Ok, I'm going to be somewhat presumptious here. I've been watching the community reactions to http://www.onehereonethere.org and the OLPCorps program and have been hearing a lot of frustrations and a lot of questions - the vast majority of which I share, actually - and decided to ping Paul Commons to see what I could learn about what they were trying to do. We just had our first conversation tonight, over the phone; it was a tough but good conversation, and can be generally summarized by "there's a community of very smart and awesome people out there and you should talk with them and ask them things." "how?"
To go out on a limb here - and I could be wrong - it seems to me that at least some of this frustration comes from (1) Paul being still in the middle of learning how to work with the kind of volunteer communities that OLPC has, and (2) from the impression that after multiple years and untold thousands of man-hours of volunteering for OLPC without much in the way of thanks or support, here drops this BLESSED PROJECT! from the sky with these people you have never heard of with no prior contribution record that you know of magically getting all these resources from 1cc, including lots of shiny press, for no apparent reason, and that just seems... unfair. Regardless of the actual situation, I'm guessing that it might /seem/ that way to some people. (It did to me, and still kind of does, though I know that's likely due to me missing huge swaths of the story.) I still don't know the actual situation. It's kind of silly to think that anybody does. But I think I know a little more now, enough to conclude that we can't deal with (2) until (1) gets a little further along - so I was really happy to hear that Paul is trying to make the workings of OLPCorps more transparent and trying to figure out how to respond to the feedback - especially the criticism - we've offered on many different forums. He needs help/advice on how to do it - learning the unwritten rules of how to participate in a new community is hard. In that vein, and with the long prelude finished, instead of asking Paul all the questions I had over the phone, we agreed that I would send a first round of my questions about OLPCorps out over a public mailing list (hi!) so that Paul could respond and we could continue our dialog, so here it is. (Paul, I know you're incredibly busy right now, so holler back when you have time.) 1.It's hard to get a sense of who you are and what you're working on from the (very professional!) descriptions! at http://www.onehereonethere.org/board.asp. When we talked on the phone tonight. You told me a far more interesting backstory about how your involvement and the OLPCorps project started, and how you worked alone for a long time on an unsupported project to make this happen before it was picked up and supported by 1cc, which is inspiring (and encouraging and instructional for those of us who've been trying to get support for our own projects for a while. ;) How can we hear more about this? 2. What previous deployments (including "unofficial" grassroots deployments like http://blog.olenepal.org/, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Boston pilots, http://waveplace.com/, and http://www.olpcfriends.org as well as the many deployment teachers at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur) have you spoken to? What was their reaction/feedback? How will what you're doing affect/help their deployments? 3. Ditto above for http://wiki.laptop.org/go/University_chapters#University_Groups, noting that not all students volunteering for OLPC are in university, not all university students volunteer as part of a group, and not all groups are listed on that page. 4. Why are we emailing [email protected] for more information or to offer help? Why not [email protected], where people can view previous introductions and comment on and welcome new inquirers? (It won't happen automatically - opening something publicly up to volunteers will not magically solve all your problems - but this makes it possible for us to help.) 5. Is there a possibility of publishing emails like the ones on http://lists.laptop.org/private/support-gang/2009-March/005198.html so that people not on the private support-gang mailing list can see them? Can we see the rough planning emails that have been going back and forth, and otherwise see why you made the decisions you made, what you're trying to figure out, and what you're having trouble with so that we can help? (There are a good number of people here who have run or mentored internship programs before.) I know they're rough and show a lot of mistakes - this is the equivalent of publishing your source code so that other people can help you find and fix the bugs. We know from all the things you've made so far that you can definitely operate very professionally and produce polished things when you need to, but it's hard to get invested and involved if we can't see and join the conversation. I have a million more questions about training, publicity, follow-up, sustainability, how you'll gauge your impact, etc. but I'll save them for a second round. ;) --Mel _______________________________________________ Grassroots mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots
