[OLPC India] Technical volunteers for OLPC in and around Delhi

[Sameer Verma]

On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Saurabh Adhikari <adhikaris at hotmail.com>wrote:

>  Sameer,
>
> You may be living on dated information.
>
> I am a volunteer for OLPC India as well and understand that there is NO
> OFFICIAL relationship between OLPC India and Reliance and Digital
> Foundation.
>
> What you are talking about was done a year ago on the basis of laptops
> DONATED by OLPC to what seemed like the Reliance organization. Some of their
> employees volunteered for it.
>

> Khairat was led by Carla of OLPC and not the person you name, though I
> hear he did a good job of supporting it at some point in time. However,
> there is no connectivity at Khairat despite the reports of Reliance of
> having supported it.
>
>

Saurabh,

This is being plainly disingenuous. Carla simply did not show up at Mr.
Surve's school in Khairat with 30 laptops. Yes, Carla led the effort, but
there were plenty of others who made this happen as well. If possible,
please give credit where credit is due. If not, please do not discredit work
put in by folks at DBF and other volunteers.

While I do not wish to continue this dialogue beyond the constructive, here
are some photos of the team at DBF with David Cavallo, Nicholas Negroponte,
Harriet Vidyasagar, Amit Gogna, Sumit Chaudhary, and a whole bunch of
others, including Satish Jha. Clearly, this is not "seems like Reliance".
Its the real deal. You'll also see Mr. Surve, the teacher at Khairat and
their wonderful school.


>
> Also, Relaince did not seem to have put in any resources, did not buy any
> XOs and OLPC had to create a formal OLPC India organization (
> http://www.laptop.org/en/utility/people/satish-jha.html),  a fact that
> seemed to have escaped you, that has about couple dozen senior volunteers
> including Prajakt Raut (former Directo of TiE Asia, Nilu (a former no 2 of
> Spectramind), Kanchan Gupta (a former VOP of GE) and a dozen others equally
> senior folks.
>
>

As for official OLPC vs unofficial OLPC, I would invite you once again to
take a look at http://blog.laptop.org/exploring-sustainable-education/ There
are two entities. Uppercase "OLPC" is usually used to refer to the
non-profit company, One Laptop per Child, headquartered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, which we all fondly call 1CC (1 Cambridge Center).  This
unit, and its partners are the uppercase OLPC. However, there are several
lowercase "olpc" groups all over the world with little to no official
connection with 1CC, but are nuclei for volunteer activities. olpc mumbai
and pune are such groups. olpc-sf, the one that I belong to in San Francisco
is similar. None of us have official affilations with 1CC other than a
burning desire to make this project successful, come what may. I'll be very
honest with you and others on the list. My involvement in this project
really took off after witnessing children in Khairat. It is evidence of what
is possible, and it needs to be nurtured.

What needs to happen at this point and beyond is for uppercase and lowercase
to work toward one goal.


> The action is in a dozen new schools that you do not seem aware of. And
> various large scale deployments that are being planned.
>

This is indeed news to me. I looked at the OLPC India page and found a
paragraph about a Katha school and a link. Katha school sounds impressive.
If you have more information, please do post on this list and others. I
would suggest posting to the olpc grassroots list as well.


> Will you please let me know the list where real discussions are taking
> place?
>
>

http://groups.google.com/group/olpc-india


>
> Yes, we do need to build community. However, we need a large number of
> users as well. And we should all be hearing about that officially sometime
> sooner than later.
>

I sincerely hope so, although I'm not holding my breath.

cheers,
Sameer
-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/


>  Sincerely,
> S Adhikari
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>  .
>
> cheers,
> 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/
>
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