User:Mchua/Braindumps/Chicago office/Charter thoughts - Mel

So, "OLPC Chicago Grassroots Office" may be a misnomer.

First: we should not only be about Chicago. There's a whole state out there - a whole world, really - of kids whose worlds we can help to open. Let's not forget that there are excellent hackers in the south, that we should reach out and hold events throughout the suburbs as much as we should in the metro areas, that the network of IL schools reaches far past the bounds of the commuter rail, and that the seat of our legislature (which I'm guessing some of the grassroots groups on this list will want to contact eventually) isn't in the gigantic hub up north, but in a bustling hive of activity in the middle of the state.

Second: we should not just be about an office. In fact, we may not need a physical office, and I'm leaning towards not wanting one. It's probably more accurate to say that we're a regional nucleation group, and that our charter is (or should be) not to get a big monolithic lump of bureaucracy downtown, but to do things in order to help other grassroots groups in the area thrive, with a sunset clause set firmly for the end of August.

Think of the nucleation group as a team of full-time pro-bono OLPC consultants with various areas of expertise and ongoing projects of our own - consultants you can call on all summer to help with your OLPC-related groups, projects, events, and more. (We'd appreciate couch crash-space and calories if you keep us on-site for more than 24 hours, though.) We're here to build tools, resources, networks, contacts, and provide occasional catalytic kicks. But we're ultimately here for the summer so that by the end of the summer, you'll all know more than we will about everything - if we're successful, by the end of summer, the nucleation group will have rendered itself unnecessary and obsolete.

In the words of a far wiser person than I, "We're in business to put ourselves out of business." It's not that we don't want to stick around, but that since "what's needed" is an open question and the answer is in flux, I'm deliberately trying not to build up long-term infrastructure under the nucleation group. I want to avoid an XO monoculture, especially in these crucial starting months when nobody knows what's going to happen or what works. Since we want to seed lots of independent, diverse options and let best practices emerge, I want to put an explicit sunset clause of end-of-August on the nucleation group and use that date as a target for "how many crazy different OLPC grassroots experiments can we run within that time?" and then step back as a community mid-summer and see where we are and where our individual, collaborative, and collective efforts might go next once the sun sets on IL Nucleation Group V.1.0. (Who knows? It could always rise again.)

So, to recap: Nucleation group, here in Chicago this summer to help you get your groups and projects to the next level, encourage experimentation, and seed/start/make many local grassroots groups (yours!) stronger. If we do our job well, we'll be obsolete before September.

(3) Semi-obligatory disclaimer, or: wherein Mel explains the roughness of this email and the page it links to.

Yes, this email is rough. The links embedded therein are also rough. (They're on a wiki. Please edit/comment either here in the list or there on the page, as you prefer.)

This is deliberate. I'm trying to keep "office" operations as transparent as possible from the beginning so that there won't be anything anyone will need to keep in the strictest confidence, so that everyone knows and can chime in on what's going on, and so we're all encouraged to share ideas even if they're not completely worked-out (the important part is to get them to the point other people can do something with them). We're coming out this summer for *you folks*, after all. But that's part of the point, really - that the world is open-source and hackable, and that we can all contribute patches to improve it without having to be approved by some arbitrary Rubber Stamp of Authority first.

There is no "secret information" on the office that hasn't yet been released - well, almost nearly none, and the part that hasn't been thrown open all deals with finances of individuals (mostly mine). A lot of things are in flux and will be settled out over the next several days, and I'm trying to keep the discourse flowing so we can have the full benefit of all the brilliant minds on this list hitting these ideas; I believe that the open-source development axiom "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" applies equally to software development and infrastructure development.

I want to make it really clear that the trio of full-time staff (so far; we may have up to 5) aren't any more special or official than all of you in any way. We aren't employees of OLPC-the-nonprofit, we aren't stamped with the Official Seal of The Almighty, we're just extremely active volunteers who've been around long enough to believe that what we're doing is good enough that we're setting aside a summer (or longer, in some cases) to work on this full-time, currently without pay, to help out grassroots groups in what we consider to be a crucial spot with lots of potential and spectacular people to work with - and in my case, at least, to give back to a place that I call home.

(NB: We're not the only ones crazy enough to do this. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bernie_Innocenti_interview - and yes, we're applying for grants and trying to break even.)

That having been said, things can't remain in flux forever. They need to move into implementation at some point - and when major final decisions are made (program dates, office location, etc), they'll be announced out on this list for sure. But having a rich body of discussion and information to draw from when we do make those decisions will be immensely valuable, and enable the community to anticipate, better understand, and steer in the helpful-hat direction many of the things the nucleation group will be doing. So please, please, do speak up - and thanks to everybody who's written in so far!