One Laptop per Child

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 cexercise/>lose? 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

Happy Holidays to all!  As I was working on a community newsletter this past weekend and reflecting on the work of the past year, I was warmed as always by the constant and refreshing work of our community groups and national partners.   They rarely get caught in the global OLPC spotlight, but as often as not they are the ones inspiring and improving the projects that flourish.  And while some contributors such as Caryl Bigenho and Anne Gentle have worked on fairly visibile projects like the Contributors Program and the XO Guides, many others work on projects that haven’t had their own press releases or events.

So I’d like to take this post to thank some of the extraordinary and prolific OLPC supporters I have worked with over the past years:  Bernie Innocenti, who was so taken with the early work on OLPC he left his home in Italy to come to Boston and support the project for over a year, inspiring us all with his passion, energy, software experience and continent-sized chiptune collection, and has since remained a pillar of support for SugarLabs; Bert Freudenberg, who led the Etoys for the XO team, helped build the OLPC community in Germany, and worked since the first software development to keep us focused on empowering children and giving them a great learning environment; and Christoph Derndorfer, who when not studying interface design has done as much as anyone to encourage local chapter formation, effective global reporting on OLPC’s works, international volunteer exchange with deployments, and outreach to new potential activity developers.  Wade Brainerd, who since winning a prize in the first OLPC Game Jam has developed, facilitated, or mentored a half-dozen remarkable activities (from Bounce to Colors! to WikiBrowse to Typing Turtle), making up some 10% of all activities that ship with the XO; Lionel Laske, who founded OLPC France, and has tirelessly organized press, superstar support, and local projects there; and Pia Waugh, who helped launch both OLPC Australia and OLPC Friends and realized half the holy grail of a videochat-powered pilot.  Chris Leonard, who has shared ideas, supported donors and health-related projects, and remained one of our most active wiki maintainers; and Tabitha Roder, who has maintained our leading group of testers for years.  And the volunteers who never tired and later joined the staff — Daniel Drake, who in-between working and contracting at OLPC has been a world-traveller supporting independent deployments with his priceless insight and energy, leaving joy in his wake; and Mel Chua, who worked on just about everything, from chapters and events to art to content and code to docs and testing.

To all of you: thank you, thank you.  It is your devotion that keeps the spirit of olpc alive around the world… and that, where we have flourished, has made good projects great.

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, for 2012.  Here are the latest images from the Fuse design team:

Today we announced our coming hardware lineup, the pending production of the XO 1.5, and published the first concept photos and timeline for the XO-3 tablet.  Here’s the press release:

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD DRIVES BREAKTHROUGH ADVANCES IN REVOLUTIONARY XO CHILDREN’S LAPTOP Product Road Map to Deliver Unprecedented High Performance, Low Power Consumption and Design Innovation at Lower and Lower Cost

Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 2009 – One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help provide every child in the world access to a modern education, announced today its product road map to deliver robust laptop performance and innovative design for use in the most remote, poor and rural communities and at the lowest power and cost in the industry.

“The first version of OLPC’s child-centric laptop, the XO, is a revolution in low-cost, low-power computing. The XO has been distributed to more than 1.4 million children in 35 countries and in 25 languages,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. “To fulfill our mission of reaching 500 million children in all remote corners of the planet, OLPC will continue to innovate in design and performance. Because we are a non-profit, we hope that industry will copy us.”

The new versions of the XO laptop will be as follows:

• XO 1.5 – The XO 1.5 is the same industrial design as the XO 1.0. Based on a VIA processor (replacing AMD), it will provide 2x the speed, 4x DRAM memory and 4x FLASH memory. It will run both the Linux and Windows operating systems. XO 1.5 will be available in January 2010 at about $200 per unit. The actual price floats in accordance with spot markets, particularly for those of DRAM and FLASH.

• XO 1.75 – The XO 1.75, to be available in early 2011, will be essentially the same industrial design but rubber-bumpered on the outside and in the inside will be an 8.9”, touch-sensitive display. The XO 1.75 will be based on an ARM processor from Marvell that will enable 2x speed at 1/4 the power and is targeted at $150 or less. This ARM-based system will complement the x86-based XO 1.75, which will remain in production, giving deployments a choice of processor platform.”

• XO 3.0 – The XO 3.0 is a totally different approach, to be available in 2012 and at a target price well below $100. It will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable and without holes in it. The XO 3.0 will leapfrog the previously announced (May 2008) XO 2.0, a two-page approach that will not be continued. The inner workings of 3.0 will come from the more modest 1.75.

Let us know what you think!

UNRWA Amari Girls School, an elementary school in the West Bank

OLPC has launched a new deployment in the Middle East in conjunction with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Since the start of its operations in 1950, UNRWA has been a vital provider of basic necessities, health care, and education for Palestine Refugees. Largely funded by the two Give One Get One campaigns and other contributions, OLPC hopes to enrich the education of these children whose lives have been uprooted by warfare. The first wave of 2,700 donated laptops will reach the Gaza and the West Bank in January 2010. Check out the new Middle East page on our website for more information.

Foodforce2 team has released a stable release of FoodForce2 activity, and has refreshed its website at Rollca Rollcats, this makes it the first Sugar activity to develop its own site!)  FF2 saw a great response this summer, with cexercise/>lose to 150 thousand downloads over 6 months after the Beta version was released in May. This game has been developed to make the children learn to apply their education to build a self-sustainable village and learn to trade and strategize in a fun way.

You are given responsibility of the village during an important wedding.

from the long time coming department:

Support for OLPC in Sri Lanka has been strong for some time, since Matt and Roger Sipitakiat visited them in early 2008.  After building a coalition of supporters, they have spent the past few months preparing for the launch of the country’s first 1300 machines.  This is a complex project despite the limited number of students involved, with underserved schools from each of Sri Lanka’s nine provinces taking part and direct oversight of the government – an indication of how this could work as part of a national deployment.

Today Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Education Minister Premajayantha presented the first 400 laptops at a public ceremony announcing this pilot program, in cooperation with the One Laptop Per Child Lanka Foundation, the World Bank, and a coalition of corporate donors (the Chart Foundation, Hatton National Bank, and mobile provider Tigo).  I can’t wait to see the first updates from the teachers and students after they have had a chance to start working together.

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa handing out laptops on December 10 at Temple Trees.

When I joined OLPC in 2006, the first thing that blew my mind was the open collaborative process  used across the project.  The second was Mary Lou Jepsen‘s incredible  sunlight-readable screen.

When the first prototype came to our machine lab, I used to stop in every day before heading home, to spend a few minutes looking at it or using it.  The displays have a delicious matte quality (the original prototypes had a similar glossy one) that makes anything displayed on them look like a work of art — not unlike the effect of a good matte finish on a photo print, or a tuxedo on the boy next door.  And it’s low-power and inexpensive, the sort of technology shift that should become universal.

We have always been open about the tech that goes into our work, in the hopes that other designers and creators will learn from our experiences.  And this display, one of the miracles of the XO, has long been something we’ve hoped to see appear in other laptops and devices.

So it has been delightful to watch the growth of PixelQi, Mary Lou’s new company focusing on producing and distributing those displays.  Their latest screen is 10.1″ and slightly lower-power and higher contrast than the screen in the XO-1.  Here’s a side-by-side comparison of different displays in an office… one of them with its backlight off.

A Pixel Qi screen with its backlight off, next to standard computers with backlights on, in bright office lighting conditions.

Today they announced they have started mass production, and will be on display with some of their first clients in at CES in January.   Technophiles may be lusting after them for indoor use, but we’re looking forward to the day that all netbooks are usable in outdoor classrooms.   To the PixelQi team: congratulations!

Here’s a short video from last month’s meeting of the East African Legislative Assembly, shortly before the EAC announced a regional OLPC initiative:

This was the 11th Summit of the Heads of State of the East African Community (EAC).  President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete of the United Republic of Tanzania and Secretary General Juma Volter Mwapachu of the EAC said a few words prior to Matt Keller’s presentation.

The East African Community (EAC) is the regional intergovernmental organization of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi with its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania.  Its legislative arm, the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA), addresses regional policy issues, and has been active since 2001; Rwanda and Burundi joined the EALA relative recently, in 2007.