Manuals

Some notes from discussion with Asher Heimermann follow. See also Todd Kelsey's and Ed Cherlin's contributions.

Technical audiences

There are at least four technical audiences:

Group 1: Kids/novices - tutorials, self-tour, etc.

Group 2: Teachers/parents/adults/etc. (people developing/presenting content, facilitating activities, etc.) There's a lot of crossover between Group 1 and Group 2, especially in the beginning stages of the program. - tutorials, activities, etc.

Group 3: 1st-tier support (site experts, server/internet connection maintainers, etc.) - people representing the site. There's a lot of crossover between Group 2 and Group 3. - "training" program as part of rollout; needs to define roles/responsibilities/expectations as well as technical stuff.

Group 4: 2nd-tier support (server installers, troubleshooters/fixers, etc.) - people representing the organization(s) deploying the olpc program - again, "training" program as part of the rollout. Similar coverage of roles/responsibilities/expectations, though with a more technical bent than the Group 3 stuff.

There may be additional, more technical audiences (hackers, developers, etc.); because of the self-supporting nature of the program, this group would probably best be served by a wiki/listserve, etc.--open, bidirectional communication.

Startup sheets

A "startup sheet" for support and maintenance should probably cover a few basic things. Sheets for a few audiences; at least groups 2 (config and troubleshooting) and 3 (distributing) above.

Basics

• Care and feeding of the laptop (don't leave it out in the rain, don't jump up and down on it, etc.)
• First-time use (hopefully OLPC has come up with a coherent out-of-box scenario)
• How to charge up the laptop, and how to know when it needs charging. (This could be a new concept for many people in your target audience)
• How laptops link to each other in a mesh, and how they link to a server for Internet access
• How to access a browser and type in a URL--such as the support URL for OLPC.

What happens if the installer can't establish an Internet connection? How will that be handled?

Other thoughts on writing and maintaining texts

We probably need to differentiate between technical and non-technical content, and figure out a way of categorizing the two. I don't think we need to do a formal information taxonomy, but we should allow room for something like that later.

• Technical content: stuff related to olpc themselves, servers,

deployment, installation, maintenance, etc.

• Non-technical content: curriculum (lessons, activities, learning

materials, etc.)

How does this scale?

How many tiers of management/expertise/content development will be needed? This is something each "market" (education ministry, other) will be helping to define, but there probably should be some kind of management model in place to help things along and provide some kind of "template" for deployment/technical management/content development, etc.

Content management

Three main use cases for distributed and interleavable content management for different audiences:

1) documentation and tutorials    [like what is discussed above]
2) textbooks and learning materials  [like what big textbook orgs use]
3) interactive applications and software [standard l10n]

Language support: Will users be able to go to a multi-lingual portal and click on the language of their choice, or will each language's support be defined on the startup sheet? (Or will this be the default home page for the laptop's browser?)

Images of the inside of the Laptop, care of Ari.

Mailing List

There is a mailing list now with weekly updates available at this url:

http://lists.cftwinc.com/mailman/listinfo/olpc-manual