Day 1 - Monday June 2nd, 2008

We met up at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol with a 3 hour layover. I was in from Logan International in Boston, MA, and Carsten and Anders arrived an hour or so later from Aarhus, Denmark.

We spent an hour and a half together which allowed Carsten and I to have our first face-to-face conversation.

Up until this point, the entirety of our meager interaction had been via the project's web-based collaboration utility hosted at olpc.ourhoist.com.

I had met Anders at a week long One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) deployment conference a few months previous and taken an immediate liking to his then unfinished project proposal.

I had been volunteering a bit on the support gang at OLPC trying to dig up opportunities to get involved with laptop deployments for a couple of months by the time the conference rolled around. I was having trouble finding an advertised (publicly available) deployment strategy (roadmap to success) tailored to governments (or NGO's) that were interested in purchasing the laptops. Ander's project proposed a pilot deployment at a small Lutheran school to be conducted in conjunction with a New Media Studies department of The American University of Nigeria which had opened its doors in Yola in 2005.

There was a professor at the University who was interested in the project and he told us that AUN was well equipped to help us document via video, audio, interviews, etc. the entire process of bringing the laptops through customs, retraining teachers to prepare them for the new constructivist learning model that the XO laptops were designed to facilitate, find and implement reliable sources of power and internet connectivity, deal with technical support, misplacement, and upgrade issues, etc.

Essentially, we were going to run a small scale pilot deployment project and document the entire process via rich media in an attempt to build what I had been trying to find internally at OLPC since I began volunteering for them; a prospect facing deployment roadmap.

It seemed that there were people within the organization who new what the roadmap to success would or should look like, but the information was spread out throughout the organization, and it certainly wasn't readily available to potential buyers.

I have learned in my years of software deployment experience that it's very difficult to convince a sophisticated buyer to purchase your product if you can't show them a plan for making your product actually work for them. This seemed like a great opportunity to get involved with building just that.

I was raring to go.