DESCRIPTION

All of the video images of Afghanistan in this 6:23 video were shot by Carol Ruth Silver using an off-the-shelf consumer hand-held camera that fits in a coat pocket.

This video short tells a brief version of the story of Carol Ruth Silver's non-profit work in bringing Linux-powered OLPC netbook computers to the children of Afghanistan. The story starts at a meeting of OLPC users in San Francisco, California, where Carol is getting some help configuring her computer. She also has decided to share video with the Digital Tipping Point project, to support our effort in documenting her story. She is seen attaching her hand-held Flip video camera to a Ubuntu-Linux notebook computer owned by GNU-Linux technologist Grant Bowman, who also happens to be a technicians who is one of the backbones of the local San Francisco Bay Area Linux migration efforts that the Digital Tipping Point is documenting.

In this video, Carol tells a bit about the children she is supporting with OLPC computers. These kids don't have schools, but instead are educated in homes or sometimes outside by sitting on the ground as their lessons are read to them. Some factions in Afghanistan are opposed to educating children, thinking that a religious teaching is all that is needed for them. Sometimes their schools are blown up by these opposing factions. The beauty of using mobile OLPC computers is that they are not sitting targets for bombers, but instead move around with the kids.

Unfortunately, some of the video shot on Carol's Flip camera was corrupted, and had to be cut or truncated to remove the corrupted portions.

This video represents the first effort by the DTP crew to composite music, still images, video from other artists, along with DTP-shot video into a new composited whole. Up to this point, the 100-plus hours of video on the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection has consisted of simple storyboard edited video with no music, and no contributions from other artist molded together into one complete work. Almost every movie made for the big screen since Titanic has been rendered on Linux server farms, but most of the software running on top of Linux has been non-Free proprietary applications. This video was made almost entirely with Free Open Source Software, from the capturing to the transfer to the editing and compositing and even uploading to the Internet Archive. And, of course, the Internet Archive itself runs on GNU-Linux. The only non-Free software used in making this video are the packages used for decoding and re-encoding the non-Free formats from the Flip video camera.