I am Tom Steinberg, the director of mySociety.org - a UK open source non-profit that builds websites which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. We run many of UK's democracy websites.

A few months ago I was mulling the way in which things like the Home Brew Computer Club are now artifacts of computing history - people only seem to meet up at technology conferences, not in little local groups. Simultaneously we were experimenting with a new feature on our site PledgeBank called Cascading Pledges.

Suddenly I saw an opportunity to combine the cascading pledges with One Laptop Per Child by setting up a pledge to encourage people to form small local Children's Machine XO hacking groups.

OLPC Hackers is a pledge to

"buy a 2B1 laptop for $300, and become part of a local OLPC hacking club but only if 2 other people in my town or city will do the same."

If you sign this pledge you'll be signing up to a local version of the pledge, wherever you live in the world. Other people signing up elsewhere will form groups where they are.

Hopefully this can kickstart some OLPC hackers clubs, and provide some feedback on this new PledgeBank feature. Our site runs in ten languages and has 3 million placenames around the world, so it is an ideal platform for groups to come together for a global project like OLPC.

Now that it has been announced that OLPC XO's will may actually sell laptops on a retail basis, I just wanted to publicise the pledge to see if any OLPC News readers are interested.

Just sign up, stick your name and location in, and when the pledge ends we'll put you in touch with the other people in your area who are interested in seeding a OLPC Hackers club.

Lastly, I hardly have to say, but this is pledge is completely unofficial and "hacking" is meant in the positive, developing new, beneficial uses, sense of the word.