OLPC Learning Club - DC

The “Cube” in the basement of the MIT Media Lab

Our next meeting will be at the Arlington Career Center in Virginia.

What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, April 26th, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Bus Info)

Mike Lee will distill several years of visits to the MIT Media Lab into a photo log on the culture of innovation and invention that gave rise to the One Laptop Per Child project. To make more tangible some of the lab’s work, several commercially available products from spinoff companies and sponsors will be demonstrated including the Ambient Orb, Clocky, LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch Sensor Board, Hyperscore, and E-ink.

Then we’ll cover the news on OLPC’s software Update.1 for the XO laptop and help install it for the brave. Much meshing should ensue.

We’ll also bring back the raffle with at least one XOView Camera Viewfinder as a prize.

UPDATE: An event page for this meeting has been created on Facebook.

Photo credit: Ewan McIntosh

Hello. My name is Mike Lee. The photo is of me with my 4-year-old daughter mugging for the built-in camera of a prototype XO laptop.

Wayan has asked me to take over running this blog and the OLPC Learning Club - DC. Wayan’s not going anywhere, but as you might imagine with the surge of interest in One Laptop Per Child because of the Give One Get One program, Wayan has been close to maxed out maintaining OLPC News.

I became personally involved with OLPC because as part of my day job as one of the directors of a large non-profit web site, I have been my company’s sponsorship liaison to the MIT Media Lab for the last four years. It’s a profound privilege to be able to visit the lab 4-6 times a year. When OLPC spun off from MIT, several people I knew from the Media Lab went over to join Nicholas and I was able to drop in periodically to see their progress over the last 14 months.

Since August, I’ve had two of the B-test-4 laptops. Experiencing them has brought me to the realization that they are truly a breakthrough in so many ways not apparent to the press or casual viewer. Probably for the first time in the history of digital computers, a computing machine, the XO-1, has been developed from scratch to serve a purely humanitarian need. Beyond being an educational platform for small children in developing countries, the open source nature of the software and hardware encourages all who come in contact with the XO to set their minds free and think about bold new applications.

I’m not involved here because I work with the Media Lab or because I happened to have one of the prototype XOs because of contacts at OLPC. I truly love the ideas behind OLPC, and would certainly have become involved regardless. I’m volunteering some of my free time to the cause.

So, I look forward to getting to know you all. Please join OLPC Learning Club - DC and set your mind free to the possibilities!

Mike

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