PyCon Day 1: OLPC Has Excited me.
Many other people are blogging about it - but this morning opening Keynote by Ivan Krstić of the One Laptop Per Child project was easily one of the best keynotes/presentations I have ever seen.
My view of the project has changed. Significantly. Ivan described the intent of the project as "changing how children learn" - and one of the quotes that made me want to stand up and cheer was this (paraphrased):
Before age 5-6, when school starts, learning is curiosity driven, all-day, peer-based, happens everywhere. After that, learning is authority driven, select hours, unidirectional and happens in a particular place.
In context, this is what they want to change - by putting a device capable of pulling information from anywhere, learning goes back to being a personal, spontaneous thing. You, in theory, are no longer enslaved/tethered to bad teachers or lack of information Another quote:
Rid the need for Kids to be dependent on others for learning.
Ivan went into a lot of the why open-source (in a tool for learning, you have to be able to let children pull everything - software included - apart). His comments on "why Python" were excellent - in a simple way, Python is perfect for something limited in space, and in a machine where adding a compiler and other things like make/automake/etc can cause serious space issues and complications., etc. If you want to have children have access to the source, the source *must* be the application (interpreted yay!).
Did you know that the OLPC machines have a "show source" button?
One of the main things that got me excited is when he was talking about the filesystem - now this is something I could sink my teeth into. Apparently, they implemented their own filesystem in Python to support/manage the limited amoiunt of space on the laptops (512mb - 1GB with the new filesystem).
Apparently, it's an Object-Based filesystem supporting revisioning, efficient n-way sync, delta, compression, metadata tracking all within the OS. Pervasive search. Sort/filter/etc. I think he said the name was "yellow".
Let me say this - an object based filesystem on a mesh-style network is hot. In python, even hotter. The fact it's open source makes it awesome. I'm hoping to talk to Ivan more about this later on in the conference.
All told? A wonderful, inspiring Keynote. This is probably one of the first open-source projects that makes me feel like a contribution could readily affect the world. I'm going to have to find some free time.
February 24th, 2007 at 1:53 am
Do you know if there is public video footage of the keynote? I looked through the PyCon website and YouTube a bit but didn’t find anything.
February 24th, 2007 at 2:17 am
I don’t think there is yet - I know they recorded it, my fat head probably covered the camera at one point, but they may publish it after the con is over.
February 24th, 2007 at 3:06 am
I think last year it took about a month for the presentations to go online; there’s lots of editing and transcoding and stuff to do, I imagine.
February 25th, 2007 at 3:19 am
It seems very strange that OLPC has been developed in such secrecy out of view of the community yet it is based on free software. It is also strange that we can’t download the software other than from “upstream” providers or emulate the hardware etc. This article suggests that the laptop will use a python based object filesystem but the olpc website indicates that they will be using JFFS. There seems to be a lot of confusion around this project which does not bode well. I hope it all gets cleared up and this thing really does change the world.
February 25th, 2007 at 3:59 am
I think that muddy water is clearing. I’e held it, loaded the image in my laptop - and Ivan was very, very open with questions and talking about giving the code to everyone. He repeatedly asked for members of the python community to join the project and work with them.
February 26th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
The Idea is good. And i am looking forward to see lot more FOSS applications and development tools built into the machine when its released.
February 26th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
OLPC can be a hard project to keep track of, because of the pace of development and the ideas behind many of the pieces (which may not be familiar to lots of people). But despite these problems the development is still really quite open. If you go to their IRC channels or mailing lists, you will see a large portion of the discussion that goes on. Sure, there’s private conversations in the offices or between individuals, but most of the work is done very transparently.
Note that the filesystem stuff is just for user documents, not all files.
February 27th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Hrm - that’s interesting Ian - I asked Ivan about the FS, and I must have missed the part about it only handling user documents. I asked him how far he had scaled it and he mentioned he had it archiving all of his MP3s and Emails - this leads me to believe it could be useful outside of the document-centric use-case.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
OLPC is a very interesting project. I think you are rigth. It is one of the handful of projects in startup at the moment that can literally change the world if they even half suceeds.
Sure, they may also fall flat on their faces, always risky with ambitions like this.