'Til All Are One

I’ll be at linux​.conf​.au fly­ing the OLPC Aus­tralia flag. In addi­tion to giv­ing a talk, I have plans for a whole range of other things, includ­ing:

• run­ning a Birds of a Feather session
• host­ing a stand at Open Day
• con­trib­ut­ing XO-1.5s to win as door prizes

Any assist­ance you can offer is more than welcome!

That’s not all. On Fri­day we made our most sig­ni­fic­ant soft­ware release, XO-​​AU 10.1.3-au1.

This is an import­ant mile­stone for OLPC Aus­tralia. It is the first XO OS build inten­ded to be installed onto all XO-1.5s in Aus­tralia, includ­ing those in the field. XO-1.5s ordered from the fact­ory will have at least this build installed by default. Many improve­ments have been made to make the soft­ware more appro­pri­ate for Aus­tralian children.

If you want to be kept updated and take part in OLPC Aus­tralia tech­nical devel­op­ment, see our par­ti­cip­a­tion page.

I will be speak­ing at linux​.conf​.au 2011 in Bris­bane about OLPC Aus­tralia, with a focus on the tech­nical side. We have been doing some amaz­ing stuff, but thus far we have been very quiet about it in the tech­nical com­munity. It’s time to fix this oversight.

My talk is titled, Enabling Con­nec­tions to Oppor­tun­ity: OLPC Aus­tralia. If you’ll be at the con­fer­ence, watch me talk on Thursday at 14:30. If you won’t be, grab the video once it is out.

Also speak­ing with me is Ian Cun­ning­ham, who works for the North­ern Ter­rit­ory Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing. Ian is heav­ily involved in the deploy­ment of OLPC tech­no­logy in North­ern Ter­rit­ory Schools, and will be able to deliver accounts from an educator’s perspective.

Here’s a copy of the abstract:

Sec­ond­ary speaker: Ian Cunningham

Aus­tralia is offi­cially a developed coun­try, but that status hides inequit­ies that exist within. In par­tic­u­lar, chil­dren in remote Aus­tralia typ­ic­ally have far fewer oppor­tun­it­ies for edu­ca­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion than their coun­ter­parts in met­ro­pol­itan regions. Recog­nising that their situ­ation is not dis­sim­ilar to those seen in the devel­op­ing world, One Laptop per Child Aus­tralia was founded.

The mis­sion is ambi­tious: to enhance learn­ing oppor­tun­it­ies for the 400,000 chil­dren, aged 4–15, liv­ing in remote Aus­tralia, by 2014. OLPC Aus­tralia are on track to rep­lic­ate suc­cess stor­ies such as Uruguay to have a com­pre­hens­ive edu­ca­tional pro­gramme out to each and every one of these children.

The centrepiece is a learn­ing device, known as the XO. Through lever­aging FLOSS, the XO provides unpar­alleled con­nectiv­ity and oppor­tun­it­ies for chil­dren to learn.

Under­pin­ning the pro­ject are seven core prin­ciples. The gestalt of these prin­ciples form an import­ant found­a­tion to the edu­ca­tional goals of the pro­ject. The fifth prin­ciple, Free and Open Source, will be dis­cussed in prac­tical con­text of the Aus­tralian circumstance.

Aus­tralia presents some inter­est­ing chal­lenges that are less com­mon in the envir­on­ments that the XO was ori­gin­ally designed for. On one hand, we have a vast, geo­graph­ic­ally isol­ated con­tin­ent, sparsely pop­u­lated with some of the most ancient cul­tures in the world. On the other, there is mod­ern tech­no­logy and Western-​​style governance.

This talk will present how OLPC Aus­tralia have been innov­at­ive and respons­ive to meet the Aus­tralian situ­ation. Some examples include:

• the world’s first deploy­ment of the new XO-1.5 models
• a stream­lined ver­sion of the XS School Server
• an eco­nom­ical and prac­tical rack­ing and char­ging sta­tion for XOs

It will dis­cuss how the use of tech­no­logy under­pins a hol­istic edu­ca­tional pro­gramme, and how OLPC Aus­tralia works with depart­ments of edu­ca­tion, schools and com­munit­ies to build a sus­tain­able operation.

If you have ever wanted a way use your tech­nical skills to bene­fit those most in need, this is the talk for you. Edu­ca­tion is a key vehicle for clos­ing the gap for the peoples in remote Aus­tralia. As a FLOSS pro­ject, your con­tri­bu­tions also bene­fit those abroad.

Here are our bios:

Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan grew up in the 1980s, as the per­sonal com­put­ing revolu­tion was heat­ing up. With only two tele­vi­sion chan­nels in his town, he turned to his com­puter for solace. He wishes he had dis­covered FLOSS before the late 1990s, because down­load­ing GNU Emacs over an acous­tic coupler would have been fun. Srid­har is a former board mem­ber of Linux Aus­tralia, and a pre­vi­ous pres­id­ent of the Sydney Linux Users Group. He is cur­rently the Tech­nical Man­ager (CTO) at One Laptop Per Child Australia.

Ian Cun­ning­ham is an IT Pro­ject Officer at the North­ern Ter­rit­ory Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing (NTDET). He has over 20 years teach­ing and lec­tur­ing exper­i­ence in Aus­tralia and abroad. A Linux user since Red Hat 4, Ian has been act­ive in pro­mot­ing the use of FLOSS in edu­ca­tion. He provides tech­nical sup­port and ment­or­ing for the NTDET OLPC Trial.

If you want to be kept updated and take part in OLPC Aus­tralia tech­nical devel­op­ment, see our par­ti­cip­a­tion page.

There’s lots of talk going on about the OLPC XO-1.75 now. A lot of it is inaccurate.

I’ll quote John Wat­ling­ton, VP of Hard­ware Engin­eer­ing at OLPC:

Dis­claimer: I’m VP of Hard­ware Engin­eer­ing at OLPC

ARM pro­cessors power­ful enough the sup­port the user exper­i­ence we wanted weren’t read­ily avail­able (at the price point we work at) four years ago, when work star­ted on the ori­ginal XO design.

There were sev­eral errors in that news art­icle which I would like to clear up:

• the XO-1.75 will not have an 8.9″ screen, but will con­tinue with the sun­light read­able 7.5″ screen designed by Mary Lou Jepsen (now at Pixel Qi) used in the XO-​​1 and 1.5.
• the $165 price is fic­tion (BOM price hasn’t been final­ized), but prob­ably not very far from the truth for the non-​​touchscreen equipped ver­sion. Please don’t for­get that since we don’t add any profit mar­gin, the laptop price dir­ectly depends on the volume ordered.
• the switch to ARM was com­pletely inde­pend­ent of any future sup­port for ARM in Win­dows. That sup­port was announced this week, while I’ve been pur­su­ing this ARM design for three years, with act­ive devel­op­ment over the last eight months. Fur­ther­more, we are using the Mar­vell Armada 610, which won’t be sup­por­ted by Win­dows (if you believe M$).
• Linux has shipped, and will con­tinue to ship, on EVERY XO pro­duced. You can believe ran­dom com­menters, or you can believe the per­son who signs off on every SKU produced.

I’ll also add that a lot of work has gone into soft­ware devel­op­ment, includ­ing port­ing Fedora 14 to ARM and adding multi-​​touch sup­port to the Sugar UI. This has been a long time in the mak­ing, and the announce­ment of Microsoft’s ARM port is a coin­cid­ence. Sorry, no riv­et­ing con­spir­acies here.

Some media reports have been imply­ing that mass pro­duc­tion will start by mid-​​year. This is incor­rect. It may pos­sibly be that the design is final­ised by then, but plan­ning and tool­ing for mass pro­duc­tion and deliv­er­ies is quite an endeav­our bey­ond that.

If you want the real inform­a­tion on the XO-1.75, look at the OLPC Wiki page. Right now, they’re up to Alpha test model 2. If you want to view or take part in the devel­op­ment dis­cus­sion, head over to the devel mail­ing list (strictly speak­ing, this list is for soft­ware devel­op­ment, but the com­munity are dis­cuss­ing the hard­ware there too).

Speak­ing for OLPC Aus­tralia, it’s far too early to say what we’ll do about the XO-1.75. I’m watch­ing it with great interest. Just as we com­pleted the world’s first deploy­ment of XO-1.5 devices, I’m keen for us to do pion­eer­ing work and lead the way. If you want to be kept updated and take part in OLPC Aus­tralia tech­nical devel­op­ment, see our par­ti­cip­a­tion page.