[Fedora-olpc-list] Introduction

Edward Cherlin echerlin at gmail.com
Mon Jul 21 16:59:56 UTC 2008


One of the aims of OLPC is a billion children who know their way
around Smalltalk and Python, and a smaller but still quite extensive
group who understand Linux and Open FirmWare well enough to
contribute. And then another billion in the decade following, and so
on until there isn't anybody else left. When we get $75 laptops, as
promised by OLPC and Pixel Qi, this plus electricity and Internet for
all will cost the world about $25 billion annually. Peanuts compared
with converting to renewable energy, or any given war, and capable of
creating trillions of dollars in new economic activity. And breaking
the Microsoft monopoly.

In addition to software, I work on whatever management at OLPC and
Sugar Labs has no process for. This includes

* Creating Pootle projects for announced target countries (Haiti and Cambodia)
* Recruiting localizers
* Documentation
* Reaching out to communities outside development
* Language and writing system design and QA
* Getting engineers to work on electricity and Internet for villages
with microfinance support
* Making contact with Obama's campaign advisers
* Involving the community in the sales process
* Creating a walled garden for schoolchildren to link up around the world
* Teacher training
* Curriculum redesign
* Rethinking textbooks to use available software and knowledge about
how children learn
* Gathering information on Constructivism and Constructionism, and on
successes or failures in OLPC programs
* You tell me: What have you been wishing someone would do, but
management isn't listening?

Please let your friends know that we need help on all of these and
more, from all of society worldwide.

On development, we need help getting Sugar packages into stock Fedora
and Red Hat, and in moving OLPC innovations upstream. We have much
infrastructure (Glucose) and dozens of Activities (Fructose) with
oodles of bugs. We need virtual machine images for those who run other
Linuces, BSDs, and whatever.
-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay




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