Getting involved in OLPC
There are many ways to get involved in OLPC. At the moment, the project is still getting off of the ground so the ways to get involved are more limited. With time, the ways to get involved will be more numerous and better documented.
Places to Help
There a number of different places where users can contribute to OLPC. This list currently only reflects the software related contributions although, with time, will also include many ideas for people to contribute in non-software ways as well.
Upstream Free Software Projects
Countries that adopt the OLPC hardware platform will be using a variety of different pieces of existing free and open source software. While the final list has not yet been determined, we feel reasonably comfortable that most countries will include the following pieces of software which will be included in the proof-of-concept base system:
- GNU/Linux system with Linux Kernel with JFFS
- Puppy Linux, a 60-MB OS cum software suite complete with software for daily use, now version 1.08 at http://puppylinux.org
- Mozilla Firefox
- Abiword and Gnumeric
- Many GNOME libraries (although not the entire gnome project) including:
- Evince
Through Other Education GNU/Linux Projects
We aim to build off the work of other projects aiming to bring the best of GNU/Linux to the free software world. Work in these projects is a great way to get involved in making a real difference in free software for education that will be easily importable to the work on the OLPC project.
- LodPup, a SCORM player based on PuppyLinux is ready (in beta) for playing interactive, reloadable SCORM packages for every child. Learning materials that conform to SCORM can be played in low-cost PCs using LodPup.
Through OLPC Software Itself
At the moment, most of *our* work is being done in the upstream system. However, with time, more and more work will be pushed into our community. You can monitor this work by:
- Watching the One Laptop per Child page in the Pedia.Media Wiki,.
- Joining to the #olpc channel on irc.freenode.net
- Watching the website at http://www.laptop.org for details.
Ways to Help
Work on the software can fall into a number of types of work detailed below.
Quality Assurance and Bugs
You should use the software that we will use and you report bugs. In addition to simple functionality and usability bugs, you can also look for performance and optimization related bugs. Due to our memory and disk constraints, we need to be much pickier about certain types of inefficiency in software than many other users of free and open source software.
Please add OLPC bugs filed in other bug-tracking system to this wikipage.
Server Side Solutions
There are many different pieces of only learning or "courseware" software out there. Writing a detailed review of the strength and weakness of different courseware systems is one great way to help contribute to the knowledge base around the project. Please add such reviews to the OLPC Courseware Review page.
Translation and Internationalization
If you know English and one other language, you can ensure that software works in your non-English language by translating strings. You can currently do that either by using your favorite PO file editor or through a piece of web-based software like Rosetta or other systems you may be familiar with that will also get upstream.
There are numerous projects in Asia and Africa to localize Linux into one or more of the languages of the country. Check with the Linux User Groups and other such organizations in the countries concerned, such as IndLinux in India and translate.org.za in South Africa. If there isn't a project for your language, you can start one, even if you aren't a programmer.
Additionally, we need as much information as possible on easily making this system work with different input methods for different languages. If you input a language other than English Please create a new wiki page with information on what software and fonts are necessary or best for inputting and displaying text in a language of your choice.
Please create the page to match one of these links:
Arabic--Farsi, Dari, Urdu, etc.
Hebrew--Yiddish, Ladino, etc.
Cyrillic--Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian, etc.
Greek--and Coptic
Devanagari--Hindi, Marathi, etc.
Gurmukhi--for Punjabi
Sinhala (Sri Lanka)
Khmer (Cambodia)
Ogham (Old Irish)
Thlingan Hol (Klingon)
and any others you might know.
Linux systems now routinely come with support for 20 or more of these writing systems, and there are free tools for making keyboard layouts for any language and writing system. There are also large Unicode fonts such as Code2000 with the characters for even more writing systems.
Windows and Macintosh also support many writing systems with fonts and keyboards.
Curriculum Work
While ultimately, the work on curricula will be done by the ministries of education who buy this, there are several efforts underway to explore some of the education potential from this project. These projects include:
- Benjamin Mako Hill's Software Freedom Curriculum which will be (very soon) be turning into a "wikibook" at the Open Textbook Project.
Programming
If you can write code, you can focus either on fixing our bugs or by building up or creating new types of education applications. There is no guarantee that anything will be on every or any machines but a compelling system stands to make a real difference.
(It would be really cool if the devices were made available to developers. Say at twice the current going rate. This way each developer that bought one would not only be contributing code that made the devices more valuable, but would be making another device available to someone in need at the same time.)
Feedback and Ideas
The best way to get things done in this project or to push it in a good direction is to get involved and help push it yourself. That said, feedback is still welcome. You can add ideas to the OLPC Idea Pool.