User:Gregorio

Currently I am a product manager for the Cisco 10008 Broadband and MPLS Aggregation RouterC10K Public Marketing Page at Cisco Systems.

I am very interested in working for One Laptop to assist in the development and deployment of the project.

Below is a brief introduction to my vision for a revolutionary development process that informs and is informed by the educational model of One Laptop.

I plan to start collecting user feedback and examples of educator - developer interactions that led to new software being built and used on One Laptop. I want to find the examplars of how educators and students learn to build the XO software that is relevant for them

I will post links of examples on my talk page:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio

I'm a believer in constructionism based on my own learning experience and that of my children. My personal philosophy of education is most influenced, by my three children, by my wife who works at Educational Development Center (EDC) training school systems in violence prevention and by Paolo Freire.

I want to contribute to the theory of constructionism, but my most immediate value would be in helping implement the praxis of a problem-posing methodology in relation to the development of the technology.

For the last 10 years I have been a product manager for Video, Streaming Media, Content Delivery Networks and Core Networking products. My primary role is to engage with customers and users to generate requirements and communicate those requirements with engineering. I have taken products from business case to requirements to production and deployment at business, government and educational customers world wide. That includes the design, sale and deployment of Content Delivery Networks (thousands of servers each) in school systems from Catalonia, Spain to Orange County, Florida.

I'm a technologist but my specialty is listening and engaging users to determine the priorities for development. As a product manager I influence the engineering community to build products which satisfy the users needs. The users learn what is possible and the developers learn what is valuable to the users. My role is to facilitate the discussion, refine the design, and determine the right priorities within the constraints of available resources. Its an iterative process of communication and collaboration.

That's my vision of the product manager role in commercial software development and I have been very successful at it on numerous products. However, commercial software is limited by the hierarchical nature of the corporations involved. The user - developer relationship is also restricted by the need to generate revenue. The more a customer will spend the higher priority we give their requests.

Open source development addresses those limits with a decentralized and non-hierarchical model. The decisions about what gets built are informed by the developers own experiences and by developers responding directly to input from users. Thus, open source has significant advantages for developing software and hardware for a constructionist educational system.

That said, any development model needs an optimal process for synchronizing the work with the users expectations. Developers don't fully understand user's daily activities and users don't fully understand the constraints of the development process. Even for open source, the challenge remains how best to achieve a problem-posing methodology of mutual education. Both sides need an efficient way to engage the praxis (action and reflection) of creating relevant applications. Transformation of the process from developers giving users features (banking method) to developers-users learning from each other (problem-posing method) needs attention that empowers all to participate.

That challenge is especially acute when there are larges gaps of culture, age, economic status, language, and geography (urban - rural and north - south). Even as users learn to develop their own code, there's a need for all users to have a say in what gets prioritized and delivered.

I expound on this to show how my work and life experience is relevant to the challenges facing One Laptop. I'm not suggesting that I know better how to implement the development process. Only that I'm ready to engage a design dialogue that uncovers the principles and models of thinking which allow the XO to optimize the goals of the education systems.

That's a theoretical introduction but I have a very hands on and practical approach.

For example, I can take responsibility for the following: - Manage deployments and ensure customer satisfaction for systems integrators, school systems, schools and students. - Track the requirements for the XO application set and the school server. - Respond to new proposals from governments and qualify new Systems Integrators. - Engage the open source community to find available software and motivate enhancements relevant to One Laptop. - Empower users by sharing the possibilities for development and helping them create their own enhancements. - Facilitate a communication infrastructure that enables users to generate and share use cases. - Manage the roadmap and gather specifics of incoming requirements. - Present, promote and evangelize the overall One Laptop vision.

In the commercial software world that roughly equates to project management, account management, technical support, and product management.

I can help get real world deployments of the XO up and running.

Those are my ideas and I want to hear what you need.

I know Linux and other Unix variants and I have programming experience (more scripting than compiled). I have extensive GUI experience including designing and executing usability studies. I have experience building distributed systems and in network and server management.

My pre-technical experience includes work at Oxfam America, assistant manager at WGBH Learningsmith (an educational products store), and political and community organizing.

I am fluent in Spanish (mi esposa es de Colombia). I have traveled extensively in Latin America and beyond for business, pleasure and organizing/activism.

I have an XO on order. I plan to bring up a Fedora system, install the sugar environment and make a direct contribution but my goal is work on this full time.