This weekend I’ve been to PyCon Uno, the first italian conference dedicated to the Python programming language. It’s been very interesting, in particular Alex Martelli’s keynote on managing the tech development and a presentation on sqlalchemy, but this post is not about the conference.
Marco Pesenti Gritti’s final keynote was about One Laptop Per Child, a project to bring a low cost computer to children in those third world countries where the benefits of worldwide information and education technology would be otherwise impossible. With the help of UN and MIT, they are trying to build a 100$ book-size laptop with a 1200×900 colour display and consuming just about 2W. It’s going to be developed using open source software only, and to use Python and GTK+ to develop a revolutionary environment that discards the desktop/office metaphor and puts emphasis on children activities. Several states already joined the project and did preliminary testing on some of their schools.
I think they did a very good job and hope this is going to be a great success.
