[OLPC-Peru] OLPC Peru Experience part 2 + Conference today at the USM

[Sebastian Silva]

(pardon quick spanish pointer)
AMIGOS, Ivan me informó hoy que se hará una conferencia en la USM.
Los detalles en http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac/blog/conferencia_bitfrost
(back to regular programming)

Hello OLPC team, volunteers and friends.

I will try to make this edition a bit shorter as there is lots to cover.

On tuesday,
I went over to the FLISOL organization meeting and met several people 
related to local free software and linux enthusiasts. It was decided 
that this year, FLISOL Peru [1] is going to have a theme: Free Software 
in Education. The event is scheduled for 26th of april, is nation wide, 
and is maybe the biggest event related to Free Software here in Peru.

[1] http://peru.flisol.net/

On wednesday morning I paid a visit to the ministerio. I met Hernan 
Pachas [2], who is the technical lead in the deployment project here. 
He's also Director of LPI certifications.

[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/HernanPachas

I approached Hernan as a volunteer working on OLPC offering to help 
coordinate communcations for community assistance with deployment. He 
said he was not in a position to reveal any details about the 
implementation and requested details about what voluntary force was 
available. We discussed community communications briefly and the need to 
involve the community further - and he said we should discuss such 
matters online, and politely invited me out.

I was leaving - a bit dishearted because I thought I went over to pick 
up my XO that Walter was bringing. As I was about to go out, I 
recognized Walter Bender, who was just about to go into a meeting, we 
said hello very briefly, but did not manage to give me the XO. Hernan 
said taking it out the front gate [3] would be a problem, as I had not 
registered my entry with it.

[3] http://radian.org/notebook/serious-business

Hernan said I could return the next day.

I sent a call for participation to several local mailing lists and have 
several interesting replies that need my processing.

In the evening on IRC, Hernan pinged me to add that the ministery's 
position was that they would currently not be working with any 
volunteers - only directly with OLPC Foundation.

Today was a better day.

I had breakfast with Walter (thank you walter!), who gave me my precious 
little XO B4. We had a good opportunity to discuss how we can engage the 
local community in a meaningful way. It seem's we'll be facing some 
challenges wrt communications and server availability.
Some of the locations are very isolated and there's no plan for them to 
have a link at this stage. This is going to make remote online support a 
bit more difficult, as a means for communication will probably involve 
portable flash media and regular visits. Maybe we should take a look at 
[4] - I think an open implementation exists already. Might we bring back 
UUCP?

[4] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

Walter eased some of my concerns regarding the lack of a publicly 
available plan of
deployment. Fact is the laptops are arriving by the end of this month 
and then deployment will begin. It is starting this point that volunteer 
input will become critical, which is why we need to start preparing for 
this.
   I'd like to request that aliases for voluntarios at laptop and 
ayuda at laptop be made - this is basic in providing an internationalized 
entry point for requests tickets. You decide if they should have 
separate RT queues or not.
   After this meeting, it was not necessary to visit the Mistery of 
Education again, I just went back to my house and started tinkering!

A day at the beach.

That's all for now, must get some sleep.
I'm administering http://www.fuentelibre.org/ as a platform website for 
coordinating local independent efforts - but I want to make it clear 
that I dont want to segregate users off of the official wiki or get 
people into my blog - this is merely a tool for communcation and 
coordination.

I'm using OpenID for authentication - I think this is making it look 
complex to participate - so I may have to write a short step by step 
guide to getting an OpenID account. It would be so nice if we had OpenID 
accross our systems - maybe even the children will find it easier - 
OpenID is a natural fit for Bitfrost.

One battle at a time.

Have a wonderful fri-day.

Sebastian
OLPC Volunteer