[IAEP] [SPAM]An intelligent sneakernet for the XO.

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

William Schaub wrote:
> The idea is basically a decentralized discussion forum that 
> automatically propagates itself amongst all XO laptops that are in 
> range. 

That's a great project!  This is definitely something that OLPC and Sugar
Labs are interested in.  You should mention it on sugar-devel.

> I just wanted to get your comments and see how I could best turn this 
> into something that could benefit the OLPC community
> as well as the general public at large.

It sounds like you've already started thinking about what might be the
most important problem here: supporting a variety of transports.  Sugar
currently uses Telepathy for all peer identification and communication,
but different mechanisms are appropriate in different situations.  I think
you'll have the most success if you can be flexible enough to play well
with a variety of identity and communication systems.

The other important thing is to maintain a strong abstraction between
storage and display so that new GUIs may be created without rewriting the
core.  It sounds like you're doing that too.

The other fun problems relate to retention/transfer policy and space
utilization, but those can likely be adapted after the design is in place.
 For plain text there's hardly a problem at all, but I expect you'll want
to do more than just text.

By the way, Sugar probably won't integrate anything that depends on Perl,
so I suggest that you minimize your reliance on it.  Also, for efficiency
it would be cool if you could make sure that the background memory usage
is small.

--Ben

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