Sydney OLPC techfest
On Sunday 1st June Riverview College hosted the first OLPC Australia Techfest. Its aim to stimulate interest in supporting the OLPC project in this region from a technical point of view was well met. We had about 50 or so delegates. The two main presenters were Martin Langhoff and Joel Stanley. Martin has primary responsibility for the XS, the School Server. Joel has been an intern with OLPC in Boston last year, and has intimate knowledge of XO innards. There was a good mixture of delegates, those that have had quite a bit of exposure to the project, and those only learning. There were a few people interested in working on the content and documentation which was great to see. There is a large general open-source community in Australia, so I feel sure given a little bit of a push there is likely to be strong interest in supporting this project in the region. While the technology itself is becoming quite mature, with many 100s of 1000s of machines heading to the field as we speak, regional customisation support for local deployments is going to needed. OLPC Australia sees its “target market” as not only Australia and New Zealand, but also the large number of Pacific nations. I would certainly like to be involved in deployments, assuming I can set aside the time and money for this.
