Training to achieve Total Buy-In, 30-45 minutes _Yamaplos

Reviewed 10/29 - tentative status - Yes, Follow up owner - Greg How much time is needed? 2 - 3 hours Who can lead the discussion? Greg, Yama (Kim, Ed and Reuben also possible, others?) What preparation and materials should be created (e.g. presentations, code samples, other)? Presentation planned.

Status - On track to include. Next steps, ToC for presentation.

Deployment is Hard! Notes from Nepal's Deployments

Summary: Bryan Berry will talk about Nepal's deployments with help from Tony Anderson. Will talk about tough stuff like teacher training, developing local support infrastructure, managing volunteers, and particular technical needs.

Time

90 minutes + 30 minutes of discussion
Bryan Berry and Tony Anderson will lead the discussion
Powerpoint presentation will accompany the talk

9.1.0 Requirements and Specification Review

Fedora Compatibility

Rebase on Fedora 10
Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO

Interoperation with legacy apps

Summary: Activity compatibility. Making it easy to run Fedora Linux apps on the XO. See also this thread: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020595.html

Who can lead the discussion? User:CScott

Activation/lease/signing/image customization

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Security%2C_activation_and_deployability

Activation_lease_security
Image_customization
Image_signing_key_delegation
Faster_imaging
Activation_via_wireless

Updating faster/better for 9.1

--User:CScott (I can give a talk)

Delegation of Signing Leases

How to allow deployments to sign their own images.

Deployment controlled activation lease security

Summary: what are we doing, what can we do better. Could review this requirement and any accompanying design: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security

Interested parties: Martin

Power management

Improved_battery_life No_power_regressions Shutdown_menu

Summary: Continuing to evolve software to wring all potential power savings out of the hardware. Timed wakeup, allowing screen blanking to recover power and allowing more aggressive suspending. Measuring power usage to avoid regressions. testing for power against real world usage, pushing the remaining suspend-related bugs to completion. Keeping a close eye on software and hardware needed to really reduce power in Gen2. Also includes - the power button is currently underutilized. It should allow either shutdown or suspend of the laptop, with the help of an on-screen dialog or menu. [1]

See also thread on power at: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020538.html - gnu

User:Cjb, User:Rsmith, gnu?, User:pgf

Localization

Some key features from Software features in the area Localization

i18n and l10n: 9.1 and beyond
The areas I would like to cover include:

Input methods: Out current input system (XKB) is not enough for Chinese/Japanese/Korean, and even existing customers like Ethiopia have needs which are met with considerable difficulty with XKB. For 9.1, I propose that we switch to SCIM[1], which should take care of most (if not all) of our current requirements.
Multiple, non English fallback languages: Many of our users will probably be multilingual. A Aymara speaker would like to see the UI strings falling back to Spanish translations in absence of Aymara instead of the normal, default English. We have the existing infrastructure in our core i18n infrastructure, implementing this is simply a matter of making changes in Sugar (and maybe Rainbow).
Language packs: The current system of language packs is not very reliable (it overwrites the original translations in the system, installations cannot be easily undone, no versioning, etc). I want to switch to a RPM based language pack system for 9.1, which will be easier to deploy (especially if the customization key mechanism gets support for RPM). This will require support for multiple locale directories, and I'll talk about that as well (Ubuntu uses a similar approach - I plan to reuse their patches if possible).
User modifiable translations: There has been a number of ideas on this - initially (during my last visit to 1CC), we were thinking of a "Translate Activity" which would let children add/modify translations, and optionally let them share the translations over the mesh. SJ and Scott have recently suggested a wiki-like editable UI, which would, definitely be much cooler ;-). I want to brainstorm on this, and try to figure out the amount of time we need to do this, the advantages, risks, tradeoffs involved etc.

Presenter: Sayamindu

John Gnu Block

Replacing Sugar Totally - whether and how to climb out of the dead-end without further investment - gnu

Fixing & featuring activities - process and progress about activity updates; from maintainer pinging (newsreader, paint) to regular activity-review (gcompris sets, simcity). Similarly, publicizing partly-finished activities (shikhar's email, b-logo).

Consider eliminating DRM

Now that Fedora runs out of the box on the XO, it's become more obvious that shipping jailed laptops is bad policy. It's been done via a misguided "security = good" mindset and a lazy "fewer SKUs is easier" approach. - gnu

Eliminating Mesh, keeping 802.11

Mesh barely works. We should expand our hardware choices and avoid locking our software into a failed effort, by moving our software and documentation to straight 802.11 ad-hoc and 802.11 access point configurations. We are almost there now, just need to clean up a few loose ends. - gnu

School Server - 2 hours

Summary - Status and plans.

Quick overview of the status of the XS
Areas where can relieve pressure from the XO
- Narrative and content publishing/ sharing
- Upgrade and other mgmt tools
Focus areas to improve XO-XS interaction for 9.1 release cycle
- Service announcement (DNS? mDNS? Zeroconf? DNS masking?)
- "XS within sight" flag on XO
- Lease management protocol - (to be continued in theft deterrence)
- Browse.xo automagic auth
- ejabberd, presence service / roster mgmt
- "Thicker" wikislices
Interesting goals for 9.2 or later
- Backup as extension of Journal (a la Time Machine)
- "Universal" book reader
- Alternative mesh strategies - Cerebro
- Sneakernet - wwwoffle
- MikMik and the XS

Community Track

Community

Why it matters

In my view it is the whole bottom line, la raison d'être of the whole project. No matter the XO and us are agents in developing scientists, artists, lawyers, whatever (who anyway are wont to migrate North ASAP), if there is not a process of community getting built among people who are not familiar with the culture and processes of collaboration, we are for naught, except maybe in making things worse. And of course, it is not at all just about sharing an activity, which is a software/hardware issue, it's the whole concept of building things together, sharing, being open to give and take, losing the "no te metás" (don't get involved) mentality. Yamaplos 17:33, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Discuss specific strategies so that all the rest of the software / hardware effort is not wasted
Specific fixes to software and hardware

How much time is needed? a couple lifetimes? OK, gimme an hour at least, maybe in such a way that it can overflow into dinner or lunch Who can lead the discussion? Yama, depending on funding, with Sur list people if we can bring any What preparation and materials should be created (e.g. presentations, code samples, other)? I have volunteered EquipoSur_XOCamp2 to help

Distributing OLPC

Summary: Open discussion to address the following questions.

How can OLPC encourage worldwide decentralized community development models for pedagogy and the content and software to support it?
1. And then let the whole worldwide community benefit? _{Yamaplos 19:39, 13 November 2008 (UTC)}
How can communication between/among OLPC-the-organization and grassroots pedagogical, content, and software developers be improved?
1. Define, clarify channels. Who do you contact for a small deployment? How do you distribute not just green bricks but knowledge and training? Who should you contact in 1CC for what kind of issue? _{Yamaplos 19:39, 13 November 2008 (UTC)}
Whether and how we want the volunteer community to help us with 9.1
1. If OLPC-the-organizations says that we support the open-source mentality and that we encourage volunteers, we should articulate exactly what kind of volunteer support we want and need, the kind of relationship the organization would like to have with the community, and the kind of support (including support and resources that are conditional) we can provide them with. Mchua 16:54, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
2. I personally think that it is especially important to articulate the kind of volunteer projects we won't support and do not have resources for, so that community members know what they have to do completely independently of OLPC. Knowing the answer is a no is better, for planning and getting-things-done purposes, than remaining in a nebulous "maybe?" state. Mchua 16:54, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

totally second both points _Yamaplos

How much time is needed - 1 hour Who can lead the discussion - Rafael, (Mel available for backup) What preparation and materials should be created (e.g. presentations, code samples, other)?

I am working on a 10-minute "canned" presentation to be used for getting people non-familiar with the program to get enough to jump in - Far from ready, but hope it will be Yamaplos 17:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Status - On track to include. Next steps, ToC for presentation.

Why is this under "software engineering"? No doubt there are software-related issues we need to address, but this is primarily a wetware issue. The tools are there, agreed they are not perfect, yet the fact they are not being used has to do with how we reach (or miss reaching) people, not with hardware or software. Yamaplos 17:57, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

XOCamp 2

Contents

Subject Matter

Agenda

Technical Track

User Requirements - 2 hours

Who is the user and what do they want?

Deployment is Hard! Notes from Nepal's Deployments

9.1.0 Requirements and Specification Review

Fedora Compatibility

Activation/lease/signing/image customization

Power management

Localization

John Gnu Block

School Server - 2 hours

Other possible topics

Forgotten or Missing Tools

Automated testing tools

Next-generation journal ideas

Libraries

Files

Searching

Multiplayer wikipad

Customizing skins

Underlying Network and Collaboration Technologies

GUI, Activities, Sharing, in Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaboration

Filesystems

Dealing with Low Memory conditions

Performance

Isolation and untrusted activities

eBook Reader

Theory of Activities

Develop activity

View source key everywhere

Community Track

Community

Distributing OLPC

Navigation menu