[OLPC-devel] Follow up to student query

[Dan Leslie]

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We met late last week to discuss the concerns brought forward on this 
list last week, namely that if any of us have relevant experience and 
the necessary skills to work within such a constrained system on such 
sensitive, specialized, and highly optimized code. The short answer is 
yes, but not many.

There are at least three students with relevant experience and the 
skills necessary to be productive. Although all students at SFU are 
required to work within constrained environments at the lower division 
(the Motorolla M68HC11) and implement a rudimentary CPU in VHDL these 
students have since been employed in positions with relevant 
responsibilities.

The rest are fairly interested in the mesh networking issues and 
related network service auto detection, as well as general 
forward-facing optimization and streamlining. Most of these would like 
to produce new software, though I suppose the Fedora OLPC software list 
is a more relevant venue to discuss such things.

Mentorship and supervision doesn't exist for this group, yet. I am 
currently acting as supervisor and director, but given that I'm simply 
a fellow student I haven't as much wisdom as I would prefer for someone 
heading up such a large team. So far things are going smoothly but not 
having raw, direct, and specific orders is making some of the 
volunteers wary. That said, they're in the minority. Most have been 
asking very intelligent, insightful questions and are capable of 
finding their own way with little direction. Regardless, I hope to find 
willing and qualified mentors soon.

Relatedly, I have a couple of questions:
- - How does one go about procuring development boards? It would be nice 
to have a couple such that those able to work on driver, power 
management, and other close-to-hardware issues can get comfortable and 
begin work.
- - Is there anyone specifically working on the networking hurdles 
surrounding mesh networking, or considering network service auto 
detection?
- - The wiki states that an increasing rollout will occur through 2007 
but it seems as though the software side of things is still in its 
infancy. That is, though there exists a fedora distribution it appears 
fairly unspecialized. Is there an expected method by which updates can 
be pushed to the early adopters, and what are the expectations for 
software progress by the end of the year?

Thanks,
- -Dan Leslie
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