Also, I spent some time answering questions in my posts last night. If you want some more details, they are worth the read.

First, the ability to draw in chat. This laptop is first and foremost a tool for expression. For kids, that means being able to express with text, but it also means drawing, music, whatever. We want to make sure that we have a more rich experience than just text can deliver. So we’ve been experimenting a bit with allowing drawing in chat. As time goes on we’ll start to add other interesting types to the chat. We hope that it will be possible to share music that kids have created as well as images that they find. This isn’t as far fetched as it sounds – there’s already a music activity in the works.

Second, the concept of presence. Sadly, Tom is alone in the world so other people on the network don’t show up. So he’s missing the most important aspect of the interface. We want this interface to be social. This means that kids can communicate in every app, that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating.

For example the [Share] Button that he mentions doesn’t just share a link with another person. When that person opens the link he or she can optionally follow you as you travel from web site to web site. This ability to take someone on a tour could be used by a teacher at the front of a class or it could be used by two kids who might want to show something to each other. But the point is that they are working together, no matter who they are.

The [Share] Button is just a sample, though. What we really want to do is to make sure that the concept of presence and that the ability to share anything with other people on the network is available throughout the interface. That presence is the fundamental driver for the interface instead of being just another program that you run.

This is the latest OLPC prototype we’ve gotten from the great guys at Quanta. Today we had an all day meeting with various countries who are interested in deploying the laptop. You have no idea how excited people get when they have a real live artifact to play with. I spent a lot of time taking pictures of this adorable little laptop with everyone in the room. The laptop is a star.

The laptop pictured above is a test machine. The case was created by a machine, but only as a one-off. It is running one of the test OLPC boards, which means it’s pretty close to the end laptop. It’s booting off an internal flash drive and is running a well-stripped FC5.

That picture on the desktop is my lovely wife. She got to have her photo taken with a bunch of dignitaries today – and she didn’t even know it!

Also, Damn! That Pete Barr-Watson guy posts photos all kinds of fast!

The image above is a result of the work that the awesome team at Red Hat has done. The board at the bottom of the screenshot is one of the first pre-test A boards that the amazing people at Quanta have delivered. The hardware is pretty close to what the final main board will be in the actual One Laptop per Child Laptops. Same memory, same CPU, same flash, etc.

The display is showing the framework that we’ve been building to run on the laptops. We’ve been working closely with the One Laptop folks over the last few months to come up with a reasonable environment for kids all over the world to use. Our goals are to turn the Laptop into a fun, easy to use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning. The image above doesn’t show much of that. It was largely a demo of showing the framework running in a minimal OS environment booting without most of the desktop stack or OS stack. But it is on a network and you can chat with friends in the area and browse the web – two of the main tasks that kids should be able to do with the laptops.

We’ll be building out more and more of the framework over the next couple of months, adding a more appealing visual design and nailing down our common UI elements.

Now that we’ve got a lot of the groundwork laid out and have good sense of our context of use, we’ll be building out more of the code. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting on a regular basis to describe more about our goals and the framework. If you want to help us out, feel free to join the mailing list or join us on #olpc on irc.freenode.net.

A little background to start. Red Hat has been heavily involved in the One Laptop per Child project. We’ve got quite a few developers working full time on the project. A huge part of that work has been to think about what we’re delivering to kids all over the world. We have had to ask questions like “what’s relevant? what’s useful? what kind of experience do we want to create for kids on these laptops?” I don’t want to talk about the answers to these questions at this point – those are worth a post of their own – but instead I want to talk about what we’ve learned about the process and what happens when you start asking those questions.

From the start the most important thing you can do is to understand the problem at hand and frame the question in the right way. For example, asking “how do I port gaim over to the one laptop screen size?” is not the right level to ask a question. The right level to ask is something more like “how do we create an interesting social environment for kids to share and learn together?” Sometimes an existing piece of software might solve the problem, and sometimes it might not. But you need to be willing to leave yourself open to answers to the question that you present that are different than what you expected. Too often in technology I see people starting with an answer and trying to find a way to change the question to fit the answer. Free software seems to breed an unusual emotional attachment to code and interfaces.

The second part that’s important to understanding your particular context of use is to make sure that you talk to people. Do research. Find people who know, people who do and people who use. And throw in some outsiders just for a sanity check. In our case, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with people involved in the project directly, people in the various countries who have to deploy this hardware and software, free software people, people who have done a lot of deep research in various educational and learning areas. The most important thing to realize is that you aren’t going to be able to do this alone, and what other people have learned is far more important than what you’re bringing to the table. Your project is not a one man band.

Ask about how people will use this software, how it interacts with the hardware, what has worked in the past and what people will think will work in the future? Understand the physical constraints. The battery limitations, the way it is deployed, what other computers and network infrastructure is available, what tasks the kids could do with these machines – then you have the start of the picture.

At this point you understand a couple of things: your constraints and the a priori assumptions that everyone else has brought to the table. If you were good, you actually asked everyone to list their agendas. Everyone has agendas. We ran into quite a few at this point in development. People who wanted us to use Java for Java’s sake, people who wanted to see their particular software on the laptop, people who wanted to control what kids would see, and what educational content they would be exposed to – everything. But in the end if you don’t get them out in the open, you can never have an honest discussion about what those mean in your particular context. It’s hard to get people to be open about their agendas – often they don’t even know that they have them. But with gentle probing and an understanding that everyone does it, it’s often enough to get people talking about it. Think of it is as design psychotherapy.

These are the common elements to defining a good context of use for your software. Ask the right question. Do research. Be open to everyone’s experience. Understand the environment. Make sure that you’re aware of everyone’s agenda. From there you can start to figure out what you actually want to do.

But that’s a topic for another post.