A couple of weeks ago, PLUG and SICSR hosted their annual event GNUnify. All in all, the event had a pretty low attendance and the average quality of the talks was not good either. But that was expected. The main focus was not on quality anyways. If it were, people who had not decided the topic of their talk would not have been selected as speakers.
All in all, it seems a bad year of open source conferences. I'm hoping the trend continues and people actually end up doing some work for a change.
There was a session for the OLPC at GNUnify, where the OLPC Pune chapter was formed. By now quite a few of people I know have involved themselves with the group. However, I couldn't help but notice a few things.
1. The session was taken by a marketing employee of Reliance Telecom.
2. A video was shown in which the Reliance Telecom team had gone to some village to deploy OLPCs. The video was a 'news channel' clip, so of course, a 'news channel' crew were coincidently there to cover the whole thing. It was well edited as well, with the nice visuals, selling the romantic hope of a high tech rural India. One could make out from the video that the poor kids had no idea what they were supposed to do with the device other than make a few musical sounds by pressing a button. But yeah, it made great selling material.
3. The OLPC is tough to use. The interface is very limited. Data cannot be shared easily. Expecting rural kids to learn to handle that thing is a bit too much.
4. The website of the OLPC India group is owned by Reliance Telecom.
I wonder why Reliance Telecom is being so helpful here. The last time Reliance did something from which they did not expect to generate business was ... ummm ... never. Your guess is as good as mine.
On another note, I have made an observation. I think that 'Management schools' probably have the following two courses as part of their curriculum.
1. How to put any information in a spreadsheet (even if it is a technical manual with images).
2. How to ignore anything thats not in a spreadsheet.
All in all, it seems a bad year of open source conferences. I'm hoping the trend continues and people actually end up doing some work for a change.
There was a session for the OLPC at GNUnify, where the OLPC Pune chapter was formed. By now quite a few of people I know have involved themselves with the group. However, I couldn't help but notice a few things.
1. The session was taken by a marketing employee of Reliance Telecom.
2. A video was shown in which the Reliance Telecom team had gone to some village to deploy OLPCs. The video was a 'news channel' clip, so of course, a 'news channel' crew were coincidently there to cover the whole thing. It was well edited as well, with the nice visuals, selling the romantic hope of a high tech rural India. One could make out from the video that the poor kids had no idea what they were supposed to do with the device other than make a few musical sounds by pressing a button. But yeah, it made great selling material.
3. The OLPC is tough to use. The interface is very limited. Data cannot be shared easily. Expecting rural kids to learn to handle that thing is a bit too much.
4. The website of the OLPC India group is owned by Reliance Telecom.
I wonder why Reliance Telecom is being so helpful here. The last time Reliance did something from which they did not expect to generate business was ... ummm ... never. Your guess is as good as mine.
On another note, I have made an observation. I think that 'Management schools' probably have the following two courses as part of their curriculum.
1. How to put any information in a spreadsheet (even if it is a technical manual with images).
2. How to ignore anything thats not in a spreadsheet.
0 comments:
Post a Comment