[Server-devel] Collaboration between schools

[info at olpc-peru.info]

I would love to hear what are those "economic reasons".  I am sure that 
most of you know that if they are
connecting to the Internet then the "big" cost is paid.  The rest are 
peanuts.  So... what are those "economic reasons" to
don't allow collaboration between schools?  Today "economic reasons"... 
don't get surprise when you hear new
and different rationalizations.

Collaboration between schools would mean total communication between them.

You need to understand what is an UGEL (UGEL = administrative unit in 
charge of many schools in what you would call a "county")
... Every UGEL in Peru feels they are "owners" of this or that 
territory.  If the schools (teachers and pupils)
join then they are "going further" than the UGEL borders.  This, in the 
eyes of UGEL authorities, is not seen as a good control policy
(control in all aspects that you can imagine). 

Are the XOs property of the children? Yes? Then I shut my big mouth.
Not? Then we (you, me, all) need to think that this "no communication" 
between schools is just the tip
of the iceberg.

We need to think in different ways to "force" (friendly) the 
collaboration and bring down the walls that
every small (or big) educative authority "needs" to put over what they 
think they control (the XOs, the project, etc.)

Best regards,

Javier Rodriguez
Lima, Peru


C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 6:28 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>   
>>  I learned more about the network built by the MED in Peru for their
>>  schools.   Each school is in its own VLAN, and cannot route to the
>>  other schools, only to the Internet and to MED servers.
>>
>>  They have good economic reasons for encouraging this, but
>>  it means that inter-school collaboration will have to happen
>>  through data pushed to an MED server (and won't be real-time
>>  activity collaboration).
>>     
>
> This is exactly why I wrote the
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_principles document.  We should tell
> Peru that their network infrastructure does not allow collaboration
> between schools, not feel compelled to solve their problems for them
> by engineering some fancy multihop proxy system to live on MED
> servers.  In the future, they can create tunnels through the MED
> servers if they wish to allow collaboration.
>  --scott
>
>