[OLPC-Chicago] Chicago-IL summer nucleation group

[Langellier, Larry]

> > Steve Mastej and I are traveling to Springfield, IL tomorrow to attend a legislative committee hearing on a proposed new bill titled "Children's Low-cost Laptop Act". We'll report back afterwards on what we hear there...
> >
> How did it go?

The trip went great! The "Children's Low-cost Laptop Act" passed out of the Computer Technology Committee by a 6-0 vote today and the bill will now move to the full Illinois House for debate and hopefully eventually a favorable vote. From there, it would move to the Senate for the same process. You can view the full text of the proposed bill at http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=09500HB5000ham002&SessionID=51&GA=95&DocTypeID=HB&DocNum=5000&print=true. Also, you can follow the bill's progress at http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=5000&GAID=9&GA=95&DocTypeID=HB&LegID=35963&SessionID=51.

Now would be the time to contact your Illinois State Representative and voice your support of this bill! Tell friends about it - up to $100 million to outfit up to 300 pilot classrooms.

In addition to the bill passing the committee vote, a couple more highlights were that we helped Ryan Croke, Policy Advisor to Lt. Governor Quinn, fix a broken screen on an XO that they have. We had Ryan do the bulk of the work and he had it fixed within 10 minutes. His comment was "WOW"! ;-) This is the first laptop officially fixed by the MVCC XO Center. Hopefully Adam won't mind that we left one of the screens from the broken laptops with them... :-) We also got to meet with Lt. Governor Quinn for 15-20 minutes. He is a HUGE advocate of OLPC and he dreams of every child in Illinois having a laptop.

> > I have attached the draft of a proposal that details an OLPC/XO Support Center that would service individuals, schools, and grassroots efforts in the Moraine Valley Community College district. This proposal was sent to the Dean of Science, Business and Computer Technology, the Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Moraine Valley's College President here at MVCC today. Any feedback that any of you would be willing to share would be appreciated!
> >
> Is this proposal something that would be ok to publicly post on the
> wiki, perhaps with large amounts of {{draft}} tags?

You are welcome to post any/all of this info to the wiki. I keep meaning to update the MVCC wiki page and OLPC_Chicago mentions of the MVCC chapter, but if anyone else gets a chance to post this info the help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

It has been a productive week. We still intend to roll out a Repair Center proposal by the end of the weekend.

Larry