Upcoming presentation at TU Graz on March 24

I’m really looking forward to next week as I’ll be spending 2 days in Graz. The main reason why I’m going is that I’ve again been invited to give a talk on OLPC as part of the “ICT and Society” (“Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie”) lecture series at Graz University of Technology. Apart from the really impressive set of speakers one of the coolest aspects of this yearly lecture series is that it’s also being livestreamed. So if you’re interested in watching my talk (which I’ll give in German) then mark your calendars and head over to http://curry.tugraz.at/ at 4:15PM on Wednesday, March 24, and tune in. I’m also thinking about how to best integrate some sort of backstream so even remote participants can ask questions, most likely I’ll rely on Twitter and a public Google Wave to achieve that.

Apart from the presentation I’m also looking forward meeting the fine folks involved in the Austrian OLPC pilot project at Pädagogische Hochschule Steiermark again. Plus I’ll also get to meet some other friends and I’m pretty certain that I’ll spend at least one evening enjoying the great food and drinks at Sägewerk.

New Millenium Learners Conference 2010

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a tweet with an announcement that the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" would take place here in Vienna between February 22 and 24. I now spent the past 2 1/2 days at the conference which turned out to be really interesting and inspiring.

I won’t go into any further details here since I covered the conference in three quite extensive blog-posts over on olpcnews.com: day 1, day 2 and day 3.

As you can see over there I used ustream.tv quite extensively to broadcast and record the various sessions and I hope to be able to blog about my experience with it in the not-too-distant future.

Recently read (February 2010)

I haven't been too good when it comes to tackling the large number of unread books that are strewn all over my room. I did however read three of them in the recent months that I'd briefly like to talk about here:

I originally stumbled across "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures" by Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson while wandering through a small bookstore in Kathmandu's Thamel area during my first week in Nepal last summer. Not being quite sure what to make of the title and the cover (see below) I forgot about it again until the book came up during a discussion with some Australian friends a couple of days later. Hearing that it was supposed to be an interesting read I put it on my Amazon wishlist and ordered it upon my return to Austria.

The book is basically a collective memoir by the three authors who met as recently joined and idealistic United Nations employees in Cambodia in the 1990s. Their accounts detail their involvement in various UN missions from Cambodia to Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia. The mood of the book changes dramatically as they describe their experiences ranging from the good life they often had in Cambodia, to personal losses and the nerve-wrecking experience of excavating the victims of massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia. Some of the descriptions, especially the ones related to the massacres, are indeed haunting. Overall the book provides an interesting insight into the lives and experiences of three dedicated individuals who each in their own way tries to make the world a better place. It was really hard for me to put the book down and so I finished it within two or three days.

I can't recall where or how I originally heard about Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice". However when I was hanging out at the Thalia book store in Hamburg on my way home from Stockholm I saw the cover and remembered that the book was on my "to-be-read" list. After diving into the book for 30min I knew that it would make for a great holiday read. Turns out I was right because I really had a great time reading this novel which one comment on Amazon perfectly describes as:

"A hilarious cross between The Big Lebowski and Illuminatus! (the trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea -- not to be confused with the similarly-titled bestseller), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Raymond Chandler novels."

BTW, this book isn't recommend for people who get annoyed by the word "groovy"!

Last but not least, the book that kept me up until 4AM last Monday was "The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders" by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier. The book is a beautifully designed mixture of a graphic novel and photos taken by Didier Lefevre when he accompanied a team from Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) into northern Afghanistan in 1986. To say that the book is powerful would be quite the understatement. Its content and visual presentation combined with Lefevre's great photos are literally mind-blowing. For me this was also the first time I've seen such a mixture of illustrated and photographed panels and this makes it all the more memorable an experience. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who even has the faintest interest in travel photography, the work of MSF, Afghanistan and/or the account of a traveler on the journey of his life.

Next up on my reading list are Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World" by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan. I had started reading both books last year but never got around to finishing them.

Mmm, on the other hand William Gibson’s “Spook Country” and the famous “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have also been on my list for quite some time…

Nicely done video on OLE Nepal

Found this video on Twitter the other day and thought it’s worth sharing here:

OLE Nepal from INVISIBLE HAND on Vimeo.

Of course it doesn’t come close to my favorite OLPC feel-good video from about 2 years ago… ;-)

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

Stuart McMillen – Part of Nature

While catching up on some tweets I stumbled across the amazing "Part of Nature" comic by Stuart McMillen. I’d definitely recommend looking at it as it nicely sums up many of the main issues when it comes to topics such as climate change, resource consumption, sustainability, etc.

P.S. McMillen’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” comic is also well worth seeing.

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!