Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
(January 27 – February 3, 2010)

One Laptop per Child Founder and Chairman, Nicholas Negroponte addressed the Fourteenth Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Heads of State: “Information and Communication Technologies in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Development, on January 31, 2010, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

After his speech, Nicholas met with President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of the United Republic of Tanzania, President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, President Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, Vice President of Ghana H. E. John Dramani Mahama,  H. E. Seyoum Mesfin, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia.

In addition, OLPC was invited to participate at the Information Technologies in Africa Exhibition. which was jointly organized by the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa, that took place in parralel with the Heads of States Summit from January  29 to February 2nd, 2010.  OLPC was selected to participate in the exhibition in recognition to OLPC’s  contribtion to Africa’s socio-economic devleopent.

Me: "I think I'm done buying computers that I can't run my own code on."
Friend: "Just think of the iPad as being a pile of books. You can't run your code on those either."
Me: "Thinking of a computer as being a pile of books is like thinking of a guitar as being Abbey Road by the Beatles."

Got seven bucks? Help buy our 8th computer for São João!!

Or make a bigger impression by talking to your company, local news source, or other organization and see if you can help with a donation of ten or more computers.

News for the day:

Right now we're looking for media attention. If you know of anyone interested in following our adventures, or if you want to write/blog/video about it on your own, please get in touch with me.

Might be doing an event in April at the Hillyer Art Space near Dupont Circle. Will keep you all posted on if it's happening!!

Got another email from Miguel. Things are going well and kids are still creating their email addresses. It looks like the classes are now being divided between kids that have email and kids that don't, so that the kids without email can create their own accounts.  I'm not sure what the kids with email are doing. I would hope that they are working on a new project, but Miguel hasn't given me much detail.

The kids are continuing to write me emails and respond to everything I write. It is adorable. And also very tiring because I feel like I need to respond to each and every one!

That is news for today.

B-Sizzle, aka Timestopper, aka Maximum Beth

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.

Today we're $20 away from having enough funds to buy our 8th computer.

Help us cross the line today and make a donation!!

Alan Boyle, reporting for MSNBC some of the sadder news from the last week:

Nine months after the Spirit rover sank into a Martian sand trap, NASA says the troubled traveler will have to remain stationary in order to survive the Red Planet’s winter.

These fucking Martians keep leaving their deadly sand traps everywhere. No regard for life or property. Can’t we, like, send John McCain up there to keep these guys in line?

...deeper issues of translation are at stake. Throughout the day while the children are beginning to integrate the language of their everyday life with this new scripting language, volunteers for Waveplace Foundation and One Laptop Per Child debate translation of Haitian Kreyol.

I spent all day trying to recreate some sample Turtle activities I found online. Not all of them worked on my XOs: “+” sign was different from what my version of Turtle has, also in several algorithms ”pen down” was missing.

 Some volunteers said that they finished teaching today as TET holiday is starting. I’ll miss big flower decoration in Saigon for three days next week, as I’ll be in Thailand.

Linh came to pick me up on time. Today only 3 girls were present so I decided not to teach Turtle, but finish greeting cards for friends and family. I asked them to take a picture, add it to the Paint Activity, paint something and type Happy New Year.

They also had to move their picture around the screen and change it’s size. As we had one unused computer, because Hanh had to study for her exam tomorrow, little Hoa took Hanh’s place and we (Linh and I) showed her how to use Paint. Hoa, who is 8 yo, was happy to draw and use eraser. She knows all the rules as she was present at every class.  Usually after 8PM other girls come, they look at the  computers and sometimes try different activities. Girls are very good about sharing computers and teaching each other.

I asked questions about school and daily schedule. They get up at 4:30 AM and have breakfast, then they help cook and clean and have lunch at noon.They ride bicycles to middle school, which has about 400 children. They are there from 1PM to 5PM.  Right after they get back thay have dinner. Then they have a computer class at 7PM.

 The cards girls created were very pretty.

Waveplace friend and colleague John Engle presents footage narrated by Dan Hobson and Chip Coffin of destroyed schools on his Haiti Partners blog. This video highlights the dire need for educational programs, like the pilots we are running this month in Boston, to be implemented as soon as possible in Haiti. We look forward to coordinating a hub in Darbonne with John in the coming weeks....

When I entered the class room girls were already working on their computers. Two played Chess, one - game Hanoi, another one - some game I didn’t recognize.

I made sure I remember everybody’s name, spell and pronounce it right. All girls showed up but one, whose turn it was not to use the computer today. New volunteer today again, who was late. She didn’t know the address of either my place or the shelter. So I had to guide her. Then she asked more questions than the children. We did Distance activity, which finally worked after we struggled a bit with discontinuing mesh and pointing right computers at each other. We found out that when Distance activity was opened twice, it didn’t work. Everything in that activity was in Vietnamese language, so it was hard for me to tell when to start or stop. And names were changed, so we were not sure whose computer was talking to who? SnowWhite to Princess or Mermaid or Cinderella?

During the class head mistress Yen came in and asked if the girls could write in Vietnamese on their XOs. I said that it is not available now but we will figure it out, but for now they have to use English alphabet only. Girls do not speak English, they only know some words. They can still type as Vietnamese language has latin alphabet base plus some extra symbols.

Then we did Traffic activity. The volunteer had hard time understanding it. I showed my greeting card I created for the girls to wish them Happy New Year, which will be in one week! I asked them to use paint activity to create 5 greeting cards for whomever they want.

They had to add their picture, paint and write wishes. The volunteer asked: “How do they take picture?” I said to her that girls know. Her eyes widened. Then she asked: “How do they add picture to the card?” I said that I showed them yesterday how to do it.

Then she asked about my greeting card that I created: “What is it for? What to do with it?” I answered: “Just to look at, but it is possible to send it by email as well”. Then her eyes widened even more… “It is possible to connect to the Internet with this computer?” I confirmed. She was in shock. I think every volunteer wants to have an XO now.

Click here to download the press release. Would love your help sending it out to everywhere and everyone!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Contact: Beth Santos, beth@bethsantos.com, 603.661.1273, http://bethstepsup.blogspot.com

Middle School in São Tomé e Príncipe Begins Computer Program; Lacks Funds

A new computer literacy program headed by a young New Hampshire native is putting one of the earth's smallest nations on the World Wide Web.

On Saturday mornings, 100 students and five teachers at the São João secondary school, on the small West African island of São Tomé e Príncipe, cram themselves into a single classroom. Students sweat bullets in a room that often has no electricity, spending four hours typing on bright green energy-efficient laptop computers. The supplementary class is headed by 23 year-old teacher Beth Santos and São Tomean computer professor Miguel Afonso da Boa Esperança. After receiving 100 laptop computers through MIT's One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, São João chose 100 sixth grade students to participate in a developmental milestone for the school and the country.

Through 100-computer deployments all over the world, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) aims to supply laptop computers to schools in disadvantaged countries. The computers are fully equipped with a camera and microphone, wifi access and a Linux-based operating system called Sugar. Yet the laptops come with higher expectations than just developing skills in word processing, photography and research science. It is the hope of OLPC that the computers will nurture students' sense of creativity and discovery, promoting an interest in education that will expand country-wide. The computers are highly personalized to reflect the progress of one individual student's advancing use, allowing students to take them home and share them regularly with family and friends.“These students are so excited to learn, it's amazing,” Santos says. “Kids regularly come to class that aren't even ours. They're blatantly lying to us in order to get a chance to participate.”

The program has made headlines across the island in both media and government sectors. It has also accrued interest in Portugal (of which São Tomé e Príncipe is a former colony) and OLPC's hometown, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where OLPC's own have lauded the São João school's success.

However, the school is desperately short on computers for its sixth grade class, as the initial donation of 100 computers is significantly less than the size of the current sixth grade, which is 612 students. For this reason, the computers cannot be utilized during class time, because they are not accessible to everyone. “We so desperately want to be able to use these computers the way they're supposed to be used- during all disciplines, every day of the week,” Santos says. “Right now the program is great but it's lacking a very fundamental element because there is just no funding.” Once the school acquires enough computers for its students, the computers will be redistributed to the next sixth grade class for as many years as possible.

Santos and Esperança both hope that, with enough computers to serve the sixth grade – a critical year before a transition to high school that only some students make – more students will be eager to learn, to become educated and to improve the circumstances of an impoverished country.

Back at home in Washington, D.C., Santos is working to bring more computers to the São João School. When she's not busy seeking corporate or foundational sponsorship, Santos coaches a high school crew team and is editor of Go Girl Magazine, a blog for independent women who travel. She also receives enthusiastic emails from her students on a regular basis – emails from children that, at the beginning of the school year, had never touched a computer in their lives. “Every time I get an email from one of them, I get excited all over again,” she says. “Hardly anyone at that school speaks a word of English. Now they're connecting to each other and to the world outside. They're realizing that there is so much more out there.”

For more information about the program or to make a donation, please visit http://bethstepsup.blogspot.com. To learn more about OLPC, visit http://www.laptop.org.

I went to Mui Ne for the weekend and did a lot of writing. Meanwhile some of the volunteers moved out of the Peace House and flew back home.  One of the volunteers got engaged, her boyfriend proposed to her here in Saigon…On Saturday several people including Andy went to get food for Tet for 20 poor families and hand it out.

On Mon I downloaded different programs to the XOs, including Chess, Hanoi, Poll, Traffic, Geography, Sudoku, Olympics, Jam2Jam and created a lesson plan. This class turned out to be difficult. At 6:50PM volunteer was not at the Peace House yet. I was worried and had to call the supervisor. The volunteer came and said she got lost. We were 30 min late for the class.  I also found out that her English is  not very good (hence she is volunteering to improve her English). She doesn’t have a clue about computers and looks more confused than the children when we do activities. So it was very hard, especially when she kept saying yes, but didn’t understand what I was asking. But I have to give her credit as she was trying very hard and was very good with the kids. It was super hot in the class room.

Thao from last week’s class showed up, I asked her to recall all the rules of handling. She knew them all! Then we took pictures again and switched computers. They had to interview the person, whose picture was on their computer. We opened Write activity and created a table with two columns. They had to imput interviewees’ age, name, favorite fruit, activity, height, etc. So it looked like a profile for each girl.

During the second part of the class we checked memory. I showed them how to delete records in the journal, and mentioned  USB drive as a storage for important files.

Then we tried to paint favorite fruit in color, but I saw flowers, stars and many other things.  Hanh drew a devil instead of an orange.  All 6 girls attended the class, Thao and Bi were sharing the computer.

At the end of the class I asked the volunteer to translate that I’m leaving the computers at the shelter today. The volunteer protested and said that it was not possible, I couldn’t do that. Why? She said that they are children and they will break computers, she was terrified. But I had to explain to her that the girls know all the rules and they will teach other children how to properly use them. Finally she gave in, but made sure everyone remembered the rules of handling the XOs.

Hanh (the oldest girl) took the computers and put them in the computer room overnight. I spoke to one of the caretakers and she thanked me for the computers.

As I came home I talked to other volunteers-teachers. Matt teaches English at another shelter for boys. Tuan teaches at a place for street kids,  ages 13-19, from very poor families who can’t afford school, but go to this day care place run by catholic nuns. Boys have to do heavy labor work to provide for their families.

Someone said that several volunteers brought toys for kids  in the orphanages but later toys disappeared. Maybe people take them home for their kids? We don’t know.

I finally submitted my 7 word memoirs before the deadline: http://sevensat7.wordpress.com/

http://www.meetup.com/Anonymous-Writers-Wanted/about/

On Thu, Jan 28, we were supposed to have our first class with another group of four girls. Guess who showed up? The same four girls and two new girls. So we had to repeat basics from yesterday and move on to new material.

We recalled all the rules of handling XOs, wrote them on the board, and did speed typing excercise in Write activity. They had to copy from the board all to dos and not to dos. It took them on average 6 minutes to complete it. I wrote down on the board their names and times. They really got into the competitive mood and enjoyed speed typing. Writing had to be grammatically correct as well. One girl said that she really liked typing and they want more writing activities in English. Then we did Implode, Chat (fun, fun, fun), Paint, MiniJam and Memorize. Only one girl had the chess program on her computer, so the others were jealous. Then I asked the girls to find their photos in their journal from yesterday and name them with their own names.

Then they had to rename their computers. That was also exciting. What names did they choose for five computers? Angel, SnowWhite, Princess, Mermaid and Cinderella. One girl wanted to call her computer a Devil, as I assumed she likes devil/dark themes, but we substituted it with another one…:)

There is one girl Hao 8 years old who sticks around and wants to be involved. She always peeks into the screens and writes her name on the board, as if she is attending the class. I told the girls that it is OK to teach other children at the shelter as long as they learn the rules first.  I also made an announcement that they are doing very well, and when we finish the course, those, who pass the test, will  get the teacher certificates! They were slightly shocked, stunned and proud of the mission. Wow!

As for the programs, they all want to have chess, they want to listen to music and they want to take more pics…

On Tue, Jan 26, I went to the Leaf Pagoda again. Extreme heat made my swollen legs hurt again forcing me to go to the hospital. Luckily Van, a local volunteer, gave me a bike ride to the hospital and helped translate. There was only one hour wait at the ColumbiaAsia International Hospital, where I was seen by an English speaking doctor. The visit costs me $40 US including medicine. On Wed, I was scheduled to teach the first XO class in the evening and worked on the detailed lesson plan during the day.

At 6:30PM, Linh, another great volunteer, stopped by Peace House and took me to Ba Chieu Shelter. Ken came with us and introduced me to the head mistress Yen. I was told that only 8 girls had time to learn XOs in the evening. There were no teachers available, so we had to teach the children. Since we had only 5 XOs, we would teach them in groups of 4 twice a week. 

I found out girls were older than I expected , but still very excited to use computers. They had minimal experience with desktop computers back from school. I thought that it was a great opportunity to teach older girls to be the teachers and then they will teach younger girls how to use XOs.  

I told about OLPC, XOs and myself.  We covered rules of handling, girls learned how to turn on/off an XO, switch views, open and close activities. Then we did speech activity (typed “hello” in Vietnamese -” Xin Chao”), labyrinth and took photos, which was the highlight of the class. Girls were so happy to pose and take pictures of themselves and their friends. They never owned a photo camera. Girls changed names of their computers from Friend 1-5 to their own names.  I told them that I would give them laptops next week and they were thrilled by the news. 

First comments by the girls: “Computers are lovely! So cool that we are  going to have 6 weeks of training!” At the end of the class little girls came and started watching computers and jumping around. 

Homework: to think about questions, what they want to learn and what additional programs they want to have on their computers.

On Feb 1 Adam sent the following update:

1) Hi and a Warm Welcome to the ~20 new people who signed up for OLPC-HAITI yesterday and today!  Get oriented around our volunteer community’s intense hour-by-hour progress/planning happening “live” here: http://newhaitiproject.ning.com/group/onelaptopperchildwaveplaceproject 

(Creole fluency is *not* required, , all welcome to register and then help!)

2) Hans: might a draft/scan of your Creole XO coloring book be possible tomorrow?

3) I just uploaded Educa Vision, Inc’s 164 book(lets) catalog of Creole materials they’ve offered Geradline/us (listeducaforzephirin.xls) to the BOOKS WE WANT section here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Haitian_Creole_Translation_for_Education

4) Congrats to Carmina whose http://RaiseUpHaiti.com blog now appears on the official OLPC community blog aggregator: http://planet.laptop.org Even if her Speaking-From-The-Haitian-Heart title (LAPTOPS?!?) was accidentally chopped by our server’s “planet” software

5) Please all keep our Garden Growing here (click EDIT just below) supporting those doing the much harder work translating thru the night!! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Haitian_Creole_Translation_for_Education

Haiti’s Educ Infrastructure is now on the front pages:
http://nytimes.com/2010/01/27/world/americas/27children.html
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012203476.html
http://haitipartners.org/the-blog

Snapshot video from DC’s Crisis Camp(s): http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ETop7DP0_Y

BBC/CNN/NPR/etc coverage explaining Crisis Commons for Tabitha & all: http://crisiscommons.org/news

15+ cities currently involved in the US, UK and Canada: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org#CrisisCamps

Follow Here:
http://twitter.com/crisiscamp
http://haiti.crisiscommons.org

Maps created by volunteers already used on the ground in Haiti:
http://bostinnovation.com/2010/01/26/video-what-i-did-at-crisiscamp-boston/

Interested in the next step?
http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Boston_Projects
http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Boston01232010

Say hello on Live Chat at http://webchat.freenode.net in channel: #haitiboston

On Jan 31 Adam sent an update to the support gang:

Thanks Carmina & the Haitian Americans in NYC who made today one of the more meaningful of my life.  We’ll meet again all-day Saturday Feb 6 downtown NYC, tracking Crisis Camp logistics here as usual: http://crisiscommons.org

As we grow this OLPC Haiti community far beyond our current 60 list members, mobilizing those worldwide caring about long-term solutions for Haiti/Education (including our good friends at http://haiti.waveplace.org) please ask those you trust to start Translating to Creole here today:

1) Join our mailing list, olpc-haiti@lists.laptop.org : http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-haiti

2) http://translate.sugarlabs.org Recheck others’ work please — just register & start translating!  Including Etoys.

3) http://laptop.org/manual (translate in Microsoft Word if you must, HTML if possible, forwarding your complete translation of any complete chapter back here to our http://lists.laptop.org/admin/olpc-haiti list)

4) 10 awesome Childrens’ Books Hans Marshalleck is beginning to gather for very young children.  Related: his very own XO Laptop Coloring Book his church group may professionally print.  Geraldine Zephirin is contacting publishers for content donations and should expand her net further.  Please all help them find the very best kids’ stories / E-books: age-appropriate & legal to translate/distribute.  Start with 2nd/3rd grade reading level (Age 7-8?) if possible.  Polish the translations.  We Can Help You convert these to .EPUB (E-book) format.  Thanks Hans for keeping us up-to-date on NYC translation party and
training sessions planning.

5) Roald Dahl’s famous kids books might be specially openly-licensable for Creole translation given his daughter runs http://PIH.org Allison Bland: can you investigate?

6) Wikipedia.org’s 1000+ most education-appropriate articles need translation.  Please start right here today: http://ht.wikipedia.org — reply to olpc-haiti@lists.laptop.org and SJ@laptop.org if you need help. An OLPC/Sugar software Activity will be built for kids in Haiti who do not have Internet, as soon as the quality+quantity of these article
reaches a high standard, just like this great Spanish version with “30,000″ Wikipedia articles used in Peru:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/WikiBrowse

7) 20 chapters/book units Waveplace’s Tim Falconer is coordinating (language arts, math, sciences, visual arts, music) to be announced on http://lists.laptop.org/admin/olpc-haiti in coming weeks, and at: http://haiti.waveplace.org

Teachers’ Guides, colorful Handouts, Courseware emerging in places like:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ClassActs/Resources
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Manuals
http://waveplace.org

9) Etoys’ Manual emerging progressively at: http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Etoys

10) Haitians Kids/Teachers talking to the world — one of many reverse translation projects from Creole to English, allowing the world to hear unfiltered Haitian experiences: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Languages_and_Translation

PS very brief photo-backgrounder on Waveplace’s 2008/2009 OLPC work in Haiti:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/ClassActs/WaveplaceStory

Foreshadowing OLPC’s separate (larger scale) work in Haiti later this year: http://laptop.org/haiti
http://laptop.org/en/olpcorps/partcountries.shtml

There were hundreds of responses to NN’s (Nicholas Negroponte) email. Many of them were

happy to send their unused or  broken laptop to Haiti, like this one:

   Will do. Wrapped it tonite, will put it in the mail tomorrow.
   FantASTIC that you guys are doing this. I am sooo glad.
   My 11th grade daughter spent a year in the Canary Islands (Spain);
   I tried to get her to take it there with her, and then leave it with
   someone - - - but never worked. So, tho we've turned it on a few
   times to play/experiment (wish we had more - amazing what you
   guys have done - amaaaazing - hardware and software!), it's
   virtually brand new.
   THANK YOU!!! for putting this program together -
   especially this sequel!!  

   There was one who said he never received his G1G1 XO, but would send it to Haiti,
   if he got one! There were others like this one:

   Dear Mr. Negroponte,

   I will try to donate another XO soon.  Just wanted to tell you what's happening with the "get" laptop.
   First, I played with it long enough to understand what made it special (wow).  Then, I gave it to a
   couple of librarians - neighbors and friends - and the husband took it to the office (Library of
   Congress/FLICC) and passed it around long enough for everyone to understand what made it special. 
   Then, the librarians took it with them to New Hampshire for Christmas with family.  The XO stayed
   up north, and now the young teachers in the family are playing with it to understand what makes it
   special and are showing it to their elementary school classes.  I sent it off with my blessing and
   don't expect to see it again, because it's busy doing its job somewhere.

   Best wishes.  You and the OLPC team are doing a really good thing.   

   Sincerely,
   XO user

Surely the XO cannot be panacea to all existing infirmities within Haiti, particularly the devastation caused by the recent earthquakes from January 12 and on. However, these devices, along with skilled Haitian mentors, can introduce creative problem solving in an area that has suffered for too long from discrimination based on color, and the discouragement of imagination.

   On Jan 26, 2010, at 8:21 PM, One Laptop per Child wrote:

   Dear G1G1er,

   At the end of 2007 you participated in the Give One Get One program
   of One Laptop per Child (OLPC). Thanks to you and others like you, 75,000
   laptops went to Rwanda, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Cambodia, Oceania, the
   West Bank, and Haiti.

   An additional 75,000 laptops came into the USA as part of the "get" 
   side of the equation. In some cases those laptops have since been put 
   into closets for one reason or another.

   We are gathering additional used XO laptops to send to Haiti. If you 
   or the child to whom you gave the laptop is no longer using it, we 
   appeal again to your generosity and ask you to send it to the address 
   below (even if it is broken).

   OLPC FOR HAITI c/o Exel
   615 Westport Parkway #500
   Grapevine, TX 76051

   75% of the schools in Port-au-Prince have been destroyed in the recent 
   earthquake, but by good fortune, none of our Haitian team was hurt. 
   They have spare parts and OLPC technical staff and teachers, and stand 
   prepared to deploy these XOs.

   Because of the XO's unique features (sunlight readability, solar 
   powered, water resistant, drop proof), it is also an ideal tool for 
   relief work.

   If your XO is in use, please ignore this email. We only want your 
   broken or unused XOs.

   Sincerely,

   Nicholas Negroponte

On Jan 21 SJ posted an update about work in CrisisCamps and Haiti OLPC http://blog.laptop.org/2010/01/21/olpc-for-haiti/

On Jan 24, two very special guest speakers were invited to the meeting:

“Please join us 4PM Sunday Boston Time (TODAY) where http://waveplace.com founder Tim Falconer will discuss his foundation’s vision for progressively expanding its XO deployments around Haiti, which thankfully all appear to have survived the earthquake.

And if there is time Nick Doiron (CMU / Haiti Community Mapping Software Developer) will discuss his preliminary work, and possible integration with existing community-mapping/community-informatics tools for Haiti, like http://haiti.ushahidi.com and http://hypercube.telascience.org/haiti“

Adam Holt wrote:

Sunday Jan 24 – Tim Falconer, Waveplace Founder 
                          How WE can help Haitians help THEMSELVES:
                          Structuring Sustainable Haiti Grassroots OLPC Projects
                          http://waveplace.com/locations/haiti/
                          http://crisiscamp.org (PLZ PARTICIPATE IN YR OWN CITY SATURDAY)

                          Nick Doiron, CMU, Haiti Community Mapping Software Developer
                          http://www.olpcnews.com/content/education/olpc_map_activity_updated_for.html
                          http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Map
                          http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ndoiron

Summary for those who missed the call — these are Tim’s answers to Christoph’s question on how the global OLPC Community can support http://waveplace.com ’s continuing / fast-evolving work in Haiti — a vision that clearly isn’t 100% finalized yet but in any case will profoundly benefit if you:

1. Donate Money so Haitian teachers/mentors/deployment experts can be paid: http://waveplace.com
2. Ship XO’s not being used, to his non-profit Foundation: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Donate_Your_Get_One
3. e-Books: FIND THE BEST copyright-free storybook others, and curate/organize them like a proper librarian please!  Entertainment based initially, Deep Learning later.     (Bastien: can you share your publisher leads with Tim, SJ & I?)
4. Translator & transcriber Volunteers Needed: English or French to Creole especially– can Elissa Carmichael from Miami’s CrisisCamp working with the Haitian Diaspora community there please explain how we can All facilitate beyond http://translate.sugarlabs.org and http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Languages_and_Translation ?
5. Find/Recruit the best Mentors for kids, on the ground in Haiti especially, starting right now…

My good  friend Mike asked puzzled. And  I understood his reaction because I had the same one at first.

Haiti ’s children don’t need laptops! They need food, shelter, the basic stuff…

I’m grateful that others have the skills and the opportunity to go to Haiti and help with those basic needs.

I applaud their efforts and admire their courage.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the skills  or opportunity to do so myself.

Almost a month has passed already…It’s time to build Haiti back!

It’s not going to happen overnight and it’s not going to happen by itself.

It starts with everyone doing a little bit, where they are, when they can.

So I’m doing the little bit I can by actively supporting 2 organizations in whose mission I believe.

What motivates and excites me about the One Laptop Per Child / Waveplace project is its potential to impact

the next generation of Haitians,  out of which future parents, citizens, mayors, senators and even presidents will come from.

I see a potential to open the minds of our children to other realities, other worlds,  give them new dreams, broader horizons.

So last Saturday at a CrisisCamp in NYC, when I heard Adam Holt and Allison Bland, exhausted from an early morning train ride from Boston to NY

talked enthusiastically about this project I saw a chance to make a difference.

No matter how small my part would be.

Then I witnessed something awesome:  people were gathering around them,  coming together, rallying around this project.

The ideas started flowing,  out of the box ideas.

Suddenly, a simple translation project request became a movement to revolutionize the educational system  in Haiti.

2 days later, we have a coloring book project under way, translation parties in the works, blogs, websites, publishers/authors

willing to giving us permission to make their children Creole books into e-books, an active and growing online community of a people exchanging ideas and

ready to make a difference in anyway they can. Wow! If we can do that in 2 days, what can we do in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year!

Yes, I realize that it’s a drop in the ocean, but if you could even indirectly impact the future of 1 child of Haiti,

Would it not have been worth your while?

You can help!

Join our community at The New Haiti Project.

Donate 1 hour of your time to translate material from English to Creole

Start here: http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ht/

In two hours, I'll be meeting with William Stelzer, our chief mentor, who flew up from the Virgin Islands last night, and Allison Bland, who just returned from Crisis Camp NYC, which was a very helpful event. The three of us will start two local pilots today, one at the Fayerweather Street School, which has an ongoing relationship with the Matenwa Community Learning Center in Haiti, and another at Graham & Parks with a class of mostly Kreyol speaking Haitian children. We'll meet with each pilot class once a weekday for the next two weeks, teaching them Squeak Etoys and...

What to do:

Step 1:
http://translate.sugarlabs.org/ht/

Step 2:
In order to contribute, you must register with the sugarlabs site
and this will give you the ability to add translated text
Locate the Register link in the top right corner of the page.

Step 3:
The first time you log in, you’ll be asked to select some settings. on that screens you also get to select the projects you want to work on.
There are 3 projects specific to the OLPC/ Waveplace projects that we need help with.
Select one or all of the following

Etoys

OLPC Content
OLPC Software

Step 4:
Click on the “Translate” tab

Step 5:
Click on “Quick Translate” link

Waveplace has indicated that these tasks are their first priority

Our goal is to translate 100 strings of text per day for the next 2 weeks.

Let me know if you have any questions

Resources
*English /Creole dictionary: http://www.kreyol.com/dictionary/

*Haitian Creole page on English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole_language

Thank You and God Bless!

Woke up Saturday morning to a handful of emails, all sent at about 5am our time. Looks like the students had class on Saturday!

This was my favorite email, received from one of the girls, Diana:

She says, "Dear Elizabeth. I'm writing you this message to thank you for everything that you did for us. Diana"

I would like to pass on the thanks to everyone who has been a part of this project, whether in STeP UP, São João, somewhere else on the island, OLPC, New Hampshire, California, Connecticut, Latvia, London, Afghanistan...all of the people around the world who have given me financial, technical, pedagogical, conversational and emotional support. Your compassion does not cease to work wonders.

Beth

Actually, nothing bites the dust besides the slowly diminishing number of laptops that we need to get for São João!

Thanks to Lisa's generous contribution, I have just been able to purchase another used XO laptop for the kids at São João, for about $45 less than the cost of the computer sold brand new!


Please keep your contributions rolling in. If your place of employment does a matching program or is interested in doing a corporate sponsorship program, please be in touch. At this point I am looking for any funding I can get. I also have a beautiful funding proposal and no one to send it to!

Thanks so much to Lisa and to everyone out there donating and taking steps to make São Tomé (and the world) a better place for its children.

Finally finished with an inquiry letter and funding proposal...but not sure where to send them.

If you know of foundations or organizations that could give funding, please let me know. Also if you are willing to do a little bit of work yourself in sending out the proposal to the right people, you would really be lending a massive help. You can download the inquiry letter here and the funding proposal here.

Thank you!

Beth

PS No class last week due to a parent/teacher meeting. Hopefully will hear about how this week goes soon!

Quite a day today. Seems like everything's falling into place easily, which is wonderful given the complexity of the task before us. In the morning, I saw that OLPC News had featured prominently, with the three videos and those awful stills of me right on the home page. Then a productive talk with Chris Low, who co-directs the Matenwa School. We decided to have two concurrent pilots up here, over the next two weeks, on preparation for trips to Haiti a week or two later. The main goal is to get the new courseware tested and tweaked, then translated. She...

Many people still have not seen the innovative display of the OLPC project's "XO" laptop. It has twice the resolution of a regular LCD (200 dpi), and works in bright daylight in gray-scale reflective mode. It's impossible for me to increase your screen's resolution by software, and I cannot make your display reflective, but here is an interactive simulation of the backlight mode with its interesting color pattern. This pattern is the source of a lot of confusion about the "color resolution" of the display. The LCD has 1200x900 square pixels, but the backlight puts a full color through each pixel. It is not made of red, green, and blue sub-pixels like a regular LCD, but the first pixel is full red, the second green, the third blue, and so on. The DCON chip (Display CONtroller) selects the color components from the full-color frame buffer.

My simulation of the DCON achieves the same effect by selecting either the red, green, or blue color component in each pixel. Just move the mouse pointer around to see how different colors are reproduced. You'll notice strong diagonal patterns, but remember, on the actual display the pixels are only half as large. Note that the actual DCON optionally applies a bit of anti-aliasing in hardware which is not simulated here. It helps reproducing fine structures and depicts colors more accurately. Additionally, the simulation shows a magnified image to better illustrate the principle, but it is not accurate because the reflective area of each pixel is not depicted. Maybe I can add this in a later version.

I made the simulation using Squeak / Etoys, which is one of the programming environments on the OLPC machine, but also works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and many more systems. If you run the simulation on the actual laptop (download the project, place it in /home/olpc/.sugar/default/etoys/MyEtoys, run Etoys, choose Load Project), then you should close the small simulated screen and just leave the magnified view open.

For the interactive simulation, download Squeak (this version installs both, a regular application and a browser plugin), then click here to run the simulation in your browser, or download the project file, launch Squeak, and drop the project into it.

Intel-Mac users beware, the plugin is not supported directly yet. To see the project in Safari, you have to quit Safari, set it to open in Rosetta (select Safari in the finder, press Cmd-i), and reopen. Or, use the download method, Squeak itself is running fine on Intel Mac, it's just the browser plugin that's making problems.

I brought my green machine home this weekend, and my twins had fun with it. Enormous fun in fact for the two 7-year olds, pounding on TamTam furiously. I couldn't bear it anymore after half an hour or so.

Instead, I showed Jakob how to make a little figure bounce around on the screen in Etoys, while his sister went to practice her cello. He painted a simple head, and then we used the "forward by" and "bounce" tiles in a tiny two-line script making it move around. I made the mistake of pointing out that the "bounce" tile can produce some noise when bouncing. Endless fun trying the different noises ensued. Oh well.

Disturbed in her practice by these noises, Sophie came over and wanted to paint, too. So we saved Jakob's project and started a new one for her. I sat back to work on my email and let her brother teach. She spend like half an hour just painting the figure. The paint tool showed that it is not tuned to the XO's display resolution yet, it's far too small. But not giving up that easily, Sophie was erasing and repainting it over and over until she was satisfied with her "cow girl". Then Jakob proudly told her how to let it move and bounce, he had rembered almost everything needed. Together they quickly made it work, and just started exploring the noise-making possibilities again when we were saved by the call to dinner ...

I gave a talk about the $100-laptop at the Magdeburg school of Industrial Design. We did some very inspiring projects using Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet together before. The designers always come up with interesting ideas, even though not everything is directly implementable by us developers.

Carola Zwick, dean of the school, wrote a book Designing for Small Screens that certainly gives valuable insight for OLPC developers, and she provided (though indirectly) some very important infrastructure for the OLPC office: her group designed the chairs they are sitting on. I got the actual invitation by Christine Strothotte, who got her PhD doing computer graphics in Smalltalk just a few years before I got mine from the same school. She's teaching interaction design nowadays. I'm looking forward to doing an OLPC-related project with these great folks.

A student took some photographs during the talk. Also, from his blog post it seems I convinced him of the merits of the OLPC project (it was a lively discussion). Thanks for posting, Cheng!

I just installed Sophie on my green machine. Sophie is a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book, is implemented in Squeak (just like my Etoys activity on the laptop) using Tweak as its UI framework (which is the original topic of my blog). Tweak is also the base for the next-gen Etoys.

Installation went pretty smooth. I downloaded the cross-platform zip file using the Web activity from Sugar
and unpacked it using the command line. The first start of Sophie failed, but after replacing the failing plugin with one from the pre-installed Squeak it started and worked. Yay!

This is an excellent example why it's a good idea to have a regular X11 installation on the kid's laptop: a lot of software will just work, even if it is not correctly integrated into the Sugar UI.

Michael Rüger of impara (a Squeak shop leading Sophie development here in Magdeburg, Germany) came over and made a little book, downloading two logos directly from the web (Sophie can do that!), adding a bit of text and color ... Tweak performance is not exactly blazing on the XO machine, I think we made the right decision to not use the Tweak-based Etoys but stick to the proven Morphic-based one. Of course one could optimize it a lot, but who has time for that? Anyway, it was useable - click the image to get a larger view:

Even with XO laptops readily available now there are quite a lot of reasons why one would want to emulate it on another machine. One being to hook up a projector. Unfortunately there are quite a number of hoops (*) one has to jump through to make it work.

Anyway, I made a virtual machine that allows me to emulate the XO in VMWare on my Mac, running Sugar in the XO's native 1200x900 resolution, scaled down to a nice physical size in a window on my regular screen (fullscreen works, too). Sound works (even Tam Tam), Browse works (so networking is good), and after setting a working Jabber server I do see other XOs in the neighborhood view (Chat worked fine). Camera and mic are half working (Measure crashes, Record shows blank picture, but reportedly does record video), and a "Sugar restart" does not actually restart Sugar, but apart from that it seems fully functional, and much nicer than the emulations I had used to date.

Click to see actual screenshots (calibrated to match the XO's physical extent using the Ruler activity on my MBP's 110 ppi screen):

Lately I work on Squeak integration in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, perhaps better known as the "$100 laptop". The whole etoys group came over to OLPC's office in Cambridge. Squeak looks surprisingly well on the display prototype, and also etoys are reasonably fast. Ian Piumarta took some nice pictures, which might very well be the first photos of the actual display in the wild.

In Ghana, where the Baah-Wiredu Laptop per Child Foundation is working towards a 10,000 laptop deployment, the Millennium Village cluster in Bonsaaso includes some of the first adopters of one laptop per child.

The Millennium Villages are part of an effort to help sub-saharan African countries realize the Millennium Development Goals through global social, financial, and innovation support.  Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former Secretary General Kofi Annan have worked closely together in designing and championing the MDGs, and proposing Millennium Villages and related programs.
This past week, Sachs and Annan visited Bonsaaso and visited the primary students there.

As the village is unusual in a number of ways, not least in that it reportedly has reliable free internet access, it will be interesting to see how the students and teachers progress over the coming year. What do you think?

Hi everyone, After talking non-stop with dozens of people and groups over the last two weeks, Waveplace has settled on a plan to help Haiti in the coming four months. Tonight I've uploaded three videos describing this plan. Please forgive the roughness of my presentation (and my tired haggard look). This was simply the quickest way for me to put the details of the plan online for all to see. I will be transcribing the videos tomorrow for those that would rather read text. Here are the videos: The transcription will be here tomorrow: http://haiti.waveplace.com We welcome the ideas and...

The latest issue of the new OLPC newsletter is out. I’m trying out different layouts for an archive, including having select past stories show up each week at the end.

As always, feedback on design and story selection are welcome. Current requests include a way to browse the newsletter online without leaving some sort of story navigation (with some sort of floating TOC?)

For the early-Feb edition we will try to gather & discuss stories and images in advance in the OLPC newsroom.  Please submit your muck-raking, globe-trotting, xo-loving ideas and links there.

		January 25, 2010
	OLPCorps 2010:

apply now

Summer and year-long internships available OLPC for Haiti New video:

XO is for Hope

Hi all, Tim Falconer from Waveplace. Just a quick update to let everyone know that the schools and kids from our two Haitian pilots, and the upcoming one in Matanwa, are all alive and safe for now. The building in Petit-Riviere was spared, and luckily the Port-Au-Prince children were moved to the new facility in Williamson just prior to the earthquake. Our chief mentor, Bill Stelzer, is in Port-Au-Prince now . . he's helping with the schools and filming. He & Suzie have been on CNN twice in the last two days (http://haitichildren.org). I'm now in Cambridge MA in talks...

Haiti has been devastated by the recent earthquake.  Official estimates are that 110,000 people died and in the Port-au-Prince area, 75% of schools were destroyed.  We are exploring what we can to support the children and schools we have been working with there.  People on the ground in Haiti urgently need sanitation, water, food, and shelter.

Please consider donating to one of these aid groups working on essential services on the ground:

* UNICEF
* World Food Program
* Partners In Health

We are doing what we can for the 60 schools that we have been working with in Haiti – primarily planning for the spring after the first phase of rebuilding is underway.  We will be sending a group of OLPCorps volunteers to Haiti later this year, and are organizing a used XO drive to recover XOs that can be refurbished and sent to Haiti.   Luckily, our Haitian team (technical and in the government) was not hurt in the earthquake, and they are planning to help displaced students get back to school as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, around the US, people (including our own Adam Holt and Tim Falconer) have been gathering in CrisisCamps to brainstorm ways to better use collaborative technology to help groups on the ground.  If you are technically-minded, there is a real demand for programmers and interface designers to help some of these projects thrive.

The boxes are coming in...and I couldn't be more thankful.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We’re incredibly excited to announce the 2010 OLPCorps program.  This year, university students and young adults will have opportunities to support OLPC deployments in one of five regions: Haiti, Mali, Cameroun, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

We saw the passion and skills of university students in our 2009 Corps program, and restructured it to extend the program and focus on a smaller number of countries.  This will allow applicants to make a bigger contribution to our mission of creating educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children.

OLPCorps applicants must now commit to a full year, and applications are open to college students and young adults over the age of 18. We’re looking for passionate people who can work independently in challenging environments. Participants will engage in capacity building projects ranging from technical infrastructure support and local software design to advocacy, classroom assistance, administration, and strategy design.  Successful applicants will receive a stipend.   You can apply for the Corps online now.

For students looking for opportunities in established OLPC deployments or for shorter periods of time, applications for this year’s Internship Program are also available.

Read about my experiences meeting up with the OLPC team in Boston to talk about São João:

http://saigonolpc.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/sao-tome/

Check out Adam Holt's meeting notes here, that he posted to the web in real time: http://meeting.olpcorps.net/olpc-meeting/olpc-meeting.log.20091230_1828.html

Also, view my PowerPoint presentation online!
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Olpc-in-sao-joao--sao-tome.pdf

The OLPC Association is pleased to announce new internship opportunities for the coming year.  Country support interns will support an established deployment for 3 to 12 months, in one of four countries: Rwanda, Paraguay, Peru, or Nicaragua.

Learning outside with an intern teaching assistant in 2009

Support interns serve a vital role in building local capacity of partnering countries and organizations.  Innovators in business, engineering, social sciences, computer science, and public relations will be paired with experts in local knowledge and community building.  Teams will work alongside local school children, teachers, community members, and government officials to accelerate each country toward their long-term goals for education development.   Projects range from technical infrastructure support and local software design to advocacy and classroom assistance.  Internships are open to students over the age of 18.

There are also internship opportunities in grant writing and foundation outreach.  These interns will work remotely, conducting research and working with country deployments to formulate and submit grant proposals.  These are unpaid internships, with possible opportunities to travel to partnering countries.

Apply for an internship online, or find out more about the program.

If you are interested in working with small, new deployments, consider our year-long OLPCorps program instead.

It's when I see the big brown boxes sitting on my doorstep in Washington, DC that my faith in the world is renewed.

Have just received the third used laptop donation from another generous Give One Get One owner. This brings our current donation status to four computers!

I am almost finished with my grant proposal. With this I'm hoping to get donations in larger quantities (or the finances to purchase them). If you know of any organizations that might be interested in seeing a copy of the proposal, please let me know.

To past and future donors: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Volunteers for Peace Vietnam (Saigon Branch)
112/16 Chien Thang, Ward 9, Phu Nhuan District, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

VPV Head Office (in Hanoi)
Coma 6 Building
Duong 70, Tay Mo Commune, Tu Liem District, Hanoi

   

---