Cambridge Friends School/Meetings/2009-03-20

Highlights

What happened this week

Please add any notes you have about the CFS pilot from this week here, including relevant links when possible.

• A number of new student groups appeared on the mailing list - many are interested in helping with the CFS deployment to get experience since they hope to work on deployments this summer. New folks, start by looking at #Help needed, please! Welcome to Anurag, David, and Pat from BU, and Owen from MIT!
• Monday, March 16, 2009 - Mel, Mack, Katelyn, and Jeffrey reflashed all 28 XOs at CFS; the machines are now ready to go out to students (some of them could use new batteries, though). The monthly OLPC meetup also happened at Cosi's, hosted by Diane, and discussions of a teacher meetup began.
• Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - Last week's questions were answered, prompting a request for ideas on various topics - please read and chime in with your answers!
• Thursday, March 19, 2009 - Elsa, Rick, and Mel did a work sprint to clear up some odd jobs and create new volunteer training docs. Elsa later went on a documentation rampage and the main deployment wikipage is now up to date, and tech and curriculum teams have their own pages - as teams further define themselves, these pages will evolve. You can now also run the CFS build with custom activities on your own XO.
• Friday, March 20, 2009 - Rob (CFS English and History), Vicky (CFS Math and Science), Sally (CFS Spanish), Peter (CFS Head of School), Mack and Katelyn (CFS deployment Loop team), Elsa (Tech team representative from Olin) and Mel (Boston area deployments volunteer hack of all trades, apparently) had a 7am meeting with multiple cups of coffee to hash out deployment details. It was the first meeting with faculty, admin, loop, and support teams all in the same room at once. Yay! Rough notes are available and hopefully there will be better ones up soon.

What's happening next week

add your upcoming events here!

• The loop team is out for spring break, so a lot of tech background will happen next week, see #Help wanted
• XS install at CFS - no date announced yet
• XS teacher training at CFS - no date announced yet

Upcoming dates

Friday, March 27, 2009 - Elsa is coordinating an "intro to sugar-core hacking" session for people who want to get a development environment set up and get their feet wet in sugar-core development by fixing a bug. Basic python programming knowledge necessary, some pre-session homework. More details coming, help welcomed, especially from experienced Sugar developers. (Mchua is guessing this will be held on Olin's campus in Needham MA.)

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 - DEPLOYMENT DAY! Students get their laptops. There will be pre-deployment sessions with students as well to write and sign laptop use contracts. More details on both needed/coming.

Support teams status

If you're part of a group doing CFS-deployment-relevant activities, please create a section and post what you're up to!

XS

• CFS's server is ready to deploy (ejabberd and moodle are up) and will arrive on campus next week.

Curriculum

• Ready to go. Various curriculum groups (Sandra, Mack, Katelyn) need to sync up over mailing list.

Repairs

• Ready to go.
• We still need to figure out how broken laptops will be delivered to Olin for repair and then back to CFS.
• Xy and Jeff will be training a CFS middle school tech team as soon as team members have been identified by faculty.

Development

• Activity hackers ready to go.
• Need people who want to be Moodle (php) and Sugar (python) hackers to handle patch/feature requests from CFS, see #Help needed

Questions for the loop team

Add questions that you have about the deployment here! Last week's questions were answered by the CFS loop team in an email, with some more recent details updated in the page above.

• What needs to be done before deployment day?
• Can you post your research protocol, if you get permission? (It would make a great example to encourage other deployments to record and share their findings too!)
• Same as above for curriculum samples. Should figure out how to utilize many college teams to test and give feedback on lesson plans.

Help needed

Posts things you need help with - make sure to leave your contact info. To take a task, email olpc_boston@lists.laptop.org with which thing you're interested in helping out with.

• XS team needs networking details about the current CFS setup - what kind of system is the XS going to be placed behind? Need someone networking-savvy to meet with the CFS IT person and ask questions on our behalf. Contact Xy.
• Development team's sugar-core development sprint project needs experienced sugar-core hackers to (asynchronously, remotely) identify good easy first tickets for newbies before the 27th, and to be on IRC or at the event during the sprint time. See #Upcoming dates, contact Elsa.
• Mel is staving off RSI and would like to request a substitute scribe for next Friday's digest so she can rest her hands for a full week - can give guidance before Wed the 25th. Email mel at melchua dot com and cc olpc_boston at lists dot laptop dot org.
• Can someone please encourage Deb and Liane to send a note about their teacher's group idea to the olpc_boston list? It's an awesome one! Ping Elsa if help is needed (this should probably pass to some combination of Mack, Katelyn, and Sandra, though).
• Developers who want to work on Moodle and Sugar on behalf of the CFS deployment are needed. Training available to those with prior programming experience (if you've taken an intro programming class, you'll be ok). Poke Elsa.