OLPC France and Sugar Labs are organizing the 1st SugarCamp at La Cantine in Paris today from 10:00AM to 7:00PM.

This event is a unique opportunity to meet the European Sugar community and Walter Bender, Executive Director of Sugar Labs and co-founder of the One Laptop per Child foundation.

The Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative and critical-thinking learning. It is already in use worldwide on 800,000 XO, the small laptops designed by the OLPC foundation and distributed to developing countries.

This event will be organized around several workshops focusing on technical facts, pedagogical materials and FLOSS manual. Walter Bender will give an introduction talk about Sugar. A Malagasy workshop, translating Sugar content for the 100 XOs that OLPC France plans to deploy in Madagascar (we are still raising funds for this project), will also be held.

Caroline Meeks of Sugar Labs will present the beta-1 of Sugar on a Stick, a tool which lets anyone run Sugar on almost any computer with a USB key. Version 1.0 is scheduled for release in Q3.

AFUL and Gdium are sponsoring this event. GDium will demonstrate how to run Sugar on the Liberty 1000 netbook.

Update: You can find a video live-stream of what's going on in Paris at http://live.ubicast.eu/ubicast/live.html.

Update (2): Things are slowing winding down here and at least some of the talk has shifted to topics such as dinner and how the evening will be spent. You can find some photos that Gary C Martin took today over on Flickr.

Update (May 17): We're back on a video live-stream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Sugar-Camp-Paris-2009. Unfortunately the WiFi is somewhat spotty here so the stream might stop every now and then. We've also got an IRC backchannel at #sugar-meeting on FreeNode.