[OLPC-Philippines] Visiting fellow

[Mel Chua]

I'd like to echo Bernie's earlier offer 
(http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-philippines/2009-January/000378.html) 
with my own, since I'm once again a volunteer with plenty of Free Time 
on my hands, and would love to give something back to the country that 
my family considers "home."

Some of the folks on this list know me already, but: ako si 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mchua, OLPC's resident community jack of 
all trades (formally Deployment Support / QA Engineer / Content & 
Grassroots Intern at various points over the last few years). Bernie and 
I enjoy working together and have skill sets that complement each other; 
I do a lot of community work, documentation, reaching out to 
universities, training, starting feedback loops, etc. - basically 
"everything except development.") Instant team, just add planefare + 
housing.

If there's a deployment (or deployments) to work on, I'd be glad to 
advise remotely and/or to come out for 2-6 months to help build local 
capacity (volunteer recruitment, training, marketing, requirements 
analysis, and so on) and connecting grassroots efforts here more with 
the global network of contributors. Ultimately, I think this needs to be 
a local Filipino-run initiative; Bernie and I (and other international 
volunteers) would be coming in to help jump-start things. My main 
interest is in growing local educational and technical support 
communities around deployments as well as in spreading advice, results, 
and stories across the network of community deployments.

If this sounds interesting, I (or Bernie and I) can work with you to 
draw up a more detailed plan for deployments and/or what specific help 
we can provide.

--Mel

PS: I'm currently in Boston, still volunteering at the OLPC offices on 
occasion (and working on Sugar Labs as well) - so Sandeep, maybe you, 
me, Marty Cuyegkeng, and the grad students you mentioned should figure 
out how we can follow up on the meeting once notes are posted. :)