After over 12 years trying to get the video games studio industry to both create and use more open source software and unrestricted hardware, Jared Hardy finally gave up on those proprietary-minded fools, and started building NELA-ISC.Net instead. In the process of bootstrapping this Northeast LA community utility cooperative (still in progress), he discovered the catch-22 of funding nonprofit community projects that can never take any tax deductible donations or returns-based investments. He then started the deductible- donation accepting Data Roads Foundation to help solve that catch-22 investment problem -- among other issues inherent to all cooperatively owned networks. More about that and his other yak shaving projects are available in the links below:

• Data Roads Foundation
• North East Los Angeles Infrastructure Service Cooperative Site moved
• Unwatch.Me! Your personal privacy cloud.
• Unicorns, Gigabits, and free WiFi for the City of Angels!
• Presentation from SCALE

If the content in these links create more questions than answers, that will provide good conversation fodder for Thursday night 6/12!

You and your family are cordially invited to the SGVLUG & SGVHAK potluck BBQ on Saturday, May 17th from 11am to 6pm in the city of San Gabriel.

Please RSVP by May 15th by filling out this Google form: https://bit.ly/QpLJeP

You will receive directions to the venue after you submit the RSVP. You can revise your RSVP at any time. Some Google scripting magic automatically updates the RSVP with how many people are expected and what people say they are bringing. Obviously, the earlier you RSVP, the more accurately we can plan.

Hope to see you there!

This month we will have a focused sort of open mic night. We will be featuring a sort of show and tell for projects. If you have been working on something in your spare time then we can find time for you to tell us about it. Bring hardware, pictures or slides, whatever you need to let us know the cool things you are doing. After getting our dinner orders in we will informally invite people to share.

Caryl Bigenho presents: Adventures in OSSIE-land with olpc 2.0

Now that MIT has closed the OLPC Foundation office and the OLPC Association in Miami has slowed production of the XO laptops, what lies in store for folks interested in Open Source Software In Education?

Adventure! Come find out how you can get involved, traveling to exotic places, meeting interesting people, and/or developing and testing hardware and software to continue to grow the OSSIE movement. Deployments large and small around the globe would love to have your help. Come find out what is happening and how you can get involved in your own OSSIE-land adventure!

Curt Thompson and James Murdza, both recently back from trips to Haiti, will talk about the evolution of the One Laptop per Child Project into Unleash Kids, their successes and failures working with schools, establishing a lasting infrastructure, and the technology behind it all.

Some of the projects they will talk about are a mission school using OLPC laptops and a school server providing internet caching/filtering servers, a remote off-the-grid school using only solar power to charge ten laptops, an orphanage with twenty computers and miniature solar panels, and several schools using Internet-in-a-Box, an offline source of Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and Open Street Map.

We will cover group business at the beginning then go through a series of quick talks. These talks will be 2-5 minute long.

• Richard will report status on social media effort

• James will demonstrate how to update the SGVLUG website using Pelican and Github.

• Jess will talk about GStreamer

• John K. will present the history of open source