Hi Mel,<br><br>Great to know that you're around! <br><br>I'm currently in the Philippines and plan to be here for the long term. Just booked a trip to Boston from Feb 18 to Mar 18 to wrap up affairs there. A Cambridge meeting between these dates would be ideal as we may have some action items from the Jan 31 meeting. <br>
<br>Team: Just stumbled across Give Meaning. While we don't have a 501c3 organization, would we consider this option for fundraising?<br><a href="http://www.givemeaning.com/about/about">http://www.givemeaning.com/about/about</a><br>
<br>Let's discuss briefly on Saturday.<br><br>Cheers,<br>Sandeep<br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 8:53 PM, Mel Chua <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mel@melchua.com">mel@melchua.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I'd like to echo Bernie's earlier offer (<a href="http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-philippines/2009-January/000378.html" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-philippines/2009-January/000378.html</a>) 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."<br>
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Some of the folks on this list know me already, but: ako si <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mchua" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mchua</a>, 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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br><font color="#888888">
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--Mel<br>
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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. :)<br>
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