One Laptop per Child

In Ghana, where the Baah-Wiredu Laptop per Child Foundation is working towards a 10,000 laptop deployment, the Millennium Village cluster in Bonsaaso includes some of the first adopters of one laptop per child.

The Millennium Villages are part of an effort to help sub-saharan African countries realize the Millennium Development Goals through global social, financial, and innovation support.  Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former Secretary General Kofi Annan have worked closely together in designing and championing the MDGs, and proposing Millennium Villages and related programs.
This past week, Sachs and Annan visited Bonsaaso and visited the primary students there.

Primary students show off to visitors in Bonsaaso

As the village is unusual in a number of ways, not least in that it reportedly has reliable free internet access, it will be interesting to see how the students and teachers progress over the coming year. What do you think?

The latest issue of the new OLPC newsletter is out. I’m trying out different layouts for an archive, including having select past stories show up each week at the end.

As always, feedback on design and story selection are welcome. Current requests include a way to browse the newsletter online without leaving some sort of story navigation (with some sort of floating TOC?)

For the early-Feb edition we will try to gather & discuss stories and images in advance in the OLPC newsroom.  Please submit your muck-raking, globe-trotting, xo-loving ideas and links there.

		January 25, 2010
	OLPCorps 2010: apply now		Summer and year-long internships available
OLPC for Haiti			New video: XO is for Hope

Haiti has been devastated by the recent earthquake.  Official estimates are that 110,000 people died and in the Port-au-Prince area, 75% of schools were destroyed.  We are exploring what we can to support the children and schools we have been working with there.  People on the ground in Haiti urgently need sanitation, water, food, and shelter.

Please consider donating to one of these aid groups working on essential services on the ground:

* UNICEF
* World Food Program
* Partners In Health

We are doing what we can for the 60 schools that we have been working with in Haiti – primarily planning for the spring after the first phase of rebuilding is underway.  We will be sending a group of OLPCorps volunteers to Haiti later this year, and are organizing a used XO drive to recover XOs that can be refurbished and sent to Haiti.   Luckily, our Haitian team (technical and in the government) was not hurt in the earthquake, and they are planning to help displaced students get back to school as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, around the US, people (including our own Adam Holt and Tim Falconer) have been gathering in CrisisCamps to brainstorm ways to better use collaborative technology to help groups on the ground.  If you are technically-minded, there is a real demand for programmers and interface designers to help some of these projects thrive.

We’re incredibly excited to announce the 2010 OLPCorps program.  This year, university students and young adults will have opportunities to support OLPC deployments in one of five regions: Haiti, Mali, Cameroun, Afghanistan, and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Installing solar panels in Kenya with OLPCorps

We saw the passion and skills of university students in our 2009 Corps program, and restructured it to extend the program and focus on a smaller number of countries.  This will allow applicants to make a bigger contribution to our mission of creating educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children.

OLPCorps applicants must now commit to a full year, and applications are open to college students and young adults over the age of 18. We’re looking for passionate people who can work independently in challenging environments. Participants will engage in capacity building projects ranging from technical infrastructure support and local software design to advocacy, classroom assistance, administration, and strategy design.  Successful applicants will receive a stipend.   You can apply for the Corps online now.

For students looking for opportunities in established OLPC deployments or for shorter periods of time, applications for this year’s Internship Program are also available.

The OLPC Association is pleased to announce new internship opportunities for the coming year.  Country support interns will support an established deployment for 3 to 12 months, in one of four countries: Rwanda, Paraguay, Peru, or Nicaragua.

Learning outside with an intern teaching assistant in 2009

Support interns serve a vital role in building local capacity of partnering countries and organizations.  Innovators in business, engineering, social sciences, computer science, and public relations will be paired with experts in local knowledge and community building.  Teams will work alongside local school children, teachers, community members, and government officials to accelerate each country toward their long-term goals for education development.   Projects range from technical infrastructure support and local software design to advocacy and classroom assistance.  Internships are open to students over the age of 18.

There are also internship opportunities in grant writing and foundation outreach.  These interns will work remotely, conducting research and working with country deployments to formulate and submit grant proposals.  These are unpaid internships, with possible opportunities to travel to partnering countries.

Apply for an internship online, or find out more about the program.

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As 10 million post-Earthquake Haitians struggle to survive, then make sense of their flattened communities and missing infrastructure, OLPC’s community-driven Contributors Program is working with the US Naval Postgraduate School’s Hastily Formed Networks Research Group’s Humanitarian Aid/Disaster Relief project (blog) — and Sahana, an award-winning Free and Open Source Disaster Management System inspired by 2004’s Indian Ocean Tsunami — to support their Haiti response.

Shaking intensity from the earthquake

We want free ruggedized XO Laptops running Linux (with Wifi, browser, kids’ learning activities and a whole lot more) to go to aid/reconstruction groups who quickly explain to us their need.  We’re in discussions with 5 so far, but want you to help us find many more aid/reconstruction groups and initiatives that can leverage our work.  Supplies are limited, but we will do our human best to consider all genuinely committed groups — please request/explain your need today at: help@laptop.org

Note Full Applications will be processed more quickly.

Free solar-charging backpacks are also currently available independently from: jeff@voltaicsystems.com ! (for more intensive uses, please consider other alternative energy approaches)

Thanks for spreading the word — please find your own way to help Haitians into the new decade, building a whole new country.

In March 2010, the One Laptop per Child Association will be gathering over 300 of the world’s best and brightest young MBA, graduate and undergraduate business minds.  These students will develop strategies for leveraging leading-edge technologies to educate and empower the world’s poorest children.

After hearing OLPC President Chuck Kane give a presentation at Hult Business School, Ahmad Ashkar, Nabil Chaachou, and Jose Escobar came up with an idea to have a Global Case Competition that leverages technology and the ability to crowdsource ideas from a global landscape.  After hearing about the challenges currently faced by OLPC, the Hult team felt the only viable solution to solve the international scope of the problem had to come from sources worldwide. The team hopes the case competition will provide a platform for the world’s students to come together and solve a global social issue.  By soliciting innovative solutions from students from every corner of the world, we can empower any social non-profit to help them accomplish their goals.  This year’s Global Case Competition is planned as the first in a series of annual competitions, and the Hult Team is already speaking to other NGO’s and non-proifts who might partake in next year’s event.

The Case Challenge will be hosted in 4 locations: Boston, Dubai, London, and Shanghai.  As of today, GCC is accepting applications from around the world.

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Here is our first take on recent events at a glance, in a new, flexible format.  This alpha edition covers milestones from our work this past year – what better time to reflect than now, as 2009 draws to a close? We are sending this out as an update to our past supporters as well. 

If you want to share this, or read it on a mobile device, you may find it easier to view it on laptop.org. Enjoy these flashbacks, and have a Happy New Year!

Introducing the XO-3			Uruguay gives an XO to every child
	Rwanda plans one laptop per child by 2012		Thank you for your support. Please help us do more: give a laptop or donate in another way.

Recently around the office we have been discussing bringing back regular public updates.  I miss the weekly news we used to send out.  Our current thought is to have a compoact visual newsletter every few weeks, linking out to details online for each piece of news.

Here is one possible design for sharing future news.  This format could cover anything from a high-level review of a few months at a stretch to an ongoing timeline online, to an email update every month.  If you have design comments, or news you’d like to see shared – in the future or from the past few months – let us know.

A six-week overview of news and events

Update: thanks for all of the feedback on the design!  There has been some discussion about materials, and a few interesting pieces have passed around the office, but no new eye-candy is forthcoming for a while — we’re busy getting the 1.5 out the door.

The XO-3: it’s designed to be thin, sleek, and touch, while continuing to lower power, cost, and material waste.  We’ve been anticipating the new designs for a while, and now they’ve arrived!  As announced in Tuesday’s  press release, after our upcoming releases of our 1.5 and 1.75 models next year, we are looking at the XO-3, a thin touchscreen tablet.  Here are the latest images from the Fuse design team: