Community liaison

I'm trying to do as much of the community liason tasks C. Scott Ananian described over email, at least until mid-June when I leave 1cc for Chicago. Help is very welcome - I'm sure there are people far more qualified to do these things! Mchua 13:15, 22 May 2008 (EDT)

Ongoing duties

• monthly tech "mini-conferences" to present current work and wild ideas
• the same for deployments, to exchange success stories, challenges, and curricula
• organizing local OLPC chapters, with their own charges, projects, & focus. Providing resources to same: http://alabama.laptop.org could be a focus for OLPC volunteers in Alabama, for example. (See http://freesklyarov.org/local-howto.html for inspiration.)
• collecting and archiving talks and press releases for reference and to ensure broad distribution. (both 1cc-created content, and locally-created content)
• A more broadly-focused "community news", agressively seeking out and incorporating local as well as "offical OLPC" content
• coordinating blogging efforts: a weekdaily blog post by a different OLPC developer each day, say.
• coordinating news releases to community sources like OLPCNews as well as traditional press sources. Providing access to traditional press for noteworthly community work.
• To some degree involving local communities with local i18n and support work for pilots and deployments.
• Hosting regular "open houses", both at 1cc and at local OLPC groups.
• Faciliating travel to allow different groups to interact: having 1cc developers give talks at local OLPC groups and vice-versa.

Project ideas

• care & nourishment of the Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora packaging of Sugar
• maintaining a Sugar live cd and/or maintaining a one-click-install Windows emulator of Sugar for groups interesting in exploring Sugar or teacher training
• a research fork investigating gestures for Sugar
• a research group to tackle the best approaches for emulating keyboards on a touchscreen
• research projects in collaboration or mesh technologies (http://open80211s.org/ and http://wiki.funkfeuer.at/ are good focal points for such work)
• someone to revive/review alternate flash filesystems for the XO
• care & feeding of adobe flash bundles for the XO
• care and feeding of gnash on the XO (keeping us up to date, liasoning between community content and gnash developers)
• similar work for patent-encumbered codecs (helps if you're outside the US)
• care & feeding of Ogg and media on the XO (assembling good demos, optimizing encoder/decoder performance)
• a research group on sound/video editing for kids
• a research group to improve interoperability with non-Sugarized applications
• someone to investigate alternate window managers for Sugar
• someone to investigate Xinerama suport in Sugar, in anticipation of eventually running Sugar across two displays in Gen 2
• a research group developing software for school management (Uruguay demonstrated a very nice database application tracking kids, XOs, theft reports, and repair history, but they had it developed under contract and the result is closed source
• it would be nice to provide an OSS alternative for other deployments