Steven McKenzie joins the RDC as a 2009 Mentee. Steven has strong computer skills and an interest in coding and programming. He brings a keen eye and clever wit to the current team, and his background in all things PC provides a cross-platform balance to the RDC. He will be working closely with Levi Thompson, who will be joining the RDC for a second year to focus on developing his HTML and CSS skills.

R. Scotty Auble joins the crew as a development mentor focusing specifically on the OLPC Laptop Project. Scotty has years of project management experience and is well known in the Port Orford area as a knowledgeable and helpful technical resource. He brings seasoned programming skills to the RDC and has considerable background in education. He is already diving into the code for the bookreader that we plan to install on the little green laptops. We are thrilled to have him on board!

Look for updates from all of us here on the Rural Design Collective blog! The official start date for the program is June 3rd when Steven’s new PC arrives at our headquarters on 246 6th Street – stay tuned!

The Rural Design Collective was recently granted a hardware donation from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. Six XO laptops were granted to us through the OLPC Contributors Program — and we will be creating XO bundles of public domain books for kids from the Internet Archive Children’s Library! These six computers will be returned at the end of the program and the IACL books will be distributed to other XO laptops. OLPC has a group of volunteers assisting in the librarianship, and we will also be documenting our progress on the web so other people can benefit. It is an exciting program, and we are honored to be involved.