Category: Aus Community

First test of OLPC XOs in remote Australian Indigenous community

Sokar Phillpot and Horatio Davis took several XO laptops into a remote Indigenous community called Pormpuraaw (Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, Australia) to see how the children would respond. They had some great results and the local community there are very excited about doing an actual trial. Check out their website below for the videos, photos and responses from the children. Great work Sokar and Horatio!

XO workshop at Pormpuraaw

Antiquated ideas won’t save Australia

The recently released Venturous Australia report that this quote refers to is actually quite an interesting read. I found it refreshingly aware of the importance of opening up research and strengthening the ICT industry, and overall recommend it as a good read with some useful recommendations.

So today I was amused when I had an article pointed out to me today with the following gem:

The recommendation referring to “machine searchable repositories for scientific knowledge” together with the recommendation suggesting that “research funded by governments… should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons” is of considerable concern.

These recommendations are commercially naïve and potentially damaging to Australia’s interests. Australia’s Asian neighbours, such as Malaysia and Taiwan, are currently implementing strategies to capture publicly funded intellectual property (IP) on a national scale so that governmen can assist with commercialisation policies and frameworks to exploit that IP to drive economic outcomes. The Malaysian government, for instance, is establishing a “Technomart” to trade and license IP; not to make it freely available unless it cannot be exploited commercially.

The old closed approach isn’t where the big innovations today are happening. Open access to research and Government data has been shown many times over to create much greater economic value than a single institution commercialising the research or data. A great example is GIS data. There was a great talk by Alan Smart about this space, and he mentioned that open access to GIS data in the US was shown to create something like 20 times the value than closed access to the data. Alan spoke at a very interesting event run by Senator Kate Lundy called the Foundations of Openness and all the recordings and slides are available.

Ideally public access to data like this allows innovative Australian companies to find and meet new market needs, to compete for work based on the quality of their service, and to innovate on quality data. It is more beneficial for our industry as a whole, and for the market because companies competing with services around open data/software are generally under constant pressure to be high quality, whereas when you purchase a proprietary application you are limited by what the provider of that application has time/resources/desire to deliver.

Collaboration and open access is key to being able to stand on the shoulders of giants and reach for the bleeding edge. Not this antiquated approach of isolated individuals hunkered down in caves reinventing the wheel and using it to beat up the competition. Competition is good! Collaboration is good! Bleeding edge development, research and new markets will not happen in isolation, and software patents are limiting rather than encouraging of innovation. Fact.

One thing that really annoys me is that this is the CEO of the Australian Insitute for Commercialisation, and where is the thought leadership? Commercialisation doesn’t have to be limited to IP protectionism, it can also include revenue/business models including support/integration services, development, hosting, analysis and many, many other options. When done well, opening access to your data and even potentially your software can often provide access to new markets, promotion avenues, and give you and your organisation a great reputation which is where you will find new business opportunities.

As an aside, Malaysia is one country that is embracing Open Source technologies and approaches quite strongly, including a massive push for Government uptake of Open Source, and Government development of Open Source. This is being driven from the Prime Ministers department, so I think the whole picture is not being presented 🙂

Why Australian trials are important to the OLPC vision

I’ve been asked a few times why OLPC deployments in Australia are relevant to the OLPC vision. I thought I’d do a blog post about what OLPC Friends is trying to achieve in supporting local projects, and why I’ve been so keen to get local trials happening in Australia. Feedback welcome 🙂

  1. Need in Australia – there are many children in Australia who are in serious need. Whether it be in remote Indigenous Australia, or living in poverty in metropolitan areas. Supporting projects for these children is a key goal of OLPC Friends for Australia, New Zealand and throughout the Pacific. The first Australian trial includes some children from extremely disadvantaged communities (including a remote Indigenous family) as well as typical kids to ensure that the technology meets both the specific needs of disadvantaged children as well as the typical education requirements of an Australian school. Details of this trial (including some videos and learning activities) are here.
  2. Funding the Pacific – By rolling laptops out to Australian schools at a premium rate, the funding raised can go directly to Pacific countries who don’t have access to funding or resources to help them with OLPC rollouts and funding volunteers to work on deployments. Then organisations like AusAID can also work in collaboration with education departments to fully fund Pacific projects.
  3. Supporting the Pacific – Throughout Australia and New Zealand there are loads of technical people and educators who are willing to volunteer for helping with OLPC trials right throughout the region. Many of them have already signed up on the OLPC Friends volunteers page. The more people who have skills the better we can support implementers and educators throughout the Pacific to improve both the resources available and the education levels of all children in the region.
  4. Cultural connections – One fantastic opportunity is to use the collaboration tools (such as the Videochat activity) and the ability to connect to another school to connect children up directly. This means opportunities for cultural sharing, awareness and ultimately for opening doors to opportunity and knowledge for children all over the region. We already have schools interested in this kind of cultural exchange, and I’m really excited to be able to facilitate this.
  5. Remote training – One important element of Australia’s first trial is using the connectivity (Videochat, Jabber, Write, etc) to provide remote support to students, in particular literacy training. The learning specialist can provide literacy lessons for children in remote areas that don’t have the local skills for the special education requirements. The OLPC schoolserver (XS) also includes Moodle for eLearning. Building up local resources for remote learning such as literacy, teacher training, and online classes means that the whole region (and world) can benefit and utilise these resources and potentially these services to improve their education and training options.

Basically, I believe that OLPC deployments in Australia and New Zealand can – with appropriate strategic planning and collaboration – have profound and sustainable positive impacts for the Pacific, while also addressing serious and general local needs in each country. I believe this kind of regional approach ensures an organic, sustainable, and ultimately community-oriented strategy.

I also believe that rolling out individual laptops to people when there isn’t that education and school-based approach ultimately doesn’t contribute strongly to the vision of OLPC. As we see many more schools around the world taking on OLPC in the classroom, I think we’ll see that a very large percentage of the value of the technology is only found when all the children in the classroom are connected together and online, and when it is integrated into their normal school curriculum.

Now that anyone can buy laptops in bulk (minimum order 100) for a reasonable price ($219 per laptop to OLPC partner countries and the 50 Least Developed Countries and USD$259 for the rest of the world) in the “Change the World” program, I hope that people will start realising that these devices need to be in the classroom, not in their Christmas stocking. For anyone interested in doing deployments you can check out the OLPC Deployment Guide and if you want any help, check out OLPC Friends and can register, sign up for volunteering, get involved and find others who have skills and interest in the project 🙂 We’re going to start regular online meetings soon, and some face to face meetings in various cities across the region (Adelaide and Wellington already have regular meetings :), so there are plenty of ways to participate.

EDIT: Please note I originally posted incorrect information about the XO pricing but it is definitely cheaper if you are in a partner country or least developed country as defined on the OLPC website here.

Catch up, and what’s to come!

This last 3 weeks have been insane. So much cool stuff, and I keep thinking “I need to blog about this or that, and then not making the time! Below is a quite recap of the cool stuff I’ve done and been involved in over the last few weeks. I have a few lengthy blogs posts coming up to cover some of these in detail, but in the meantime, I AM STILL ALIVE EVERYONE! 🙂

New Zealand trip
Jeff and I planned to take a short holiday, unfortunately on the day Jeff remembered he hadn’t got his passport renewed after it was stolen in Malaysia. Argh! I ended up going anyway, spending two days snowboarding at Mt Hutt near Christchurch with a friend (hi Glynn!), then a few days hanging out with Glynn and Jayne in Wellington doing Pilates, training with an awesome Shaolin Gung Fu master, and hacking on OLPC related work in preparation for an upcoming trip for the Aussie OLPC trial I’m helping rollout (more details on that later, so please don’t ask yet! 🙂 I got to catch up with the Wellington “Friends in Testing” OLPC group and got inspired to start a regular OLPC usergroup in Sydney, to be announced at SLUG in the coming week! All in all a tiring but awesome holiday 🙂

Aussie OLPC trial
I’m running Australia’s first serious OLPC trial which has been technically challenging, and has consumed _all_ of my time over the previous few months. It has been awesome and I’ve have just now finished the implementation. The documentation will be made publicly available (and put on the OLPC wiki) in the coming week or two. We’ve basically done a world first of focusing on the remote collaboration and child support element of what the OLPC vision and technologies can deliver, so I’m really excited to be involved in this, and hopefully the lessons we learnt will assist many others 🙂 We connected up 3 schools, such that specialist teachers can provide support to children in remote areas. Very interesting and the children are thriving with the tools they are playing with. I did a trip to the two remote locations, and we had a film crew come with us who are making a short internal doco, which may hopefully be able to be publicly disseminated over the coming months.

Linuxchix Microconf
Today I’m participating in a Linuxchix Microconf, a bunch of awesome women from Sydney and Melbourne participating in a video conference where people in both locations are presenting to the combined group real time, and it has been great. My talk is in an hour (just finished my slides 😉 and the day has covered a huge range of topics. All have been recorded and I believe will be made available for everyone. Awesome job by Alice, Mary, Sun-Hee and a huge thanks to Google for the resources. They provided the venue, videoconferencing, and a tasty spread of catering!

Coming up!

  • Documentation and publishing of all OLPC stuff plus kick off of bigger regional community project
  • Malaysian Government event on FOSS, and FOSS MY, I’ll be speaking about building FOSS community building and stuff happening in Governments. I’m really excited about going to Malaysia both to see the country, and to learn more about their approach to FOSS, which seems to be pretty cool. I’ll try to live blog during the event.
  • Open Education Workshop – ASK-OSS in collaboration with the NSW Department of Education is launching a workshop on Open Education to both share knowledge, and to start trying to understand the needs of the sector, and making a strategic plan for Open Education in Australia. This is meant to be broad to include FOSS, Open Standards, Open Knowledge, and open collaboration methodologies amongst much more. If you are in education and interested in openness, come along and participate!

Anyway, much more blogging to do, and I’ll try to be less slack even though there is so much going on 🙂

Australian”innovation”: desires and reality

Last night was the Pearcey Awards, which in itself is always a great way to find out about up and coming leaders in the field and achievements in ICT, however they also created a national roundtable event called INNOVATION & ICT IN AUSTRALIA: A NATIONAL DEBATE. It was closely linked with the Federal Government’s National Innovation Review, released just a couple of days ago which has some excellent recommendations in around open publishing, sustainability, Open Source, open standards and patent reform, just to name a few. In fact chapter 7 of that review has many of the recommendations put forward at Senator Kate Lundy’s ‘Foundations of Open’ Local Summit back in March. There were two panels last night, one with entreprenuers (which I participated in) and one with larger organisations. Then there were speeches from Minister Conroy, NSW MP John Della Bosca and Dr Terry Cutler just to name a few. It was really a great evening and it was fascinating to hear many of the concepts we have taken for granted in the FOSS world be brought up as important to Australia’s future economic properity, ideas such as “open innovation”, “services built around shared content”, “searchable publicly available data sets [particularly publicly funded data]” and more.

On the panel I spoke about how we need to educate entreprenuers and small business how to stand on the shoulders of giants and better leverage tools like FOSS to build both cheap and scalable infrastructure (I mentioned an organisation I’m involved in where the ex-Deloitte employee assumed we would need $100k for a website!) as well as the ability to create new value and services by combining existing FOSS components in new and innovative ways. I spoke about the need for more focus on technical skills (every child should learn basic programming) to help all our citizens to better leverage technology in all circumstances. I also spoke about how we need to be not only recognising and encouraging ICT as an “enabler for all industries”, a term thrown around a lot, but we also need to focus on core ICT and being a world leader in bleeding edge technologies. We need to recognise that if we only see ICT as an enabler, then we are actually parroting the much disliked “Australia is a consumer nation” phrase with new buzzwords. The increased awareness of innovation at an organisational and infrastructure level is wonderful, however it can not be at the cost of innovation at an ICT industry or technologies level lest we be left behind in such a competitive global market.

Other panelists spoke about the need for Government to partner more with smaller innovative Australian companies rather than always going to safest road. Apparently the Australian Government already has a requirement to spend something linke 0.5% on piloting innovative solutions, so it would be great to see more work going into this. Several people mentioned how Government will often get a great idea from a small company (or from the many smart and innovative people in Government), which will go to tender and then inevitably be won by a large multinational who isn’t providing the inspirational and innovative solution initially proposed. A massive loss for those smaller companies with big ideas.

I was in the audience when IP came up and luckily had the microphone ready to ask the next question (one panelist said that the dropping number of patents recently was an enormous issue for Australia, argh!), so I spoke briefly about how Government and industry need to look at new IP models, new business models and realise that IP protectionism (patents, proprietary code) is not the means to open innovation nor an openly competitive market (particularly when we follow in the footsteps of the flawed US patent system), and ultimately we need to keep focusing on how to create world leading exportable services, which is where the industry has been heading for some time. This earned an applause which was interesting.

I was quite surprised throughout the evening the number of people who came up to me and said they were really impressed with my comments and observations. I didn’t think that I had said anything particularly incredible, but it made me realise that is because I’m so involved with the Open Source community which is full of people who are innovative, focused on openness and collaboration, aware of the practical implications of different IP approaches, often on the bleeding edge of new ideas and technologies and often successfully making a living with new business and IP models not yet in the mainstream. Our community has world leading innovators and thinkers who are miles ahead of the curve, so my expected level of comparison is quite high 🙂

Education came up again and again. Education at schools/TAFE/University for students, technology education, entrepreneurial skills, information and training for small businesses, what skills are needed to meet the needs of evolving markets. It was great to have so much attention on this topic because ultimately there is no point having great policies and support around “innovation” if we don’t have any skills in Australia to innovate with.

Many people expressed a desire to enable innovation, but it was said several times that “innovation” is a term that is thrown around a lot without people necessarily being on the same page. I think that is has been overused and abused a lot, and it was Terry Cutlers speech at the end that really brought it together for me. Terry wrote the innovation report that was discussed, and in his speech he pulled no punches when it comes to the laughable reality in Australia at the moment (very, very low OECD rankings when it comes to investment in ICT and education, amongst other things). He spoke about the potential for Australia, about “open innovation” and I think the report has many excellent recommendations that will hopefully pull our public and private policy and practices into sharp evolution. I think in Australia we have the smarts and the desire to be innovative, successful and to be competing in the global ICT market, but achieving this success starts at home. Many Australian businesses and Government agencies want to see success overseas or great success locally before committing to even trialling new solutions and we need to figure out how to better enable local success which will feed into growing local innovation and global competitiveness. The Australian market is extremely risk averse and as such runs the risk of always being behind the ball.

Murali Sagi, who is an extremely clever and successful CIO and a great example of the innovators found in Government, put it most concisely.

Australians are innovative, but Australia isn’t.

Let’s try and fix that 🙂

Indigenous Literacy Day and TechEd women’s panel

Today I went to a talk by a great man, Noel Tovey, a 64yr old Australian Aboriginal man who has been through some of the most awful experiences you will ever hear. He shared his story, and how he overcame extreme adversity to become successful globally. He wrote a book a few years back called “Little Black Bastard“, and he read a little from the book which I will absolutely be going out to buy now. Anyway, it was awfully sad but inspiring at the same time. I spoke at the event about the OLPC project and how it might be both beneficial to disadvantaged communities, but also a way to get Australian Aboriginal cultural content out to children through the project.

Straight after that event I went and spoke on a panel about women in technology at… TechEd 🙂 It was pretty amusing to be there in a way. The other panelists were all Microsoft or Microsoft engrossed, and we all spoke about our careers, answered questions from the audience and just enjoyed being in a room full of women in the industry. It was good to get different perspectives particularly given how my experience is quite different from a typical IT career largely due to the awesome nature of the FOSS community, which went down pretty well. There were some good questions from the floor, and I spoke with one women from Malaysia afterwards for a while about the poor self-image of a lot of women in technology. It was a fascinating conversation and I learnt a lot 🙂

Good day, now to work late to catch up :/

Who wants to sleep with Bill Gates?

I have a lot of blogging to catch up on! In the last month I’ve been to Norway, the US and Niue on really cool projects and conferences, Software Freedom Day is only just over 4 weeks away, and I’ve had some awesome ideas I want to blog. All will happen in the next few days, but last night I went to another Girl Geek Dinner in Sydney, which was awesome. About 80 women who love technology, great cheese and chocolate, talks and networking. It was a really fun night, and a huge thank you to Damana who organises the events!

Some highlights:

  • Fountain of Chocolate – now I’m not really a chocolate sort of girl, but when you throw strawberries in the mix, I’m totally there! Plus lovely cheeses, champagne and other nibblies made it really nice! Thanks Thoughtware!
  • A talk on Agile programming, presented in Agile format, that left me a little confused. So Mary in about 45 seconds explained what they meant. Thanks Mary, you rock!
  • Mary winning the sparkly girly Microsoft shirt in a competition where you sat down if you weren’t geeky enough. Her putting it on and the girl sitting next to me saying “I really wish I was more geeky, I LOVE Microsoft!”. I made the introduction figuring Mary probably would grow tired of it fairly quickly (seeing she is a Linuxchix gal) and the other girl told us that if she could sleep with any man (but her husband to be) it would be Bill Gates. Mary and I were a little stunned at that one 🙂 The girl was very enthusiastic about big trends and also fangirls Google, so we had a very interesting and fun discussion after the fact, but I’m still a little stunned. I mean my picks would be Trent Reznor or Jet Li, but I guess it takes all sorts. Also, to be fair she was pretty nervous, and a really interesting person nonetheless 🙂
  • Quote of the night, in reference to Ruby on Rails:
    Question: I’ve heard that Ruby on Rails doesn’t really scale when you starting getting thousands or tens of thousands of users?
    Answer: There are loads of large successful Ruby on Rails implementations. For example, Twitter!
    FAIL! 🙂

I’m looking forward to the next one, which will be at Tech Ed. That will be quite weird but hey I’ve been invited onto a panel about women in technology there, so it should be interesting 😉

TechFest, TechGirls, GeekGirls and Software Freedom

The last couple of weeks have been CRAZY! After getting back from my incredible Gung Fu week away, It was straight into everything. I flew back Saturday night, Sunday morning Jeff and I ran an OLPC TechFest in Sydney which had some amazing people come along, get talks about the OLPC server and XO projects, and then have some useful hacking time. In the middle of that I ran away to a wedding which was a big and wonderful Italian wedding, so Jeff was left holding the fort at the TechFest. There will be a more full report about the TechFest soon but there is a great write up by Sarah Maddox, so thanks Sarah! Awesome work by Martin Langhoff and Joel Stanley, who both totally rock!

A couple of days ago I spoke at a TechGirls event up at the Central Coast. I was the keynote speaker to about 200 girls aged 11-16 from the area, and it was fantastic! I got some excellent feedback (from girls and teachers alike) and I received this email which made it so incredibly worth it!

I thought you spoke extremely well and you have inspired me and my friends a lot. I aim to be a Graphic Designer sometime in the near future and you have encouraged me to follow my dreams. Up until today i was undecided if that was the career i wanted to pursue but after your speech today it has made my mind up. Thankyou very much for attending and sharing your views today. You have helped me choose my career.

Yes! I got a few other awesome emails and it was so exciting to have so many girls keen to get into IT.

Tonight was the third GeekGirl dinner in Sydney, which was awesome. Over 110 people (about 85% women) all getting together for an awesome evening of food, wine and talks. We had Claudia and another girl from Yahoo, and then Sara Falamaki, and all the talks were awesome. Then we played Guitar Hero for a while and it was a late night home. An awesome night and a major thanks to Damana, all the other organisers and to Yahoo for putting on such a great night 🙂

I’m currently (and have been for a couple of years) President of Software Freedom International, the body behind Software Freedom Day which is coming up in September. This is an awesome day and we had over 330 teams from over 90 countries last year all taking the concepts of freedom, democratic software, and of course FOSS to the mainstream. All the teams generally do events that are locally relevant and you’ll see some teams have an entire village do a march, or a music festival, or, as Nepal did last year, a candle lighting ceremony 🙂 It is a fascinating and exciting event and I’m so proud to be able to help make it happen. Anyway, we opened registrations for teams almost 2 weeks ago and we already have over 160 teams registered for this year! We are expecting around 500 teams. Check out the easy to browse map for teams near you, and register your event today! Only the first 300 teams get a team pack with shirts, stickers, badges, some CDs and more 🙂

sfd-june1308

Lastly, one of my best friends Sue recently posted a whole schwag of photos on Facebook from our trip to China in 1999. It was one of the best trips of my life. I learnt a lot there and it reminded me how much I want to return! Below is a (kind of crappy) scan of one of my favourite photos!

Horseriding along the Yellow River (Huang He) in China

Yes, that is me with short, red hair and riding a young and very fast horse. The locals thought I was lost control but I galloped to the group in the distance and back again. It is one of my best memories 🙂 There are also some photos of us at Shaolin Temple and more, but you’ll have to find me on Facebook 🙂