Planet Geek

Boston OLPC Meetup - A success!

Life. Don't talk to me about life. , OLPC

This evening saw the third Boston OLPC meetup, this time congregating at Cosi restaurant in Cambridge, right across the street from OLPC Headquarters in Kendall Square.

My son and I arrived at around 6:40pm, and things were already in full swing, with a table full of XO laptops up and running and various folks working through getting a mesh network started and fiddling around with sharing. There was some consternation at the beginning about how to actually get shared chat going, but apparently what was needed was the influence of a 9yr old, who charged in and helped get it working.

There were around 8 XO's, with Diane showing particular verve with her 2 laptops and accompanying green accessories (including OLPC Green headphones and roll-up keyboard. Outstanding!).

One of the goals of the evening was letting folks have some experience with activity sharing - something that many of the people there had never seen. After a bit of fiddling, Zach and Tracy got the Write activity running in Shared mode, and had quite a bit of excitement co-editing a document together.

With my non-XO laptop, I hopped on #olpc on FreeNode and mentioned the get together, and lo, Chris Ball (master coder of the Python development activity 'Pipppy') and Michael Stone came down to join us and mix with us users.

A great time was had by all. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Michael, Chris, and the other 'grownups' work with Zach on various things he was interested in, as well as showing him some new tricks. In the US, Zach is a perfect representative of "kids who are into the XO". He's teaching himself Python, is a big fan of Scratch, and loves learning stuff. Okay okay, so I'm a little biased.

Thanks to everyone who made it, I look forward to the next one!

Posted by dbs at March 25, 2008 9:12 PM