OLPC Content Working Group

Ideas for the OLPC Content Working Group and members.

Notes, Proceedings and Ruminations

TODO: Set regular meeting times. Monday or Tuesday afternoons?

Meeting Notes

10 Dec 2006: party @ 1700, discussion @ 2000 EST. [Kevin

30 Nov 2006 (SJ & 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
    • Owusu Ankomah (Ghanaian contemporary artist, work featured on Empirio Armani (Product)Red capsule clothing and packaging).
  • 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 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).
     • Thoughts: this idea interconnects questions 2, 3 and 5 .. the BBC produces 'Link-Ups' between school children in various parts of the world (example: UK-Tanzania apparently produced by Radio4's 'Woman's Hour' and Jurusalem-Ramallah apparently produced by BBC's 'Outlook' . SJ mentioned during the last meeting that OLPC has some contact with the BBC. Perhaps the BBC and/or similar organisation might help establish (aka initially produce or at least provide a handbook for) such link-ups between OLPC receipient communities. References to (or the complete files of) such link-ups might be provided on the OLPC content / non-profit content partner website mentioned above. The Woman's Hour production reminds me of comments made during Nancy' Hafkin's Berkman Center Luncheon which regarded technology gender bias in the developing world. Perhaps the UN would provide support (Human Resource or other) for link-ups between female school children in OLPC communities?
3. 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.
4. Note both questions and values to inhere within the answers (eg. durability, timelessness, robustness).
5. 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-code interpreters/editors and the like.
     • Encourage stories about writing & publicly-reading stories, writing interactive fiction, &c.