Friends of our community, I'd like to introduce you to a project that Rafael, me, Alejandro (proj.man.) , Antonio (django wiz), Alfredo (theather educ) and Jose (mathematics professor at the UNMSM) have been working on. It is our proposed strategy for training and supporting a large rural and distributed sugar deployment including collaboration servers in traditional Computer Labs settings. Already we are preparing for a workshop with the first teachers in early february, when the roll out will occur. We have two main strategies:
- Reduce the maintenance overhead of schools by providing a tailored suite + best practices + documentation --- "easy to replicate" - Harnessing social network functionality for sharing, collaboration and peer-support --- "easy to share" Everybody understands the value and power of social networks. However these remain propietary and have a number of privacy and control issues. We'll incorporate existing social networking software (could be Elgg, NoseRub, Pinax...) that not only will provide "One Social Network Per School", but will jumpstart the first (that I know of) massive, self-replicating, decentralized educational social network ecosystem, a network of social networks. And we want to make it extra easy to add a node anywhere on the globe. Our expected deployment involves ~200 school laboratories (and servers), and ~2300 workstations, for a total of tens of thousands of students and their respective teachers who will be online and collaborating with each other and with the community across organizational, geographic, and cultural boundaries. We will foster this community and bring them in touch with other teachers using Sugar in the classroom. Perhaps even more schools will join this global network, as we want to make it as simple as possible. We hope to give details on this deployment soon but need a particular confirmation from the Regional Government. We have submitted a proposal for USAID challenge and would use the money as SugarLabs to develop, prepare, tailor and integrate a platform that allows us to deliver excellent teacher workshops that empower educators to appropriate the technology and learn about it "in community" like we so happily do in Free Software. Please find our proposal for at http://www.netsquared.org/projects/free-social-networks-rural-education Give it a look. Think about it. A large social network owned by its users, that can grow organically without any need for central offices or large datacenters... Give us your comments and feedback and... Vote for it. The voting process is particular, you have to pick us, and then 2 others. You can't vote unless you pick 3. Please do this for us. I would do it if you were asking! ;-) In all seriousness, I think our proposal has a great chance, because frankly, i think it rocks and is better than the other options, but the first phase of the challenge involves the community for picking 15, then a panel picks 3 winners. So we need you, community! Thank you for your time. -- Sebastian Silva Iniciativa FuenteLibre http://blog.sebastiansilva.com/ _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep