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Grassroots OLPC Jam scheduled for this weekend
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CommentsThis weekend, the One Laptop per Child movement in New York City is holding an OLPC "Grassroots Jam" at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. The Jam is a gathering of volunteer educators, content creators, artists, writers, programmers, engineers, and others who want to help create a central server for NYC schools that already make use of OLPC laptops.
According to LXNY secretary Jay Sulzberger, the server will provide "automatic backups, end-to-end encryption and authentication of email, extra processing power for individual and group tasks, convenient Bitfrosting (working with the default OLPC security platform), and [working] with programs which today do not yet run on the XO-1 [laptop]."
The group hopes to attract at least 50 volunteers, and to create a working server by Sunday evening, although it is likely much more work will need to be done before a working server, dubbed "School in a Box," could be officially deployed to serve all OLPC users in the NYC area educational system, Sulzberger says. Interested persons can volunteer at the Grassroots Jam wiki.
The School in a Box system is supposed to integrate the use of the OLPC laptops with curriculum modules hosted on the server, according to the Grassroots Jam team, who are also inviting local schoolchildren to the event, accompanied by parents, to test the new system.
Sulzberger encourages local free software advocates to attend the event, regardless of how they feel about the OLPC program. "Despite the recent brouhaha over reported statements of Nicholas Negroponte, and despite a years-long concerted campaign by Microsoft and Intel against the OLPC, today there are for sale about 10 competing small light laptops, none of which would be available without the success in the market of the XO-1. While the XO-1 was for sale, it was the fastest selling laptop ever. The nearest competitor, the Asus Eee PC, is right now the fastest selling laptop. Most of these new small laptops run GNU/Linux as their base system. Later this year the XO-1 will again be offered for sale, under the Give One Get One arrangement, as before. To repeat, the success of the XO-1 is extraordinary: it is superior in hardware, it runs a free OS, and it outsells the competition at a price disadvantage of 'pay for two, get one.'
"The Englobulators have money and reporters and whole governments of large states on their side. So we must work hard to keep the ground we have won. And we must work even harder to drive them from the field. And this is why you should come to the OLPC Grassroots Jam."
Tina Gasperson writes about business and technology from an open source perspective.
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on Grassroots OLPC Jam scheduled for this weekendNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
The Sugar desktop is being spun off from OLPC. We are working on putting together a desktop that will work on any computer. Fedora, Debian, and Red Hat are all building packages which allow you to install Sugar on top of their distributions.
I was an early OPLC contributor and I quickly became disgruntled by their lack of transparency. That being said, remember the mess Oracle made when they showed up at the linux foundation summit with a shopping list of stuff that they wanted the kernel develops to work on.
Nicklaus' main problem was and still is hubris. When he could not figure out how to work with the linux community, he stomped out of the room yelling, "I didn't want to plan with you anyway!" Every time he tried to sell to a national government, Microsoft's sales force would step in. Who did he expect to win the sales game, him or Microsoft? So he stomps of the room yelling, "We really intended to play with Microsoft all along!"
Grassroots OLPC Jam scheduled for this weekend
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 64.252.11.222] on June 14, 2008 01:46 PMRe: Grassroots OLPC Jam scheduled for this weekend
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 24.251.89.217] on June 14, 2008 04:42 PMYou mean, "Unlike RMS, Nicholas Negroponte does more harm than good every time he spouts off". RMS has mellowed over the years. He has some strange opinions and some blind spots, but his public pronouncements these days are mostly helpful. Try reading what he actually says instead of recalling the kind of thing he used to say 10 years ago.
Why bother?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 222.172.221.99] on June 14, 2008 10:16 AMThey need to get a clue. It's not the technology or the technology community that caused the problems. Rather, the whole reason the the XO-1 was the fastest-selling laptop ever, despite the "2 for 1" price, was the technology community's support. It's management's inability to use the communities to which they are tied, including the technology community, effectively that is (part of) the problem.
Now they want everyone to join in and give them free labor. I can hear them now, "They're just geeks. They'll come around." And the "if you don't support OLPC, you're just hurting the children" argument will doubtless be trotted out, but frankly, at this point, that's an argument OLPC management needs to take to heart itself before trotting it out as a club to bludgeon others. They really need to be reminded that one should not bite the hand that feeds you.
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