Community building

This page focuses on building communities to support the OLPC project. If you want to help OLPC in another manner the "Getting involved in OLPC" and Getting started programming entries is a good place to start. Also check out the OLPC Foundation that focuses on stimulating grassroots organizations. See also rollout and community building ideas.

To enable the open content revolution, OLPC must not only build and distribute the XO, it must nurture and encourage three groups of people to develop content. This list is incomplete; please add. The categories are interrelated and may blend into each other; most groups will consist of people from multiple categories, and people will fall into multiple categories. This grouping is only a rough attempt at ordering.

Community Segments

1. Hardware Developers
   1. XO hardware developers
   2. XO hardware repairers
   3. Peripheral/accessory development
2. Software Developers
   1. Low-level software developers (drivers etc.)
   2. Code library developers (graphics, sound, etc.)
   3. Application developers (games, office programs, etc.)
   4. UI developers (get sugar, accessibility, etc.)
3. Educators
   1. XO teachers (directly using laptops with children)
   2. XO administrators (supervising XO teachers)
   3. XO teacher trainers (explaining to / supporting XO teachers)
   4. Curriculum contributors (creating raw materials for libraries etc.)
   5. Curriculum/material curators (creating/packaging "sets" of materials for classroom use)
   6. Curriculum translators (translating raw materials for libraries etc.)
   7. XO students (children using the laptops)
   8. XO student supporters (organizations/individuals from outside school systems providing financial, academic, etc. support for children using the laptops)
   9. Non-XO students (children from non-laptop countries who want to study and collaborate with laptop-using children; needs a better name)
4. Artists
   1. XO guardians (parents/guardians of children with laptops)
   2. Graphic/web/interface designers (layouts, css, usability, book covers, print templates, etc.)
   3. Musicians/composers
   4. Journalists (writing time-sensitive, breaking-news work)
   5. Authors (writing non-time-sensitive work, fiction or nonfiction)
   6. Filmmakers/videographers
   7. Photographers
5. Advocates
   1. Government agencies & ministries of education
   2. Advertisers/promoters
   3. Non-governmental agencies

These communities may be international or national and have sub-groups by nation or linguistic region. There are some rough ideas on how to stimulate the development of these communities. There should be special emphasis stimulating communities in developing nations.

Matchmaking

Communities in the US, Europe, South America, and elsewhere need to be matched : educators, visionaries, students, class teachers, and children. The critical mass of local communities seems to be low for similar self-sustaining projects; perhaps 10 or 12, which we already have. Harvard's presidential fellows project is looking into mediating such matchmaking.

Resources on Community Building

• Presentation Slides
• How to build a Grassroots organization -- these are specific to creating the OLPC project in a specific country
• Community Building Events -- organizing a GameJam is a great one
• Team Building coming soon
• Stimulating Content Communities
  1. Software Developers
  2. Educators
  3. Artists
  4. Advocates
• Fund raising ideas
  • OLPC Nepal's Concept Note -- Good overview of OLPC w/ a very basic implementation plan. We made this for Nepal's Minister of Education. Prints out nicely

Links to Existing Open Courseware Repositories

See OLPC Courseware Review

Licenses

OLPC recommends the Creative Commons license for content licensing.

General ideas

See also volunteering, contributing content, developers and code.

Project homepages, meetups and ideas

some of this is more global community building, and creating spaces to share thoughts about olpc on the major social sites

• on reddit, delicious, stumbleupon
• on wikieducator, wikihow, wikipedia, wikimedia commons

meetups

• look into an international meetup accounts for local OLPC meetup groups

swag ideas

• Joshua McGinnis is working on setting up a Cafepress store. We should put up a design for an OLPC t-shirts there, and some laptop or bumper stickers.
  • An excellent t-shirt would be one with a large XO icon on the front. If cafepress allows it, people buying it could choose the colours of their XO icon, or perhaps choose between a set: white XO on black t-shirt, black on white, plus some random color variations of the XO. HoboPrimate 00:13, 25 June 2007 (EDT)
• If you are starting a local community, and have at least five people signed up in your area, we should make a box of swag available for distribution in person.
• The OLPC CafePress store has been created: http://www.cafepress.com/olpc.
• T-shirts

See also

• Regional community groups