Standalone mesh deployment ideas.

[Chris Ball]

Hi,

Scott and I brainstormed around which software features a deployment
with few school servers and little connectivity might benefit from.
These haven't been examined in terms of utility to deployments or
how difficult they'd be to get working; it's just a braindump.

 * customizing/managing laptops
   - content deployment without a network
    - autoinstallation of content from USB keys?
   - backup without a school server (to a USB disk?)
   - recovery method for backups
   - create a Backup/Restore activity?
   - dealing with lost laptops, recovering data

 * phone home/infrastructure
  - how could we find out what the state of a school's mesh network is
    (healthy or overloaded?) if the school itself is offline?
  - how many laptops are at each school?
  - stolen laptops, lease management, without school server?
  - ability for software to ask olpc-update to return arbitrary data
    with olpc-update's periodic update requests
   - such as power management statistics, or network status information,
     or how many other laptops are nearby

 * contact information
  - being able to optionally set contact details (e-mail address?) for a
    laptop?
  - equivalent of Windows "net send"; ability to send broadcast messages
    to groups of laptops, e.g. for teachers to their students?
  - "Blackboard activity" for sending persistent notice board messages
    to the class or school

 * disconnected operation
  - we can't use webmail for e-mail if there's no network; should we come
    up with a simple stored e-mail solution that batches outgoing and
    incoming mail on USB keys that can be passed around?
  - maybe allow offline requests for web pages, with the pages downloaded
    whenever possible or downloaded elsewhere to a USB key?

 * content sharing without school server
  - a simple Share activity for transferring journal objects and
    activities to friends

 * UI for updates?
  - allow teachers to decide whether to push updates?
  - alert kids to the presence of new updates somehow?

Any comments/more ideas to add to the list?

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>