Contributing content

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The One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) is looking for quality educational content and learning software to spread to children around the world. Some of these tools and materials will be included on the XO laptops, some will be made available on local school servers, and some will be made available online.

Content ideas

OLPC is extending a call for content creators, publishers, and archivists to suggest educational material for inclusion in our digital library network. We are particularly interested in materials that are designed for children and teachers; designed for ease of localization, customization, and other reuse; available in many languages; and available under a free content license. Materials can include the following.

• Texts – stories and poems; textbooks, workbooks, how-tos and lab manuals;
• Reference works – encyclopedias, dictionaries, maps and atlases;
• Images – symbols and fonts, blueprints, sketches, photographs and art;
• Multimedia content – animations, audio books, songs and audio recordings, videos;
• Software – games, tools, scripts, simulations, self-assessments and interactive tools

Copyright

All material installed on the laptops will be available under a free license, such as the GNU General Public License, GFDL, or the Creative Commons Attribution or Attribution/Share-alike licenses (The Creative Commons No-derivatives and Non-commercial licenses are too restrictive and should not be used). The full list is: gpl, gfdl, cc-by, and cc-by-sa, public domain and equivalents, mit, bsd, and cc-noattrib. Materials under other Free licenses may be included in school and regional libraries, but only in extreme cases.

We should be primarily about contributing to the public domain, from every region and culture. We waste too much time talking about licenses, when these discussions are in many cases diametrically opposed to sharing. Collaboration is about process and community and mutual respect, not about rights and law and anxiety.

How to license your work

The recommended licences are Public Domain for text and other media, and GPL for code. See the Licenses page for more information.

How to contribute

• Suggest an idea for content that could be included on the XO by adding your idea directly to the educational content ideas page, the software ideas page, or the hardware ideas page.
• Learn more about developing content for OLPC by joining one of our mailing lists. (The library and devel lists are good places to start.)
• Apply for project hosting by filling out a project hosting application.
• Test your content directly on an XO by running an emulator on your own computer or applying to our contributors' program.

Submitting your content to OLPC

OLPC is always looking to expand our content repository and software collection. If you have material that you would like to submit to OLPC, please review the following information.

Formatting your content

Content submitted should be available in file formats that support the OLPC goals. In particular, they must be unencumbered formats (not requiring patent licensing or other restrictions), and they must take relatively little space (so compressed formats are valuable).

Document formats like HTML, PDF, DJVU and OpenDocument are encouraged. In particular, DJVU allows existing paper books to be scanned into an efficient storage format so they can be used as e-books.

See Image file formats for more about image formats, such as PNG and SVG. See Data file formats for other supported formats, such as Ogg for audio.

Submitting your content

• If you are submitting a single file (a poem, an image, a movie, a song, etc.), you can upload your file directly to the wiki. Then, you can add a link to your file to the list of content by type or the list of content by subject area.

• If you are submitting a collection of files (a website, a textbook, an image archive, etc.) that is already online, you can add a link to your collection to the list of content by type or the list of content by subject area.

• If you are submitting a collection of files that is not yet publically available, or if you are submitting a software application, follow the instructions below in order to package your content for the XO.

Packaging your content

• To package a collection of files (a website, a textbook, an image archive, etc.), follow the directions in Creating a content bundle.

• To package software for use on the XO, read about Activity bundles (design guidelines). Every activity on the laptop is packaged in a self-contained bundle. The bundle includes all the resources that the activity needs in order to function. Once you have bundled your software, fill out the request for content form.

Adding links to external sites

To add a link to a valuable external website, see the list of external sites. Please note the language(s) covered by each link, and the reading level required.

Examples

School books become mini-websites

Once publishers/authors share their normally printed materials (so that electronic versions can be formed), children will be able to -at the teacher's instruction- turn to page-x simply by clicking on the shortcut icon (or bookmarked web page) of the "eBook" in question and instantly go to page-x; and will be able to associate their assignments directly with a page in the book.

Wikitexts

If you have text material which you want to be made available to anyone for editing, localization, and inclusion in learning packages or lesson plans, you can upload it as a file to this wiki (you must be logged in to do this), create a new project page for it here, or add it directly to Wikibooks in the language of your choice and link to it from this wiki.

Software for learning

If you have software tools, simulations, or packages for learning, you can create a new software project and host it on OLPC servers or on Sourceforge and link to it from this wiki.