On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Sameer Verma <sve...@sfsu.edu> wrote: > Dear Community, > > As I was listening to the interviews of some of the OLPC SF Summit > attendees, I was amazed at the richness of diversity in perspectives. > In spite of being a part of this community since July 2007, and trying > to keep up with all that is OLPC and Sugar, these interviews threw me > off a bit. > > The videos are uploading as I write this. They'll be available at > https://www.youtube.com/user/olpcsf/videos soon. Bill Stelzer, who > usually interviews and runs the camera asks people a handful of > questions. So, here's a little community exercise. Why not ask you all > the same? > > 1) What brought you into the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)?
After leaving the military, I was searching for something meaningful to do with my life. Over the years, I have become frustrated the the ability for individuals and groups to control others, often for their own benefit, by restricting their access to education and communication. Precursors to the Arab Spring emerged as dissidents used technologies such as cell phones, texting, and email to bypass normal communication restrictions in their region. This brought me to the conclusion that the intersection of rapidly falling hardware prices, rapidly increasing availability of connectivity, and open source software had the potential to be as culturally disruptive as the printing press was in the 1400 and 1500. Somewhere across the line I came across the OLPC project. While the focus of the project was different then my personal goals, the methods, and likely the effects, of OLPC plus Sugar seemed remarkably similar to my personal goals. > 2) What keeps you going in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? While frustrating, the project is nudging the world in the right direction. > 3) What are the challenges you face in the OLPC and/or Sugar project(s)? The major challenge ( albeit, on a rather abstract level ) is how the ecosystem deals with the issues of Control, Credit, and Money. > 4) What would you change/do differently so OLPC and/or Sugar > project(s) could do better? Identify and attempt to fix bottlenecks in the ecosystem which limit the effectiveness of deployments: 1. Create a deployment sponsored distribution, Dextrose, to close the feedback loop between developers and deployment. The Dextrose sustainability model ensures that loop is closed. Fixes and features which go into dextrose are valuable enough that some deployment somewhere is willing to pay for it. 1a. Establish the company-community arms race. While a bit dated there is an excellent talk at https://fossbazaar.org/content/bdale-garbee-collaborating-successfully-large-corporations/ about company and community relationship. Bdale uses the interesting analogy of the arms race to describe the relationship between companies and communities in Open Source development. The Company is constantly trying to add features and fixes which provide them competitive advantage in the market place. The Community is constantly innovating and unwinding the companies competitive advantage and making it available to the community. The highest rate of progress happens when the parties focus on getting ahead of the other guys rather then when they focus on holding others back. Progress tends to stop when one party gets so far ahead that it is not worth it for others to compete. 2. Establish a effective community-company project, XSCE, to prove that there is nothing inherent in the OLPC/Sugar space which prevents effective community-relationships. Over the last year, we have been following two core principles to build a effective school server community. Welcome people with overlapping but non-identical goals. Build on one another's strength while minimizing the effects of our own weakness. 3. Establish a 'facilitators network' to improve communication between parents, teachers, deployers, and developers. ( Work in Progress) 4. Build on lessons learned in 1,2, and 3 to establish a mutually beneficial relationship between AC and Sugar Labs. Please note, these are intentionally very specific area in which I plan on investing my time and money:) > Reply-all in your answers. > > cheers, > Sameer > -- > Sameer Verma, Ph.D. > Professor, Information Systems > San Francisco State University > http://verma.sfsu.edu/ > http://commons.sfsu.edu/ > http://olpcsf.org/ > http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ > _______________________________________________ > Sugar-devel mailing list > Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel