[OLPC India] Partnering with OLPC in India

[Dev Mohanty]

Hey Marc/Sameer/ JVA

Satish and me we'd exchanged a couple of mails yesterday, wherein I'd 
put forth my doubts regarding some of the stats that had been mentioned 
in the mails. I'd raised some questions with regards to, what had been 
planned as the way ahead and if things were feasible.. for deployments 
of such magnitudes. I believe besides a couple of mails from Satish in 
the recent past, most people are still unaware of how things are being 
planned, and who the decision makers are.

Anyways below are some excerpts from my previous mails to him for 
everyone's benefit.

Guess must say it's nice to see OLPC India getting to be a lot more 
formal and making stead-fast progress on various fronts. Though I did 
want to voice my opinion on the fact that you mention "Any organization 
willing to support G1G1 in India must commit to have 100,000 XOs in 
inventory for sales as requested by the G1G1 buyer. The other 100,000 
will be distributed to needy children in regions selected by OLPC India."

If you happen to have done your homework correctly you would notice, 
there has been plenty of debate on it in the past. Forget an 
organization, no country has
"ordered and received" as many XOs, not even close to it. A few 
countries pulled out of the OLPC pilots and moved to Intel Classmates or 
other low-cost laptops for the very same purpose. Since the rather now 
infamous statement from one gentleman about the OLPC initiative being 
that.. "it's an educational project and not a laptop project" doesn't 
seem to hold good anymore.

Have you got the stats on how far behind OLPC is on pending shipments or 
if they've even figured out how to replace broken hardware, or are they 
even thinking of tagging XO's anywhere close to the 100 USD figure 
sometime in the recent future, which to me sounds awfully far-fetched 
right now. Well, if it's all about the education, then I firmly believe 
no number should not be small enough for a pilot. They'd missed their 
mark on this before and various other manufactures seemed to have taken 
a good advantage off it, and now you seem to be following suit. Would 
suggest you re-think your strategies on that collaboration part.

Second mail excerpts:

Would it be possible to have a broader picture of how things that have 
been planned, right from selection of schools.. to deployments, 
monitoring of usage & progress reporting, networking and scalability. 
Does OLPC India, plan to raise funds for all deployments from just 
corporate houses, or is it willing to look for alternative sources from 
donors such as ITU/WFP/Unicef/Read Canada, Save the Children/ World 
Bank/ IT societies and foreign embassies and the likes.

How is the Govt planning to be involved, both the central and state 
entities. Since the XO is rather looked as an enabler for better 
education, are you also looking to tap into resources such as NCERT/CBSE 
for educational material or online libraries? I believe there are quite 
a few organizations like E-shiksha and others, that are already working 
on FOSS education material, are they planned to be packaged with the 
XO's. How do you plan on customization and localization from state to 
state? Do you also plan to have an integrated large scale network for 
sharing of resources and material.

I hope we get answers to question like these, before having to read them 
on news online.

Cheers,
-D-

Marc Valentin wrote:
> Hi,
> I didn't get this email from Satish Jha. Is it normal ? Is there some
> problem again with the indian list ? Or it was posted somewhere else ?
> About the content, I almost fell from my seat. As always in India,
> people think BIG but just see the facts. So far it took one year to
> import 500 machines and the organization is struggling to put just a
> simple wiki website online ! (Sorry Amit ;-) )
> By the way, we are still waiting to watch the record of the "OLPC
> India day" of august.
> -marc-
>
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:  
>
>   
>> Hi Satish,
>>
>> Some questions for you:
>>
>> 1) Can you describe what "undertake to support at least x%  of all
>> children" entails? Are we talking paying for the laptop, helping with
>> their education, etc?
>> 2) When you say localization, is this the language/script
>> implementation part or something else?
>> 3) Where do you see the volunteers fit in this picture? Many
>> volunteers on this project do not live in India.
>>
>> Sameer
>> --
>> Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
>> Associate Professor of Information Systems
>> San Francisco State University
>> San Francisco CA 94132 USA
>> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
>> http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
>> _______________________________________________
>> India mailing list
>> India at lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/india
>>
>>