Getting involved in OLPC

There are many ways to get involved in OLPC. At the moment, the project is still getting off of the ground so the ways to get involved are more limited. With time, the ways to get involved will be more numerous, more documented, and more

=Places to Help=

There a number of different places where users can contribute to OLPC. This list currently only reflects the software related contributions although, with time, will also include many idea for people to contribute in non-software ways as well.

Upstream Free Software Projects
Countries that adopt the OLPC hardware platform will be using a variety of different pieces of existing free and open source software. While the final list has not yet been determined, we feel reasonably comfortable that most countries will include the following pieces of software which will be included in the proof-of-concept base system:


 * GNU/Linux system with Linux Kernel with JFFS
 * Mozilla Firefox
 * Abiword and Gnumeric
 * Many GNOME libraries (although not the entire gnome project) including:
 * GTK+
 * Pango
 * Evince

Through Other Education GNU/Linux Projects
We aim to build off the work of other projects aiming to bring the best of GNU/Linux to the free software world. Work in these projects is a great way to get involved in making a real difference in free software for education that will be easily importable to the work on the OLPC project.

Through OLPC Software Itself
At the moment, most of *our* work is being done in the upstream system. However, with time, more and more work will be pushed into our community. You can monitor this work by:


 * Watching the One Laptop per Child page in the Pedia.Media Wiki,.
 * Joining to the #olpc channel on irc.freenode.net
 * Watching the website at http://www.laptop.org for details.

=Ways to Help=

Work on the software can fall into a number of types of work detailed below.

Quality Assurance and Bugs
You should use the software that we will use and you report bugs. In addition to simple functionality and usability bugs, you can also look for performance and optimization related bugs. Due to our memory and disk constraints, we need to be much pickier about certain types of inefficiency in software than many other users of free and open source software.

Please add OLPC bugs filed in other bug-tracking system to this wikipage.

Server Side Solutions
There are many different pieces of only learning or "courseware" software out there. Writing a detailed review of the strength and weakness of different courseware systems is one great way to help contribute to the knowledge base around the project. Please any such reviews to the OLPC Courseware Review page.

Translation and Internationalization
If you know English and one other language, you can ensure that software works in your non-English language by translating strings. You can currently do that either by using your favorite PO file editor or through a piece of web-based software like Rosetta or other systems you may be familiar with that will also get upstream.

Additionally, we need as much information as possible on easily making this system work with different input methods for different languages. If you input a language other than English Please create a new wiki page with information on what software and fonts are necessary or best for inputting and displaying text in a language of your choice.

Curriculum Work
While ultimately, the work on curricula will be done by the ministries of education who buy this, there are several efforts underway to explore some of the education potential from this project. These projects include:


 * Benjamin Mako Hill's Software Freedom Curriculum which will be (very soon) be turning into a "wikibook" at the Open Textbook Project.

Programming
If you can write code, you can focus either on fixing our bugs or by building up or creating new types of education applications. There is no guarantee that anything will be on every or any machines but a compelling system stands to make a real difference.

Feedback and Ideas
The best way to get things done in this project or to push it in a good direction is to get involved and help push it yourself. That said, feedback is still welcome. You can add ideas to the OLPC Idea Pool.