[Ambassadors] [Event Report] OLPC Code Camp 2008 in Paris (France)

[Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)]

Hi ambassadors,

This Saturday, I was at OLPC CodeCamp.

This event is a bit particular as it was not really a « Fedora event »
and we were not holding a booth or anything. However, given the
relationship between the OLPC and Fedora projects, I thought it might be
interesting to report on this event (if you don't think it is, don't
read any further :).

The event was held by the OLPC-France team. They first introduced the
OLPC project and the XO laptop, and we all had a really interesting
conversation about the values and ethics of the project, i.e. if it was
not trying to impose a pedagogy model as well as an economic market.

During lunch, I could discuss with a developer from DailyMotion. He told
me that they had set up a special site for OLPC users:
http://olpc.dailymotion.com. What is particularly interesting with this
site is:
- it's interface is simpler than the official DailyMotion one, to be
more appropriate on a XO
- there are also no commercial ads, to not waste the expensive bandwidth
of the children
- the provided content is focused on education
- the videos are streamed in OGG, avoiding the need of the flash player.

He told me they were actually working on improving this site, seeing how
they could ease the uploading of content by the OLPC children.

After that, five workshops were held simultaneously.

The first one was organized by Daniel Drake
(http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/) from Cambridge, it was a discovery
of the Sugar interface, and how to build an XO activity in Python. They
worked on a mind mapping activity.

The second one was about pedagogic uses of the laptop, and how some
concepts could be improved, for example the journal which received some
critics from both teachers and children.

The third one was held by Torello Quercy (http://tquerci.blogspot.com/)
who came from Italia. It was about how to build a Sugar activity with
Mono (Torello wrote the Mono bindings for Sugar, the source is here:
http://code.google.com/p/sugar-sharp/). They did not build an actual
activity, however, they produced a « LabActivity » (which is an evolved
« Hello World ») and a documentation, which should be all that is needed
to start writing actual activities with Mono.

The fourth workshop was about translating Sugar. Most guests had never
participated in FOSS translation, so they focused more on setting up the
translator work environment, presenting the translation process and
building a community of translators. I'm not sure they actually had the
time to translate some module.

Finally, the fifth workshop was about setting up a school server.
However, it proved to be a rather difficult task as the OLPC set-up
seems to be not flexible at all. We had a hard time modifying each and
every XS configuration file / script and finally did not have the time
to fully set up one. The conclusion was that OLPC-France would go on and
share their experience on the OLPC wiki for helping others, as well as
maybe provide patches for « easifying » things.

This CodeCamp was also the occasion for me to actually meet the french
OLPC community. They are trying to build strong contribution and are
doing a great job in promoting the project (through conferences, TV
interviews, contacts with Amazon.fr for this G1G1,...).

As a conclusion, given that the Fedora and OLPC projects are strongly
related, I do hope that Fedora-FR and OLPC-France can as well work
together in a similar relationship. As a start, they accepted to come
and give a conference on the OLPC project at our F10 Release Party in
Paris. :)

Regards,


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Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
French Fedora Ambassador

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"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin
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