<html> <head> <style></style> </head> <body class='hmmessage'> Hi All, I would be feeling very depressed since I will miss our great gathering in SF weekend after next. But the reason I have to miss it, a vacation we made reservations for a year ago, will cheer me up! Maui will be a great cure for the blues. However, I do hope to be able to attend some of the remote sessions. Our resort has wi-fi. The only problem might be if I am off doing something else, like a community beach-clean-up on Saturday. We shall see. There is one thing I hope you all will consider taking time to discuss... SCaLE 9X. This is a very large open-source event in Los Angeles. It is scheduled for February 25-27 at the Hilton LAX. In past years, they have given us a free booth in their expo (a value of several hundred $$$... maybe even $1000+) and have encouraged us to do presentations on any aspect we like of Open Source Software In Education (OSSIE). They are also very generous with their comp passes for booth tenders and presenters. All in all, it is a great opportunity to get the OLPC and Sugar Labs story out to a lot of very significant people in the Southern California open source community. In addition, it is a great opportunity to see some of the latest stuff and do some networking. So what I am proposing is this... take some time at the gathering to discuss the feasibility of putting together a team for SCaLE9 X. My husband and I will definitely be there and we may be able to get some folks from some of the local Contributors Program projects to come too. Those of you who live in the Bay area can probably fly down quite reasonably (SWA had tickets for $59 each way to LAX for Oct... if you watch, there will be other sales). There are often fare sales from places like Boston, NY, and DC. We could all watch for them and spread the word when we find them. I live pretty far from LAX. It takes an hour to drive there from here... on a good day. Up to 3 on a bad one. So, inviting you all to our house doesn't make a lot of sense. However, I would be willing to work on finding us a house (maybe a beach house) to rent for that weekend. If we had a team of, say, 10 people or so, the individual cost could be quite affordable. There is also still time to put in a paper for a possible presentation. The CFP doesn't end until some time in December. I will be putting in a proposal to present a general OLPC update, the Contributors Program, SoaS, other ways to run Sugar on Macs and PCs, and other free software options (like Etoys to go). That is a lot for one person to talk about in one session... even if I talk really, really fast! Obviously, if some of you signed up to talk on one or more of these topics, or any other topic of your choice, it would be wonderful! I will be taking my MacBook (and an XO-1.5 if I can squeeze it in). I have Skype and can do video conference on the MacBook if you want to set up a meeting time to talk about "Team SCaLE 9X". Just be sure to give me plenty of advance warning so I can arrange to be available. I really hope we can make this happen! I can't promise balmy beach weather in February, but we probably won't have snow... unless you drive to the local mile-high mountain resorts. Caryl </body> </html>