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.

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 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.