User:Sethwoodworth/Outquisition

TC with Seth and Jonathan and Tim: Overlap with programs in OLPC.

Wants to deploy content. Director of Content is a wikipedian. A lot of public health information.

Thinking about the postman. It's really the survivalists.

Appropedia : sustainable and appropriate technology wiki.

Content involving important knowledge for survivability: Ag/sanitation/personal health. Lots of materials out there. The Seed Project

Trying to find this material is ridiculously hard. Getting permissions to use it is even harder.

But there is an interest in collaboration if people think about it. Some of this is done really piecemeal. Lots of money going on in these fields and people are getting paid to translate this stuff.

Moving from language to language/format to format.

Jonathan: why this is something OLPC is doing particular.

Use the strong digital collab networks (egalitarian societies like FSF and wikipedia. Apply it to public health and sustainable tech).

Seth: what is outquisition? Jonathan: a lot of different initiatives under the umbrella. Working with an inventor. OLPC as a piece of the puzzle to get many people collaboriting on these sustainability systems.

How about the Fab lab. Connection. Seth: lots of talks. Basically the Arduino. About 10 dollars. Like an 8088 plus a sensor. Salvaaged from spare devices. For ex: how to change a vcr to make stuff. Success in the field-- kids really using the XO and an Arduino in interesting an innovative ways.

School in cambodia: logged temps in the school room. Then did tests and graphs to see what would be the best way to improve the temp at given times. Fans and evaporative cooling. Water over their metal roof.

Next plan: tiny reservoir. Model how they could do rice agriculture.

How to get people together? Jonathan: list of possible things. How to connect ppl with the skillset with a certain part of your portfolio? Seth: Sometimes. Best way is the million monkeys. Like Wikipedia. When they did the give one/get one, the help was all done by volunteers. Support email got a volunteer. Half an hour worth of training. Unlimited support que. Amazing folks showed up. Ph.d. from NJ, another guy who is a sysadmin on a volunteer basis. Interfaces that can be done in bite sized chunks. Social aspect. The support gang has a weekly support call and a mailing list.

Seth: See Outq as a venue for volunteers to take over pieces of the OLPC information dispersal.

CDC public health image library. 10k high resolution images of illustrative health things. Mechanism of malaria transmission etc. Entire DB is in the public domain. Just on the CDC site in a circa 1998 db with poor searching. No metadata. Poor searchability, no redunancy.

Scrape the info, put it on wiki commons. Duplicate to Archive.org

Hesperian documents: a non profit that produced a printed booklet called "where there are no doctors." 6 languages. Basic healthcare info. Simple language. PDFs are online, pretty big. Not best format. So OLPC has source files and design documents. But they need to put them on the web. Grainy. etc.

Seth wants it on a translatable format on a wiki.

What about backing up the public domain? Missile silo in Washington. 600 bucks a month for 1200 sq. ft. 3 hours out of seattle/2 hrs from spokane.