Kevin Mark commented on my post OLPC community Jabber servers:
The only issue is that when xochat.org was running, I was able to connect from my sugar emulator in ny to an xo users in australia. Your idea will not allow that, more or less.
I thought responding to this would benefit a broader audience.
Global servers that anyone can join are simply not feasible at this time as xochat.org showed: the server dies due to being overwhelmed by the number of users.
(Once we’ve got the next generation of server connectivity done, we should be able to run highly scalable servers, and run multiple federated servers that are connected to each other, allowing kids from different schools – or adults anywhere – to collaborate. That’s the promise – we’re still a way off.)
However, people can certainly set up global special interest servers – like say one for PyGame activity developers, or one for library content contributors, and so on. The key is to narrow the focus so you don’t get too many participants.
Alternately, as I mentioned the best way may be servers by city, or region for a particular use. In particular, there should be servers specifically for kids, where the only adult participants are parents helping out – not adult users looking for their own collaboration channels.
If you’d like to chat with OLPC-interested people in strange and foreign lands, then I recommend IRC chat: join #olpc on freenode, and you’ll find people from all over (depending on time zone). There is an XO activity for IRC: XoIRC – so you can chat from your XO.
For serious questions and discussions, please join the appropriate mailing list. Discussions on IRC are immediate and often effective, but transient. There’s little to no record of them, for others to discover and follow up – so questions that may benefit others are best done by old-fashioned mail.
Feed - the whole site
Feeding the Penguins 
I’d just note that the next generation of servers is “a way off” by a somewhat unusual definition of “way off.” That is, the specification and open source technical infrastructure for doing these things in the general case exists, we just need to optimize it for the XO’s needs, and modify Sugar to handle these cases. The big problem is that there just aren’t very many people who actually understand the above mentioned specifications and infrastructure and getting this stuff figured out hasn’t been a big priority for OLPC yet, compared to, say, getting working XO’s out the door.
Daf is working on a server component to replace the shared roster: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Gadget. However it’s not ready for Update.1, and it’s not clear whether we will be able to set it up for XOs with Update.1 or whether there will be changes that require waiting for the following release before we can get it in operation.
That’s what I mean by “a way off”…