Said article and my comment to it:
“I didn’t get the ‘one per child’ part of things having benefited from the UK’s handful of BBC B’s per school approach. Eventually I understood that this wasn’t about teaching computers - OLPC’s replace paper and books.
If you start asking “Is it important to get paper and books to kids in schools around the world”, it becomes a much simpler discussion. “
Some notes I made in the OLPC keynote…no particular order:
* We need a Tux with a feather on a t-shirt.
* “Conventional desktops don’t work before the child can read”
* OLPC badly need Firefox bug #404059 fixed.
* Schools in Peru can be up to 20 days travel from Lima. One solution to this will be meshes of meshes. Or a mesh chain. Or something like that. You can imagine it.
* Anirudh Badam’s HashCache in combination with a CDN.
* 350 languages in the world with over a million speakers.
* Uruguay youtube video made by a child with an OLPC.
* Solar power access pt for under $50.
* 2.2 km mesh network achieved in the outback.
* Unique screen. 200dpi in b/w mode. Great in the sunlight. 0.1 watt usage b/w, 1 wt colour. > 13hr ebook mode.
* 1.5 billion kids.
* 50 cents for a wooden spoon and a photo diode attached to the audio port to make a unique instrument.
* CPU/Mobo turns off. Wireless stays on. Display on, but doesn’t animate (ie: no clock) so can drop to low power easily.
* Child can generate 5-10 watts with a hand crank.
Another small tidbit. We (ASF, and other open source projects too), should use git or equivalent distributed repository type for GSOC students. That way we can both give them a good one to one conversation with their mentors, and get them using a source code repository.
Apparently we should be doing this:
“the policy is that any commit of stuff created by someone else must be marked as such, either by ‘Submitted by: ‘or ‘Obtained from: ‘ being part of the log. ”
ie) if applying a patch from an issue tracker, or if applying code that someone else wrote and passed on to you in another way (IM, personal mail, mailing list, git repository).
Well… I did it. Finally talked at ApacheCon to about 20 people, so not very intimidating. Sanjiva’s WS/REST talk had one section of the conference (post Roy’s packed talk) and Sandor Temme had the other group for his 2 hour talk on HTTP Server.
I improved the talk a little with help from Bjorn Townsend, and then with some suggestions from Brian McCallister I pimped it up such that it wasn’t just a bunch of bullet points. I also pulled a chunk of the content out into post-it notes that only I would be able to see.
Unfortunately that failed at launch - I could show the audience my notes on the screen, but not reverse it so that they saw the presentation. So I had to fly without notes, which was irritating as there were various bits I didn’t cover.
Reaction to the talk was positive - and a couple of POI committer/contributors (Yegor and David) were happy that the original description was satisfactorily achieved. Generally I think the crowd was ASF aware, rather than people who are only just starting to contribute to OSS. They were probably learning about REST and HTTP. That’s one of the tricky things at ApacheCon; the business track is very attractive to the ASF developer audience, and it slowly merges into an ASF track which is less of interest to either ASF audience or ASF users.
For the presentation notes, see the following ’site’.
Lack of posting for me (despite the many hand scrawled notes) because I woke up on Friday morning with an injured wrist. I think one of my carpals gave up or something like that; I couldn’t lift up a drink of water without the wrist losing strength half way.
Fortunately it’s getting better - I just need to give it some time to recover and not overdo the typing.
I’ve a bunch of bits to try and blog over the next couple of days, but one thing that I want to bounce up and down and talk about are OLPC’s - the $100 laptops (currently retailing at $200). Jim Gettys brought a half-dozen along for people to look at and I spent an hour playing with them and discussing them with the others around.
Let’s cover the basics - I love the idea, I love the hardware and I love the software. I’m very happy with my decision to buy one back on Monday. The only open question which is likely to lead to a complaint is putting on other software. I want to put a DOS emulator on to run old 90’s games that my son adores.
There’s a version of LOGO on there that uses the Lego Mindstorm style programming environment of plugging blocks together rather than doing it by hand. I had a lot of fun with that (while others were figuring out how to get console and dig around underneath… sometimes I have the strong suspicion I’m not a hacker). The automatic mesh network seemed good - the biggest bit I had to learn to do was close applications rather than leave them hanging around. In fact it feels much like my Psion netBook did - if you didn’t keep things clean then you’d find your memory was all gone.
I was a bit confused that the left mouse button had an X while the right mouse button had an O - unless it was a localization of the Portguese version I was using, it seems odd to be that way around. I’d expect X to be the right hand side and to imply cancel. Maybe it’s for playing noughts and crosses.
The keyboard felt like a larger zx81, no pulling keys off in our household again; and the whole thing felt light enough to not be a burden on a young kid. I love it. Looking forward to reading about the ’school server’ and presumably there’s some kind of educator’s version.
Less done on Tuesday. A bit more Lang coding, an ApacheCon planners meeting, show Nathan off to Apache (general thought…. what’s that orange coloured fast moving thing that is lurching dangerously near me), dinner at a Chinese restaurant, a couple of Murphy’s at an Irish pub and some dodgy geezers on the street giving Santiago and I trouble as we headed back to the hotel.
Time for Day 3.
A corollary to “activity begets activity” is “it’s all about the itch”. This is a fairly common bit of diatribe for OSSites to use. Let’s go a step further and talk about the importance of the shared itch in a community.
We, individually, get started in Open Source because of an itch. We contribute to a project because something irritates us enough to fix it or complain about it, then we dig a bit further and that itch becomes a hobby, a vocation, a bloodsucking vampire that drains our souls. Erm. Pretend I didn’t say that last one ;).
That’s all about the individual - the selfish instinct. Communities don’t have itches, rather they have a shared itch. It’s the overlapping of the various individual itches at first, but as the community grows the need increases for that shared itch to gain character, to anthropomorphize, to pick up its scythe and start pulling people onto the same page.
I suspect the shared itch is an important factor in the long term survival of a project. It’s about how the people involved have a common ground and a shared understanding in the general direction of the product’s requirements. I think that it usually manifests itself as we answer “What does X do?”. We record the shared itch in the description of the project’s output, and focus little on where it really lives in the input to the process.
