Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar...

Back in mid-May 2009 many members of the European and North American Sugar and OLPC communities followed OLPC France’s invitation to attend Sugar Camp 2009 in Paris. As expected the meeting turned out to be a great success and it was literally one of the best weekends I had in 2009.

Laurence Buchmann, a French filmmaker, documented Sugar Camp 2009 by interviewing many participants and filming some of the activities going on there. The resulting 13 minute video called “Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar...” was now posted over on dailymotion.com and I think it gives a great insight into and overview of both the Sugar project itself and the larger Sugar and OLPC communities.

Interview with meetforeal.com

At 26C3 Adrian (@amonter5) from meetforeal.com (@meetforeal) did a short interview with me about OLPC, Sugar Labs and the current state of things. The video was posted earlier today and you can watch it below:

I have to say that I’m quite content with it except for the fact that I have to learn to suppress those “ammm“-s. Oh, and next time I should also consider putting on some make-up before an interview because you can see every minute of sleep deprivation in those bags under my eyes… :-D

26C3 – Here be dragons

Back in early October a tweet by someone I follow alerted me to the fact that the deadline for submissions to the 26th Chaos Communication Congress was less than 48 hours away. In a lunch break I whipped up a quick proposal for a lecture called “After the Hype – The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs”. A couple of weeks later I learned that my submission had been accepted.

So just like last year I spent the time between Christmas and New Year’s having a great time hanging out at 26C3. For those not familiar with the Chaos Communication Congress: it’s a yearly event organized by the famous Chaos Computer Club (Wikipedia entry) that brings together hackers, researchers, artists and many other interesting people.

I saw a ton of great lectures, got introduced to many interesting projects and learned about research into the scary security issues of GSM and the mobile phone eco-system in general. But almost more importantly I met tons of awesome people, some of which I had known previously but hadn’t seen in many months and others which were strangers only a few days ago.

It’s hard to describe the atmosphere at 26C3 to people who have never been to such an event. Things that come to mind when I think of it are energy, pure awesomeness, liberation, deep thought, an urge to understand, thinking outside the box, challenges, etc. (Oh and it’s also hard to think of 26C3 without being reminded of the perpetual sound of Club Mate bottles falling over;-) To me personally 26C3 is definitely one of the coolest spaces I’ve been to in 2009.

One thing that was also great is that all the talks were streamed over the Internet so even people who couldn’t attend the congress in person or simply didn’t make it into the often packed lecture halls could watch them. Additionally the videos are being made available for download, you can find more details and the download links here.

Two talks which I consider to be absolute must-sees are:

• GSM: SRSLY? (details, video)
• WikiLeaks Release 1.0 (details, video)

I saw many other great talks and more that I couldn’t attend in-person but hope to watch over the coming days and weeks.

As for my own talk I have to say that I was quite happy with it even though I literally only finished the slides 10 minutes before I went on-stage. The feedback I got after the talk - in-person, via Twitter and via the 26C3 Web site – was also very encouraging. Of course after a quick look over the recording of my talk I found a number of areas I should definitely improve on in the future but I guess it’s always an iterative and evolutionary process. If you’re interested in watching After the Hype – The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs you can do so by downloading the video (~700MB), the slides are available for download here.

In the end I want to thank all of the people who made 26C3 happen, especially the organizers, angels and volunteers behind the scenes. Here’s to you for an awesome event!

FUDCon Brno 2008

I'm sitting here in the car on the way home from the Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon for short) in Brno, Czech Republic. Daniel from OLPC Austria and me attended the event from Friday until today and I have to say it was well worth the 2x 5 hours ride to/from Brno.

The main reason for going to FUDCon was to meet up with the core Sugar developers (Sugar being the software platform originally developed for One Laptop per Child) and have a OLPC / Sugar / Sugar Labs (the latter being the new non-profit organization created to improve and spread the Sugar platform) presence at the event.

We arrived quite late on Friday evening but we did make it in time for some great Czech food and beer at a small restaurant near the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University where the event was held. We didn't waste any time and quickly moved into a very good discussion on the recent past and current status of OLPC, Sugar and Sugar Labs. Apart from recounting the madness that was the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Session in Ljubljana back in March we also generated a couple of good ideas for things to be improved or done in the foreseeable future. While we initially had the intention to call it a day when the waitress closed the restaurant some of us decided to take a peek at nightlife in Brno. We ended up in this somewhat generic disco/pub/bar but the beer and discussions were good and it was nice way to chill out after what had been quite a long day for me.

Sugar Labs gang

Saturday's program was dedicated to a BarCamp where we hosted a 50min session in the morning. I started off with a 15~20 min presentation on the "who, what and why of Sugar" which was basically a broad overview of some key features in Sugar, the core challenges that the project is facing, some thoughts on education and the current state of things with regard to OLPC and Sugar. The second part of the session was held by the Sugar developer team and focused on the more technical aspects of the project and especially areas where the Fedora community can contribute. At the end we had quite an engaging Q&A session with the majority of the comments and discussions centered around storing and retrieving data. Instead of the traditional files and folders system Sugar (on the surface) employs something called the Journal which basically acts as a diary (with support for searching, tagging and filtering) of everything you do on your machine. It was interesting to hear people's thoughts on this approach and I think we're definitely going to have many more discussions on this topic in the weeks and months ahead.

The afternoon was spent sweating away in a very steamy lecture-room where we first we heard a presentation about what seems to be quite a cool translation platform called Transifex. Later we turned our attention on getting some work and, in my case, mostly e-mailing done. The evening was dedicated to the FUDCon social event which meant mediocre food, great beer and outstanding discussions all while surrounded by people wearing white FUDCon Brno 2008 t-shirts. We really got an awful lot of work done both before and after dinner and thanks to having an XO at hand we could record all of our thoughts, strategies and ideas which we would have undoubtedly forgotten otherwise. We then went for a nice walk towards the city center which was followed by the long walk home since our hotel was a couple of kilometers away from Brno's center. We almost lost our two Italian developers along the way because while they might be able to code for 3 days straight walking for a bit apparently kills their spirit or something.

getting things done

Since everyone had gotten a good night's sleep (7h, I hadn't come close to that during the rest of the week) we were all quite relaxed and energetic today. While the Sugar team got together for a discussion of the roadmap and feature-set for the Sugar 0.84 release I toyed around with the RoadMap activity, caught up with most of my e-mails and sketched out some ideas and to-dos for the weeks ahead. In the late afternoon we had a good discussion were we wrapped-up many of the thoughts that we had collected on the day before.

All in all a very productive and enjoyable weekend and while it's going to be a while I'm already looking forward to the next meeting with these fine folks. As always with OLPC-related experiences it's a great pleasure to be able to spend your time with people who are that smart and inspiring.

Some random observations:

• I assume almost 2/3 of all the laptops I saw at FUDCon were Lenovo ThinkPads. There were also a number of eee PC owners at the event and in general there's definitely a strong trend towards machines which are smaller than 15.4".
• The organization at FUDCon was nothing short of stellar and kudos to Red Hat and everyone who was involved in the process. That's exactly what a community event should be like and I know of many organizations which could learn a thing or two from Red Hat / Fedora in that respect!

Walter Bender's 23 Questions

Last week Walter Bender, President of OLPC Software and Content until he resigned in April and now leading the Sugar Labs project, posted an entry called "A page from the Hilbert playbook" on his personal blog. In reference to David Hilbert's famous 23 problems in mathematics he came up with his own set of questions related to computer science, engineering, education, economics and social sciences.

For me these questions and thoughts are one of the most inspiring pieces of writing I've seen in quite some time. I'm almost tempted to print them out and stick them on my door as a constant reminder of some of the interesting challenges ahead when it comes to these fields.

Given that Walter's thoughts were the last part of a talk given at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and he had written up the first half in a two-part article on olpcnews I was also very happy when he allowed us to re-publish his latest text. Somehow it feels like a foundation had been laid upon which we can now build ideas and actual projects pertaining to all these issues. There's definitely a lot to think about and no chance to be bored in the years ahead!

SugarLabs

"Following Thurday's news about OLPC teaming up with Microsoft, Walter Bender - former president of software at OLPC - announced the launch of SugarLabs. Consistent with the OLPC mission to provide opportunities for learning, SugarLabs will focus on providing an open ecosystem that enhances learning on the XO as well as other hardware platforms."

Please digg!

More explanations and comments on the subject to follow over the coming days...