The big news this week – we are getting set up for our Second Annual Launch Party (which is essentially a fun way for us to demo all of the cool work we have been doing over the summer)! We will be demonstrating our work with digital books, plus creating a few analog specimens in the process. The event will take place at our headquarters on 246 Sixth Street in Port Orford, OR, over Labor Day Weekend. If you are in the area, please drop by. It will be fun!

The primary agenda item for this #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday was syncing up on “The Sugar Solution.” As we reported last week, we were thinking that modifying the GIAB activity might be the best route to go – but as we delved deeper into the problem, we discovered that offering a straight-forward HTML/CSS solution in the XO default browser from the SoaS stick itself solved all manner of technical problems. For one thing, it does not overload the Journal with the entire index of the bundle. It also enables us to repurpose the design solutions that we are already addressing in our web user interface. Recycling is good, even on the web! We still think that the idea of building this into Sugar is a “Very Good Idea (TM)” and should be pursued … and we plan to look at it in the future.

We are also taking a look at our overall collection. We want to maximize the distribution of material throughout categories that may be of interest to kids. We currently have categories that have 800+ items that may (or may not) hold a child’s interest. We would prefer to have more categories available in this sample collection. We are not librarians (as we mentioned going into this), so we are going to invite some of our area experts to participate in possibly helping us polish the basic material. We also have had a very generous offer of over 600+ new digital books for our target collection that are not available in the IACL. We are working out the details, so more news on that as it develops. We will need to fold those books into our existing categories, and perhaps even add a few more to our existing collection. Everything will be available via the web, either through us or through the original source, but the stick has limitations. Our current limitations are 8G.

Ideally, we want to automate the process of creating customized bundles – but that is another challenge to be met on another day!

Greetings! We had a great #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday – we successfully downloaded our target collection of books in DjVu format, and took a close look at the current state-of-the-art in bundle creation and content collections at http://wiki.laptop.org/. We realize that what we are trying to do is somewhat ambitious, so we are trying to manage our own expectations.

The first order of business was registering our developer keys with the OLPC. We want to upgrade our current base of XOs to support the DjVu format, and it appears we need to upgrade to Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) .84 to improve performance (hat tip: James Simmons and Sayamindu Dasgupta). We will be updating several of our OLPC laptops to support this feature. We are currently conducting research to see if there is any way to auto-update the XOs that boot from the sticks to make integration of the DjVu format into the default Read.Activity easier.

We also spent some time setting up our XO Computer Lab at 246 6th Street (photos forthcoming!) so we can start sharing our work in progress with visitors to our studio. Today marks the designated halfway point in our program, but we are having so much fun working together and coming up with so many cool ideas that we decided to extend our own deadline until October so we can take our time and deliver a great product … plus share our discoveries with our friends in the area. We still have several laptops to retrieve – and given this is the summer months that makes this aspect of the project quite difficult! Our fallback plan is to make sticks for all 12 laptops (six granted from the OLPC, and six we donated in our local area) – but ideally we would like to meetup with everyone nearby with an XO to share our work and show them how to work with the collection.

So, our plan moving forward is to bundle the IACL collection in as many usable formats as feasible, providing a plan for graceful degradation – we know that the PDF format works in the current XO-1 bookreader on default, DjVu requires an upgrade to an XO-1, and EPUB is the wave of the future. We are starting work on mockups for a web user interface for the IACL collection, plus helping Steven map out a plan for the release of his auto-downloader program.

The excitement continues at the RDC!

This week it was Scotty’s turn to be on the road, so in the absence of our DA (Designated Adult), the RDC crew did some experimenting with Steven’s new auto-downloader program and looked at how to create a collection for the XO. We ran a few tests downloading some of the subject groups in our target collection – and the program is working splendidly! We also spent some time looking at the new S3 API recently released by the Internet Archive as yet another alternative means of downloading the IACL collection (in addition to the Open Library Bulk Access Downloader). We plan to use our auto-downloader – but it is always good to have a backup plan.

Ideally, we want to make the creation of these bundles as automated as possible, and extend the ability of the downloader to retrieve materials from any source so anyone who wants to can start creating bundles for the OLPC XO. Right now, Steven is exploring to see if he can get his auto-downloader to create the bundles according to the structure format outlined on the OLPC wiki, auto-generating the necessary directories and library files. He is also developing a roadmap of pre- and post-launch deliverables for his app so he can continue development beyond the RDC Summer Mentoring program. We plan to host his code and continue to help him with his quest! Levi is pitching in with the first order of design business: creating a custom icon that will represent our IACL-4-OLPC bundle like the ones at wiki.laptop.org.

We also brainstormed the idea of downloading the books in bulk (IACL-complete) as well as in the organized sub-collections (IACL-by-topic) as represented in our target collection. As we mentioned previously, our target collection is essentially a subset of the IACL. This target collection was also used in another open source project called the Virtual Shelf, created by two talented developers from the Berkeley School of Information (their prototype application only runs in Mozilla Firefox 3. If you cannot view it, you can read more about it in the developer’s master thesis). We want to retain the meta-information if possible (at this point, just the sub-collection information from the Internet Archive), but also give others the ability to build their collection from scratch. The idea is to pass this collection on to others – not just the OLPC, but to other folks with XOs – and they should be responsible for their own librarianship. We do want to do as much as possible to help get them started.

Speaking of passing on the collection … we will be picking up some of the area XOs this week. First stop: our friends at the Port Orford Library!

We all agreed that the best plan is to deliver the bundles as DjVu so we can use the native bookreader (with some possible enhancements – more on that later), but create a target collection of 20 or so books as a research experiment for future development with EPUB. So, Levi and I are currently building a subset of those books that are an accurate representation of the different formats popular for children’s books (heavily illustrated, large type, poetry, etc). Then, we plan to experiment with mark-up. These books will be culled from our target IACL collection. EPUB is not fully supported at this time in the XO Read Activity – but we want to be ready when it is!

We are on target for our proposed deadline, Labor Day Weekend – you can see a very rough overview here – we have a more detailed production schedule that we will be posting soon.