[olpc-nz] InternetNZ has $80k available for grants (400k/annum) & DIA's COGS has $14 million/annum we're eligible for

[Tim McNamara]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha at tabitha.net.nz>wrote:

> Hi Tim
>
> InternetNZ funding has been on my radar for a while, I have just been too
> busy to get onto applying. Same with registering some sort of legal
> olpc/Sugar entity (will get onto it).
>

Please don't 'do incorporation' without participation from the rest of the
group. There are many considerations about which form this will take, as
well as the alignment with Sugar Labs & OLPC in Boston. One consideration is
that if we are a registered charity in New Zealand, it will be *illegal* to
spend money overseas. This requires an amendment of an Act of Parliament for
every individual agency (no, it's not in a regulation).  I wrote an email
about this several weeks ago - no one responded.


> The question is indeed priorities, but more in terms of what are the aims
> of olpc-nz - testing community, activity maintenance, potential support
> centre for Pacific, translation and customisation for Pacific deployments,
> visiting the deployments and helping them technically as well as with the
> shift in pedagogy, NZ deployment in schools of Sugar or XOs?
>
> Of all the options, I would suggest the biggest need is for support in the
> deployments in the Pacific.


I'm fairly strongly against this as number 1 at this stage. From your list
above, I think that you have listed our activities in order of priority.

I would deepen & spread New Zealand's capability & capacity base in New
Zealand first. Otherwise we could become what Sugar Labs has - very few
volunteers taking on way too much. International development assistance has
its own channels & requires much more funding than several tens of thousands
of dollars.

I agree it's the biggest need. However, I am skeptical that taking on
responsibility for other countries' education systems is appropriate for a
dozen or so fairly well-off, well-meaning individuals that have no
experience providing development assistance. There are many agencies working
overseas that have failed with this thinking.


> A cheaper and likely better solution, but one more difficult to sell, would
> be funding for volunteers to travel to interested schools or give workshops
> at Education conferences. This would get technical volunteers interacting
> with real life educators (good timing wise - for example, the current talk
> of a Sugar workshop at ULearn in Christchurch in October which is attended
> by about two thousand people in education) which I think is important, given
> currently most of the NZ volunteers are not educators.
>

Heheh, the idea as stated is "Cash for travel & expenses to conferences,
teacher training". Our thinking is completely aligned here. I think this
will be an easy sell. As a rule, our members have technology-focused
experience, not professional development / sales experience.


> USB sticks and mobile internet - show the sponsor the benefit and we can
> probably get those.
>
>

Ya, I think this is why I have this at the top of my list. It's discrete and
greatly benefits our work.
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