OLPC Oceania

Oceania Community - News - Content - Evaluation - Languages - Countries
Cook Islands -French Polynesia - Kiribati - Nauru - New Caledonia - Niue - Palau - Papua New Guinea - Samoa- Solomon Islands - Tonga - Tokelau - Tuvalu - Vanuatu

see also OLPC Australia and OLPC New Zealand

OLPC Oceania describes OLPC activities in the Islands of the Pacific excluding New Zealand and Australia. Ethnologically the region includes sub-regions of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Geographically it includes thousands of coral atolls and volcanic islands with small populations, grouped in 26 island nations.

OLPC activities in the region are coordinated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), with Dr Jimmie Rodgers as Secretary-General, with additional guidance from members of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), with Mr John Budden as executive secretary.

Current activity in the region includes implementation of a satellite-based Pacific Rural Internet Connectivity System (Pacific RICS) consisting of low-cost VSAT satellite broadband Internet that will provide a broad infrastructure to accomodate large-scale OLPC rollout.

Initial countries include Solomon Islands, Tonga, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. It is expected that other countries will participate later in the year.

To view the current status of progress within a leading site see the Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea pages.

Participating countries

Trial deployments have started, or as of June 2008 are in preparation at the following countries:

1. Solomon Islands
2. Papua New Guinea
3. Nauru
4. Kiribati
5. Vanuatu
6. New Caledonia
7. Niue
8. Tuvalu

Other contacts

Coordinating contact for the Wiki (until others have caught up with me!)

• David Leeming, Technical Advisor, People First Network, Solomon Islands

The following people have also been instrumental in the evolution of this project:

• Dr Jimmie Rodgers, Director General, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)
• Ian Thomson, RICS Coordinator, SPC
• Sam Taufao, IT Manager, SPC
• Rangan Srikhanta, Executive Director OLPC Australia
• John Budden, Economic Infrastructure Advisor, Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat
• Technical Working Group let by Dr Robert Whelan, University of the South Pacific (USP)

Strategy

The team is working on all of the overarching strategies below. At the moment we are in a learning phase - the Oceania top-level strategy will be informed from out experience in the 8-country trials above. Each country will have to develop local interpretations of these strategies. Meanwhile, we hope to post information on our approach in the areas below, in the relevant country pages of this category.

• Content
• Evaluation
• Distribution
• Training
• Scaling up
• Connectivity

Documents and Resources

• Agenda and Briefing handout for meeting with the Ministry of Education, PNG, June 12th 2008. This contains useful summaries and can be adapted for similar meetings.

Document formats are ODT (use Open Office) or PDF.