As some of you may know OLPC is planning the so-called XOcamp for mid-November. The core goal of the event is to work out the details of OLPC's long-term software development goals and efforts, especially looking towards version 9.1.
As with any other event the idea is also to build trust and relationships between community members as OLPC developer Michael Stone put it in an e-mail. So XOcamp is undoubtedly an important event with a lot of impact on the future of OLPC's software development and developer community!
Marveling at the 1CC "garden".
However for some reason OLPC isn't able or willing to provide a travel budget for the core-software developers, many of which are located outside of the United States (especially the Sugar team which can be found in Germany, Czech Republic, Italy and South Africa) or at least a red-eye away from Boston.
Therefore OLPC developer C. Scott sent out a message earlier today asking for donations to allow for as many developers as possible to attend in person:
I'd like to consider asking for donations to cover travel costs for key developers, like the sugar team: marco, tomeu, erikos, and morgs. The cost of their travel would be about $2500. Including school server developers (douglas), kernel developers (deepak), translation team (sayamindu), and firmware (mitch) would probably double that, and there might be more expenses if we can't find homes to host them all. ...To put his money where his moth is, C. Scott followed up on his original message with a pledge of $1,000 of his own money to the costs of getting the Sugar team there.
Having had both the good fortune of flying to Boston to attend an event at 1CC thanks to a donation and having crashed on couches of fellow olpc community members and OLPC employees I understand just how much of a difference it makes when you're able to attend such an event in person.
Many of the finest people I meet in the past 12 months are members of the olpc community. These are the folks who make this project truly awesome and work their nights and weekends away so we and hundreds of thousands of children around the globe can enjoy our XOs.
I would therefore ask you to support their efforts if somehow possible. Being an undergrad student I unfortunately can't make the kind of donation that C. Scott is pledging however I will put $100 of my own money towards making this happen - supporting the olpc community instead of personal inebriation.
Update
If you are interested in contributing, C. Scott set up a Paypal biz account for donations and is tracking your support developer travel needs at: XOCamp Fundraising.
Mmhh, I am not talented enough for this, but I would like to know, how much laptops have been shipped till now? Thanks.
If someone makes it easy to donate (Paypal?), I'm sure a few of us would chip in...
chris: over 500,000 machines manufactured. And ten thousand or so more each week. About 200,000 machines have been "turned on within reach of an internet connection" -- which doesn't include many machines in our deployments, unfortunately. But it does give you some idea of the lag between "manufacturing" and "deployment"; the 500,000 manufactured machines will become deployed machines within a few months.
These numbers are included in the most recent talk I gave, at USMP, at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Presentations (at the bottom, and in Spanish, unfortunately).
Frankie: that's a great idea. I'll try to set that up today, along with a "fundraising status" page on the wiki. Thanks.
frankie: ask and ye shall receive: Paypal link now at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2/Fundraising
Another page I like to keep an eye on, covering the deployment numbers, is generated from semantically tagged deployment data else where on the wiki:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments
Another Sugar/XO Camp is happening in January. I found the instructions this time more clear for how to earmark funds, between http://sugarlabs.org/go/XOCamp_2 and http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Donate -- they're set up as a 501(c)3 (for tax deductions).