Tuesday, November 18, 2008

OLPC launches Give 1 Get 1 2008

Apart from finally managing to meet up with some friends today for a good game of soccer I spent most of the day glued to the screen and trying to stay on top of the developments surrounding the return of OLPC's Give 1 Get 1 program. That means reading / writings tons of e-mails, checking the olpcnews forums, following keywords on news.google.com, tuning into IRC, etc.

Anyway, since I've done quite a bit of blogging about it over on olpcnews.com I'm not going into details here. Except to say that despite what some media outlets are saying OLPC is a pretty great project making good progress, additionally I've met a large number of smart and awesome people via OLPC and that alone is highly motivating. And even if this sounds stupid ,I probably wouldn't know what to do with all my spare time if I didn't spend it on related efforts. ;-)

Most of this week will go towards OLPC as we're working on publishing lots of great content on olpcnews. Plus I'll be heading to Graz on Wednesday evening to hold a presentation for future CS teachers at the Technical University there on Thursday morning. Afterwards I'll be attending the USAB 2008 Symposium which I'm really looking forward to. I'll also have a small table there to present OLPC and especially some of the projects that OLPC Austria has been working on.

In related news I gave an interview to BBC Radio's Up All Night program last night and I was quite happy with it. (In case you're interested it's available as a stream here, the segment on OLPC starts at 01:11:40.) Last week I also had an interesting talk with Cyrus Farivar who was working on a story on Inveneo which I had visited when I was in San Francisco. You can find the excellent piece (with a short comment by yours truly) at The World/Technology - definitely my favorite tech-podcast these days!

Anyway, I badly need to grab some sleep now, I can barely keep me eyes open as I write these lines...