[OLPC-Philippines] Organization Formation

[Mel Chua]

Another alternative would be something like 
http://sugarlabs.org/go/Local_labs (note that multiple labs and chapters 
can coexist in the same place - there's no reason there has to be one 
and only one of these organizations for the entirety of the Philippines, 
especially if we're trying to cultivate as many grassroots leaders as 
possible!)

The Sugar Labs idea of Local Labs is still very much under construction, 
but it seems like the Philippines would be a great group to try out some 
of these ideas and be one of the pioneering groups that begin the 
definition of what Local Labs are and can become, if people here really 
want to be on the organizational bleeding-edge.

The big advantage I can see here is that it wouldn't give you the 
bottleneck of "we rely only on this hardware," but you could totally 
still begin by deploying XOs if that's your ideal situation. This would 
basically decouple your choice of hardware from your choice of software 
(Sugar also runs on multiple Linux distros) and give you more 
flexibility. (It does assume, however, that you want to use Sugar at 
least in part, which I realize might not be a given.)

I suppose one thing I'm trying to ask is what exactly is it that people 
here would like to go for - is it XO machines running Sugar in specific? 
1-to-1 open-source computing for k-12 education in general? Somewhere in 
between?

--Mel

> The problem with 1) is that OLPC becomes the single point of failure.
> If OLPC fails in the long term, the organization will have nothing to
> distribute at all. As for 2) it is much saner as the OLPC XO machine
> becomes a means to fulfill the goal, that is promote technology to
> education perhaps in various forms, like build software that
> corresponds to curriculum, education matching, etc. This is similar to
> what Waveplace does in the Caribbean (see http://waveplace.com/).