(from marta)
About fundraising, have you thought about the FP7 European Union research
program?
I know that they are interested in funding research worldwide ( outside
Europe) specially research promoted by a network of partners located in
different countries as long as there is one of them inside Europe!
FP7 is a huge funding program, they even funded some small projects just to
figure out where to put their money:
Last June there was a small conference in Sao Paulo promoted by
www.digitalworldforum.eu, I was contacted by Roland Burger who was
coordinating this project to figure out how FP7 could invest in research
related to lowcost laptops in South America - the conference program is
attached. Few of the mentioned people attended, Roland asked us to write an
article to create a book as the result of the conference, so I wrote the
attached text "The laptop opportunity". I wrote this text in june 2008 as a
response to what happened in two days of conference: some discussion about
hardware and lots of criticism for the one to one approach, criticism made
by people totally faraway from education, most of them engineer professors
from private universities in Sao Paulo...
Roland was going to use my article as the introduction to the laptop chapter
of the book that was suppose to summarize this and two more conferences in
LAC and Africa... but I didn't hear from him anymore...
Well, besides this experience I have seen a few documents from FP7 and I
think that they are looking for opportunities to give grants to people like
us!
We could apply for a grant to guide and observe a few schools in different
parts of the planet, and research how they respond to E-toys adoption, and
as a result we would write material to support growth of e-toys for other
schools; and give feedback to the software team (also funded for
maintenance/improvement...)
Many ideas are possible, I just want to highlight that they ( The European
union) like to grant projects promoted by networks that's involve
universities and organizations from different countries. To increase
representation of developing world we could extend observation of schools to
Uruguay ( easy for me to work with them) or any other country that you know
that local partners would collaborate...