As a person running some OLPC trials, I have been struck by the lack of communication and technical peer support of deployments. I thought it would be useful to kick off weekly meetups between people doing deployments to share knowledge, ask and answer questions, and to generally touch base with others doing similar projects 🙂 Anyone is welcome, and I expect we’ll also see people from developer and other communities come along, but the focus will be on deployers’ needs, people doing the work of rolling out computers
Considering deployments are happening all around the world in all different time zones, I’ve committed to running two meetings a week. One at 3pm Tuesday Boston time, and one at 3am Wednesday Boston time and are expected to last about an hour (which ends up being at 7pm and 7am Sydney time). This way no matter what time zone you are in, you can meet up with others. If one meeting ends up being far more popular than the other, then we’ll just do just one meetup, and I’ve tried to choose a pair of times that balance different regions I know are doing deployments today.
Because I’ll be facilitating both meetings, I hope to ensure we don’t lose information transfer between the different groups.
Appropriate info gathered will be documented publicly and hopefully the deployment guide continually updated for others out of this process. Feedback from deployers will also be fed back to developer groups and hopefully this will help facilitate developers better understanding the needs of deployments.
Meetups will be via IRC (which will make it a little easier to script into other languages and to record) and there are instructions for how to connect to the meeting if you aren’t used to IRC as well as a basic agenda maintained on the wiki here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_meetings
Meetings to commence January 20th, and all details are on the link above.
Looking forward to meeting more deployment gurus out there and hearing about the awesome successes we are all having around the world!
Please forward on to any lists or people you think will be interested. Thank you
Great initiative. Driving the same effort for Gdium deployment I believe we have the same issues and I hope you won’t mind us joining as well.
Ian,
I’d love to republish this on OLPC News to help get the word out. Maybe a copy as a Guest Post, unless you’d like to write a custom post for us.
Wayan