OLPC UK/Lending Library and Repair Centre

Objectives

The combined Lending Library / Repair Centre serves to:

• support the OLPC mission and community via lending out laptops to UK volunteers / contributors; and

• facilitate with space, materiel, and expertise XO repairs by volunteers; and

• encourage, enable, and support Contributor Program applicants from the UK.

We see the Lending Library and Repair Centre concepts as symbiotic and synergistic: the same set of hardware and volunteers can both encourage the OLPC mission and supply a volunteer-run Repair Centre. For more specifics, read on.

How do I get a Laptop?

• Just ask. If there's one free we'll lend it to you (within reason). Email olpc-uk@lists.laptop.org and say "I would like to borrow a laptop for X months to do Y thing".

Now that I've got a Laptop, what do I do?

• See the Sugar Labs Getting Involved page.

• Some activity development FAQs: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac

• Ideas - Get excited about something to implement; some existing project ideas.

• Community
  • Sign up to the olpc-uk list ( http://lists.laptop.org )
  • Sign up to the sugar-devel list ( http://lists.sugarlabs.org )
  • Use irssi or another IRC client to get on to irc.freenode.net channels #sugar and #olpc to chat with other developers.
  • Both OLPC and Sugar Labs will give you shell accounts and git hosting space ( http://git.sugarlabs.org and http://dev.laptop.org/git ). Check IRC (below) for contacts or google/wiki for how to do that.

• Get accounts on:
  • wiki.laptop.org
  • wiki.sugarlabs.org
  • dev.laptop.org
  • dev.sugarlabs.org

What do we do?

Some examples of how the LLLL / Repair Centre could help:

LLLL

• UK professor interested in prototyping a contributors program application

A professor (or Linux User Group or...) might be considering a contributors program application but hesitant to commit the time / effort. The LLLL could bootstrap this effort with a loan of two (2) XOs for 1-3 months and two part-time mentors, in order to guide the professor and students towards a first prototype activity and a full Contributors Program application.

• OLPC UK member organises teachers mini ContentCamp

XOs might be lent to ContentCamp organisers to supplement a majority of sugar-jhbuild / Sugar-on-a-Stick instances to give teachers a hands-on sense of the deployment scenario, and enable testing the content on "real" XOs. As mentioned in the OLPC UK LLLL FAQ, with OLPC and Sugar Labs encouraging software development that makes use of the unique OLPC hardware, what's lacking often is a sense of what exists and what incremental developments are best (witness some of the GSoC proposals that start off very rough even after a motivated student has gotten so far as to reach out and get involved)

• OLPC UK publicity efforts

OLPC UK can enable "XO demos" at conferences / LUGs without having to rely on the same volunteers giving up their laptops.

• OLPC UK member wants an XO to look cool

This is not a good enough reason to lend out an XO.

Repair Centre

• Community member's XO develops a fault

Repair Centre could assist in triage and repair. RC would use its own volunteers (see People section), liase with RCs, mailing lists, IRC participants, OLPC UK members to execute this.

• Remote Repair Centre requires hardware

Repair Centre would consider a swap / help in sourcing the hardware.

People

• All: Peter Robinson
• Happy to help remotely: Martin Dengler
• Happy to help on promoting and publicising the OLPC library: Dom Baker
• Happy to help with the library; repairing laptops and administrating the library: David Craddock

I want to help

Great - please add your name above and then join the olpc-uk mailing list. Here is a list of suggested areas that we can definitely use help in:

• being an available contact person for the combined LLLL/RC

...and one or more of:

1. help lending out laptops
2. help mentoring laptop lendees
3. help administering the library
4. help repairing laptops
5. help administering repair processes
6. help publicising the LLLL/RC
7. provide inventory space

Prior proposals archive

The earlier proposals have been moved an archive page

Inventory

Library

TODO

Repair Centre

TODO

Status updates

Status 20090505

Status 20090925