Greetings from RDC Headquarters! We are still waiting on Steven’s PC – I will be tracking that soon to see where the shipment is. But we had our first kick-off meeting and things are well underway at 246 6th Street!

#rdc2009 Hacker Days kicked off this week.
We warmed up with robots from Maker Faire!
view full #rdc2009 Scrapbook on Flickr →

We decided that Wednesdays will be our designated #rdc2009 Hacker Day where the whole RDC gang will be on-site to make progress on the “IACL-4-OLPC” project – and we will share what we are doing online. Next week, Scotty Auble will lead the crew with an orientation of the XO to the RDC mentees. I will be on a fact-finding mission that day, so we probably won’t make it a live online event until the week after next.

Speaking of which, I made a misstatement in a prior blog post (and in a press release to our local media) – we will not be “filling the hard drives of the XOs with public domain books” because, of course, the XO-1 does not have an internal hard drive at all (and the XO-2 will use the same NAND Flash storage). So, we are currently exploring whether we will attempt to maximize compression of the available formats of the Internet Archive Children’s Library (IACL) books when we create the XO bundles (.xo) onto the installed flash memory on the little green laptops – or if we will simply use the web as the mechanism to deliver the books. All of this is somewhat difficult to convey in a short press release – but things will get more technical as we go along!

It is going to be a fun summer. I will be posting a production schedule and a list of our target books to the site soon – stay tuned!