We return to Gallaudet University this snowy February to meet two young social entrepreneurs who are making a big difference in the OLPC community.

What: Family XO Meetup
When: Saturday, February 20th, 2010, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: We are UPSTAIRS from the old meeting rooms in the basement on the first floor [floorplan], in computer lab SAC 1010, Washington, D.C. 20002

In the summer of 2009, Beth Santos (pictured above left with kids) worked with OLPC and an NGO to successfully deploy 100 XO laptops at a secondary school on the small island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, which is in the Gulf of Guinea off the western equatorial coast of Africa. Beth will share some stories from her remarkable journey and detail her plans to return to the island this year with more laptops.

Perfectly complimenting Beth’s talk, Luke Faraone, a longtime member of the Learning Club, will conduct a beginner’s workshop on maintaining and repairing the XO laptop hardware. Luke runs the Learning Club’s busy repair center, which is authorized by OLPC to install original replacement parts and revive laptop software that refuses to start.  The XO laptop is uniquely designed to be easily repaired in the field with an ordinary screwdriver. Please bring your XO laptop and a small Phillips head screwdriver if you want to follow along.

More help for the children of Haiti

After the devastating earthquake in Haiti, many immediately thought of the rugged XO laptop as a perfect solution for bringing education to the children in the camps. In addition to longer-term plans with other NGOs, OLPC has come up with a plan to recover unused Give One, Get One laptops. Visit the OLPC blog for details on where to ship if you have one to donate.

Upcoming events…

Thursday, March 11 - Project H Design has begun its Design Revolution Road Show featuring a display of 36 innovative products (from their book of 100, which includes the XO laptop) that are making a significant social impact in the world. The national mobile tour brings their Airstream trailer to Baltimore for a stop and evening lecture at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Saturday, March 20 - We’ll be back at the Arlington Career Center.

TimeLapse is computer software for the Sugar Learning Platform used to gather periodic data (sound and images).  It is the first software activity developed by Sugar Labs DC and runs on the OLPC XO-1 laptop. The idea for TimeLapse grew out of the exciting, eclectic, interdisciplinary meeting of scientists, computer programmers, pedagogues, and hardware hobbyists originally brought together by the OLPC Learning Club DC.

Dr. Frank Linton, who has an observation bee hive in his house, was interested in studying the relationship between the sound made by the hive and the health and well being of the bees inside.  He wondered if he could use his XO laptop to gather periodic sound sampling from the hive.  This real world need became the seed for the development of TimeLapse.

Over the past two years, with Dr. Linton acting as customer, Jeff Elkner, and a group of young programmers from Sugar Labs, DC have made steady improvements to TimeLapse.  The current release is the first one that is installable through the Browse Activity in Sugar, making TimeLapse easily available to Sugar users all over the world.

Come celebrate the accomplishment of these talented young programmers.  Bring your XO and try out TimeLapse for yourself.

Update: TimeLapse is now available for download on the Sugar  Labs activities site.

Note time change!!!
When: Saturday, January 16th, 2010, 1 pm to 4 pm
Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Aerial Photo, Bus Info)

Walter Bender of Sugar Labs will join in by video conference from Cambridge, MA.

We’ll also raffle off an original copy of the new XtraOrdinary 2010 SD card!

Congratulations to the team at Sugar Labs who has officially released another major update to the Sugar Learning Platform in the form of the significantly enhanced ‘Blueberry’ version 2.0 of Sugar on a Stick. In the time it takes to bake a holiday cake, you can install Blueberry one or two USB flash drives to try out with a young child on a desktop PC or laptop. As can be seen from the photo above, I’ve got it installed on several USB flash drives and SD cards. Blueberry on a flash drive makes a great stocking stuffer, but don’t leave the drive in your stocking or on the tree for too long!

For December, the Learning Club will gather at Taste of India in Woodley Park, DC to reflect on the year past and discuss plans for 2010.

December Dinner
Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 6:30 - 8:30pm
Taste of India
2621 Connecticut Avenue Northwest (near Woodley Park Metro)
Washington, DC 20008-1522
(202) 483-1115
[ Map, Web site http://toidc.com/]

It would be a good idea to RSVP before Tuesday evening 12/15 so we have an idea of the size table we need. Email Mike and Kevin at the email addresses on the right column of the home page.

Other notes and reminders:

• The OLPC Contrbutor’s Program is a way to get XO laptops granted free for worthy projects.
• The OLPC Support Gang is a group of volunteers that answers help ticket questions that people submit to help@laptop.org. They are always looking for more volunteers of all technical levels to participate.
• OLPC has a number of job openings.
• While the Give 1 Get 1 program will not happen this holiday season, the giving campaign is still on.
• Sugar Labs has partnered with Nexcopy to collect used USB flash drives to reload with Sugar on a Stick for distribution to schools.
• There is a brief video clip available of Walter Bender’s keynote speech at the Netbook World Summit where Sugar on a Stick version 2.0 was released.

Until January’s meeting is scheduled, we may or may not post further here. So if we don’t see or hear from you, do have a safe and happy holiday!

The illustration at left is one where, for fun, I Photoshopped the OLPC XO into the hands of Lady Liberty to create a graphic for the upcoming OLPC / Sugar Labs community meeting in New York City. A few of us are going to take the Bolt Bus up to the Big Apple to help out with the meeting, so we’re moving up our DC meeting date and location for November.

The OLPC / Sugar Labs Community Summit aims to re-catalyze the NYC-area community and touch off regular meetings again. Time, location and agenda details:

Saturday November 21; 1 - 4PM
The Church of St Mary the Virgin
3rd Floor Meeting Room, Mission House
133 West 46th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues)
[ Google Map, Church web site ]

The 1PM formal presentation will include:

• OLPC’s brand new XO 1.5 B2 Laptop
• Summary account of the 1 Million XO Laptops now shipped around the world
• Previews of upcoming Sugar Learning software
• Some directly personal explanations of our movement’s strongly maturing “volunteer ladder”.
• Come see some actual books written by our Community!
• Participate and strategize around OLPC and Sugar’s unheralded successes
• Local Projects, and long-term forward path.

Anyone interested in impacting education worldwide is welcome. More information about the summit can be found on the wiki page. There is also a collection of promotional graphics, Meetup event listing and email list.

The OLPC Learning Club DC November meeting has been moved up a few days to a weeknight:

Thursday, November 19, 6:30pm
Looking Glass Lounge
3634 Georgia Ave NW
One block from the Georgia Avenue-Petworth Metro
[ Map ]

Wayan Vota and I will be there for sure. There will be plenty to talk about given OLPC’s recent announcements about ebooks and future laptops.

Update: The slide presentation and links mentioned during the meeting are now on the wiki.

For October, we’re back at Gallaudet University to look at a new software product for the XO-1 and an update of Sugar.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, October 17th, 2009, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: We are UPSTAIRS from the old meeting rooms in the basement on the first floor [floorplan], in computer lab SAC 1212, Washington, D.C. 20002

We have a copy of Ondisk’s XtraOrdinary operating system which is an SD card that boots the Debian flavor of Linux. There have been other SD-based adaptations of Linux for the XO, but this is the most comprehensive to date and easily obtainable via mail order. Though all the software on the SD card is free open source, Ondisk charges $40 to cover the cost of the SD card and duplication. With this card installed, the XO becomes an adult-friendly netbook with software such as a version of Firefox, Open Office, the GIMP photo editor, Skype, Pidgin universal chat, Totem multimedia player and much more.

We will demo the product and describe some of the minor quirks discovered to date. We’re impressed with this effort and it’s a valuable contribution to the XO consumer community, especially for those who do not have time or expertise to configure Linux software.

The latest 0.86 build of Sugar will also be reviewed. I will also bring news from my trip this week to the Media Lab and OLPC Headquarters.

Please let us know in advance if you have any OLPC-related hardware or software support needs.

September’s meeting might be our most information-packed ever with Jeff Elkner’s report on Sugar Labs DC and a reprise of the preview at HacDC of the new XO-1.5 brought to you by SJ Klein of OLPC Headquarters.

What: Special Event: Sugar Labs DC and the XO-1.5!
When: Saturday, September 19th, 2009, 10 am to 1 pm
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Aerial Photo, Bus Info)

Since the formation of Sugar Labs DC back in June, Jeff Elkner at the Arlington Career Center has hit the ground running mobilizing a team of high schoolers to develop software for the Sugar Learning Platform. Jeff’s students started with enhancements to TimeLapse, an Activity for the OLPC XO designed to easily record, store, and display data to be used in applications that need a scheduled recording mechanism. TimeLapse came out of a student collaboration with club member and beekeeper Dr. Frank Linton to capture periodic audio of bee sounds to access the health of the hive. That project was presented at our November 2008 meeting. Jeff will talk about current and future plans for our local lab.

A photo composite of two photos I took of the new laptop at HacDC illustrating both the Gnome desktop manager and Sugar running.

SJ Klein will be bringing one or both of the XO-1.5 prototype laptops that were shown at HacDC Tuesday night. SJ will talk further about OLPC’s plans for the XO-1.5. In addition to the hardware improvements such as increased processor speed and memory, we were impressed with the new ability to rapidly switch between the Sugar desktop for children and the now pre-installed Gnome window manager for adults. OLPC News has blog posts about SJ’s talk as well as a video comparing the startup speed of the XO-1.5 to an XO-1.0.

George Hunt, Kevin Cole, Yama Ploskonka and Adam Holt hold the first paper printout of the 93-page draft of the teacher guide. 

Also this past week, Kevin Cole hosted the OLPC Community Book Sprint at Gallaudet University, where onsite and virtual volunteers marshalled by Adam Holt, OLPC’s community support manager,  collaborated on creating a new teacher guide for deploying laptops. Filled with inspiring stories and a wealth of practical advice, the manual will go a long way to supporting the OLPC Contributor’s Program and small deployments all over the world. More editing and post-production remains, but you can take a look at the draft on the Floss Manuals site–or even jump in to help with writing and editing! Photos of the book sprint are on my Flickr set and another from Nancie Severs.

And to cap off the weekend, XO laptops were part of the Ubuntu DC Local Community (LoCo) booth at the Takoma Park Folk Festival. Halfway through the festival, the number of visitors to the booth exceeded last year’s count of 180. Photos also on Flickr.

We hope to see you at a meeting. Do sign up for our monthly email newsletter if you’re not already on.

Samuel “SJ” Klein, One Laptop per Child’s community content director, will speak on the progress of the worldwide effort towards delivering low-cost exploratory computation to millions of children in developing countries. The project was just showcased in the new book, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People.

To date, nearly one million laptops have been deployed around the world, typically in the remotest of locations with little or no electricity, or internet access. Empowering learning through information accessibility will be the focus of SJ’s talk along with the market-changing innovations in the platform’s hardware and software. SJ will also show a working prototype of One Laptop per Child’s brand new XO-1.5 laptop, which uses a newer, faster processor and has more onboard memory. The XO-1.5 now dual boots into Gnome desktop as well as the child-friendly Sugar Learning Platform. Both are based on Fedora 11.

The OLPC Learning Club DC and HacDC will announce their joint effort to launch an XO Lending Library and describe local activities that support OLPC and Sugar Labs. Please join us if you want to talk about redesigning education access throughout the world for the 21st Century.

Where: HacDC (1525 Newton Street NW, Washington, DC–map on their web site) in the church sanctuary
When: Tuesday, September 8th, 7:30pm

And for those itching to know what the new laptop looks like, we haven’t seen them yet! But we do know what cosmetic changes were made so we altered an existing photo:

Turning over the new laptop, one will see that the battery latches are now in green plastic. Opening the lid will reveal that the screen rotation and power button are in green plastic as well (left on photo illustration). The new laptop carries forward the recent simplification of the trackpad and has a slightly thicker keyboard housing.

It is not known if these laptops will be made available in an offer like the Give One Get One program, but when steady quantities are available late this year, they can be acquired through the grant process of OLPC’s Contributor’s Program if you have a unique project idea.

If you miss this opportunity to see SJ and the laptop, they are scheduled to appear at the Learning Club’s Saturday, September 19th meeting at 10am at the Arlington Career Center. There will be another more detailed announcement here on the blog about that meeting.

Photo of SJ Klein by Doc Searls from Flickr.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, August 15th, 2009, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: We are UPSTAIRS from the old meeting rooms in the basement on the first floor [floorplan], Classroom 2 SAC1210 and Classroom 3 SAC1211, Washington, D.C. 20002

This month, we are back at the Gallaudet Student Academic Center in the AV-equipped classroom one floor above the multi-purpose rooms where we used to meet. We have another informative presentation by our own Kim Toufectis on options for streaming audio in your XO-1 browser. Kim went on to investigate audio after researching his presentation on cloud computing.

Kim will present a survey of sites he’s tested that work for streaming music and news via the XO Browse Activity’s built-in open source Gnash player that handles Flash files. If time permits, and some of our command line experts are around, we’ll also demonstrate how to set up the XO to play MP3 audio from a USB flash drive. Mike will do an update on the OLPCorps Africa deployments [see the team blogs].

We will also raffle off one or more sets of folding paper eco speakers.

September 19th, we’ll back at the Arlington Career Center with a special presentation on the activities of the first few months of Sugar Labs DC by Jeff Elkner and plans are shaping up for a demo at the meeting of the upcoming XO 1.5 laptop (essentially an upgraded motherboard)!

Don’t forget to sign up for our meeting announcement email list if you’re not already on.

8/14: Adding links to use during the meeting:

OLPC Teachers’ Mini-Deployment Guide book sprint in DC

Prezi Zooming Presentation Editor

OLPC Blog OLPCorps Deployment Update

OLPCorps Sahn Malen, Sierra Leone Blog

8/15: From the meeting:

Kim’s presentation

Adobe Flash version test 

The June meeting is back at the Gallaudet University Student Academic Center.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, June 20th, 2009, 10 am to 1pm
Where: Gallaudet University [map, aerial photo], Student Academic Center,
**NOTE ROOM CHANGE: First Floor [floorplan], Classroom 2 SAC1210 and Classroom 3 SAC1211, Washington, D.C. 20002

Our guest speakers are members of the team from the Washington, D.C.-based Lubuto Library Project that deployed 10 OLPC XO-1 laptops in Lusaka, Zambia. The project’s core mission is to build libraries with carefully selected high-quality books to serve street children. The team will talk about what they learned from using XOs in the library and how they plan to sustain and scale the effort.

The July 18th meeting will see a return to Friends Community School in Greenbelt, MD for a reprise of last year’s OLPC News Great 4P Laptop Bakeoff. Bring your netbooks to compare with others and to try out the latest version of Sugar on a Stick. More details will be posted in July.

At the end of the month, we will be representing OLPC and Sugar Labs at the 2009 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) June 28 - July 1 at the D.C. Convention Center. There will be a batch of XO laptops at the open source pavilion in the exhibit hall and we’re helping Sugar Labs present at the NECC Unplugged “fringe” festival.

If you haven’t heard, there are some excellent new videos on OLPC.tv of Chris Ball demonstrating the working alpha board of the upcoming XO 1.5 laptop and a Mary Lou Jepsen showing off the first commercial production samples of her company’s daylight-readable LCD screen for netbooks. “Mr. Biotech” has created a very nice 5-minute video review (minus mesh collaboration) of the current version of Sugar.

And at long last, the official URL for Sugar Labs DC, http://dc.sugarlabs.org, is live! More details to come in another blog post.

Are you excited about the OLPCorps idea - teams of college students headed to Africa with a stack of XO’s and determination to make a change? Want to meet a winning group that’s headed to Madagascar from right here in DC? The OLPC Ampitso team is leaving in early June, but before they go, they need your help.

They need the collective wisdom of OLPC Learning Club-DC, our excitement, and our years of exploration with the XO laptop. They can also use our support - deployment in Madagascar is going to be tough, and we can supply research and expertise that would be priceless to OLPC Ampitso and their beneficiaries, the children of Ambatoharanana.

So come out and meet OLPC Ampitso, learn what they’re planning, and share what you know:

OLPC Ampitso Meetup
Wednesday, May 27, 6:30pm
Looking Glass Lounge
Back beer garden
3634 Georgia Ave NW

[ Map ]