User:Nlee/Sandbox

Mel's ideas

meta

0. Mel is hosed feel free to act and don't worry about

people

Mel, Nlee, Tank, Chris Carrick.

Others: IMSA? Chicago grassroots people?

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

Stipends (Mel would like to pay people... and wouldn't mind breaking even herself, although that's far less important)

• Rent
• Van
• Class supplies

Sponsors

• 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?

• probably not just for the summer, but OLPC Chicago might consider setting up at least a bank account.

Incorporate as nonprofit?

• Not necessarily now
• Tax deductible yay!

  this really isn't as interesting as it seems

• Easier to get contributions/donations

  but not for small contributions, and it takes a year or so to take effect

• 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

My advice : work under an umbrella first, worry about incorporation and then nonprofit status later.

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?
• These are all good ideas. There are general nonprofit umbrellas.

Piggyback w/ existing nonprofit org?

• OLPC itself?
• a school? which?

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. 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 for the fun part:

local support is high!

• people are 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

• the low-cost laptop bill
  • YAY!
  • olpc-chicago list rocketing off on getting support in the legislature
  • what can we do to help?

• local support:
  • 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...)
  • 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

• 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

• Plan ahead of time : pilot mini boot-camp at 1cc first (possibly part of 2nd) week of june
  • 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 ideas

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?

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

Timeline

...

Other random notes

• meet Greg Smith and invite him to get involved with Olin chapter
• go through repair center meeting notes