OLPC Nepal

Behind the Pilot

2008-04-01T01:04:00.000-07:00

Caffeinated eyes, fatigued body and loads of work is not only recollection from our first ever XO deployment. The best part is how we enjoyed every moment, I just never want to forget all the moment we shared, those jokes, pranks, lighter moments and joy. I am trying to remember as much moments as I can from this marvelous event we orchestrated together.

Who's Hungry:
On the event night, Shankar wanted to have fruits only for dinner, Prakash wanted rice badly and I was starving for heavy dinner, jwalanta and Nirmal were searching food for us desperately and at 11pm night we couldn't find any fastfood or restaurant to have something, my patience was about to break when jwalanta called me and informed one kitchen was open, even though we have to pay twice or thrice the normal price we were happy to see the face of food at midnight.

This is where you start sharing

Go...od morning sir!

"We have learned everything, and our battery is already drained" was the first thing we heard from the children next morning, they were showing us painting they have done and pictures they took, almost all of the village was snapshot by XOs when we examined few of the journal :). We listened their poems about XO "mero sanu sathi", stories and jokes. They were enthusiastic like never before. When we show them their photo on national newspaper , they were excited and said "thank U sir".

Returning From the day's trip

Hackers on hood:
That day, we returned on hood of local bus from our pilot site. Wind gushing at about 60-70 kmph on our face couldn't stop us from making jokes about different political leaders and caricaturing how they will push OLPC agenda on the verge of upcoming election, we even shouted "vote for laptop".

Happy on the Hood

Lets hope this spirit will always go on and long live our geekism !! Please add more moments on Comments hai.

Sunrise has happened & we got our lab localised too, साँच्चै भन्या :)

2008-03-31T09:25:00.001-07:00

The pilot has definitely landed well, the training (that lasted until yesterday) is almost over. The air is pretty good and all of us are happily green.
Getting a high out all of this, we also managed to localize our lab and have decided to begun calling it as "गुँड" literally meaning "nest". ( Anybody finding this unpleasant is asked to present his/her ideas to the community, while we're still going to nest-ify our lab :D )

Talking more about the pilot, kids back at Janjyoti are happy(actually crazy) and are beginning to sharpen their photographic(Record/Camera) , Communication(Chat) and Musicianship(TamTam) skills AND it's only been 3 days.

For everyone's information TamTam has got the highest hits until now. "Hey Pal, what does this knob do ?"

And trust me, we definitely will have a lot more to share in upcoming days.

Hmm... the "गुँड" , well what to say about it ? It was all green when it happened. Kavre was definitely green. Our XO jerseys were green, the bus that we had a ride back to Ktm ( but dropped at Jadibuti ) was green, the seat covers were green, few ladies down the street we're clad green(ahem). Man it was a green green day.

So we pumped up some young blood and decided the "office" version of the lab was definitely uncool, after going through some insanity like "विकासे" and "दुलो" and blah blah blah... we were finally hit by "गुँड" , thanks to our respected green-lord of the day.

And then we caught another bus back to the "गुँड" ! Couldn't spend time messin' around.

Sunrise

2008-03-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, 27th of March, 2008 was the BIG day for us. In coordination with Department of Education, Ministry of Education, we distributed Mero Sanu Sathi, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Laptop, to the students of 4th graders of Janajyoti Ni Ma Vi, Ugratara-8, Janagal, Kavre as a part of first ever pilot distribution of the laptop in Nepal, codenamed “Sunrise”. The laptops were distributed amidst a program chaired by Purna Bahadur Khatri, Chairman of School Management Committee. The officials from Department of Education, Nepal Government were also present in the distribution ceremony.

Sunrise of the day as seen from OLPC Development Lab, Kathmandu.

OLPC Nepal core volunteers.
Not in photo: Team from IOE, Pulchowk Campus and Kathmandu University

Along with the laptop, the school also received a School Server which contains extra books and contents that can be accessed on the laptop through wireless connection.

Distribution Ceremony

Director of Department of Education, Mr. Janardan Nepal distributing laptops

Kids get the laptop!

The school also has formed a committee for monitoring and safeguarding the laptops. This committee consists of 9 members from School Management Committee, Parents, Teachers and members of OLPC Nepal.

Committee formed to safeguard the laptop having a meeting

As the children start using the laptops, OLPC Nepal Community will be closely monitoring the performance and influence of laptop on the children along with its usage by them. Our real work has just begun..

Sunset of the day as seen from Janajyoti School, Kavre

OLPC Pilot: Preparations

2008-03-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

Janajyoti Lower Secondary School, Ugratara-8, Janagal, Kavre - the Department of Education, Ministry of Education had already provided us the name of school where it'd be best to do a pilot. But the real work began as we received 25 B4 XOs sent in by OLPC International. It was almost at the beginning of the month, but we decided to keep the news little low. Afterall it was just a pilot and not a major distribution. All we wanted was to make it work rather than have big publicity. However, all the active volunteers knew about this and we had the news quite goin in our IRC too.

School's Principal Narayan Prasad Mahaju

School Complex

Power supply for the laptops

As the project started to heat up, we started getting help from everybody. Department of Education provided us the computer for School Server. Sastra Net helped us with wireless AP. Our community volunteers were excited more than ever. Our Development Lab became home. IRC channel was busier than ever.

We approached Curriculum Development Center (CDC), and they agreed to provide us books in digital format too, but due to upcoming election, the person in charge wasn't available. However they provided us with hard copies of the books, which volunteers from Kathmandu University did a great job of scanning and converting them into pdf books. We're getting the digital copies of the book immediately after election is over.

Similarly we also received a lot of help from Help Nepal Network LTSP eLibrary guys. They provided us all the contents they have been using for their eLibrary to put in our school server. This contained a cache of Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks website, Doctor Na Bhayema Website and lots of other stuffs. The collection of content was simply incredible.

Getting the XO and School Server ready

Volunteers from Institute of Engineering, Pulchowk Campus did a incredible job of arranging all these contents into one place and making a nice searchable web interface to access them on XO via wireless connection.

Even the volunteers not physically available but have been close to the community via IRC did a great job preparing the questionnaires and preparing lots of other documents.

The build we put on the XO was Joyride 1774. There was a huge discussion among us for using this instead of the current stable build, but in all our tests the Joyride build turned out to be stable enough. We did the following customization to the build:

Firmware: Q2D14
Build: Joyride 1774
Localization: ne_NP.UTF-8
Keyboard layout: Romanized Nepali (Fixed version. The standard Romanized keyboard distributed with any linux distribution is broken)
Little hack to olpc.fth file to display the rotating XO sign at startup
Adobe Flash Player
Increased Font Size. We seriously felt that the font size is too small, especially when Nepali glyphs are displayed.

School Server: OLPC_XS_160

Contents:

Translation of XO Guide in Nepali
All books of Grade 5
Bal Gyankosh (Children mini-encyclopedia in Nepali)
Wikipedia Mini
HowStuffWorks Cache
Doctor Nabhayema

The standard Marvel wireless chipset created a lot of trouble during our test. So we used wireless AP provided by Sastra Net. For web server, we used LAMPP.

Community Volunteers

Staying overnight, OLPC Dev. Lap

Scratch in Nepali

2008-03-22T22:37:00.000-07:00

Scratch, which is also being developed to run on XO has been Nepali Localized. Thanx to Evelyn Eastmond of MIT Media Lab for the screenshot.

Scratch for Windows and Mac can be downloaded from here. OLPC version is here.

Yaay.. translation's over!

2008-03-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

Yup, translation's over and we did it faster than we'd expected - all strings done by morning!

Altogether 12 developers burned the midnight oil for Translation Nite-out and all the XO strings (except that of EToys) have been localized to Nepali. More of this here. All the translated strings were rechecked and proof-read by Shankar Pokharel, our in-house Nepali expert.

The following packages were translated:

XO Core
XO Bundle
Terminology
Packaging
Activation Server
Pootle
Scratch

Statistics on translation are in our wiki.

Great work guys. Afterall what's community for? And finally, cheers to all the caffeine we consumed!

Translation Nite-out: Midnight Update

2008-03-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

1:14 AM

Translation Nite-out is going strong! Guys are going crazy. And our IRC (#olpcnepal@irc.freenode.net) had never been this busy.. We have been getting around 5 messages per second on average!

Here's the participation:

Working from OLPC Dev Lab:

Ankur Sharma
Jwalanta Shrestha
Nirmal Adhikari
Shankar Pokharel
Ujjwal Shrestha

Working at OLPC Nepal Dev Lab

Working from home:

Suvash Thapaliya (Ktm)
Bipin Gautam (Kantipur Engineering College, Ktm)
Bibek Paudel (NIT Durgapur, India)
Biswash Parajuli (NIT Durgapur, India)
Sushil Pandey (NIT Durgapur, India)
Prasanna Gautam (Trinity College, Hartford, USA)
Bikal KC (Nepbabu) (Australia)

#olpcnepal@irc.freenode.net

Seems like we're gonna meet our goals pretty fast and easily. EToys (with 23K+ strings) is our real headache but that doesn't come under our prime priority for this localization attempt. Apart from the strings mentioned in Pootle server, we're also translating Scratch; lots of thanx to Evelyn Eastmond of MIT Scratch Team for this.

The translation madness will last till 8pm tomorrow. We're expecting more volunteers to join us, especially from Pulchowk Campus and Kathmandu University.

Holi @ OLPC Nepal Dev Lab

2008-03-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

Holi, the festival of colors, also made its mark at OLPC Nepal. Actually we were at office for the Translation Nite-out preparation, but ended up playing little bit of holi too.

We were Ankur, Jwalanta and Prakash first. Nirmal joined meanwhile. Ujjwal and Manoj joined later. We're still waiting for Shankar to come.. He's sure gonna be busted!

UPDATE:
Shankar arrived in the evening. We had some more fun..

Donation Vs Generation

2008-02-06T09:03:00.000-08:00

"It is good to get OLPC Laptop deployed in country, it is even better if we get it for free" But wait! Is it really as good if we get it for free? I don't think so. I feel there must be some paying mechanism, either pre-paid or post-paid. The essence of OLPC implementation in country like ours should be as a system rather than as a product or tool.

Papa will you buy it for me?

The demand should be from the community themselves, but awareness is necessary to create that demand. We focused on same thing and got overwhelming response at CAN info tech '08. I bet we could have easily sell couple thousands of XOs there. Situation is definitely different at remote places. With fewer way to reach them, and aware them. I wonder what will be the consequence of distributing laptops to kids without proper community awareness and with zero liabilities to community.

schemes like G1G1 might not be as suitable for our economy but selling laptops in bulk to urban private school won't hurt either. Since government is keen on moving the OLPC concept forward they should atleast play the role of implementer and leader with large community base supporting them at back. OLPC could be integrated in current government plan to mobilize graduate student to villages in order to facilitate education. Thousand of students graduating in technical discipline per year, if can be mobilized on little fraction to volunteer in OLPC will surely become large technical support base on long run. These schemes could fundamentally save deployment and development cost off the project.

We are waiting!!

Coming to the point I started first, what I think will be best is have three mechanism for XO distribution from Government perspective. SELL, SUBSIDY or SERVICE. In Subsidy version of distribution mechanism government could get the payment of laptops in term basis or provide loan from micro finance. In service model government get eventually paid by asking guardians to do social service or help certain aspect of project for certain period. In this way government and community will benefit on long run and there will be less financial burden to both government as well as community. This mechanism could also help sustainability of project.

These are all my calculation which may or may not coincide with all, but local level fund generation will certainly be effective then 100% donated laptop, atleast from ownership and sustainability point of view.

Feedbacks from CAN InfoTech '08

2008-02-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

"How much? Can i buy it?"

The question we got from almost all the visitors. And why not, this cute little low-priced rugged laptop is soo lovable everyone would wanna buy it for their kids. But wait (the wait might get a little longer), this laptop is for FREE - to be freely distributed by the Government to all the students. Nevertheless, although the banner behind us clearly said, "This is an educational project" and we pasted "Not for sale" stickers all over the laptop, people still continued to reach their hands to their wallet as they see the laptop.

The crowd was unbelievable

Although most of the visitors already knew about the OLPC Project, for most of them it was the first time they were witnessing a live XO. Sometime back there was quite a massive media coverage about this laptop being distributed to the children of Mustang, so we had a lot of question regarding that too. When deployed these laptops gonna go to Government schools first. So a lot of people were disappointed as most of them had their kids going to a private school.

There even was this guy, who told us that he came to CAN InfoTech just to see the laptop. No wonder he was impressed!

OLPC Nepal brochure

We also got a lot of people interested to work with us on the project. Some of them have also left their email and phone number to be sure we'll call them when needed (of course, we let them know that OLPC Nepal is a totally non-profit organization and we all are volunteers). So our next big step: grab them! A hackathon would be really nice.

Apart from couple of people, everybody seemed quite excited about the laptop. Few raised legitimate questions on the price of this laptop and the corruptions that might get attached.

Look at those inquisitive eyes..

The worst part is, our 20+ XOs are still at Custom Office. We tried hard to get them out and demonstrate them at InfoTech, but the Government procedures, u know, are enigmatic.. :)

Richard Stallman on the OLPC Laptop

2008-02-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

Richard M Stallman (popularly known as rms), the founder of the GNU project and President of Free Software Foundation was in Southern India this January. On his regular advocacy tour, he gave talks in different locations where people thronged to get a glimpse of him and hear what he had to say about issues relating to free software.

We caught up with him for an hour long interview while he was in the city of Hyderabad. RMS heaped praises for the One Laptop Per Child Project. He is even contemplating making a switch to XO, the flagship machine of the project, from his "old thinkpad". Stallman went on to say that the OLPC laptop has given people a way to use the free BIOS. Lack of a widely available free BIOS has remained a major issue in the free software community. Stallman has always stressed for the need to use free softwares in educational institutes. The OLPC project has only made him happier.

He is, however dissatisfied with the wireless networking system used in the XO. Since it uses a proprietary technology, he plans to remove it and use a separate device when he needs to make wireless communication with others.

You can download this one-minute audio clip (ogg-vorbis) of our interview with him where he talks about the OLPC laptop.

OLPC Nepal in CAN InfoTech 2008

2008-01-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

Check us out at CAN InfoTech 2008, stall P-14. We got really busy to update this both on mailing list or blog. Nevertheless, we got a nice stall in a nice location (thanx to CAN) with beautiful banners and brochures (thanx to Nirmal for the design and CAN for printouts).

Even on the first day, when other stalls were waiting visitors, we'd a huge crowd on our stall. The purpose of having a stall in this edition of CAN InfoTech was to inform people the fact that OLPC is an education project, and not a technological gadget distribution program. Good thing is, people are gettin it too..

Getting Started..

Nice flex. Yeah, this is an *educational* project!

Steve Cabb was there too.. (Remember him? Kantipur FM few years back)

We definitely had a large crowd even on the first day

People were really interested

Nepali Keyboard

2008-01-25T17:40:00.000-08:00

Today, we received a XO keyboard with Nepali letters printed on it. We had sent this draft keyboard layout few months ago to OLPC international and voila, the Nepali printed keyboard is here..

However this layout is still in draft phase and we're working on more scientific layout.. But still, it was good to finally see a XO keyboard with Nepali letters printed over it. We quickly grabbed one of the XOs in our development lab and replaced the English-only version.

Ankur replacing the keyboard

English-only and English-Nepali Keyboard

Looks good huh!

First XO laptop in Nepal through Simply Give program

2008-01-21T03:03:00.000-08:00

Simply Give donation program has brought the first XO Laptop to Nepal. The lucky one is Prajesh Dulal. Jane Smith (USA) has contributed the laptop. Today he came to OLPC Nepal office for learning how to use this beautiful machine.

Prajesh seems happy with his XO

Using camera

Shankar teaching how to use the laptop

Laptop Manual and Thank you letter signed by Nicholas Negroponte

Now we need to see the impact of this laptop on Prajesh. Although he's not from rural part and also has access to computer at his school, it'll still be interesting to monitor how and for what purposes he uses this laptop.

The Mero Sano Saathi Song is out!

2007-06-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how OLPC inspires people. Some Nepali musicians and poets were so inspired by this project that they approached us to create a song for it. Please enjoy the Mero Sano Saathi song.

The name of the song is "Mero Sanu Saathi," Nepali for "My Small Friend." Mero Sanu Saathi is the Nepali name that OLPC Nepal founders Shankar Pokharel and Ankur Sharma gave to the XO. This name reflects the constructionist philosophy behind this project. The XO is like a friend in that it helps you explore and create.

Some people may be bothered by the fact that we are personifying the XO. We ask them to realize that people and children personify anything they care about whether it is their car, pet, or even computer. We hope that children treat Mero Sano Saathi like a friend, that is both play with it and protect it.

All of us at OLPC Nepal want to say thanks to the artists who made this beautiful song.

Song Credits:

Musicians: Mr. Shyam Nepali (Sarangi)
Mr. Babu Raja Maharjan (Modal)
Mr. Kiccha Chitraker (Guitar/Mixing)
Mr. Raman Maharjan (Flute)

Songwriter:Manjul (poet/songwriter)

Singers:Bishno Nepali
Kriti Nepali
Prezol Nepali
Prince Nepali
Rahul Nepali

Studio recording: Virgin Voice Recording Studio, Naxal

Organizer: Meredith Moore Adhikari

Mero Sanu Sathi Song lyrics

Nepali:
मेरो सानू साथी, राखी छाती माथी
फुरुंग भै घुम्छू, फुरुंग भै रम्छू

English:
my small friend... let me put it on my chest
i am pleased i am delighted

-(music)-

Nepali:
कैले लेख्दा लेख्दै, कैले पढ्दा पढ्दै
दंग भई चुम्छू, दंग भई हेर्छु

English:
sometimes while writing, sometimes while reading
hapily i touch it, happily i see it

-(music)-

मेरो सानू साथी, राखी छाती माथी
फुरुंग भै घुम्छू, फुरुंग भै रम्छू

my small friend... let me put it on my chest
i am pleased, i am delighted

-(music)-

Nepali:
चित्र बनाउछू, खेल हरु खेल्छू
मेरो साथी संग, रमाई रमाई खेल्छू

English:
I draw drawings, i play games
i joyfully play with this small friend

my small friend... let me put it on my chest
i am pleased i am delighted

-(music)-

Nepali:
कथा सुनाउछू, गीत गुन्गुनाउछु
मेरो साथी संग, लुकामारी खेल्छू

I listen to stories, listen to the songs
I play with my small friend

Nepali:
सुखद भविश्यको, सुन्दर तारा संग

with the shining star of bright future

Developer Drill #2

2007-05-13T22:19:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, May 11th, OLPC Nepal hosted its second developers' drill. Five new developers attended in addition to Prasanna, Shankar, Ankur, and Himali Kiran. ShankUr and Himali Kiran organized the drill. All involved were quite excited.

Record of events
11:30 Shankar gave a general of overview of OLPC project
12:00 Ankur gave a basic introduction to programming in Python
13:00 Himali gave a tutorial on Sugar, dbus, localization, and activity development. He also covered how to create SVG icons for activities
14:00 Prassana gave a tutorial on building activities with PyGames. The newcomers got a chance to write a tic-tac-toe game.
15:00 Distributed LiveCDs and snacks
16:00 Ujwal gave a presentation on his work on the Karl Pearson Coefficient Method for Handwriting recognition. He would like to port it to the Jotpad activity. You can access some of his source code here. It has not been Sugar-ized yet.

For the next drill, we would like to have educators present to work directly with the developers. We also need more computers for our office so the developers can work hands-on. Also, they would like to give tutorials on dbus, avahi daemon, and mesh networking.

Point from Ankur: "This drill was quite successful because we made it simple and not overwhelming. We tried to get them excited about the possibilities."

We are currently working in a very crowded office. We hope to move into this bigger room once we get the financial resources to buy more computers and furniture. This room may not look like much but it would be a huge improvement over our current space.

An Amazing Educator

2007-04-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

This week we managed to attract one of the most respected educators in Nepal to our project. Christine Stone has worked in the education field in Nepal for over twenty-five years. She has taught primary school, written Nepali textbooks, and now primarily trains teachers in the rural areas of Nepal. Here is a great article in the Nepali Times about her.

Christine focuses on child-centered learning and until recently all her learning activities were done on paper. When we showed her the XO, she immediately saw its potential. She was especially excited about the opportunities for math and science education. She loves Gcompris, TamTam, and eToys. We are very excited that she has agreed to lead our education team.

We intend to work with her develop a set of learning activities, a teacher-training program, and work with her network of teachers and kids to test our activities.

Christine has written literally hundreds of different paper-based learning activities. After reading about the GameJam this weekend at Olin College, I would love to see future GameJams focus on adapting learning activities like Christine's to Sugar. Gamejam participants likely could not implement her Nepali language activities but they could easily implement her English as a Second Language and maths activities.

Ankur, Himali Kiran, and Shankar will soon start collaborating with her on Activity Development. Meredith is also looking forward to work with her.

In other news -- Presentation Slides
I am excited to see the great # of sets of presentation slides on the wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Laptop_demonstrations. There are some great presentations up there from Mike Fletcher, Rafael Ortiz of OLPC Colombia, and Ian Bicking.

Ankur, Shankar, and I have probably spent over 30 hours developing our presentation slides. We would have much rather spent that time on developing activities. The presentations on the wiki will help folks around the world promote OLPC without having to spend a big chunk of time formatting pictures and checking their grammar.

We still need presentations on the following subjects. Some of the subjects are not yet mature in OLPC.

Technical
- For software Developers -- How to build an activity
- Power Mechanisms for OLPC
Education-Specific
- Introduction to Constructivism
- Role of the teacher in OLPC
- Teaching art and the XO
- How to create content for OLPC and how not to

Kids In Jiri Love XO!

2007-04-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

Jiri is located in a beautiful valley in the Dolakha district of Nepal, around 200kms east of Kathmandu. It is known by many as 'Nepal's Switzerland' due to its landscape being similar to that of Zurich. It has also achieved fame as a good cheese producing area. The journey to Jiri from Kathmandu also provides a fantastic opportunity to see Nepal's national flower, the Lali Guran.

The locals of Jiri recently organised a film festival with assistance from nepa~laya. nepa~laya is an organisation created to support/promote the arts in Nepal and to use this medium to increase awareness of social issues throughout Nepal. Shankar and Ankur of OLPC Nepal were invited and sponsored by nepa~laya to attend the festival to show the XO to school children and also teachers from some of the schools in the area.

A single bus managed to carry a team of about 42 people including film makers, journalists and crew on the 9 hour journey. For obvious reasons of space Shankar and Ankur chose to ride on top of the bus but nonetheless arrived safely with 4 XOs in tow!

For many children the first response was "what is that green box?". Rather than an explanation, a simple demonstration of how to move the cursor and click on things was all that was needed before the first batch of experts were on their way! It wasn't long before these kids were then eagerly teaching their friends whilst the OLPC team simply sat and watched in satisfied silence.

Jiri has 3 primary schools, a local secondary school, a community run higher secondary school, and a technical college which runs courses in nursing and veterinary science amongst others. Mr Tek Bdr Jirel, the motivated and enthusiastic principal of Jiri Higher Secondary School, assisted nepa~laya to arrange for each school to have at least 2 representatives attend the presentation. It was very exciting and in many ways a relief to find that the teachers were extremely interested in and supportive of the XO and it's prospective uses and potential.

All in all, the day was a huge success and another significant step in raising awareness of XO and just how valuable it can and will be to the children of Nepal!

Stimulating Content Communities

2007-04-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

Stimulating Open Content Communities for OLPC

This is Part III of the Grassroots series. I am skipping over Part II "Teambuilding" because it has proven harder to write. I will come back to it. Thanks to Xavi Alvarez for reminding me to work on it and the wiki

OLPC seeks to provide every child with a powerful learning platform and an-ever evolving array of powerful learning activities. To accomplish this, OLPC must not only build and distribute the base platform, it must nurture and encourage three groups of people:

Software Developers

Educators

Artists

These communities may be international and have sub-groups by nation or linguistic region. Here are my suggestions for comprehensive programs to stimulate the development of these communities. I have put special emphasis stimulating communities in developing nations.

Developer Program

Engineers in developing nations need more financial incentives to participate in Open Source projects than engineers in the developing world require (often none), typically due to the financial pressures placed on them by their families. We need to convince both student developers and their teachers that they should switch their academic focus from J2EE to Python.

Benefits for Core Developers:

Certificate from an internationally recognized technical university -- ideally MIT.
- Other possibilities are the MIT Media Lab or Open Source Lab at Oregon State. Certificates are a big deal in the developing world.
- Certificates could be based on amount of code contributed to dev.laptop.org, participation in code reviews, hardware development etc.
Discounted internet access and possibly provide extra UPS -- this benefit would vary country by country and a grassroots organization would have to coordinate it.

Free hardware -- important step, OLPC is already doing this

Discounted or free examinations for related IT certifications for accomplished developers
- Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
- A Python programming certification -- I know this doesn't exist but OLPC is a good enough reason to start one
- Internships -- We intend to offer internships at OLPC Nepal but this may not be feasible in a country without an active OLPC organization.

Events to Stimulate Interest in OLPC

Regional and international events to stimulate interest in development, should emphasize commercial value of skills learned from working on OLPC, for example: "learn Python and you could eventually work for Google, Red Hat, etc."
- Regional and national programming contests with significant prize money, for example in Nepal $2000 USD would be a substantial prize and huge incentive
  - Separate contests for Activity Development, hardware development, and power systems development, could be organized similar to CSIDC
  - Pie-in-the-sky idea -- regional Google Summer of Code style summer camps focussed on OLPC
- Regional or national programming hackfests and sprints

Educator Program

The term educator includes many types of individuals including working teachers. I refer to an educator in the OLPC context as anyone who generates instructional content and/or facilitates learning with kids.

It will be hard to convince veteran teachers to use a radically different method of instruction. However, we can convince the next generation of educators who have recently graduated or are still in university. If we can win their support they will ensure that OLPC is an integral part of their respective national education systems in the long run.

We especially need to recognize individuals that digitize histories, literature, other academic works under the creative commons license.

Benefits for Core Educators

A Certificate from an internationally recognized Education Body or Academic institution -- a certificate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education would be ideal.
- Unfortunately, a certificate from Brazil's Ministry of Education would mean little in Nepal
- Possible Certificates: Certified Teacher Trainer, Certified Curriculum Developer

A Certificate from an educators local Ministry of Education recognizing their contribution to OLPC

Points towards academic tenure -- We will pursue this in Nepal

Free hardware

Discounted Internet Access

Events to Stimulate Interest in OLPC

Regional and National seminars to develop different kinds of learning activities

Regional and National awards for learning activities

Teacher Training Seminars

Artist Program

We need artists to help develop the creative possibilities of the XO. Specifically I am thinking how to involve musicians, photographers, and graphic designers. Frankly, I am at a loss how to best reward this community as I don't have a creative bone in my body and I only hang out w/ computer geeks. However, we really need to stimulate this community. Please contribute your ideas for the artist program.

We need artists to 1) generate learning activities around art and design and 2) Digitize paintings, music, photos, etc. under the creative commons license so that children around the world can enjoy them.

Benefits for Core Artists

???

Events to Stimulate Interest in OLPC

Etoys Art Competition

TamTam and SynthLab Composition -- Could be run through TamTam website
- Students could post their composition to the Tamtam site
- site visitors could vote for their favorite composition
- We need some kind of competition to spur digital musicians to implement different instruments and rhythms into TamTam
SJ Klein's idea -- create a drop-in center where storytellers, musicians, and graphic artists could get their work digitized.

How to Start a Grassroots OLPC Organization

2007-03-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

I intend this to be Part One of a multi-part series on how to build a grassroots organization for OLPC. We at OLPC Nepal are ourselves still figuring out how to build a grassroots organization. I have put down some of our ideas and some of the problems we face. Nepal's government has yet to commit to OLPC but we are working hard to change that.

Disclaimer: OLPC as yet does not have an official policy or guidelines on how to create a grassroots organization for OLPC. The ideas presented here are my own. Before starting a grassroots organization I highly recommend you e-mail Lindsay of OLPC.

OLPC has created the OLPC foundation specifically to foster grassroots organizations. You can submit funding proposals to OLPC Foundation for specific initiatives.

I have created a wiki page on this subject in the OLPC Wiki. I will try to include some of the ideas on the Rollout and Community Building entry.

One Laptop Per Child is a huge global initiative with many aspects. A number of people criticize this project because it lacks this plan or that feature. Where is the testing engine? Recycling Strategy? Digital curriculum? OLPC has a full-time staff of only 15 people. They are doing a damn fine job by the way. If you think OLPC is a sound concept, it's time for you to roll up your sleeves and contribute. Got a good idea for OLPC? As they say in the Open Source world, Show me the Code. I believe that Grassroots organizations are a good vehicle for people to contribute to this project.

What a Grassroots Organization can't do

Grassroots organizations can't implement OLPC in a given country. Most children attend government schools. Most teachers are employed by the government. If you want to affect change on a mass level you are going to have to work through the government, no matter how effective you believe your respective national government to be.

If you try to go it alone you may alienate the Ministry of Education and actually slow the adoption of OLPC in your country. You may get lucky and implement OLPC at a few schools in your country-- if OLPC will provide you w/ XO's--but you won't succeed in changing your country's education system.

A successful campaign for OLPC in your country will require diplomacy. If you tell the education authorities in your country that they are idiots if they don't accept OLPC, you could set back OLPC in your country indefinitely.

What a Grassroots Organization can do

Promote OLPC in your country/region to the press and community groups
Contribute to software and curriculum development
Contribute to hardware testing and peripheral development
Educate your Ministry of Education about OLPC and its benefits
Software and Content Localization -- People didn't believe that the XO could support devanagari script until we implemented it and showed them.
Contribute to pedagogy and curriculum development

A lot of the above activities are non-technical. In fact, most of them are Marketing and public relations. Most early enthusiasts, like myself, are techies w/ no marketing background or savvy. You need someone on your team who understands marketing. I intend to cover this in a future post on Team Building.

Whew! It took me an hour and a half to write this introductory post. In future posts I hope to cover:

Organization Structure: Volunteer community or become a non-profit?
Promoting OLPC -- How aggressive should you be?
Team Building -- Curriculum team, technical team, marketing, etc.
Fundraising -- ugh -- we're still working on this part
Building the int'l OLPC community -- I've got some wacky ideas on this, but mostly I like Ubuntu's structure for LoCo teams

Here are some links on Community-Building for OLPC

OLPC mailing Lists
Tuquito -- GNU/Linux group in Argentina
OLPC Spanish America
OLPC Foundation

Special thanks to Rafael Ortiz Guerrero of OLPC Colombia. An e-mail conversation w/ him inspired many of the ideas in this post.

XO As A Tool To Preserve Language/Culture

2007-03-07T22:22:00.000-08:00

The development team at OLPC Nepal have been working hard on developing various learning activities for children using the XO. A significant area in which they have been making progress has been in creating activities to help children learn their local dialect.

The first dialect to be setup for use on the XO is Limbu. This is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than 300,000 people in eastern Nepal as well as parts of Myanmar, Bhutan and India.

This is a really exciting development and is a positive counter to concerns that the OLPC project will only serve to homogenise indigenous cultures. In fact, the project may aid the long term preservation and viability of minority dialects and culture which are no longer part of the curriculum in the traditional school teaching models.

In the long term it is likely that the majority of dialects and other cultural features of the many and diverse groups throughout Nepal will find their way into the XO system. The reality is that more children across the country will have more access to information about their heritage, language and traditions than traditional teaching methods and materials could ever have provided to them.

Another great leap forward for the dedicated team of OLPC Nepal - well done guys!

Live XO Demo in Nepal!

2007-02-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

Last week, three trailblazers working on the OLPC Nepal project made the journey to Butwal, about 250 kms southwest of Kathmandu. This town is very close to Lumbini which is known as the birth place of the Buddha. Last week however, the majority of the visitors to the area were there for a regional IT Exhibition/Conference. This was the perfect place to give a live XO demo to help spread the OLPC word.

Himali, Ankur and Shankar, three of OLPC Nepal's key members, made the arduous bus journey without incident, spurred on by their excitement at the opportunity to show off the fruits of their months of hard work.

Shankar gave an excellent presentation of the XO features as well as delving into some of the content that has been specifically designed for Nepal. The audience contained several hundred people from various industry sectors including IT and Education and the presentation was very well received. Nepal's State Minister of Science and Technology Man Bdr. Visworkama, who was the chief guest of the event, also took a separate overview of the XO curiously.

This was the one of what we hope will become a regular promo activity for OLPC Nepal in the coming months. There is no doubt that one of the biggest challenges in making a project like this one work is in obtaining the support and involvement of the community and we hope that by giving them as much information as we can on XO that we will be able to achieve this.

Having said this, its not clear how often Ankur and Shankar will be wanting to take bus rides with goats and chickens around the more remote regions of Nepal! Although when greeted by smiling faces like the one below it is hard not to be motivated to keep trying to do more. Thanks guys!

OLPC initiative in Nepal

2006-07-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

We have started working on OLPC development here in Nepal. It's an purely a development initiative since Nepalese Government has not yet shown interest in OLPC. But we want both the streams, i. e. Development and Deployment, go parallelly. We are also working on to organize a team of developers and stakeholders. Please post your suggestions, which will help Nepalese children learn learning through the laptop from OLPC.