OLPC Content Working Group

Ideas for the OLPC Content Working Group and members.

Notes, Proceedings and Ruminations

TODO: Find regular meeting times. Next weekend : Sunday gathering @ 1700 EST.

Meeting Notes

30 Nov 2006

attending: SJ Klein, Matthew Steven Carlos

• Human Resource Hubs/Nodes for each Community/ Country (and the reasons these particular people are important to the success of OLPC) will include:
  • Kids
  • Artists
  • Storytellers
  • Teachers
  • Librarians
    • Christine Madsen (Open Collections Program, Manager @ Harvard University Library)
  • Non-profits
    • Cathy Casserly (Hewlett Foudation)
    • Mike Smith (Hewlett Foundation)
  • Global Academics
  • Scholars at Liberty (eg. McArthur Fellows)
    • Aaron Lansky (National Yiddish Book Center, Founder)

• • Other HR Nodes
    • Edward Tufte, Harvard Faculty

• People/ organisations to help identify and contact HR Hubs:
  • United Nations
  • Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (who have created tools for working with healthcare practitioners in developing nations). See their page on "Cultural Competence"
  • Area-Specialist Librarians at the Harvard Libraries
  • Poverty Lab at MIT
  • African Virtual University
  • Widernet and the eGranary project (distribution of library content over LANs)

= Questions

1. How to present the mission and method to these various persons/institutions?
2. When OLPC kids produce content, how is that shared / uploaded (with both other OLPC communities and the industrialized world)?
   • Thoughts: OLPC/Partner Not-for-Profit manages a domain and content team ... blogs.laptop.org / podcasts.laptop.org ... that every/anyone recognizes as the first place to go for this content genre. Benefits of this initial approach for OLPC & partner PR (enumerate: ).
   • What kinds of copyright will be employed by default? (include this in community briefing).

• How might OLPC communities download / access large content repositories during brief/sporadic/asynchronous (eg. satellite) internet connections?
  • Work (who?) with communities and content repositories (eg. NYTimes, BBC, etc) to craft downloadable packages of content, indexes of significant global content.

• Note both questions and values to inhere within the answers (eg. durability, timelessness, robustness).

• What stories might one tell children to help them teach others (children and adults) about this technology?
  • Communicate to the communities that the content they produce is valuable to the industrialized world. To to see how we are the same and different; to provide new paradigms for human interaction, as well as the uses of technology, etc.
  • Gather OLPC stories about what did not go as planned during research and initial implementation of previous related projects (wrong, imperfect, unexpected results) and find a way to combine them into a story OLPC might share with other organisations and communities where laptops will be dispersed.
  • Acquire copyright for text adventures; cf. .Z readers/editors.
  • Encourage stories about writing & publicly-reading stories, writing interactive fiction, &c.