Talk:OLPC Spanish America

How to start a chapter?

Hi there, im .hj barraza from Monterrey México. I currently have a project called Ukini to leverage digital divide in Mexican education. The project is being develop with the council of science and technology and the council of social development of the state (nuevo leon). The world bank is currently evaluating the project in order to decide whereas they will join us as well.

Basically we will provide opensource software, (office tools, a learning management system, and social networks) We will connect the schools to internet with the help of Telmex and Cemex and provide thin clients in both schools and community centers.

Since they will be using thin clients we will also provide LiveUSB with a special linux distro. (still not developed).

All this being said. We are just about to start the investigation to solve some of the problems we have. Since our objectives are pretty much the same as the olpc, i would like to keep a close dialog to identify in which areas we overlap in order not to duplicate efforts, and whats even better, we might collaborate to achieve better results.

Regardless this current project, I believe a olpc Chapter in Mexico is definitely required and we are willing to share our efforts and resources to help the foundation in topics regarding Mexico.

So... where could we start ?

Good question! :) My first reaction is to point towards OLPC Mexico... currently lacking some 'meat'... ;)

On second thought, if all the planned content would be in spanish and Open Source, I'd say that should/could also fit/go in the main article page, probably somewhere along the content section. New pages would pose no problem either, just remember to link them from the main corpus ;)

That said, there are pages within the wiki dealing with this: Category:Learning, Category:Resources, Languages, Educational ideas, Education networks, Educational Software... it's still a bit 'messy' :P

Why in English?

My reason (Xavi) is simple: the OLPC organization's language is English. That said, we should be able to interact and coordinate with them and later take those ideas into the specific country pages. BTW, this is an open question, not an answer.

Comments

Is good to have this page, in the future could be usefull for other countries in latinamerica, but i have to make a suggestion, could be Brazil also in this page, even though they dont speak spanish...?

I also feel sort of bad for leaving out Brazil, and I wouldn't mind to include them, but the reason I left them out is basically that they already have a big presence and mass, while spanish-speaking america is fragmented at best. There are basically two things that put Brazil in a different league: single government and large population. This implies a unified education program and plan, one target language, etc.

Spanish America on the other hand has many different governments, each with its Ministry of Education (and plans/system). The local communities can work 'isolated' (ie: each interfacing with the rest of the wiki and OLPC), but I think that a 'common blackboard' for all of the countries sharing Spanish may simplify and reinforce the common front for the Spanish community as a whole.

For example, Uruguay seems to have jumped on board, although they only need around 400,000 machines a year. What other countries would jump on board to start pilot (or full-ahead) programs if they could order less than the required one million 'minimum order'?

Spanish America, as a whole, has sufficient volume to start production (five million units), but individually things are too risky. If on top of that you consider that most of the localization and development efforts would target a single language, this leaves countries like Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, etc. 'free' to cater their local languages (Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, etc) because they can reuse material developed by/for the other countries that somehow share a common culture.

I can clearly imagine the internal fights in countries with multiple official languages to guarantee that the OLPC be deployed in an all-or-nothing scenario—all languages at the same time—resenting (and possibly blocking) partial or incremental deployments, as cultural marginalization . This would probably make the deployment impossible, and we'd all lose.

Summarizing, I think Brazil has enough muscle to battle this one independently, it's Spanish America that needs to band together :) --Xavi 10:05, 3 January 2007 (EST)

Your reasons are well supported and i share them, lets get spanish america working together--RafaelOrtiz 12:13, 3 January 2007 (EST)

This comment is for developers in Latinamerica, we neeed activities that go with our own needs and Idiosyncrasy,there is a lack for this kind of educational contents in our countries.--RafaelOrtiz 23:06, 7 January 2007 (EST)