Fwd: Standalone mesh deployment ideas.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Feb 18, 2008 2:26 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.

A number of the topics listed here can be addressed with updated forms
of FidoNet (for schools intermittently on the Internet) and SneakerNet
(USB, SD cards, or optical media, for schools not on the Net at all,
with variations for server availability and features).

Being able to transfer Journal entries to another computer would also
be quite useful for those with earlier development and G1G1 units.


>  * 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>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay