Kindling Discoveries Series

Think about this as TED Talks - an eKindling version, retro-fitted to address the needs of a growing OLPC community in the Philippines. Here, we bring you the best and brightest..

As part of our ongoing effort to learn best practices, and develop our community capacity, eKindling will be sponsoring a series of open talks on themes pertaining to OLPC deployment and content development. By learning from the wealth of experience of other organizations throughout the globe, we will be better positioned to deploy programs and develop relevant content for the benefit of children across the Philippines. Engage, ask questions, and learn as we bring you the innovators and changemakers of the OLPC realm. - eKindling Team

Speaker Schedule

Bryan Berry: Open Talk on Community

When: July 24, 2009, 11am (Manila Time)
Where: Connect to irc.freenode.net and join #sugar-meeting

The first talk of the series will focus on Bryan Berry's experience with OLE Nepal and his views on the role of communities. Bryan Berry is currently the Technology Director of OLE Nepal, and was a volunteer community organizer at One Laptop Per Child. To date, OLE Nepal has deployed nearly 1800 laptops in 26 schools in 6 districts across Nepal.

Guiding Questions:

1. How do you define a community?
2. What role did the community play in identifying leaders and formalizing a formal organization?
3. What role did the community play in OLPC deployments?
4. What role did the community play in content developments?
5. In the experience of OLE Nepal and unrelated to OLPC deployment and content development, how else have the community added value?
6. What are your strategies for growing the community and its capacity?
7. If any, what are the limitations and pitfalls of a community-driven organization?
8. Add your question here

Connection information

Virtual meetings will take place on IRC. You can download and use the following IRC clients:

For Windows:
Pidgin - http://www.pidgin.im/
XChat - http://www.xchat.org/download/
mIRC - http://www.mirc.com/

For Mac:
Colloquy - http://colloquy.info/

Just make sure you connect to irc.freenode.net and join #sugar-meeting

Freenode is a common server in most IRC clients. If you can't find a freenode entry of the server list, just add irc.freenode.net then connect. You can create a username and assign a password but this is an option. When you are connected, just type /#sugar-meeting

Here's a good IRC tutorial as well: http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/irctutorial.html