[OLPC-Philippines] OLPC-Philippines Digest, Vol 10, Issue 6

[Mel Chua]

> don't we have direct contacts with MIT/OLPC main ba?

Well, yes - but grassroots groups and efforts are *the* thing that makes 
deployments happen (Jerome is absolutely right

>> to your local community to create awareness. The biggest thing that
>> impedes people from going further is laptop availability. For
>> grassroots efforts to continue, this is a necessity. It is ironic as a

One thing that helps tremendously is a detailed proposal for how many 
laptops you will need and why, who will deploy/support them, how they 
will be used, and so on. A lot of effort is going into the large 
government-sponsored country deployments right now so there is no 
"official" route for smaller groups to purchase machines, but 1cc (the 
OLPC office in Boston) knows that smaller pilots need XOs as well. If 
you can convince them that you have everything in place except the XOs 
(there is no official support or teacher training package, so we would 
have to make our own), they're pretty flexible and willing to work 
something out.

There is another upcoming G1G1, so for a small pilot, individual 
machines can be obtained for ~USD $400 each this way. (You may have to 
ask a friend in the US to have it shipped to their address, and then put 
a bunch of XOs in a balikbayan box.)

>> initiatives. The second one I believe, is having a legal identity for
>> such an effort to be taken seriously by stakeholders.

OLPC Nepal might have some good thoughts on this.

-Mel

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mchua