Weekly Update, Jan 9th 2007

[OLPC Nepal]

Weekly Update for Jan 9th, 2007

• We have issued our first official Press Release. Please re-distribute it to every media channel you can, including Internet mailing lists.

http://wiki.olpcnepal.org/index.php?title=Press_Release#1

• We had excellent meetings with the Danish Embassy, Asian Development Bank, and UNESCO over the last week.
• For those that aren't already aware, Rwanda has committed to OLPC. We feel that this is a watershed event. Up until last week, only second-word countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Libya had committed to OLPC. Rwanda ranks 158th out of 177 countries in UNDP's 2006 HDI report. Nepal ranks 140th on the same report.

Romain Murenzi, Rwanda's Minister of Education, Science, Technology and Scientific Research had this to say about the agreement:

 "We have almost no natural resources and no seaports in Rwanda, 
 which leaves us only with the knowledge-based society.[...] 
 We intend to quadruple the average income by [2020], and 
 communication networks can help us achieve that goal,"

• OLPC Nepal will give the opening presentation at CAN Infotech on Wednesday, January 9th at 10 AM. CAN Infotech is the premiere technology expo in Nepal.
• Shankar has agreed to become a staff writer for the popular website www.olpcnews.com. Expect to see articles from Shankar highlighting the importance and progress of OLPC in poor nations.
• OLPC was the subject of the most recent FOSS Ka Kura (Free Open Source Software Talk) held at Prime College in Naya Bazaar. Over 25 software developers attended. Prime College offers Python programming courses and the college principal suggested that the students final project be an OLPC activity.
• We have started work on a software package that will allow software developers, such as those at Prime College, to build activities for OLPC using conventional hardware. Eventually we intend to include tools that educators without programming knowledge can use to design learning activities.
• OLPC Nepal's kernel hacker, Manish Regmi, has begun to work on the XO linux kernel source despite his reservations about working w/ a monolithic kernel.

The OLPC Nepal Team

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