<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:50 PM, Tabitha Roder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tabitha@tabitha.net.nz">tabitha@tabitha.net.nz</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi Tim<br><br>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). <br></blockquote><div><br>
</div><div>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 <i>illegal</i> 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. </div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">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? <br>
<br>Of all the options, I would suggest the biggest need is for support in the deployments in the Pacific. </blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">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. <br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Heheh, the idea as stated is "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; white-space: pre-wrap; ">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. </span></div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">USB sticks and mobile internet - show the sponsor the benefit and we can probably get those. <br><font color="#888888"> <br clear="all">
</font></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Ya, I think this is why I have this at the top of my list. It's discrete and greatly benefits our work.</div></div>