Collaboration Requirements

[Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos]

Dear Greg and Michael,

It seems to me that we spend more time discussing things, instead of 
implementing them. The issue of scalability in large ad-hoc networks has 
been around for more than a decade and some pretty descent research 
results have been out there for several years now. Even if you pick one 
randomly you are guaranteed to scale by a whole order of magnitude 
better than OLPC's current implementation. Just pick one and implement 
it. I'm afraid that it is no exaggeration if I say that, from a network 
engineering standpoing, the current collaboration mechanism is literally 
the worse one possible, scaling quadratically with the number of nodes 
no matter if an access point is used or not. I do not mean to sound 
condescending, but rather note that it is very easy to improve on our 
current situation.

I would rather see us spending our time iterating through implementation 
of a viable solution, large-scale testing (anyone testing collaboration 
with _scale_ in mind using 2-3 XOs should just be fired) and thinking 
about how to build and use feedback mechanisms (that do not involve 
humans) from actual deployments in schools in the US (where an internet 
connection is dependable) wrt our collaboration technology.


Pol

-- 
Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
Graduate student
Viral Communications
MIT Media Lab
Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058
http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/