SugarLabs Sur - Libre Social Network Project

[Sebastian Silva]

Friends of our community,

I'd like to introduce you to a project that Rafael, me, Alejandro
(proj.man.) , Antonio (django wiz), Alfredo (theather educ) and Jose
(mathematics professor at the UNMSM) have been working on.
It is our proposed strategy for training and supporting a large rural
and distributed sugar deployment including collaboration servers in
traditional Computer Labs settings. Already we are preparing for a
workshop with the first teachers in early february, when the roll out
will occur.
We have two main strategies:

 - Reduce the maintenance overhead of schools by providing a tailored
suite + best practices + documentation ---    "easy to replicate"
 - Harnessing social network functionality for sharing, collaboration
and peer-support ---  "easy to share"

Everybody understands the value and power of social networks. However
these remain propietary and have a number of privacy and control
issues. We'll incorporate existing social networking software (could
be Elgg, NoseRub, Pinax...) that not only will provide "One Social
Network Per School", but will jumpstart the first (that I know of)
massive, self-replicating, decentralized educational social network
ecosystem, a network of social networks. And we want to make it extra
easy to add a node anywhere on the globe.

Our expected deployment involves ~200 school laboratories (and
servers), and ~2300 workstations, for a total of tens of thousands of
students and their respective teachers who will be online and
collaborating with each other and with the community across
organizational, geographic, and cultural boundaries. We will foster
this community and bring them in touch with other teachers using Sugar
in the classroom. Perhaps even more schools will join this global
network, as we want to make it as simple as possible.

We hope to give details on this deployment soon but need a particular
confirmation from the Regional Government. We have submitted a
proposal for USAID challenge and would use the money as SugarLabs to
develop, prepare, tailor and integrate a platform that allows us to
deliver excellent teacher workshops that empower educators to
appropriate the technology and learn about it "in community" like we
so happily do in Free Software.

Please find our proposal for at
http://www.netsquared.org/projects/free-social-networks-rural-education

Give it a look. Think about it. A large social network owned by its
users, that can grow organically without any need for central offices
or large datacenters... Give us your comments and feedback and...

Vote for it. The voting process is particular, you have to pick us,
and then 2 others. You can't vote unless you pick 3. Please do this
for us.

I would do it if you were asking!        ;-)

In all seriousness, I think our proposal has a great chance, because
frankly, i think it rocks and is better than the other options, but
the first phase of the challenge involves the community for picking
15, then a panel picks 3 winners. So we need you, community!

Thank you for your time.
-- 
Sebastian Silva
Iniciativa FuenteLibre
http://blog.sebastiansilva.com/