OLPC:News/2008/Week 23

the week in review: Week 23, 2008^*
feel free to comment and update with footnotes and links to the talk page.

^ Overview

Community: Cambridge plays host to its first Open Jams, bringing local community members together to work on projects and describe them for others to join. The Yale OLPC chapter is formed.
OLPC Europe: Holger Levsen oversaw the OLPC presence at LinuxTag in Berlin, one of Europe's largest hacker conferences. A project application contest led to 70 of 100 XOs being given away. Christoph Derndofer is visiting through early Wednesday for the bootcamp
Contributors' program : Over the past two weeks, in addition to the XOs given to developers @ LinuxTag, 50 machines have gone out to developers, and another 65 have begun the shipping process.
Interns: Alex Levenson started work this week, focusing on setting up a demo machine to highlight the capabilities of the XO. He is publishing images for others to try; the idea is that a pair of machines running this image should be able to demonstrate any of a few dozen use cases and features, with minimal startup time. Suggestions and feedback welcome about what should be demonstrated; as is testing of this image.
Wiki: a number of parts of the wiki are being actively updated. Cjl and Francesca have been categorizing and organizing lists of deployment countries, activities, and partner organizations. Contributors from Oceania have been highly active over the past week, rapidly organizing pages about their sites and proposing a number of related software and activity projects.

opportunities, people, engagements

Francesca Slade has been here now for her second week, and has worked on setting up regular Open Jams (the first was last weekend; the second will take place tomorrow)
In the spirit of a weekly interview of an OLPC luminary, Andriani Ferti shared her thoughts on how she got involved with OLPC and her thoughts for the future
Jams : Mel is looking for others. This week's Open Jam will have a set of Cambridge-repair-center projects for people who don't come with their own.
Grassroots unconference : the unconference is off to an early start, with morning visits from the Berkman Center's Charlie Nesson and OLPC Austria's Christoph Derndofer.
We are looking for likely community ambassadors to help smooth the growth of our developer and other communities.
Nigeria : Asabe Yabane got to meet with Andy Rabagliatti (of Wizzy Digital Courier and wwwoffle, an offline-synchronization toolchain)

projects, events, news, materials

Robertofaga has been working on an RPG-creation tutorial to go with his game creator.
Repair centers details have been cleaned up, thanks to much work by mchua, nlee, and ccarrick. A small repair center has been set up by mchua, and is being put to use and expanded Saturday afternoon during our weekly Open Jam, with help from femslade. The related Repair draft page is also useful for anyone planning such a center.
andreatl, nlee and ccarrick also worked on a set of five simple language-free repair photoesays for the most common DIY entries in the repair guide.
Help for content bundlers : a Content bundle making script was posted by mchua, and has been used by cjl, among others.

status, deadlines, assumptions, processes

Next week : the Grassroots bootcamp comes to 1CC -- 10 community members from active local OLPC groups are coming to Boston to discuss best practices for organizing local communities and connecting them with ongoing OLPC trials. The guests will be in the office from Monday through Thursday working on drafting and refining existing guides, materials and support networks.
Local grassroots office updates : ILXO and ilxo.org. Work planned on XO Accessibility and other projects. Proposed small XO projects : Cambridge Friends School Pilot

milestones, sequences, first and next

A rigorous application process for future grassroots gatherings is proposed.
Processes and priorities being defined include the Repair draft for starting repair centers, the Community ambassadors for liaisons between different parts of our international community, and the Jams description of how to organize and promote a local jam/event.

Calendar

The grassroots groups are working this week on smoothing out the coverage of upcoming presentations to more equitably cover different fields of interest, languages, and countries. Also scheduling the next year of events - those organized by OLPC groups and those where we have a presence or a booth.
This week : Grassroots bootcamp (June 9-12); This weekend : Grassroots Jam NYC
June :
End of June: Developers are gathering in Boston for a week (including Martin :)

June 26-27? Chicago meetup
August :
2d half of Aug: OLPC Croatia is planning a pan-European event in the outdoors

Week of Aug 17: OLPC HQ is planning a public poster session for its summer projects, and accepting ideas for presentations and lightning talks.

review, updates, analysis, feedback