On Dec 29, 2007 3:12 AM, Nicole Lee <<a href="mailto:nicole.lee@students.olin.edu">nicole.lee@students.olin.edu</a>> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
the G1G1 program is a huge strain on the people directly involved in the project, though. there are a lot of benefits, such as the number of enthusiastic people brought into the project, eager to get cracking and help out.
</blockquote><div><br>Would a more limited program be beneficial?<br><br>Apple has long run a special program available only to educators, offering a discount on products headed into an educational setting. I'd propose a similar system for OLPC to limit the scope:
<br><br>* Make XO's available only to <b>educational institutions</b> (public schools, private schools, homeschools); at a rate no greater than 1 XO per student per year.<br>* Maintain an at-cost (or at-G1G1-cost) volunteer-run spares shop to ensure broken XO's make it back to the developers for feedback and customers aren't locked-out by a hardware failure.
<br><br>This pulls OLPC completely out of the commercial market. <br>Re-focuses OLPC onto the educational mission. <br>Greatly limits the size of the OLPC deployments to be managed. <br>Targets all of the deployment efforts into the kinds of channels OLPC wants to support; largish deployments to educational settings where a single coordinator team is already in place.
<br>Builds competency and infrastructure in support of those deployments. <br>School administrators would act as the 'support firewall' (aggregating and answering questions) as well as the on-site evangelistic sales staff.
<br></div></div>-- <br>Steve Holton<br><a href="mailto:sph0lt0n@gmail.com">sph0lt0n@gmail.com</a>