One Laptop per Child

The OLPCorps Africa program is getting underway, and OLPC are looking for a program director for the student summer program experience in Cambridge and Kigali.

Applications from student groups are now being accepted.  Accepted applicants will receive a stipend of up to $10k and 100 XOs, and take part in a 10-day preparatory workshops and a post-mortem review.  Read the FAQ for details or to ask a question of your own about the program.

If you’re interested in helping out in areas of program planning, the OLPCorps team leads will be joining the support gang call this Sunday, and are looking for additional help.  French-language materials and communication will be particularly important, for instance.

Be Rewarding is a group that has been working on developing online educational quizzes in various languages that are fun and engaging, with participation linked to donations to related charities to encourage continued participation.  We have worked with them and their founder Elise Moussa (happy birthday, Elise!) for over a year, and it’s great to see their alpha site go live — it is looking quite beautiful and I wish it every success.

Check the project out and send them your feedback.

A group of students who have worked on two small deployments in Africa
over the past year have proposed an OLPCorps project (quick, how many C’s did you read?), to encourage students everywhere to found and contribute to locally-supported school projects.

You can find and comment on the proposal for this summer on the OLPCorps Africa wiki page.

G1G1 flyer from OHOT

OLPC is considering this seriously for promotion and funding this summer.  The program would be open to students from all countries.  Paul Commons from Indiana University has been leading the proposal development – their “one here, one there” chapter made the G1G1 flyer on the right during the fall.

What I like best about the proposal is that it is not competitive, and there is real incentive for different project enthusiasts to help one another make their projects better.  In practice this happens to some degree with publicly-posted proposal contests, since everyone reads other proposals and learns from the best; but it is a silent borrowing of ideas, not the give-and-take of suggestions.

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We have been running a Change the World [CTW] program since November, which (along with the Give Many program which preceded it) allowed groups that wanted 100 or more XOs to get them at cexercise/>lose to their raw production & shipping cost.

This was a nice way to engage potential G1G1 supporters and others who were interested in supporting an entire school or educational work done by local charities.  It has had only limited popularity, however, and minimal overlap with our goal of getting countries and districts to embrace olpc for their children at scale.  As part of refocusing on our mission this year we are wrapping up CTW.

This is a program we would love to support if we had time to do everything — it has produced some lovely stories, and on rare occasions starts a process that leads to larger, lasting commitments.  In time we may make a similar program available again, and welcome feedback here from those who have taken part, or considered taking part, over the past year.

If you are waiting to finalize details on a Change the World request, including longer-term fundraising plans, please do so this week (emailing us; those who have written in already should have received similar updates by email).  The page describing the program will stay up for a short while longer, and all current CtW conversations and transactions will be completed, even after the program has ended.

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A couple of weeks ago, OLPC XS 0.5.1 was released with little fanfare. Everyone was busy — understandably so — and the announcement went unnoticed.

So perhaps it is time to go back and look at it in detail. The School Server is a Fedora-based distro that auto-installs and (mostly) auto configures itself into a server that complements with the XO laptop. Even if it is not obvious, the XO behaves much better when it is working on a network managed by a School Server. And in locations with limited or no Internet access, a School Server with a bounty of educational content makes a huge difference.

XS 0.5.x is a big leap forward from the earlier series. It upgrades the base OS from Fedora 7 to Fedora 9, streamlines instalation and configuration, and is a better platform to build upon. Ah, yes! It also has some cool new features.

So what does the XS do for your XOs?

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XO costs are scheduled to drop soon; while we’re not yet in the $75-$100 range, raw materials costs have stopped going up and other economies are kicking in. The Globe has a fairly balanced piece on the update.

Meanwhile, feature-limited appliances such as modern bookreaders and many single-purpose phones continue to keep their prices up around $400, well above production costs; or subsidized by locking into hefty service plans.  Is that the model for the future?  Are netbooks moving the default price of a laptop from 1500 to 500, or shifting us to a culture of dropping costs over time?

XO Camp attendees, and many taking part from afar, were invited to submit questions about OLPC’s future.   Nicholas answered a limited number during two sessions; the full list are posted below.  Now we have to figure out which wiki FAQ to add them to…

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1. Current programs and general questions

* What efforts will OLPC make to support the XO-1?

The XO-1 will be fully supported, including hardware and firmware up-dates, spare parts and ever growing activities. OLPC is in discussion with several of the large deployments to understand how they help beyond their own national boundaries.

* For how long is the XO-1 going to be in production?

The XO-1 and its planned revision, which we fondly call 1.5, will be in production for at least two more years, and is expected to remain available to existing deployments beyond that point for replacements and spares.

* Is the production of XO-1s at risk if the sales stop? Do you have a plan to sustain the demand for XO-1s in this atmosphere of uncertainty?

OLPC itself is independent of sales. At the moment, there is a back order of 500,000 laptops. At the current rate of production, which is 50,000 per month, the world could stop and there is 10 months of life in the supply chain. Yes, there is a global economic slow down, but we do not expect sales to totally stop. Rwanda just ordered 100,000 laptops. Give the focus of OLPC’s mission, many of our sales are to entities where funding is a concern even in the best economic times.

* Will the XO-2 be developed as an important free software project as the XO-1 was?

The XO-2 will continue OLPC’s tradition of open development including Open Firmware and open-source operating system support.

* In what ways are you planning to involve the community in the development of the XO-2?

We may need the community more than ever for XO-2, because we are exploring the degree to which the hardware of XO-2 can be open source (whatever that really means in hardware).  OLPC’s strategy for XO-2 support is to build a broader community of interest in the technologies used, to provide greater benefit to participants.

* Whats your timeframe for having the XO-2 in the market?

Two years.

* Are there any updates on dual-boot deployments of XO-1?

We expect them soon, less than three months, taking advantage of existing XO-1 hardware.

2. No-cost connectivity program

-Great idea, as connectivity is one of the largest challenges for a country or region to implement a one laptop per child program. What technologies are you aiming at?

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OLPC Australia’s first pilot program is coming along nicely, spearheaded by Pacific region community OLPC Friends, dedicated to “sharing OLPC resources . . . throughout the Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand.” Each machine is being shipped with VideoChat-7 and a host of other applications for collaboration and content.

The OLPC Friends site has a write-up with more information and advice for Australians and New Zealanders who want to get involved with the program. There’s also a wonderfully detailed entry on wiki.laptop.org with news, information, FAQs, and links.