[Grassroots-l] [support-gang] Change the World (FAST!)

[Samuel Klein]

Hi Niklaus,

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Niklaus Giger <niklaus at laptop.org> wrote:
>> > If OLPC Germany knows of a good project that you support and
>> > want to get started, I hope this will not keep you from talking to
>> > people to get it off the ground.
>>
>> It makes the perception very different and very difficult.

I understand that it makes it difficult, and I regret it.


> OLPC Foundation should just not be surprised if the OLPC community/grassroots
> is turning to other HW alternatives (netbook, classmates, www.gdium.com),
> which may be technically inferior but good enough for a lot or our purposes.
> Or we will just give the children a Sugar USB stick (as a Windows program
> and/or booting any linux distro with Sugar). This one they can take from home
> to school and back and will be their access to the rich world of free
> educational content and activities.

It has been said many times and bears saying again -- the existence of
these other projects and efforts are complementary, not in
competition, with OLPC.  Many XO projects do get started with Sugar on
existing computers, or other hardware.  It is great that you have a
choice; if one of them works for you for a small pilot, that's awesome
and you should do that and share your experiences.  capital-OLPC is
not geared to handle small orders.

>> [say] "programms dont exist anymore, but maybe we can still get some despite of
>> this" which doesnt really sound serious.

Indeed; I would not say this.  It is worth inquiring after XOs when
that is important to your plan; but the ending of the official program
means precisely that one should not predicate long-term plans on being
able to buy small quantities.   Define a program that you can
implement with more than one choice of hardware, and gain support for
that.

>> (And you have to keep in mind that without proper keyboards (aka german
>> ones in this case) noone is really considering more than one or two
>> classroom sets. Together with the above, it's gotten quite frustrating.)

Indeed.  The current requirement for a different keyboard is a
quantity of >5000.  Again, if you find better options for low-quantity
machines with custom keyboards, go with that and let us know.  The
decision to make XO-2 with two touchscreens was in part to get around
this annoying production-line necessity.

> We have in Switzerland one pilot project, where Martin Hofmann, one of our
> volunteers, worked over a year to get an approval from his university. Here in
>
> He needed (would still appreciate it) 30 XOs for one primary school class,
> calculated everything using prices from G1G1.

This is a good example, thank you... I will follow up off list; but
you are right, this is the sort of project we are not supporting
outside of G1G1.  If anyone else has similar examples, or projects
that they know of which were considering G1G1 or G100 but haven't
expressed their interest yet, please let me know.


< foundation if these kind of decisions is made without consulting the
> community, e.g. way did you not post on a few mailing list (grassroots, etc)
> saying that you consider stopping "Change the world" and whether it is okay if
> last orders can still be place till end of March?

There should be better organized public notice about such changes, you
are right.  Expect a public announcement about the program tomorrow.


SJ