OLPC: Open Organized Transparent

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 6:47 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 8:05 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
>> p.s. a @laptop.org address does not imply I am paid by OLPC.  It is an
>> address that lets me participate more directly, that's all.
>
> Let me try to head off another charge of cabalism here before it is
> alleged: there is no special privilege granted with a @laptop.org
> address.  You don't get invited to secret OLPC planning meetings if
> you've got a @laptop.org address.  There's no secret handshake or
> secret priority given to the features that scratch your itch.

There is one exception. The OLPC group on LinkedIn requires an
@laptop.org address, for no obvious reason. I find that
unsatisfactory. But as a non-member, I can't complain to the group
administrator.

> Rather,
> we have in the past given @laptop.org addresses to members of the
> community who have made significant contributions to OLPC, both as
> recognition of their work as well as out of sheer laziness on our
> part: it's a lot easier to just type username at laptop.org than to try
> to remember the personal domains of all the non-OLPC contributors.

So there is no regular process for asking for one, then? I think I
ought to have one, as (for example) apparently the only person
involved in OLPC who knows the difference between Russian and
Ukrainian keyboard layouts. More seriously, I discovered that there
were no localization projects for Haiti and Cambodia when deployment
plans for G1G1 were announced, so I created them and recruited
localizers, and now I am working on planning and recruiting for all of
the deployment issues that OLPC has done nothing about, such as
electricity.

Please talk to me if you see management holes in the OLPC program, and
don't bother our hard-working developers with problems they can't do
anything about.

> Quozl's "participate more directly" means that he's been a contributor
> since the first A-test boards (far long than I've been involved with
> OLPC) and he's earned a spot as a go-to guy when we need help.  (See
> http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=User:Quozl&oldid=77199 and
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Special:Contributions/Quozl and (my
> favorite) http://wiki.laptop.org/go/MotionDetection).

And read the Alan Dean Foster novel Quozl, too. I showed Foster and
many others an XO at the BayCon2007 Science Fiction convention, and he
thinks what we are doing is totally wonderful.

>  --scott
>
> --
>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
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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