Peru and Microsoft announcement

[Ed McNierney]

Folks -

Thanks for the comments and input on how to communicate OLPC activities
better to our various audiences.  I want to mention a few things in general
and also look at this specific situation.

I am happy to help better communicate software development activities to the
broader community.  It is particularly easy to coordinate information with
Jim Gettys for community-news as we happen to share a rather small office
right now so we really can't avoid each other!  If possible I will try to
help existing efforts and vehicles succeed rather than attempting to invent
new things.

I'm not, however, signing up to be OLPC's PR agency to communicate
everything we do, and I'm going to remain focused on software development
activities.

I agree that proactive announcements and taking the lead on communications
are good things.  However, I don't think that's really applicable in this
Microsoft case since, from an OLPC perspective, nothing happened.  Microsoft
made an announcement about the next stage in their deployment of machines
they're purchasing.  They don't need to tell us when that's happening -
they're not our machines (i.e. we don't own or control them - they're XOs of
course) and we're not involved in that deployment.  Nothing happened other
than a natural consequence of what was announced in May.

OLPC can't announce things we're not involved in.  And it's hard to get much
press coverage out of a release announcing that Microsoft's about to
announce something that's not news <g>.  So in this particular case there's
nothing (coming internally from OLPC) that I think would have been
appropriate or helpful before the announcement (especially since I can't
think of any way we could or should have known in advance).

What can happen, however, is an effort from the community to avoid reading
between the lines and attempting to speculate about what's happening -
especially when reading a press release that contains both the words
"Microsoft" and "OLPC".  There will be inevitable fire-fighting, but let's
not try to light the fires ourselves.  I realize there is much history here
that I wasn't involved in, and I appreciate that it takes time to change
behaviors and expectations.  But the more we try to keep non-events as
non-events by avoiding on a flurry of emails around each one, the more we
will be able to keep the community and the world's focus on the REAL events
when we do want to get their attention.

Having watched OLPC from "outside" for a while before joining, I certainly
wanted to see a steadier flow of technical / development information and I
will definitely try to help.  I'd also ask for your help in that process so
we can help focus the world's attention on what we ARE doing, because it's
pretty cool stuff.  Thanks!

    - Ed

Ed McNierney
Vice President of Software Development
One Laptop Per Child
ed at laptop.org