Dr. Tabaré Vázquez, President of Uruguay, writes glowingly in the Americas Quarterly magazine about Plan CEIBAL, the XO-1 laptop program in Uruguay:
We are implementing the plan one step at a time. To date, we have delivered 151,918 XO computers—low-power laptops that operate with flash memory and a Linux operating system—to students in public schools in Uruguay. By the end of 2009 one laptop will be delivered to each of the 301,143 students and 12,879 teachers in Uruguay’s 2,064 public schools. Students with mental, visual, hearing, or motor disabilities—as well as their schools—will also receive computers specifically tailored to meet their needs.
You can find out more about the Uruguayan OLPC deployment at the Plan CEIBAL website in Spanish or in English.
The Public Software Portal of Brazil works to aggregate all the initiatives with FLOSS inside of the Brazillian government. It also connects them with the community in that it’s open to anyone (companies, individuals, etc) who want to contribute or propose a new solution. It’s an important step forward when the citizens of a country can see and contribute to the technology and the source code used by their government to serve them. This is a level of transparency that, without doubt, has become a critical element of modern democracies.
Many of the predictions in the existing roadmap have already started to come to fruition. For example, FLOSS has already begun to bridge the global digital divide. FLOSS continues to become more and more mainstream, despite the billion-dollar initiatives to marginalize it. Nice blog.
Tom