Developer XO laptop loan or buy - Speakeasy project

[Chris Ball]

Hi,

On Mon, Jun 11 2012, Lester Leong wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm trying to get this project off the ground:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speakeasy

Have you considered joining forces with:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jsalsman/choose-your-reading-and-pronunciation-adventure

?  They seem to be very expert in language learning and speech recognition.

> I would like to buy or, if possible, loan, an XO laptop for
> development and testing. I live in Wantagh, NY, which is in Long
> Island and reasonably close to the greater New York city area.
>
> Please let me know what I need to do to get this project off the ground!

My advice would be that hardware and porting are not the difficult part
of this project -- if you create software that teaches literacy well,
porting it to the XO will be straightforward as long as it runs on top
of Linux and X11.  (And even if it doesn't work on the XO's platform,
there are so few good Free Software literacy software projects right
now that someone else would probably volunteer to do the port for you!)

The difficult part is actually designing and writing the code.  I think
you should think more about that, write up your ideas (your wiki page
currently contains no technical information at all!) and start seeing
if the ideas work by running them on standard laptops.

Sorry if this e-mail feels negative.  I think it's important to
understand that good literacy software is possibly the most difficult
type of software to write, yet also one of the most needed types in the
world right now.  I think your effort will be most likely to succeed
if you seek help from experts, and spend your time researching and
experimenting; there's no need for an XO to do any of those things.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>   <http://printf.net/>
One Laptop Per Child