[OLPC India] moving forward..awareness..

[Satish Jha OLPC]

>
>  Apart from numbers, OLPC in India, as well as places like San Francisco, needs
> good awareness.
>

Sameer,

Thanks so much for a very thoughtful email.
I am with you on awareness. In India as well, people know more about
Nicholas Negroponte and the $100 laptop than OLPC per se. That has to change
and we are creating plans to reach out. (That's almost as true in the US. At
a conference in SFO where I am on the Advisory Board, I found that the
VPs/EVPs of Genetech, Amgen, Bayer, Alcon and the likes did not know about
OLPC either! But they had some recollection of an MIT professor and some
laptop that may be good for Africa and had some solar power etc.. as distant
as that!) This despite it has received reasonable publicity..

So our work is cut out.. We need every journalist who professes interest in
development to write about it. Everyone we can reach, we must. Every
corporation we all can ask to contribute towards it, we must and make it a
movement.. Its not just an educational laptop.. Its vaccination against
falling behind of a whole nation..


>  It is after all some form of marketing. There is an incredible amount of
> misdirection in people's minds which needs to be cleared. I am currently in
> Jamaica, doing a series of presentations on Free software and OLPC and its
> very obvious as to how much the public at large is misled by the media about
> the true merits of this endeavor. I will be in India in mid-October and
> intend to do the same at some campuses. Any pointers would be great!
>

Please do let me know your plans and I will be glad to have you meet as many
groups as you may be ready to meet.. We can have a presentation on the
possibilities with XO, for selling it to corporations, CSRs, foundations,
academic audiences, policy makers and wherever we can generate goodwill and
you can take it there..if you do have time and relationships to share it
with..

Thanks and best

>
>
>
>  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/
>



-- 
-- Satish Jha
T: 301 841 7422
F: 301 560 4909
IN: +91 98 75 68 39 50
www.laptop.org
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