“ceibalJAM” is a volunteers’ organization born in Montevideo in 2008 one year after the Uruguayan government launched Plan Ceibal (http://www.ceibal.org.uy/) to provide laptop computers to all school children and teachers in the country.
The organization is based in the international community of developers and educators, with members from different countries and special links with SugarLabs, the organization that developed most of the base software being used in Uruguayan schools.
After Plan Ceibal started we noticed the need for local interactive contents to be developed and for a broader knowledge of the technologies introduced, which mostly came from the US-based organization OLPC (One Laptop Per Child, (http://laptop.org). Moreover, we saw that if some basic computing skills were not brought closer to common people, teachers and children, the computers’ potential would be underused.
At the same time, there was a lot of discussion around the kind of software that had to be used in the computers, whether it had to be open source or proprietary. As there were big lobbies promoting proprietary software usage, we wanted to show in practice that it was possible to make a more open and participatory development environment, sharing software and technological knowledge with organizations and volunteers from all around the world.
That’s how “ceibalJAM” started, with two main goals in mind: 1) Learn, master and disseminate information technologies introduced by Plan Ceibal. 2) Develop educational software applications using the free software model.
In these years we have built a strong community, mainly linked by a mailing list with more than 300 subscribers and a portal with more than 100 active users.
Our major working events are the “ceibalJAM” meetings, which are two-day activities in which volunteers take the first hours to teach their works-in-progress and projects, then take a time to discuss how to go ahead, and finally take most of the meeting time for development. So far we have held four of these meetings in Montevideo and two in other cities in the country. Two more “ceibalJAM” meetings are planned for 2010.

Links: http://ceibaljam.org

ceibalJAM had its first outing in May 2008 with a first meeting at the Universidad de la República. Since late 2008 ceibalJAMhas established its own place on the web: http://ceibaljam.org. There we can store information about ongoing projects, as well as keeping the community in touch and informed about its activities. In November 2009 a civil, non-profit association was established.