Mentoring and sharing.
I learned most of what I know about computers in open forums like the Debian project mailing lists in the lat 90's and any places since. I really enjoy the opportunity give back to the community some of what I've received either informally through mailing lists and forums or more formally through conference presentation or direct supervisory relationships.
This page details some of the more formal projects I've been involved in that don't fit well in the more usual places. These are mostly part of CSAIL's Imara initiative which became an umbrella for a number of out reach projects.
The Laare Community Center was founded by lab alum Eric Mibuari and was probably one of the first projects to come under the Imara umbrella. Around the same time professor (now lab director) Daniela Rus had an engagement with Fijian primary schools on the islands where she was doing underwater robotics research.
My involvement in both project was providing a specialized Edubuntu based operating system. The projects had similar requirements. Intermittent power availability, infrequent and slow network connection and requirements that the system could be reset to a clean state easily by a teacher with minimal training. I developed and installed the system and media content and trained the MIT personnel traveling to each site to train the on site teachers
In February 2007 as a result of publicity around these initiative The Director of Information Technology and a Computer Science professor from Diné College on the Navajo Nation contacted us about potential collaboration.
In response to this I co-developed and co-taught a summer course on computer hardware repair, Linux systems administration, and open-source software development with a focus on translation and localization. I also provided mentoring for some of the junior Linux IT staff, and assistance with modeling and testing long(ish) range WiFi links for distributing network service form the main campus areas to housing areas. It was quite a 90 days. A mini-blog of mine exists for this period, it's like proto twitter with only one user.