[Olpc-uk] OLPC Meeting Summary

[michael_jordan50 at bigpond.com]

Good afternoon everyone,

As I am still in the process of preparaing the minutes from last weeks meeting I thought it worthwhile to update the entire mailing list on the topics covered, with the aim of fostering further discussion prior to the next meeting.

The following is a summary of the meeting and comments from attendees and non-attendees; expanding on the below points or raising new issues, opportunities and areas of interest is important.  I look forward to your comments.

Key Themes

1. OLPC UK - aiming to adheare where possible to the principles and ideals held by the OLPC organisation generally
2. OLPC UK to create and support education projects here in the UK; and in regions as identified in the future
3.  That the first step in the process is to run a pilot project here in London

The first aim of the meeting was to identify each of the sets of skills and resources that attenedees could bring to the table.  As I said in my email confirming the date for the Meeting on May 6, last week attracted excellent interested people with diverse skill sets which set the platform for a strong OLPC UK

We grouped into categories of skills / resources required each of the attendees and while each category had at least one person to develop it; we will need additional volunteers so if you have skills in one of the following then please let us know:

* Infrastructure and Installation
* Software and Application Design
* Curriculum and Content
* Organisation and Structure
* Marketing, PR and Communications

If you have skills in any of these; or in project management then do return an email to myself or the mailing list.

Ideas and Opportunities

* Pilot - more detail on this below
* Sugar Community - suggestions forthe development of such a community included a programming competition, a sugar and elearning based conference, and school science clubs
* PR Strategy - The discussion around this on the night was brief, however it is important for a variety of reasons and resources in this area will be vital to OLPC UK success
* Education Contacts - there is a need to work closely with the education department here in the UK to ensure all activity based in this part of the world meets the requirements of the education department -- developing contacts in this areas is obviously very important

Issues

* Content and Curriculum - one of the issues we will have to face is that eventually deployments of XO's will be impacted by content issues; hence the importance of developing a strong sugar community in the UK so we can contribute to content development
* XO Production and Delivery - something that has to be monitored and managed is the production timelines of XO's; which, as per Daniel's email recently, is struggling to output units in a timely fashion.
* Tech Coummunity - one of the issues raised is the perception that OLPC is alreaddy a failure; with 750,000 laptops in third world nations it is far from a failure and getting that message across will be vital to our success in the UK

Pilot

Full details on the pilot will be available at the next meeting.  In summary though, Warren Pimm has been able to arrange:

1) School - a willing headmaster and teachers to pilot the laptop
2) Funding - while the final source is still to be confirmed I believe there was one option defiinitely available to fund the pilot

Still to be done:

1) Curriculum: investigations into the current available content and how that may be adapted to the curriculum need to happen.

It is an exciting opportunity and thank you to Warren for his hard work in that area.  The success of this pilot is vital for the OLPC UK cause, as it will give us a strong example of what can be achieved using the XO and leverage for future projects.

Finally

Everyone with the thoughts, other ideas and issues they think need to be raised please reply to the mailing list.  It would be fantastic to thrash out much of the detail on different thoughts prior to the May 6 meeting to give us a strong base for discussions on that night.

Thank you and regards,

Michael Jordan
07 8814 64213