Community liaison

Discussion (mainly from C. Scott on the grassroots mailing list, iirc) on what kinds of community facilitation tasks a community liason(s) might take on.

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.
• Facilitating travel to allow different groups to interact: having 1cc developers give talks at local OLPC groups and vice-versa.
• Presentation materials/flyers/etc encouragement and collection for people who want to promote OLPC

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