• OpenOffice.org allows 3rd party independent extensions around it. It is not blogged about or written about enough – but it does exist. It is fairly trivial to begin writing extensions anyway and an easy extension could be to create localized versions of templates like resumes, business letter etc which the users of an office-suite-which-cannot-be-named are pretty much used to. There’s a load of documentation here and on the wiki. My favorite wicked cool extension of the week is eVoice which is an easy-to-use extension to embed voice comments in your slides. It provides the capabilities of recording and adding audio commentaries to your slide shows. Every comment will be associated with a single slide and embedded inside the Impress document in Speex format to keep file size small. Comments will also be automatically reproduced during presentation.
• Gabriel Gurley released a textbook “A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2 for Windows and Linux” under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 and the GNU Free Documentation License. It is available for download or purchase off this link. The book is pretty well written covering the basic tasks from an user perspective. Should come in handy for those who are trying mass deployments of the office suite and come up against user queries and training issues. The book could be well served by translations as well, do get in touch with the author.
• From this link, you would be able to obtain a list of kickstart files related to creating an Indic LiveCD. Pretty good work by him to come up with the small sweetness. Do try them out for your language and use the #fedora-india channel or the fedora-india mailing list to provide feedback. With the falling prices of USB Keys, it makes sense to lug around a localized live image.
• Good to see that the GNOME Membership Committee queue is being worked upon, now if only the Accounts queue got some love. It is a bit of a downer to be in touch with so many folks who are waiting to get their accounts in place so that they can contribute.
• The OLPC effort in India does require some massive doses of mashup love. Besides the usual activity of localisation of the User Interface, I do not see anyone coming around to start thinking about activities that can be created around OLPC that will make it truly useful and more importantly, get a community going. In India at least the project requires a community leader who can lead “from within” and gets it enough to talk with educators and developers at the same time to develop an activity library. There are large number of ideas being discussed daily on the olpc-library list and it is somewhat distressing that when it comes to India the only thing being iterated on mailing lists is “If they don’t have bread, let them have a laptop”. That sucks. Sayamindu has been pretty much involved in ensuring that L10n and i18n bits work on the XO, it is time to move the interest from the XO to the project that is OLPC.
• Shaun Connolly touches upon “The Future of Open Source” in a Cloud-Computing world. Question – whether it is a cloud or a real hardware for the user – does the method/process for collaborative contribution really change ?

Thanks to two fine gentlemen, I have an XO to play around for a few days. The reports prove to be correct – the keyboard is obviously not made for stubby fingers like I have and of course not the heavy left hand that I use on the keyboard. It does have an awesome battery life and the screen does work well in sunlight (I tested it out in moderate direct light at around 1100 and 1300 hours in Pune). In short it is a fun thing to have around As a friend put it – it is an amazing piece of hardware and coolness that kids can get.
So I poked around the wiki a bit especially the sections relevant to Etoys and Educators in order to figure out what the project thinks about the possibilities of this hardware. To continue from my earlier rant on OLPC in India, the OLPC India team does need to figure out the way forward beyond the pilot (at Khairat). The pilot can teach valuable lessons about the feasibility of the hardware, the corner cases of mesh networking or even the applicability and usage of the hardware in the pedagogy. But taking those lessons and extrapolating them into much larger, distributed deployments is going to require a heavy dose of community (or capacity) building. This means doing much more than just being a deployment/services unit for the project as a whole

• focus on transparent and open development by using lists, IRC, technology roadshows to ensure that developers get interested in working on the hardware
• give everyone a fair shot at contributing by lowering the barrier to contribute to the project
• go back to school – the current set of activities that are with the projects needs to be expanded and extended and that means one requires competencies of developers, educators, academicians, usability folks and one of the easiest means of getting all of them in the game is going back to schools, colleges and universities
• show how to extend the possibilities – do not attempt spoon feeding. Show how things can be done and then allow an organic community to contribute
• advocate the technology and evangelize the philosophy – build up a core group of believers who can communicate the possibilities and the culture of collaboration so as to ensure that there is enough credibility around the development

Localization is not the only thing that the OLPC would require in India, though it is one of the important things. What would be required more upfront is a range of activities that can allow the target users to start using them in their daily lessons ie more content around activities. This means that sooner rather than later there has to come up a server that can be the repository of such learning objects which can be (re)used by OLPC deployments across the nation.

The OLPC effort in India would be going through a sufficiently critical phase. While a large chunk of work is being done at the backend in getting Indic rendering, printing etc fixed on the browser and applications, getting the physical keyboard layouts in place – the focus would now be required to be put on to how to get buy-in for the product. There has been a by now controversial buy-in of the concept, the next obvious stage would be to figuring out a “GoToMarket” strategy for the project.

Such a strategy would include the details that allow potential pilot sites to assess where and how they stand vis-a-vis requesting a pilot, a set of codified preliminary requirements for a pilot and a set of objectives or lessons_to_be_gleaned from the pilot. This would translate into having a means to actually have the hardware on the ground. For developers, an emulation environment or (a single unit) serves well as the platform. The platform for a pilot is the hardware itself. A mashup of the hardware with appropriate content would enable the India team to assess and quantify what they want to achieve with the project and where they stand with the current roadmap. Right now there are a large number of queries happening about “How do we pitch in” but barring G1G1 there’s no real input or map towards getting the hardware in place. In fact, there is not much in terms of how to replicate Karjat in various other suitable places.
The other jarring note is the explicit lack of community around the OLPC in India. Conversely, there seems to be a growing sense of attachment to the Asus driven hardware. When I say community it is not the community limited only to developers. From what I read and here there are a few developers who are actively contributing to it. A community in this case would be the target audience, the potential audience, the potential contributors and the mavens who find more uses for the program by pushing the envelope. A small but not unimportant bit of the task of Community Engineering involves putting in place the infrastructure that allows inclusive participation. One of them is the Pootle deployment for translators which is an awesome thing to happen. At this stage of the program in India, a larger part is played by evangelising the Project. Till date, the negative PR that has happened has fortunately been limited to a small set of press notes. A coherent and cohesive effort at Community Relations through various media means available would actually allow more folks to “get the message”. There has been some thought around this for sure,

OLPC cannot survive without a strong community.  From where I sit, OLPC
engineering is in a classic trap right now -- all work on production, but
almost no work on capacity.  Community building is capacity building;
that's why it's so important.

The reason the “capacity” bit is important over here is because without it the OLPC would only remain as a marvel of what a concerted effort at innovation can achieve in the field of computing technology. And if that is the only reason for OLPC to exist, then it is a sad one indeed. Perhaps it is more of a “vision” thing. Figuring out the intersect between the EEE and the Classmate and the OLPC (in terms of OLPC software) may just be a way forward. Would it be a good thing to have installable LiveMedia with Sugar being available so as to get folks to test-drive and if happy install an OLPC interface on their conventional desktops ? Would that increase the disconnect between the target users and developers ? Is that one of the possible ways ?