[Grassroots-l] Weekend food for thought.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 4:27 AM, Christoph Derndorfer
<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> one of the questions I spent a lot of time asking myself in the past few
> weeks is how we - as grassroots organizations and user groups - can up
> our efforts to directly contribute more to olpc.
>
> In my humble opinion a lot of time is spent discussing recent
> developments in OLPC-land, pondering ideas, setting up infrastructure,
> talking about organizational forms, etc. and at the end of the day too
> little actual work gets done. On a personal level I feel (and I get
> caught up in this myself) that we're often spreading ourselves too
> thinly and easily get distracted by the million interesting things that
> are going on in the greater context of olpc.
>
> For these reasons I found one of Greg DeKoenigsberg's (Senior Community
> Architect at Red Hat) latest blog entries
> (http://gregdek.livejournal.com/30505.html?view=204585#t204585) so
> interesting as he describes some of the challenges that the Fedora
> project is facing these days when it comes to community engagement:
>
> POINT #1: ALL THE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORLD FAILS IF IT CAN NOT BE HARNESSED.
> POINT #2: WE STILL DO NOT HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE SET OF FEDORA WORK ITEMS
> SUITABLE FOR NEWBIES
> POINT #3: ONCE WE HAVE STRONG TASK MANAGEMENT TOOLS, WE CAN FUNNEL ALL
> KINDS OF NEW ENERGY INTO OUR PROCESS.
>
> I think all of these points are also very valid for OLPC (and probably a
> lot of other FOSS projects) and we should try to tackle them over the
> coming weeks and months.

Second the motion. But we also need to bring in whole existing
organizations as partners for developing teaching/learning materials
(schools of education, Ministries of Education, teachers'
organizations), translation (coordinate with the Ubuntu localization
teams, for example), and other functions. And we need to provide
places where teachers can share materials in their own languages. We
have one Spanish-language mailing list, and nothing for French,
Arabic, and the multitude of local languages needed.

Longer-term, we need sites where children can collaborate between
schools. This presents security as well as organizational challenges.

> With regards to giving people something to work on I'd suggest pointing
> everyone to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_projects which is by no means
> complete but does give somewhat of a nice overview of smaller (and
> larger) projects that people could work on.

And add other projects to it, such as writing new curricula,
textbooks, and teacher training materials, and getting them
translated.

> There's also been talk about setting up some kind of mentor program with
> some folks from maybe both OLPC and the larger community which would run
> outside the regular internship and Google Summer of Code programs. I for
> one would be happy to support someone who's interested in documentation
> (user-manuals, dev-documentation, ...).

I am a professional tech writer, and would also be happy to mentor
writers and translators.

> Another thing that I've been also thinking about - but don't know how
> feasible it really is - is setting up mini-competitions (think
> "Challenge XO" or something) to get more community members involved in
> creating content, writing activities, documentation, testing, etc.
>
> Ideas, rants, comments, suggestions?! :-)

I am organizing some other projects that are out of scope for OLPC,
including electricity and Internet for villages, and microfinance.

> Enjoy your Sundays,
> Christoph
>
> --
> Christoph Derndorfer
> Co-Editor
> OLPCnews, http://www.olpcnews.com
>
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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