OLPC San Francisco Community Summit 2010

There were six people who flew from Boston to SF for the OLPC summit this past weekend, three of them work for OLPC, one for SugarLabs, one for public media non-profit and myself. It was a beehive of a weekend, as everyone felt like a bee taking active part in presenting, learning and collaborating! The opening reception took place on Friday evening at the Market st location of SF State University, kindly arranged by Sameer Verma and SF OLPC community. It was great to hear Carol’s announcement of San Fran Mayor’s decision to proclaim Sat, Oct 23 of 2010 as One Laptop Per Child Day in San Francisco.

On Friday my role was to encourage people to pin their home locations with red sticker dots on the world map so that we know what countries and continents are represented at the summit. People from all over the world came to the event and shared their OLPC experiences and deployment stories. To name a few, Mongolia, Uruguay, India, Australia, UK, Jamaica, etc. To see profiles of attendees go to Summit People.

The next two days were full of various sessions and panel discussions, and what is more exciting: notes were taken and published on-line, see Summit Schedule and click on links to wiki notes.

I was interested in Outreach Track and Education Track, so I attended Peer-to-peer learning, Service volunteerism in high school and college, Pen Pals in 2015, etc. On Saturday I was at Speed Geek, where I gave short presentations (5min each) about Vietnam OLPC http://olpc.vn/ to various summit members.

By Sunday Nick Doiron with help of others created interactive online map http://olpcmap.net, and attendees were able to add themselves to the map again, this time not with red dots but with several mouse clicks. The purpose of the map is to connect volunteers and deployments to improve collaboration and team work, because as Adam H. said “we are each other’s infrastructure and social fabric”.

I liked the final moment of the summit, where group photo was taken of 100+ attendants (those who lasted to the end), and the same Adam closed the event by giving a long friendly speech : “Thank you all!”

On Sunday evening, many attended the BBQ party at the Kleider’s Camp in Bolinas, CA, where great time and fun was shared by all! Thank you, dear hosts, for being everything to us, volunteers, in terms of infrastructure and moral support! On another note, the summit ignited more talks and future plans on how OLPC volunteers can help the world and another map was created… See more photos by Mike Lee, Mark Battley/Marina Zd,  Mark Terranova and Bill Stelzer.