In the first session, I was paired up with a male teacher who was nervous about communication. He asked if I spoke French, and I apologized that I did not. He then continued to have entire conversations with me in English. He began by saying he didn’t think the teachers would use the computers in their classroom. This particular school received their XO’s 6 months ago, received their first teacher training about 2 months ago, and will be introducing the students to the computers for the first time on Monday. … After that, my partner began by pointing to each individual activity and asking how each could be implemented into his curriculum. Although I scoff at the ideology that “curriculum” is somehow not important, I began to understand the dilemma. I said we should begin by opening one activity and we can answer those questions about curriculum after.

Distance was his gem! The distance activity measures the distance between two XO computers. It sends sound waves between them and a measurement in meters pops onto the screen. He loved it. He began brainstorming assignments for his kids to measure the distance around their homes or rooms and said they could also figure out area from those numbers. Although it took us the full 90 minutes for him to be comfortable with opening the program and inviting another XO to share the program, his enthusiasm was quite the relief. When each person shared what they learned from the first session, it was great to see his enthusiasm about distance in other teams about other activities. The goal of making teachers the experts for each other felt underway.

The idea of democratizing video is simple enough. For the past 30 years, moving pictures have been the dominant force in our social discourse. The accessibility, immediacy, and veracity of a video make it the ideal medium for the discussions a society has about itself. Our great social debates happen in movie theaters and on television screens, far more than in books or newspapers, because viewership is so much higher than readership, and compelling news footage beats prose any day of the week.

We have had a mature industry of moving pictures for about 100 years now, and for all that time, video production has been essentially “industrial” in nature. Until the 1980s, producing video footage of any quality required equipment so expensive that only large corporations could afford to build a television studio or film a movie. Even in the 1990s as camcorders approached reasonable prices, worldwide distribution remained an oligopoly of the major networks and studios. An independent filmmaker who produced a documentary could not hope to have more than a few people see it unless she convinced a major movie distributor or television channel to show it.

In the last few years, the barriers to distribution have been crumbling. With the advent of YouTube, it is possible for anyone to make a video, using equipment that costs less than $200, and upload it onto the web for all to see. For the first time ever, it is now possible for anyone to make a video, publish it, and have millions of people watch it, without any negotiations with distributors, networks, or studios.

The social implications of this are dramatic. The most powerful tool we have for emotional argument and revealing truth is available to any ordinary citizen. If you have something to say, and people want to hear it, you can, and they will. This represents an unprecedented decentralization of the means of persuasion. The media’s old guard, the gatekeepers of television (and even radio), are losing their stranglehold on public opinion. We are about to find out what the people really think, whether we like it or not.

Talks at the conference covered many aspects of this change. Some talks discussed its history and current status, in the US, Europe, and elsewhere. Some discussed the future, and its implications for our society. One oft-mentioned example was the video of protests coming out of Iran, recorded by average Iranians on their mobile phones, and uploaded to YouTube for global distribution. Obviously, this video would never have made it out of Iran ten years ago, when the only mechanism of distribution was a state-controlled television broadcaster. Even US television stations haven’t run most of the footage, for fear of offending their viewers sensibilities (and perhaps the Iranian government, which is essentially holding their reporters hostage).

Most sessions, though, seemed to focus on the imperfections in the system, and what we can do to prevent the formation of a new gantlet of gatekeepers. One obvious example is YouTube. Most people who want to achieve wide distribution of their video post it on YouTube; they may not even retain a copy of it themselves. This makes YouTube a dangerous single point of failure. In fact, in order to avoid lawsuits, YouTube allows major media conglomerates to remove videos from YouTube instantly, without any human intervention, even if those videos are entirely legal according to US copyright law. As it currently stands, then, YouTube is far from manifesting the full promise of Open Video: that no one can censor you.

Another major limitation is the licensing of the technology used to distribute videos. Most video distributed today is in MPEG formats, which are heavily patented. As a result, anyone who wants play back video, such as the digital signals now broadcast by all US television stations, must buy a patent license for the technology. This prevents developers of Free Software, like the Firefox web browser, from including support for these video formats in their products. To solve this problem, a group of engineers called Xiph has been developing a video encoding system called Theora that does not infringe on any patents, and so can be used royalty-free. The next version of Firefox, due to be released in a few days, will include support for Theora video, already available on sites like dailymotion.com.

Other presenters discussed the cost of internet bandwidth and how to decrease it, the next generation of free tools for movie editing, and many ways to make use of the Open Video phenomenon. In fact, I only know what was said in about a quarter of the sessions, because there were many parallel tracks.

It was a remarkable conference. I learned quite a bit about the social scene, and I hope many people learned a lot about the technologies. I can’t predict where this phenomenon is headed, but it is definitely worth watching.

OLPC was hiring during all of last year, and so I considered applying for a job there.  Every time, I concluded that it was more important to me to finish grad school first.   I know too many stories of graduate students who left to work for a startup and never came back.  Once I had graduated, in a few years, then maybe I could work for them.

That now seems unlikely.  OLPC has laid off most of their software engineers.  As a charitable organization, they are dependent on donations from their corporate backers, who have become less and less generous for a variety of reasons.

I spent some time with the staff last night, before skating home across the ice-sheet sidewalks of Cambridge.  The people around the table had largely just lost their jobs, and yet they shared with me an unexpected optimism.  The OLPC Foundation has been financially strapped for months, and the resulting internal tensions have slowed progress tremendously by causing the organization to focus on short-term concerns just to stay afloat.  Their ability to maintain momentum and focus on long-term technical improvements had been lost months ago.  The resulting divergence between the goals of Sugar Labs and OLPC created friction that wasted a great deal of energy.

I foresee, or at least hope for, a renewed relationship between Sugar Labs and OLPC, and also between Sugar Labs and the hundreds of thousands of children who are using XOs and Sugar every day.  There are many challenges ahead, and principal among them is the problem of finding the hundreds of thousands of dollars we would need to pay the salaries of developers to build this system.

Even without any immediate source for that funding, though, I am still optimistic.  A company is hard to maintain, requiring millions of dollars a year and a great deal of management overhead.  An open coalition of volunteers, engineering firms, support companies, teachers, students… that’s much harder to kill.

So here’s to a new year of Sugar and OLPC.  May it be a good year for all concerned.

EDIT: modified to be less inaccurate regarding the number of engineers.

With this crowd, it’s not always easy to tell the difference between a party and a conference. Sugarcamp had lots of hardware, lively discussion, laptops, projectors, pizza, beer, whiteboards full of Venn diagrams and grids, visitors from far coasts and countries… all of which is indeterminate. I guess that’s what makes it a camp.

Not very much code was written, though some was, and not too many concrete decisions were made, though a few were. The most valuable steps are more like clay not yet fired, commitments that have taken shape but are still subject to the impressions of more hands before they are fixed.

I caught only a slice of the camp. I saw a great deal of what conferences are famous for: the resolution, smoothly or abruptly, of the tensions that accumulate when we communicate from a distance. I also some of the unfortunate converse: people whose incompatibilities can be ignored in text but are prohibitive in person.

We drew in new people and made painstakingly detailed plans on how to draw in more. If we are lucky, work hard, and are half as smart as we think we are, the next Sugarcamp will be far larger.

Maybe then we can get something catered other than pizza.