<div dir="ltr"><div>As some of you may know, this week was the "Google Code In" winners ceremony,</div><div>where Ignacio Rodriguez from Uruguay and Jorge Gómez López from El Salvador, our finalists,</div><div>
their parents and I on behalf of SugarLabs,</div><div>came to San Francisco. This is brief report,</div><div>to share the experiece with the community.</div><div>The event was perfectly organized,</div><div>with a excelent work from Stephanie Taylor,</div>
<div>and her team. They shown not only profesionalism,</div><div>but love by the project.</div><div>We participated with other 9 projects.</div><div>The event started the last Sunday at the night,</div><div>with a presentation of all the winners, and food.</div>
<div>Googlers gave us food, a lot of food, all the time :)</div><div>The Monday we had a visit to the Google campus,</div><div>with the official prizes ceremony,</div><div>and a talk from Chris DiBona, Director of Open Source at Google.</div>
<div>Later some Googlers gave us talks about the projects where they work, and about their career.</div><div>All the talks were different, some more technical,</div><div>some more human, but all had good advices for the kids.</div>
<div>The Tuesday was a day to know the city, </div><div>we could choice between go to Alcatraz Island,</div><div>or to do a tour in Segway for the city.</div><div>The Segway are fun devices, and we had a little</div><div>
training before doing the tour. Ignacio said the </div><div>Alcatraz excursion was very fun too.</div><div>Later we went to the Academy of Sciences,</div><div>(is like a giant museum but alive, have collections,</div><div>
a beautifull aquarium, a planetarium, and so.</div><div>We had a "Behind the Scenes Tour", with a guide,</div><div>and the possibility of see places not opened to the public,</div><div>like the places where the researchers work.</div>
<div>Today was the last day, we went to Google offices in SF</div><div>and we had the possibility of present every one of our projects.</div><div>Later we went to San Francisco State University,</div><div>to meet Sameer Verma, who did a interview to</div>
<div>Jorge and Ignacio.</div><div>All the week was a very nice experience, we could talk face to face </div><div>with our students, students from other projects,</div><div>and other mentors. We interchanged experiences,</div>
<div>about how they manage GCI and GSoC contest,</div><div>and I tried to start contacts with other projects </div><div>related to us. In fact tomorrow I will visit the </div><div>Wikimedia offices (is amazing how many internet</div>
<div>companies and groups are in the SF area)</div><div>I will upload photos when return home,</div><div>just need do a selection, SF is a incredible place,</div><div>I took 1000 photos!</div><div>Sameer already shared photos from the OLPC SF</div>
<div>meeting the last Saturday, from my part,</div><div>I enjoyed participate in the meeting.</div><div>I talked about the features in Sugar 0.100</div><div>and 0.102, the webactivities, </div><div>and other trends in Sugar development.</div>
<div>They shared the project they have, as the work in Pathagar and statistics visualization.</div><div>I hope we can work more connected in the future,</div><div>SugarLabs and OLPC SF.</div><div>Regards,</div><div style>
<br></div><div>-- <br><div dir="ltr">Gonzalo Odiard<br><br><div>SugarLabs - Software for children learning <br></div></div>
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