[Grassroots-l] Volunteer opportunities -- Simple solutions

[Bryan Berry]

The easiest way to organize and stimulate the development of volunteer
groups would be to make it much easier to get XO's, particularly for
working educators and small, small pilots. It is still painfully
difficult to get them, particularly in small quantities.

It would be quite difficult to see volunteer groups starting up w/out
any access to XO's. A community site would be nice but it won't address
the difficulties of putting XO's in small #s in the hands of talented
educators.

There are good organizations in almost every country w/ experience in IT
and education. Those organizations could get involved if they could
easily get XO's. Most countries don't need to start a OLE Nepal from
scratch, they have existing NGO's that can do the job.

The OLPC volunteer should model itself after the Moodle community, which
is characterized by working educators and techies who work for
educational institutions. Currently, the OLPC community has lots of
young and talented people w/ limited to no field education experience.
The OLPC community needs leadership from experienced educators. Sadly,
while there is a "Developer" program that gives out XO's, there isn't a
similar "Educator" program. Even then, working educators would need to
have a classful of XO's to see them in action.

People like Mel Chua and Alex Keybl need guidance from working educators
for them to be truly effective. We have 3 working educators working
full-time on OLPC in Nepal and they make all the difference in the
world.

<rant>
In general, there seems to be a lot of organizing going on in OLPC-land
but limited useful output for the pilot countries. People want to be
part of a community that makes useful stuff. A community needs to define
its outputs and put timelines on them to create useful outputs. I don't
see such a planning process in the OLPC community, just an ad hoc free
for all. Virtually all successful open-source projects have timelines,
milestones, and feature specifications for their releases.


I would love to see the community define a set of activities and content
bundles that need to be improved or created and then set deadlines to
get that work done. Then they organize folks to get the work done on
time.  
</rant>
 

-------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:53:34 -0400
From: "Samuel Klein" <sj at laptop.org>
Subject: Re: [Grassroots-l] [laptop.org #14765] Volunteer
	opportunities
To: "Blair Golson" <blair.golson at participantmedia.com>, 	"Alex Keybl"
	<alex.keybl at duke.edu>, 	"Christoph Derndorfer"
	<e0425826 at student.tuwien.ac.at>, 	grassroots at lists.laptop.org
Message-ID:
	<5396c0d10806261853uee18dfbx169e19221beb0a61 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Alex, Christoph,

Meet Blair Golson, interested in community reporting and how people get into
the field to work with deployments.  We spent some time discussing the
current state of OLPC community outreach and fieldwork, and touched on two
things:

 * we don't yet have the social infrastructure to identify groups of
talented volunteers willing to form a local team to help out in a particular
country or region

 * we have a lot of low-hanging fruit to gather in terms of identifying NGO
and University contacts by country, and helping them get involved / share
local knowledge about how to get things done / sign up to host volunteers or
give them projects to work on.

... both of these especially in the majority of deployment sites where we
can't currently send anyone from OLPC.

Blair, Alex in particular has been working on a community site -- hopefully
he can show you the current state.

I copy the grassroots list, as part of my commitment to not sending any
email longer than a paragraph that doesn't go to some public list :-)

Cheers,
SJ