User:Sethwoodworth/writingsample

An email about peer-production collaboration in health

Michael,

We had a conversation sometime last week when you were here at the OLPC office. I just wanted to touch base with you on continuing our conversation. I feel very strongly that a community of volunteers could provide a lot of value to your work and lower the cost to SEED to produce the materials.

Right now, OLPC has a team of professional tech writers who are taking a week of vacation as volunteers to write the manual for our laptop. It's a great example of volunteer contribution. So far the materials coming out of the documentation sprint are excellent. The total cost to OLPC has been minor. Less than $3000 total so-far.

The most likely contribution to your material will be imagery. The community of Creative Common's licensed images at Flickr are a great resource [1]. There are currently around 40 million images there, many of which are taken by professional photographers. There is also a project between the OLPC and Wiki-commons communities to improve the CDC's Public Health Image Library [2]. We are currently moving ~10,000 images from their site over to wiki-commons where they can be categorized, described, and ultimately searched in a far superior interface to the CDC's antiquated and awkward database system.

With the proper organization I could foresee volunteers expanding what you're doing entirely, by recording audio versions of your works, or distributing them in additional channels.

I would love to speak with you further about how massively distributed volunteering could assist in your projects.

All the best, Seth Woodworth

[1] http://flickr.com/creativecommons/ [2] http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/home.asp/

An email on local Cambridge/Harvard grassroots organization

Hello and welcome to OLPC. I met with a Harvard education student last night about:

a) a local school pilot for 1:1 computing here in Cambridge b) a student group at Harvard for fellow students interested in 1:1 computing in education

I'll put you in contact with Mel Chua, the person at OLPC that she was working with right now, and with the other student (who's name I didn't catch) when I get her email. But it sounds at this point the club is just waiting on signatures and the term to start.

In short there are plenty of opportunities for you here in Boston this year. In fact it is a pretty exciting time.

The local OLPC Boston group holds an Open Information Session at the MIT Museum from 1-4 on Saturday. They setup around 8 XO's, let people play with them, and tell people about OLPC's mission. Both Diane from the local group, and I will be there and likely your fellow Harvard student if everything goes to according to plan. If that works for you why don't you meet with us there?

All the best, Seth Woodworth seth @ laptop . org

Other samples

• A sample from my blog
• A sample from this wiki: Participate