Volunteering

See also our how to participate page

If you'd like to volunteer to help OLPC out, please start by signing up for an account here on the wiki.

There are a number of ways to help the OLPC project. See developers program and curators and coordinators for ways to get involved with software development or curation; see hardware ideas, software ideas and content ideas to contribute your thoughts and writing. Or send email to volunteers at laptop.org to offer specific help or expertise.

You can find out more about contributing content or add yourself to the author list if you're already involved in developing activities, community services, or designs for the laptop. If you want build a local community of OLPC enthusiasts, you can also find ideas on the wiki about how to do that.

"How to help" effort

Project: develop better 'how to help' introductions for people from a number of different background and fields.

Social and education networks:

• University students
• Free culture activists
• Non-profit organizations (local and global)

Open content:

• Authors, artists, and other creators
  • Remix and reuse communities
• Collection curators

Free and open software:

• Open source evangelists
• FOSS programers, see Getting started programming

Language

• Translators and linguists
• Local newsletter editing
• Interpretation and mentoring across language barriers

Communication and outreach

• Build Grassroots Communities to support OLPC

Request tracking

Todo: set up a separate tracker for volunteering requests. Keep records of new trackers on the wiki -- nothing beats global RC.

Open projects

Content, software, and other.

 mapping/geobrowsing | localization | midi/sound playback | 
 video playback | mozilla/Browse optimization | sugar-jhbuild / development |
 emulation & live-cds | pygame, sdl and game development |
 offline wikipedia/dictionary browsing | intelligent tiered web caching
 for children : stories | math | science | art | languages (other than py)
 intros to : programming / gnukids & free licensing / social networks & safety

Other volunteer positions

• International marketing and outreach
• Website development and maintenance (wiki, www, dev, rt, blog, and forum.laptop.org)
• Volunteer infrastructure gang - sysadmin and database work for community projects
• Activity mentoring and review (see user:wadeb for an example :)
• Intern mentoring (for summer and term-time internships)

  Software intern mentoring : see Summer of Code for an example.

  Travelling interns : in-country experience for one of our deployments needed

• Storytelling - adopting a country or school, editing a column for the blog or newsletter