This is impossible to keep up with. Great session on the Media Lab's $100 Laptop. Michail Bletsas and Michael Brown. Highlights:

• 50% of the world's kids don't have electricity at home
• learning happens not just with teachers - learning happens with communicating and doing
• the internet was not meant to be mediated by servers (Shades of Mark Bernstein's puzzlement at educators' concern about hosting from edBlogger 2003. Is there never any progress?)
• main goal is to get the kids to create their own content
• teachers are the bottleneck - building a teacher infrastructure is a waste of time, they learn slower - best to get them out of the way

And OK, OK, once again the emphasis on hand-helds, on cell phones. I resist and resist and it's probably time to cave in and buy one. For what - spam students with news of new library books? spam staff with news of summer tech training opportunities? Hah!

Zack Rosen, David Geilhufe and ...

The "latest and greatest" in open source devleopment for non-profits session was excellent, but I won't try to summarize. Way too much discussed, most of which I understood, some of which I simply missed. (And notes are of no help. I can't listen and write. I don't have the enthusiasm anymore. I keep imagining Alan Bennett at one of these things. Or better, trying to explain this stuff to him over lunch at a monastery ruin.)

 One great line that stood out from the opening of the session: "Go forth and deploy!" I.e, dive in. Funny thing is that is EXACTLY what we've done with Manila since 2000 at <a xhref="http://www.bayareawritingproject.org">BAWP</a>. Looking back from the perspective of some of the deployment challenges mentioned in this workshop, we haven't done badly at all. Big question is, where do we go next? Open Source solution like Drupal makes sense based on what the presenters said here. OS communities of active developers, downloads and forums. A chance to avoid duplication of efforts (nice example of VolunteerMatch and HandsOn Network - 80% of the same stuff needed for both organizations yet 5 years ago each was alone in its development efforts, granting that such a challenge might have been an impossible challenge for open source at that point). Lots said about the need for the intermediary agencies (what Kern County Superintendent of Schools web team has played for us, an Application Service Provider). The fact is that to engineer something you need money. And it helps to no end if you have a fundamental need and some sort of notion of how the software might work to accomplish what it is you want to accomplish. Loved this comment (paraphrased): "Hey if it works for social change and it's Microsoft, so what? That's what differentiates this Open Source conversation from a commerical vendor conversation. Bravo for MS! Next topic?"

Best conversations happen in the hallways at these things. Grabbed a hallway lunch with Roland Tanglao who I think I met for the first time at the Harvard bloggerCon thing in 2003. I caught him up-to-date on my continuing use of Manila / Frontier for Galileo, BAWP and NWP. We agreed that it's a great CMS. But for my part, I was asking "Where's it going?" When I get a bunch of users at BAWP or NWP, how do I offer it as a solution avialble beyond our KCSOS ASP? Turns out he's working with Bryght on developing Drupal as a CMS for clients. Hmmm.

Points that stand out from the morning plenary sessions. Both Rheingold and Saffo noted the importance of encouraging, supporting and guiding young people to use social media tools for concrete political action. Gillmor, Hong and Zuckerman demo-ed samples of good netizen-driven journalism and activism. Our abecedarian effort at Youth Voices has got a lot to learn and reconsider. That's obvious. But leaving aside for the moment the question of completely open vs. password-protected can learn these two things: 1. Yes, use editors! We knew that, but didn't have time to factor it in from the beginning.

Tag this "commuting." Arrived, surprisingly, on time for the pre-NetSquared conference orientation for volunteer bloggers. Any trip down the peninsula from the city<!--break--> during normal commute hours reminds me that I should NEVER complain about the 12 to 25 minute drive that gets me to and from <a xhref="http://www.galileoweb.org">Galileo</a> everyday. Now if only I could convince Gary to let me bicycle in the city. <p>Morning will be plenary sessions including Howard Rheingold (How long ago did I subscribe to Co-Ev Quarterly?) and Dan

I'm Pat Delaney, librarian at Galileo Academy in San Francisco, associate director for UC Berkeley's Bay Area Writing Project (that's the "non profit" part of my work), and the instigator of edBlogger 2003 conference and the briefly vibrant Educational Bloggers Network.