15 hours left in Boston

Oh my God, these past 2 1/2 days have just gone by in absolutely no-time, I can barely believe that it's Monday evening already which means that I'll have to say my good-byes here in as little as 15 hours. It's weird, the last time when I was here at 1CC at the beginning of June the time also went by very quickly but at my departure I was very much aware of the fact that I'd be back soon. Tomorrow when I head to the airport it's going to be hard to convince myself that it's really au revoir, not good-bye as I'm sure to be back here at one point or another. However it's definitely going to be a few months and realistically the earliest I'll really be able to make it back to Boston is late spring 2009.

Anyway, no time to be nostalgic now, that's what I can do on the flight tomorrow. Now I'm going to make the best of the little time that I have left and thanks to a great and very enjoyable dinner with great company at the Cambridge Brewing Company I'm well prepared for the hours ahead of me.

Scared of the ticking clock

I know, I talk about this a lot, but it is really really scary how time flies. I'm not even talking about those outstanding 5 days in Boston from where I just got home two hours ago. Rather it's the fact that I realized that I only have a bit more than 2 1/2 weeks left here in DC!

Anyway, off to get some badly needed sleep... Good night everyone!

Day 3 @ 1CC - 06/09/08 - Cambridge, MA (#2)

Ahh, it's already 4 p.m. and only now do I have some spare time to do a brief write-up about yesterday...

It was again a pretty good day and you can find all of the artifacts, transcripts and whatnot produced during yesterday's grassroots bootcamp session at w.l.o. We started the day with a brainstorm on the most pressing grassroots community facilitation problems that need to be addressed. It yielded some good and interesting results, community-assisted testing being the one I'll be focusing on over the coming days and weeks. After lunch consisting of very good pizza I briefly meet up with Walter Bender for an interesting discussion about both olpcnews and Sugar Labs. Afterwards I had the pleasure of joining in on an OLPC tech-meeting where some of the plans for the coming weeks and months were discussed. There should be some challenging tasks in there for external contributors, more information will be made available over the coming weeks.

In the evening I meet up with my friend Bob to grab some burgers and beers close to Harvard square. As always we had some great discussions about topics ranging from wifi networks to history.

By the time I got back to the office I was quite beat but we decided to call it a night. Unfortunately Maker House, where I'm staying, was locked and there was no key to be found so Seth and I ended up staying at SJ's place. Anyway, the 6 hours of sleep were certainly well deserved!

Well, I'm off to see the city, after all it's my 2nd time here in Boston and I've spent basically of it here in the OLPC offices in Boston. Last time we did spend 2 or 3 hours walking through the city center and the Harvard area but this time I want to see a bit more and maybe grab a bite to eat (seafood!) somewhere. :-)

Day 3 @ 1CC - 06/09/08 - Cambridge, MA

Another productive day.
Lack of sleep.
Good night.

More details to follow tomorrow.

Day 2 @ 1CC - 06/08/08 - Cambridge, MA

Ah, what a great evening. I'm currently sitting in a courtyard, surrounded by fancy new buildings of the MIT and other R&D companies. It was a relatively hot and humid day but right now it's just perfect outside, with a light breeze and dusk slowly setting. It kind of reminds me of summer nights at Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria where my family used to go a lot when I was younger, with the only slight difference being that I'm several thousand kilometers away from Austria and not looking at the lake.

Anyway, we had another very productive day here at 1CC, with many more interesting discussions about community-related activities. Rabi from OLE Nepal also gave everyone an overview of their work there, I had heard most of it earlier in the week in DC but it was still an interesting session. Afterwards some plans for some important projects to be done in the June to August timeframe were discussed, more details about them will become available shortly.

Tomorrow marks the official start of the grassroots bootcamp and I'm very much looking forward to 2 1/2 days of intensive sessions, brain-storming, planning and hacking.

I can't even begin to really describe just how great it is to be here, I'm having an outstanding time and I'll definitely try to stop by again in late July before I fly back to Europe.

Day 1 @ 1CC - 06/07/08 - Cambridge, MA

I arrived in Boston 20 hours ago and I've spent 16 of those hours here at the OLPC HQ (aka 1CC). We ended up staying until ~ 6 a.m. last night, just discussing a lot of recent developments and plans for the future, obviously with a focus on community engagement and whatnot. Then we headed to Maker House where I'm staying while I'm in town, only to get up 2 1/2 hours later, take a quick shower and head back to the office. Today we've been quite busy discussing various bits and pieces, from a match-maker platform, community focused communication and events to feedback loops between deployments and (potential) contributors around the world. We also had a couple of good laughs and we might share some of our stories and jokes via a podcast (or something similar) in the near future.

Anyway, even though I've had my fair share of chai latté, coffee and coke I'm slowly starting to crash and it's about time I get outta here to grab some dinner and beers. Very much looking forward to tomorrow, especially the afternoon shall be interesting and it will be great to have a chance to match some faces to e-mails and nicknames in some of the meetings tomorrow. :-)