Our mission is to create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

We've now shipped these laptops to EVERY SINGLE CHILD AND TEACHER in Peru and Uruguay.

Wellington OLPC group meets to test software and hardware weekly. No prior experience necessary, just a methodical mind, to go through educational software for all ages, and seek out flaws. The software includes jigsaw puzzles, measuring games, and ebook readers.

We also love to find bilingual and polygot people who can translate, or checking someone else's translation - from popular languages like Spanish to more obscure dialects of Twi from Ghana. We translate things like children's activities and electronic firstaid manuals for the world.

it's been a very quiet year, with very little travel and yet many new experiences.

We started the year living in that awful awful flat in Reuben ave. The floor was not level. The bedroom wall wasn't attached to the floor. It was freezing cold in december. It smelled really really bad and got no sunlight. Oh, and wetas liked to crawl into our bedroom and into the bed.

the only redeeming feature was the spare room, which became a music room and I got back into playing cello regularly. Cello, unlike flute, needs alot of space and i'm unlikely to do a quick practise if i have to set everything up everytime.

but there was a rather good pub round the back of the flat.

The NZ OLPC "Friends in Testing" meets every saturday in Wellington. This saturday will be the first meeting after a very successful Software Freedom Day here.
http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/wellington

This saturday is also the first ever meeting of the Auckland group.

What's involved is: brunch, coffee, conversation, intro to the green XO laptops, how the OS works, how to install an activity, and then you test your chosen activity, try to find some bugs. If we find bugs we send a test report back to the project.

If we don't find any bugs we also send a report saying how awesome the project is. Those that know python may wish to track down and destroy the bug, but for the most part we don't.

We've been asked to test the list of activities that are being deployed to kids in Peru soon

We're meeting at 10:30am, and tying the two locations together via irc (we're a bit bandwidth constrained in cafes.

Wellington is at the southern Cross http://thecross.co.nz
Auckland group is at Ironique, 448 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden.

Please join us - there will be many newcomers at both events.

p.s. People hacking on other projects are also welcome - we like "cross pollination". I know there are some koha, statusnet and drupal hackers coming.
p.p.s. If you have your own laptop, whatever flavour, bring that along too. The "sugar" software project that powers the OLPC laptops should run on most anything, and if it doesn't work on yours, we'd like to know that too.

the goings on in Wellington, that i've heard of recently:

Tim McNarama is rallying a Sahana New Zealand cluster. Their online presence is at Launchpad.net. They've had hackfest and strategic planning meetings - there's been lots of great designs including distributed models (borrowing from laconca) and New Zealand customisations.

Don Christie, and the New Zealand Open Source Society have launched the Public Sector Remix, a desktop operating system specialising in government / public sector.

Tabitha Roder continues to lead a group of OLPC testers who meet every Saturday at the Southern Cross.

Nigel McNie, and the rest of the mahara team released 1.2.0beta1.

Who have i missed out? Who's doing Open Source mighty deeds in Wellington?

Here's the routine that helps me contribute to open source software - and it's all centred around breakfast.

Not so long ago I didn't have breakfast - stumbling outta bed, changed into whatever clothing smelled clean and dashing off to the office.

This has changed - now each morning, which eating breakfast I test something.

It might be a build from latest from dev branch on a project.

Or it might be an obscure combination of setups - like using lighttpd instead of apache, or sqlite instead of mysql.

Or it might be a bug somebody else reported on a project

Or it might be a curious error I found in a log file somewhere.

And while waiting for breakfast to settle (damn morning sickness!), I try and get a patch completed. The minimum is to narrow down the cause or provide more info on how to replicate something - and submit it to the project.

In the last month i've been testing laconica - and it's been lovely to find they've accepted my patch into dev branch before i've get off the bus at work.

And then there are hackfests. These usually centre around brunch.

I attend the OLPC hackfest every saturday. They meet at the Southern Cross. I do some OLPC work (usually trying out sugar on a stick), but most of the time I'm getting deeper into a trickier bug or feature request for some other project.

Testing summary - 27 June 2009 Wellington NZ
Who - Tabitha, Tom, Grant, Callum and Brenda

back at the Southern Cross, tried getting devkeys, changing dates, played cellgame-1 and XOlympics-1

Spent more time looking at different ways of upgrading Sugar on XO
hardware and also how to run Sugar on other hardware in an emulator.

Wrote proposal draft for Mini conf at the Linux Conference to be held
in Wellington, New Zealand, January 2010. Looking for other
contributors/supporters so feel free to put your hand up! http://www.lca2010.org.nz/

This morning a group of us (Martin, Tim, Leonie, Callum, Tabitha, Stephen and I) gathered at the Southern cross for brunch and an OLPC testing session. It involved following a test script to check what works, and what doesn't.

Tesult: 2 confirmed bugs, 11 new bugs filed, lotsa apps tested , lotsa existing bugs gone.

Another MiniHappyDevHouse will be happening on the first of June - this one is themed "Hello World" - in obscure but awesome languages ;)

A few people will be giving lightning talks on some really obscure languages, how you code a "hello world" program in them and some of their unique features.

And of course, there will be coding, beer and wifi - assuming you bring your laptop :)

Remember to visit the June projects page and list what you will be working on!

• When: 1st June, from 1pm 'til you're bored
• Where: Southern Cross - http://thecross.co.nz/