User:Nlee/Sandbox
Contents
Mel's ideas
- 0. Mel is hosed feel free to act and don't worry about
- Tank, are you going to be with us this summer?
- Do you need housing?
- Stipend?
- Any other equipment/requests/accomodations?
- What do you want to do?
- Funding
- We need it
- Stipends (Mel would like to pay people... and wouldn't mind breaking
- We need it
even herself, although that's far less important)
- Rent
- Van
- Class supplies
- Where can we get it?
- Josh Gay has offered help/contacts from Chicago-local FSF folks
- The person who writes grant proposals for IMSA has offered
mentorship, editing, and introductions to grant-granters, but says it's much easier to do this as a nonprofit (more on this in a sec)
- (Very Bad) Backup Plan: "Mel's Life Savings" (...as a buffer, while
grants/donations haven't come in yet)
- Legal structure
- Do we need it at all in the first place?
- Incorporate as nonprofit?
- Not necessarily now
- Tax deductible yay!
- Easier to get contributions/donations
- Especially if the low-cost laptop bill passes and this becomes a
statewide effort
- On the other hand, bureaucracy and paperwork sucks
- Mel would like to avoid it, but is torn b/c long-term planning is
good and it's not that big a deal to set up a nonprofit
- Nonprofit umbrella? see Software Freedom Conservancy' (SFC) and
'Software in the Public Interest' (SPI) and similar
- Should there be a nonprofit umbrella for OLPC grassroots groups in
the US in general, similar to one of the umbrella orgs above?
- Piggyback w/ existing nonprofit org?
- OLPC itself?
- a school? which?
- Piggyback w/ existing nonprofit org?
- Location
- Kathryn Satewicz introducing us to Boys and Girls clubs about renting
cheap/free office space for summer in exchange for teaching a mini-boot-camp at their location (win-win)
- Kevin Crews talking to his dad, who owns an office building, about
the possibility of free space for a few months
- Looking at Evanston-area tech incubators (problem: expensive.
solution: nicely-worded letter.)
- local companies/schools/libraries/orgs etc have offered their spaces
for meetups, but this is not a good long-term solution
- Still very in flux... need lots of help, ideas, advice
- biggest problem: what rent can we afford?
- Van/mobile office
- one of the biggest arguments for going nonprofit or under a nonprofit
umbrella (so an individual doesn't have to take personal responsibility/liability for a vehicle)
- yay craigslist - for less than $2k Mel can get a van from NYC or Boston
- also looking at used vans from rental car agencies
- ugly van + rustoleum ---> pretty van! (a-la ian bicking's car)
- Also saves us plane fare from Boston to Chicago
- contains: staff, XOs, XS, EE equipment, library
- goes: freakin' everywhere
- Supplies
- need XOs (asking for ~50), should look for a local pilot that wants
them and can pay for them and will loan them to us for the summer in exchange for setup help.
- should we start purchasing XOs off eBay? (Mel would rather not, at
that quantity)
- we have a lovely library, or the beginnings of one - kindly donated
by O'Reilly
- school server; Mel would like to have one, trying to persuade Chicago
people to work on one
- "hiring," quote-unquote
- do we need any legal status to be able to 'hire' interns, even unpaid
ones?
- if not, let's not do it
- if so, start paperwork now... or convince someone to let us be an
umbrella under them
- teh interwebs
- ilxo.org (name; less chicago-centric, there's a whole state out
there. we will be mostly in the chicago area though)
- chicagolpc.org - office (subset of ilxo; just an url)
- turtlemobile.org - van (subset of ilxo right now; just an url - if
successful could expand but not counting chickens atm)
Ok, that was the boring stuff. Now the more fun part:
- local support
- high!
- super-excited!
- holy cow were local people at PyCon psyched and really want to do this
- IMSA and MVCC going nuts with activity, plans for summer
- hosting Jam (MVCC) after Larry's 2-week programming class for teens
- off-grid power research (IMSA) and who knows what else
- people with contacts to legislators in IL left and right
- including ChiPy, PyCon people, programming book authors, CS teachers
willing to volunteer time and help teach and train at OLPC events (but not organize events themselves, at this time...)
- support from
- google (incl. at least one dev who wants this to be 20% time)
- chipy (many members, at least - will try to make this a little more
formal)
- imsa (institutionally - current president of imsa == former state
superintendent of education, and he's *insanely* cool and *loves* OLPC)
- mvcc (institutionally)
- students/profs from U of C, U of I, probably others
- members of the IL legislature (big fans!)
- many, many other companies, parents, hackers, students, etc. from the
area
- brightstar, presumably? at least they're nearby and they work with
olpc at the moment... no contact from the /hat{grassroots} direction though, yet - don't think we're comfy making that contact without "permission" from 1cc
- the low-cost laptop bill
- YAY!
- olpc-chicago list rocketing off on getting support in the legislature
- what can we do to help?
- activities
- personal projects (off-grid power, accessibility, ?)
- getting other projects started
- getting other grassroots groups started
- getting pilots started
- getting all of the above to be independent - explicit sunset clause
at end of april (people can restart/continue then if they wish, but we're setting up so other groups can become strong enough that we can go away and let them run themselves)
- boot camps - for students who want to start OLPC chapters in their
schools/communities
- local libraries offering to provide classroom space
- imsa-olpc student wants to intern and TA these classes; working out
details now, currently unpaid - so that could work out nicely
- relationships w/ other olpc stuff
- can we hang out and learn at 1cc first (possibly part of 2nd) week of
june? (pilot mini boot-camp)
- what do you want us to accomplish
- what makes a good grassroots group
- any restrictions/constraints or at least strong suggestions?
- what is the relationship between olpc the organization and olpc
grassroots groups?
- what resources does olpc have that we can take advantage of?
- meaning of life?
Summer
The general gist of this is to figure out what we're doing for the summer; completely undirected hopping around won't accomplish much. So, what are we up to?
People involved
Others:
- IMSA?
- Chicago grassroots people?
Purpose and projects
What is the function of a grassroots office? What are our goals? What should our goals be?
- continue working on repairs and hardware training
- XO hacking?
- repair jams?
- grassroots outreach
- local mentoring
- support of projects
Organization
What do we want? What do we need?
Timeline
uhm.
Other random notes
- meet Greg Smith and invite him to get involved with Olin chapter
- go through repair center meeting notes
