Mentor org recruitment

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Dear NAME,

Would you like more volunteers for ORGANIZATION? Do you have any content projects you'd like to get done - seminars you would like people to run, outreach programs you'd like developed, photographs you'd like taken, books you'd like written, anything?

If the answer is yes, we would like to invite you and ORGANIZATION to be a mentor organization for the upcoming Summer of Content (SoCon) program. SoCon helps you with recruiting, matchmaking, coordination, and organization of volunteers for your projects; this is a low-cost, almost no-maintenance way to get publicity, projects, and new contributors all in one, and in just 6 weeks and is guaranteed to Get Things Done.

Run by a team from the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC, http://laptop.org) and the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL, http://col.org), the Summer of Content program matches interns who want to contribute to open content with mentors from existing open-content projects who can help them, and provides stipends to the interns that allow them to work full-time on their project. Organizations such as Fedora, Google, and Name.com are already on board. The program's first run begins on August 10 (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content_2007), and there will be a Southern Summer later this year with projects beginning in December.

If you're interested, contact Mel Chua (mel@laptop.org) - Wayne Mackintosh (from CoL) and SJ Klein (from OLPC) are also involved. I hope we'll see some ORGANIZATION projects up and running in August!

(Please help us spread the word - if you're trying to reach potential mentors and interns, there are some email templates for over at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content/Letter_templates.)

Thanks and best wishes,

Your name

PS: Here's a description from the website, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Summer_of_Content:

The Summer of Content (SoCon) program offers budding creators mentorship and stipends to develop open content and run free culture events throughout the world. Inspired by Google's Summer of Code program, our goal is to support a self-sustaining ecosystem of open content by encouraging growth of contributor communities, and attention to communication and accessibility around projects, where they're most needed.

There are two Summer sessions a year, each lasting approximately 10 weeks: a Northern Summer running between June and August and a Southern Summer running between December and February. (The current Northern Summer 2007 is a pilot run, taking place in August and September 2007.)

Each summer, applicants, mentors, and the open content community define open content projects that need working on. Applicants describe the projects they want to work on and the kind of work they want to do. Mentor organizations describe the projects they can support and the mentors they have available. SoCon acts as matchmaker for mentors and interns, and project work begins! The Summer ends with a series of local Jams around the world to showcase and gather feedback on the new creations.