Grassroots
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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This is a page to discuss and brainstorm about the design of a future lightweight Grassroots Group Program to help interested citizens to start local OLPC efforts within and directed towards their own country.
Note that the presence of a grassroots group in a country doesn't imply government endorsement of the OLPC program in that country, although many grassroots groups are actively working with their government to make this happen.
This page is extremely rough (and mostly stolen from University program). Feel free to edit & contribute - see the Talk:Grassrooots page for discussion.
Why grassroots?
- Local communities should be able to make things for their children - we should have games, music, programs, stories, lessons, and so on from each local community for the children in that particular country, or even town.
- Centralization is a bottleneck.
Questions
- How much time do you spend on the organization?
- How are you structured?
How to form a grassroots group
The process of forming an University chapter is very informal. University chapters are really just good excuses to get groups of interesting people together to do interesting things... that happen to be related to OLPC. The following instructions are suggestions - feel free to change them according to what works best for your group.
- Gather a group of at least 10 interested people (students, faculty, staff, community members and their families) at your school who want to form a chapter. If people at your school use computers a lot, creating a mailing list or website can help you recruit. Template flyers and letters are also available - please remix, modify, and create new ones!
- Create your group's homepage on the OLPC Wiki and include it in the University chapters category. The easiest way to do this is to use the University chapter template.
- Create a mailing list for communication within your group. Universities will often host mailing lists for clubs and community service groups; talk to your IT department if you're not sure how to do this. Google and Yahoo also offer free mailing list services. It is often convenient to define group membership and mailing list membership as the same thing (in other words, if you're signed up for the mailing list, you're a member of the group).
- Once you've got at least 10 people, call a meeting and collectively decide on a name and some projects to begin working on - see the What University chapters can do section for some ideas. Holding a Jam is often a good first project to bring a group together (and can help you recruit new members and projects to boot).
- Designate one person to be the main external contact for your group. (This is usually called "electing a leader," but your ideas on self-governance may vary.) The external contact person (and any other interested members) should subscribe to the university-chapters@lists.laptop.org mailing list (discussion mainly in English).
- You may want to turn your OLPC chapter into a club or community service group at your university. Talk to your Student Life department or student government representative if you're not sure how to do this. Forming a campus group often makes it easier to obtain resources from your school.
- When you have an active group, a first project, a webpage, and a contact person, add yourselves to the Current university chapters list at the bottom of this page.
- Send out an email announcing your new chapter and introducing yourselves to the university-chapters@lists.laptop.org mailing list.
Being listed as a chapter
In order to be listed on this website as an active university chapter, you need to keep your chapter profile up-to-date. This is particularly important for contact information, as newcomers who want to join your group should always have a way to find out who to talk to. As such, you should update your entry in the "Current university chapters" table at least once a year. The easiest times to do this are usually at the beginning or end of a school term, or when your group selects a leader. Here's what to do:
- Make sure the link to your website is correct.
- Update the contact information to point to the userpage of the appropriate person - usually the group leader.
- Change the "Last Updated" date to today's date.
Entries with a "Last Updated" date more than a year old will periodically be deleted from the table (if you see any, feel free to edit the wiki and remove them yourself). This is in order to keep contact information current for people looking for active university chapters.
Benefits
- An "XO lab in a box" - some number of spots (3? 5?) in the developers' program so the students can have machines to play/experiment with (note: not sure if this is possible yet)
- Connections, networking, etc. with others in the OLPC community (not that you can't do that without a university chapter, but this lowers the activation energy for people to join in)
- Announcements about research, internship, etc. opportunities for OLPC work
- A good excuse to work on OLPC for credit :-)
- Your ideas here - what else would you like to see?
Activities
- Participate in the Classrooms for Free Culture program
- Run Jams at your school
- Take on OLPC projects as class projects/assignments for CS, engineering, education, history, language, etc. classes - see Andy Barry's X(I/O)_Reconfigurable_Gaming_Input_Device, Arjun's Measure project ideas for some examples
- Serve as mentors for younger students making content, software, hardware, etc
- Your ideas here - what else would you like to do?
Ideas
Expand beyond universities - high schools, elementary schools, etc. might want to help
- They could always be part of the chapter by their local college - great mentorship opportunity for the college students.