Courrier OLPC Association/en

From: Lionel
To: Rodrigo
CC: NN, Bureau OLPC France

Dear Rodrigo,

following your meeting in Paris with Sean Daly (Sugar Labs / OLPC France) and Bastien Guerry (OLPC France), and our conversation with Nicholas Negroponte at TEDx Brussels, I hereby send you a quick overview of OLPC France's activities. I hope it will give you a sense of our continuously growing commitment to OLPC mission.

OLPC France is a grassroots association gathering volunteers who help OLPC. It started in May 2008 with a group of G1G1 participants, some of them already being in touch with people from OLPC (like Samuel J. Klein). We are now more than 40 members : hackers, teachers, engineers, students, etc.

OLPC France has 5 major activities:

• Deployment,
• Support,
• Content (educational resources and Sugar activities),
• Translation,
• Communication

Deployment

OLPC France has made a small deployment in Madagascar on the island of Nosy Komba. The goal of this project (more details are available there: [1]) was to fill up the school of the Antitorona village (100 children in 2009, 126 children in 2010) in strict compliance with the OLPC Project core values. The project was conducted in partnership with the non-profit organization called "G du cœur", already present there for several years, and Stefano Palazzi, the local Italian Red Cross representative. OLPC France trained a team of volunteers, supported the shipping of the XOs, enabled electrical infrastructures on the ground, trained teachers and managed the deployment of 160 XOs. Last year, a School Server has been deployed in the school. In 2011, an Internet connection will be installed. OLPC France as also conducted a project in France in a school for children with special needs: this was a 6 months pilot program with 6 XO laptops available for 12 children. This project was useful to introduce OLPC and Sugar to teachers.

Support

We help french-speaking people all over the world getting accurate information about OLPC. 5 people from OLPC France are part of the foundation's support-gang, led by Adam Holt. We answer to French questions sent to "help@laptop.org" ; we also deal with frequent requests on our own support address, "contact@olpc-france.org", both channels amounting to about one hundred requests per year. We created one of the five "official" OLPC repair centers - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair_center_locations. We voluntary support XO repairing (thirty laptops from the beginning) and we share our skills through scheduled repairs workshops (about 3 per year).

Content

Our work around contents is to develop or adapt French Sugar and XO content. We brought together the developers of Gcompris with those of Sugar Labs, and thes Gcompris tool suite is now one of the most downloaded around the world. We developed the Help activity in French (HelpFr) and we also managed the OOo4kids project to adapt OpenOffice.org tool suite for Sugar. We built a library containing about fifty free e-books in French for the XO. We are still working on other projects as:

• A Wikipedia activity in French,
• An activity about learning nutrition (through a partnership with Danone Research),
• An activity about music in partnership with Sugar Labs and the Carla Bruni Sarkozy foundation (which was the subject on which you participated),
• A "disassembly" cloth, displaying all necessary steps to assemble and disassemble an XO - with its corresponding activity - in partnership with Ateliers-Paris Design Institute (ENSCI), the only French national Institute exclusively devoted to industrial design.

Translation

Translation is central to our activities. OLPC France led the Sugar interface translation into French. We also translated the XO manual. We are currently finishing the translation of the Peruvian manual called "The XO Laptop in the Classroom" for teachers.

Communication

Our overall communication goals consists in spreading the french-speaking world about OLPC and to let our community grow upon OLPC values.

Our website is largely read - about 2 000 000 visits per year, which tells about the growing interest of french-speaking readers. A Blog and a very detailed FAQ are used to provide help. We also participate to about 20 events per year, either with talks, booth, demos, exposing OLPC and Sugar to developers and teachers.

Finally, we organize an annual community OLPC event to bring together community volunteers and to introduce the Project to interested people. We gathered 40 people in 2008, 50 people in 2009 and 75 in 2010.

I hope this summary will tell you a lot about who we are, what we do and our level of commitment. Clearly, OLPC France is now considered one of the most active grassroots organization in the larger OLPC community. Our only ambition is to help expanding OLPC by bringing French resources: whether content, skills (including volunteers) or support.

If you think OLPC France can help OLPC further in its actions, please let me know!

      Lionel
      Président OLPC France