OLPC Australia is the Country's Toughest Linux Deployment

   
   
   
   
   

There are now more than three dozen countries where OLPC projects are going on. Among them OLPC Australia has increasingly attracted my attention over the past six months or so. I don't remember what originally peaked my interest but it might have been the Australian team's increasing amount of contributions on the various OLPC and Sugar mailing lists.

However I very much do remember my delight when I discovered that for its own core principles OLPC Australia took OLPC's famous 5 principles (Child Ownership, Low Ages, Saturation, Connection, and Free and Open Source) and complemented them with two additional ones:

  • Empowering Teachers
  • Community Engagement

Being a strong believer in the key roles that teachers and broader community involvement play in projects such as OLPC I couldn't wait to learn more about OLPC Australia's efforts.

Luckily for me OLPC Australia's CTO Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan recently gave a 50 minute talk called "Australia's Toughest Linux Deploy­ment" at Open Source Developers' Con­fer­ence 2011 in Can­berra. It's a great overview of the project and really emphasizes the many ways in which OLPC Australia adapted the general notion of OLPC to the specific Australian needs. Definitely a must-see!


Please note that Sridhar's own blog post about this talk contains a lot of links to additional background materials and other relevant resources. And if you plan on attending linux.conf.au then you also have a chance to watch Sridhar's presentation on Thursday 19 January 2012 in person.

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