Deployment Team/Meetings/Minutes/2010-05-27

First up was Anurag talking about Delhi, India, where he is going from June to August to work with 100 students in two schools. They plan to use Sugar on a Stick - 0.88 - and school server. Each student will be getting a thumb drive for use in the schools computer labs. Anurag will provide details of the hardware in the computer labs so we can test his planned install. More info http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_India and http://www.seeta.in/j/ They want to be sure the "send to" function works in the Journal so students can "send to" the teacher. They are also struggling with the XS setup. We can see some of the planned activities on the Seeta website.

Daniel_C, Esteban and Ebordon talked about Uruguay. With 360,000 XO-1.0 laptops, 100 employees (teachers, sociologists, engineers). There are 5 people working on software. They are currently on 0.82 but are making their first Fedora 11 image thanks to Paraguay. They will email the testing list with their test request when the image is ready. Plan for deploy around July / August.

Tony Forster talked about multiple deployments - Timor Leste (East Timor) 25+25 laptops, Australia 1500 laptops and Oceania 3000 G1G1 laptops. The first 25 laptops for Timor Leste (East Timor) are about to arrive. The identified issues so far are lack of resources in Tetun, the national language and quality open source textbooks. Also the relationship between the constructionist self-directed learning Activities and the more conventional curriculum. That is, the expectation for the equivalent of textbooks, worksheets and lesson plans in electronic form. Resources for the Timor Leste deployment are at http://www.seaton-olpc-ug.org/?q=node/54 OLPC Australia has been very active. For Australian indigenous communities, low English literacy coupled with a large number of indigenous languages each with a small number of speakers is an issue. (Localization seems to have been effective for large deployments sharing a single language but less successful for smaller deployments and languages). oceania, each has a satellite station mainly solar, Timor Leste no net, one unreliable mains other solar, au will have net and quality solar/diesel

Dirakx spoke from Colombia. http://co.sugarlabs.org/ They have a mix of XOs with 0.82 and Sugar on a Stick blueberry already. There are 7 district schools at Bogota who will use Sugar installed on old computers. Most places have electricity and internet but not very good connectivity. We need more information to test for Colombia.

Icarito and alfredogutierrez spoke from Lima, Peru. http://somosazucar.org/ and http://pe.sugarlabs.org/ They are working with native Amazonian schools in Lima and going to Puno next. They have XOs and there is an etoys expert local (zdenka). They will get connectivity in the school from the education board. They plan to discuss with the board how to get schools collaborating. They use Sugar 0.82.

tch (Martin) spoke from Paraguay where they have 4000 F11 Sugar 0.84 XO-1.0 they want to update to 0.88 in August and want to deploy next 5000 XO-1.5 with 0.88 in September. They are working on some sugar activities like poll and adding new features.

I look forward to being able to test for these deployments and any other that requests testing - mail testing at lists.laptop.org your test request.

There were two closing questions: 1) how do we (deployments) aggregate our feedback so developers can know better how to act upon problems 2) how do we (deployments) share our lessons learned to make it easier for new/others deployments I am hoping someone else can summarise this as I had to leave. :-(

Tabitha