Without further ado, here is Ivan.

I have long wondered how they get so much work done in such a short period of time. ‘When do they sleep?’ I have often though. Now I know, they don’t sleep. Ivan gave this talk on no sleep. Seriously, he had not slept the night before and was somewhere on hour 38!

Dan Bricklin recorded the video, and also has full audio recordings (podcasts) of the event. Dan has some other fantastic podcasts, including one with Antonio from Tabblo, so please check those out at your leisure.

It is always fun to watch Ivan give a talk, and even more fun to watch people who might not have known much about the project or had preconceived notions about OLPC, listen to him. I noticed a few people sit up and really take notice. One person (whom I will not mention by name as I never asked permission to use it), really seemed to ‘get it’. This person was alternately witting notes franticly, gasping, smiling, and at one point could only be described as ‘giddy’. Seeing that made it all worth while for me. I now see that PJ over at groklaw has made a post about the video as well, and it just made my year:

From this talk, I finally understand fully what the project is for. It’s not to design a cheaper laptop. It’s to create a a new way to educate.

Some of the most interesting information, for me, came not from the talk but from conversations before and after. One thing he mentions is that no one in the group is a ‘hopeless Idealist‘. No one is an ‘incurable optimist‘. Every one working on the project is very realistic. It is that realist approach which has kept the group grounded and able to get the work done. Ivan said he himself does not know if they will succeed, but what else is there but to try. There are problems, there are restrictions, there are complications. It is the ability to identify, breakdown, and then attack those issues which makes it all possible. They do not have all the answers, but they are working on finding them to the best of their ability. That is the reason why I feel this project will succeed.

One of the other side discussions was on personalization. The first thing children do is personalize their laptop, usually with stickers. This actually works as an added security feature. ‘It is much harder to sell one of these [laptops] with a My Little Poney sticker on it.’ The beta 3 and beta4 XO’s now have thermal transfers of the ‘XO’ character on the cover now. They approached the vendor and at first the vendor said ’sure we can do that’, then OLPC asked ‘What if we have 20 X color transfers and 20 O transfers, could you randomly mix them on each laptop produced?’ After some more technical work, they made it happen. The beta 4 machines will also have a textured surface like that of a golf ball, and a different plastic. This is being done to reduce scratching, add some strength, and reduce the visible ware which happens over time. There is some concern that stickers will no longer stick as well to the surface. If it is something that is important to the children, it is something important to them, period.

There was plenty more which occured at the summit, and both Dan Bricklin and Andy Updegrove have fantastic blog posts on the event. There was quite a strong python presence which makes me quite happy. Beyond OLPC, there were lightning talks on Zope, some side mentions on Plone, and SnapLogic. Mike Pittaro of SnapLogic gave a lightning talk at both the summit and at Wednesdays Python meetup. I have a (poor) recording of the meetup and will post that soon. There were hall discussions on Django, Turbo Gears, PHP vs. Ruby, Vs. Python, Drupal vs. Plone and Guido’s Python 3000 post. I had not had time to read Guido’s post so I couldn’t participate as much as I had wanted to. I don’t feel I have anything worth while to add about the rest of the event, beyond to say that I think Andy was too kind, and yes I was wearing jeans.

My goals for OLPC at this summit were to get the message out about this local effort and the revolutionary open source/hardware technology; this is a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Counsel event after all. Second, get the spotlight on the ideals and the software behind the project, not on the ‘laptop’. Third to get people interested enough to get involved. And, of course to promote open source and python. It is too soon to know if any of the goals were achieved, but I think the first two were thanks in large part to PJ over at groklaw posting the video.