SFSU Lending Library

The Plan

San Francisco State University would like to help OLPC by starting a lending library at the main campus. The purpose would be to help increase awareness of OLPC’s goals by letting faculty, staff and students borrow the XO computers.

Technological development has been a strong bias at OLPC. Education and social exposure to the project is necessary so that students and researchers can assess and address the issue of education in remote and rural corners of the world. We would also like for some of that collegial discussion to trickle into the US school systems. Universities are aptly geared towards community outreach.

The library would also allow students the opportunity to use their diverse backgrounds and experience to develop hardware and software for the XO. Students from many of the departments, such as Engineering, Computer Science, History and Art could be inspired to contribute to OLPC’s goals once they are familiar with the project. Open source software would be used to track lending of the laptops, as well the inspiring ideas students may have.

To achieve the stated objectives, the project would be coordinated with faculty from other departments, to inform students of the existence of opportunities. The project leader is Professor Sameer Verma. At the beginning of the semesters, volunteers from the Business College would present a short speech to other students about the project to collect contact information from interested students. The interested parties would then be able to borrow the XO laptops to learn more about its capabilities and potential.

The Academic Technology group at SF State University will manage the housing and loaning of XOs in the same fashion as other equipment. The XOs will be loaned either in single units, in pairs or the entire batch. Depending on requirements, we'll also include a schoolserver component to serve the entire batch. We will also provide documentation electronically and in print (one copy).

First meeting (June 11, 2009)

We met on campus today. We have a tentative plan for handling the logistics of checking out laptops to students, faculty and staff. A key question is "Do we check these out as equipment, or as books?" More on that later...

Attendees: Robert Meyer (Business), Vasudha Chaobal (Early Childhood Education), Bonnie Homan (Information Systems), Lisa Ho (Division of Information Technology), Deborah Ferguson (Division of information Techonlogy), Maggie Beers (Academic Technology), Sameer Verma (Information Systems)

Possible projects:

• Organize Translation jam
• Explore Classroom use
• Reach out to Student groups such as ACM, IEEE, Eco, etc.