The Weekly Squeak

From: Michael Haupt,

The German/Swiss/Austrian TV station 3sat has a weekly 30-minute show called “neues” (roughly translated “new things”) which deals with IT-related information. Yesterday’s show was focusing on bringing IT to isolated regions and emerging nations as well as developing countries. The show featured an article on mesh networks in Ecuador and the Linux4Africa project.

Linux4Africa is a German project collecting old but functional hardware. The components are cleaned, repaired (if necessary), bestowed with an Edubuntu Linux installation, and sent to Tanzania and Moçambique.

12 of the show’s 30 minutes were dedicated to an extensive coverage of the OLPC project. Etoys and Squeak were mentioned several times during the feature. The project itself was introduced, and Bert Freudenberg was interviewed about the technical features of the XO laptop, which was presented in detail.

There were also two interviews in the studio. Two members of GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit; German Society for Technical Cooperation) responsible for XO distribution in Ethiopia talked about the project in general and about the impressive progress children made when working with the XO.

The other interview – which filled the first slot in the OLPC coverage – featured two students from Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, who have developed strategic and skill-improving games for the XO in the Software Architecture Group‘s course on software architectures.

All in all, the editorial staff at 3sat did a tremendous job in preparing this show. To the writer’s knowledge, this was the first time the OLPC project was presented at such a level of detail in German television. Germany being a country where the the project has no actual lobby, it is important to have such media coverage – it would be nice to see much, much more of it.

The entire show can be watched online (in German).