OLPC Content Working Group

This is the Wiki for the Notes, Proceedings and Intellectual Gestalts/ Ruminations of the OLPC Content Working Group and its members.

Table of Contents [create here]:

OLPC Meeting Notes (30 Nov 06)

attending: Samuel Klein and Matthew Steven Carlos

• Identify Human Resource Hubs/Nodes for each Community/ Country (and the reasons these particular people are important to the success of OLPC). These include:

• • Kids
  • Artists
  • Storytellers
  • Teachers
  • Librarians
    • Christine Madsen (Open Collections Program, Manager @ Harvard University Library)
  • Non-profits
    • Cathy Casserly (Hewlett Foudation)
    • Mike Smith (Hewlett Foundation)

• • Global Academics
  • Scholars at Liberty (eg. McArthur Fellows)
    • Aaron Lansky (National Yiddish Book Center, Founder)

• • Other HR Nodes
    • Edward Tufte, specialist in visual representation of information/data (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/)

• What people/ organisations might help us identify and contact these HR Hubs:

• • United Nations
  • Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (http://www.hprt-cambridge.org/) (who have created tools for working with healthcare practitioners in developing nations). See their page on "Cultural Competence" http://www.hprt-cambridge.org/Layer3.asp?page_id=13
  • Area-Specialist Librarians at the Harvard Libraries
  • Poverty Lab at MIT
  • African Virtual University (http://www.avu.org/default.asp)
  • Widernet http://www.widernet.org/ See their eGranary project for distribution of library content over LANs http://www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/index.htm

• How do we present the mission and method to these various persons/institutions?

• When OLPC kids produce content, how is that content shared / uploaded (with both other OLPC communities and the industrialized world)?

• • OLPC/Partner Not-for-Profit manages a domain and content team ... blogs.laptop.org / podcasts.laptop.org ... that every/anyone recognizes as the first place to go for this content genre. Benefits of this initial approach for OLPC public relations (enumerate: ). What kinds of copyright will be employed by default? (include this as part of the briefing OLPC communities receive).

• How might OLPC communities download / access tremendous content repositories during brief/ sporadic (eg. satellite) internet connections?

• • Work (who?) with communities and content repositories (eg. NYTimes, BBC, etc) to craft downloadable packages of content, indexes of significant global content.

• Note not only what are the questions, but what are the values to inhere within the answers (eg. durability, timelessness, robustness).

• What stories might one tell children to help them teach others (children and adults) about this technology?

• • Communicate to the communities that the content they produce is valuable to the industrialized world. To to see how we are the same and different; to provide new paradigms for human interaction, as well as the uses of technology, etc.

• • Gather the OLPC stories about what did not go as planned during the research and initial implementation of the project (wrong, imperfect, etc) and find a way to combine them into one story OLPC might share with other organisations and the communities where this technology will be dispersed.

• • Acquire copyright for text (story) adventures.
  • Write story about writing these sort of text adventures.