Support meetings/20080127
Sunday Jan 27, 2008
(4-6pm EST)
About 20 attendees (mostly community support volunteers) including at least:
- Chih-yu Chao (Massachusetts)
- Aaron Konstam (Texas)
- Manu Gupta (1CC, India)
- Steve Holton (North Carolina)
- David Aquilina (North Carolina)
- Guynn Prince (North Carolina)
- Kurt Maier (Tennessee)
- Ian Daniher (Ohio)
- Chuck Schwartz (New York)
- Caryl Bigenho (Southern California)
- Phil Bordelon (Louisiana)
- Mike Burns (NYC, Oregon State University)
- Thomas Tuttle (Pennsylvania)
- FFM (Virginia)
- Sandy Culver (Massachusetts)
- Greg Babbin (1CC, New Hampshire)
- SJ Klein (1CC)
- Kim Quirk (Massachusetts)
- Adam Holt (1CC)
- Mel Chua (Chicago, on IRC)
Guest Speaker Manusheel Gupta
- OLPC technical consultant & advisor Manusheel Gupta, visiting from India, and dedicated to OLPC since June 2006, mentioned:
- XO keyboards he helped develop (EG. languages like Hindi, Marathi & Nepali)
- Activities he helped develop (Read, Paint, Spreadsheet is forthcoming!)
- The OLPC India Foundation, helping with the India Pilot deployment, and many other things.
- "XOs for Entrepreneurship," a paper he's writing for publication, which will touch on Social Entrepreneurship.
4+ areas he's exploring:
1) expanded design...paint can be used for textile design. He wrote the software. Wants to scale it up so it can be used for textile design by the rural community. Wants to be able to use a printmaking function (?). Add certain prints eg. grass, as effects that could be used to "paint" or draw over the surface. Can reduce the effort needed to make designs. Children are working in these designs (10-12 years old). Rural communities need a faster process for making new designs. Designs are applied by hand...painting or embroidery. Way beyond Clip Art!
2) Micro-finance...programs for loans and sharing resources. Wants an application to help. Spreadsheet app could help with this.
- Perhaps http://www.kiva.org might be persuaded to help develop this software, or share advice, experiences, and code? Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
3) Supply chain and logistics....rural communities make and distribute lunch boxes. Can reduce energy used to communicate in farmlands. Food processing industry growing. Needs a model to help with logistics. XO could do this. Use XO as a model of how this could be done.
4) Find out the "best deals" in a community. Fertilizers, tractors, selling produce not only for farmers but for people who are purchasing the products. Can get data. Needs an activity to enter the data in. Could also work for travelers. Help then find things in an area.
5) Using XOs for adults in general, exploring that
- Is this for adults who are the parents of children with XOs, "standalone" adults, or both? Regardless of which, I'm interested. Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
In Thailand pilot projects working on photographing mushrooms. Getting some good photos. May encourage careers in photography.
OLPC for health. Looking for applications. Important for rural communities.
Children are involved in most of the above activities.
Cellphone availability in rural India sometimes runs as high as 1 cellphone per person! Wants to develop stand-alone activity that can also be used with a cellphone.
- UNICEF is developing some cellphone-based tools that would be interesting to pair with use of an XO. It's all open source, of course - primarily geared towards work in the Philippines, but this discussion should definitely be opened up and continued. Manu and others interested, please contact me and I'll pass you on to the UNICEF folks. Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
Q: What is happening with India project? A: Has become a part of the curriculum but is not required We asked: 1) Do activities on XO meet need of children? Yes 2) How can XO be used to solve problems in the community? Improving attendance and participation.
- Other things brought up on chat during/post meeting: There's been talk about grassroots gruops in India, nucleating more of them in general, and connecting the ones that do exist (I believe it was SJ who mentioned this during a Content meeting on IRC). From Manu's perspective - or anyone else's - what grassroots encouragement and infrastructure exist in India? Is there cohesion? Is there a need here someone needs to fill? Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
Yani Galanis
2) Possible Guest Speaker #2: core developer Yianni / Giannis / Yani Galanis, visiting from Greece, may talk about his wireless networking work.
Yianni did not make it -- hopefully he'll join us in a future week.
Introductions
3) Introductions, Fast! Can we get more Canadian volunteers?
Please fill in your name above if you attended!
Billing and shipping
4) Billing and Shipping - Peer2Peer exchange/gifting/parts/refunds network?
Shipping update from Kim, Adam, Sandy, Steve and Greg: about 5000 machines shipping as we speak, entering Fedex especially last Friday, and this coming Mon & Tues. Many if not most of these people will receive their XOs end of this week. The rest will generally arrive in donors hands much later. An email in the coming days from someone like Walter will break the bad news, explaining the delay to the thousands of people whose orders have been delayed, and explaining what they can do.
Better News: significantly improved per-order info from Patriot coming early in the week. Including much-improved order tracker at laptopgiving.org possible as early as Monday afternoon. Donors will need their 10-digit order/confirmation number, or original email address, EG. if donor only has their Paypal confirmation number etc. Shipping addresses continue to be resolved via new 800 number etc, where substantial progress has been made in the last week, but sometimes email addresses get caught spam filters etc.
Also: spreadsheet for tracking down these folks already in RT will help.
Reminder: Peoples' shipments are (roughly) prioritized by order date for shipping, but issues like bad addresses obviously change the order.
Also shipping delays are exacerbating the situation -- parts shortages.
People upset over an undelivered machine's delay will be able to get refunds, both partial refunds on the "get" machine if they no longer want it, or a complete refund if they also want to cancel their machine going overseas. The new call center's workers are getting more training here quickly to prepare.
T-Mobile: can get PIN number from the reference number. See RTFM # 17. If users have machine and can't find their reference number, they can call Donor Services to get that number or email a help ticket to us with their serial number (CSNxxxxxxxx) which is on the machine (not the battery) as well as their originating email for purchasing the XO.
Un-deliverables are returned by Fedex to Brightstar, who generate an RMA number for them. Addresses must be fixed via Donor Services, or we can try to help.
Would like a teamwiki page to have copies of the emails that are going out to folks. Mchua is collecting, please email out any donor emails you've found to her with "LATE DONOR MESSAGE" in the subject line for easier filtering. Can we also have some call center scripts on the team wiki? Will work on it and decide tomorrow with Walter.
5) RMAs and Fedex prepaid labels.
Donors who mistakenly received a 2nd laptop should receive prepaid Fedex shipping labels very soon...this week. There is a standard RMA# if donors want to pay for shipping immediately. But really most should wait for the prepaid labels we are sending out. See RTFM #53
(Clarification: when returning faulty machines for repair or replacement donors always have to pay their own shipping to Brightstar's Libertyville, IL facility)
An email with a lot more questions about shipping and billing was sent to the support-gang list post-meeting.
Open talk - developer program
6) All Volunteers Speak Their Minds -- what was YOUR toughest challenge this week? What does the OLPC Foundation owe you in return?
Developer Program computers...wait in line behind G1G1. Spare parts program idea is to use to fix "broken" (true RMAs) computers. Might these be used to get computers into the Developers Program? People applying for developers program should post what they plan to do on the content section of the wiki. 90% of development can be done in emulation mode.
Zine
7) Weekly Zine Update from Seth & SJ Etc: Weekly zine and Talk:Weekly zine
Hard to encourage folks to post stuff to the wiki for the Zine. Has posted a formatted outline for articles to help them.
Social cartography
8) Vesna/Holt/Etc Discussion on "Social Cartography" and how the almost 60 of us here can each get to know each other Much Better, to know who to Go To, to learn every day how to solve tickets more efficiently.
Holt is beginning to post "resumes" of each new support volunteer to our private list among all ~60 of us, so we can get to know each other better. Vesna should update us on her progress in the coming week.
- I'd love to start seeing those "resumes" go up on people's talk pages, either on public wiki or teamwiki (or both - I probably won't share my address on public, but would be fine with it on team, personally). Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
Repair centers
9) Repair Center and parts update: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair
Kim and Adam just want justification (explanation) of what proposed repair centers will do before they send out RMA'd XOs to a "center." We don't want to send out inventory to a center without a "plan." Need to put a plan together to set up the centers and decide what we really want to do. Need to start with the right space, plan, equipment, and people! Please help formulate such plans -- eg. Steve Holton wonders if a deposit program might help, for community repair centers that need machines fast?
Hundreds of RMA'd XOs should be available as parts machines to community repair centers, even if the cost & details haven't all been worked out. Also 70-100 B4's are still available at 1CC if anybody at all wants to apply for the Developer Program. In future the Developers program should distribute up to 250 XOs per month out of Brightstar's Libertyville, IL facility.
An after-meeting was held two hours later with support-gangers (primarily DyDisMe, nlee, kfx, sph0lton, and mchua) filling in yet more of the repair center model possibilities. Notes on teamwiki (hoping to move to publicwiki soon).
Documentation
10) Documentation Progress Report: update from Kate or anyone else interested! Which audiences are we addressing today? Tomorrow??
People in Austria working on some.
- mburns and I talked to openusability folks and ended up with some excellent suggestions ("Font contrast, esp. in translations bar" and "instead of using your mainpage as an info dump, use it as a portal for different areas of interest" were the two most helpful, imo - along with examples of very well-designed sites by similar organizations) and a draft redesign thanks to Jordan. Taking this forward. Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
- I'm also tackling documentation as furiously as possible; feel free to request wiki page cleanups and redesigns via my talk page. Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
QA
11) QA Update from Kim, Chih-yu and Adric
Since B4 machines, the MP (mass-produced) have changes on the motherboard to support better battery life, sleeping etc,. Generally everything's the same except it will not go into suspend/resume.
See Testing if you'd like to help! --Chihyu 01:57, 28 January 2008 (EST)
- I'm tackling testing documentation in particular this week. Also, there is a group in Palos Hills, IL which is getting together and wants to focus mostly on contributing to testing; it will probably be a few weeks before they're fully ready (school is still getting back in gear) to sink their teeth into some big projects, but Chih-yu and other test-types should contact Larry from MVCC. Mchua 22:39, 27 January 2008 (EST)
Others
12) Call center & phone training update from MOG?
Preparations delayed, partly due to shipping snafus and ongoing IT issues no doubt :)
13) Skating & Brewing Party with Kate delayed til approx Feb 8 - 10! BE THERE!!!
14) Thanks to Caryl Bigenho for helping with these minutes as always!