OLPC’s mission to empower the world’s children through education is far from over. OLPC is thriving and making more inroads at bringing education to those who can’t easily access it. OLPC recently formed a strategic alliance with the Zamora Teran family through many of their enterprises and their philanthropic foundation, the “Fundación Zamora Teran to deliver XO laptops not only to Central and South America, but also to Africa.
Aside from distributing more laptops in several schools in Costa Rica, Uruguay is receiving its first 50k units of the XO-4 Touch (running Android) in a few weeks’ time. In addition, the XO Tablet is currently available directly through governments and NGOs, as well as in Europe and Canada and through all major retail outlets in the United States including Walmart, Amazon, Toys ‘R Us among the others.
OLPC also has outsourced many of the software and development units because the organization is becoming more hardware and OS agnostic, concentrating on its core values – education. As an example, we’ve partnered with the Smithsonian Museum to bring feature-rich, interactive and more targeted content to our young learners.
We have more exciting things planned in the horizon including the implementation of very large scale projects in several regions of the world, so be sure to stay tuned.
I think OLPC’s strong points are:
1. it aligns with the strategies from the top leaders regarding education and sustainable development: e.g. the United Nations’Millennium Development Goal nr. 2 = Bringing Universal Primary Education, UNICEF, the Ministries of Education are responsible; OLPC just aligns. OLPC doesn’t pretend to be the only party in the educational landscape that has something intelligent to say, but OLPC does have undisputed leadership in developing the best open community laptop-tablet-robot in the world. OLPC doesn’t have to be reminded that throwing some million laptops in the schools will solve all the minister of education’s or teachers problems. OLPC is aware that if you have a hammer (the XO laptop-tablet-robot), you tend to over-simplify every problem by reducing it to a nail. But this also counts for those organisations that can’t bring the multi-disciplinary team together to make not even the simplest of hardware: their hammer is ALWAYS no hardware because they don’t master it, and their nail is to ALWAYS want to see the solution as talking and meetings and discussing strategies. How are they ever going to include the millions who can’t afford paying an airplane ticket to participate in the talking and meetings, wherever they’re going on? There is a consensus that miniaturisation and mass-production is a game changer. Most of the time a marrying between AND hardware AND soft-skills will unlock synergies. If you don’t master the hardware side, make OLPC your alley and to head an olpc community department in your organisation.
2. OLPC harnesses the free energy and knowledge that is available in the world community to make sure there is an open community project that makes sure there is an alternative to the commercially available laptop-tablet-robots.
There IS a real rupture of confidence with the commercial peers. This is the reality – just some examples:
a. Computers and hardware that is programmed to fail
b. Viruses due to not following open standards
c. GSM manufacturers, do they want to sell us GSM’s or cables and adaptors? Every family can fill a bucket with them that don’t fit the next generation programmed to fail gsm’s.
d. ISP & Mobile phone operators: they are in our pockets through our kids to get the last 5€$¥ via all kind of sneaky not so free subscriptions and not so unlimited sms etc. packages.
e. electronic waste and an overheated push to sell, regardless if the customers have been able to make a profit/generate additional revenues before the hardware/software fails.
No wonder there is so much mistrust and complete revulsion by many leading ngo’s, decision makers and a large % of the population to everything that is electronic hardware and software. OLPC is the answer and reaction to that!
Anno 2014, the number of “people” that DO have been educated, that DO have the software and hardware and organisational skills, combined with the free knowledge available, and available money to support OLPC alike projects, and massification and miniaturisation and internet, make that an organisation like OLPC can emerge.
I wouldn’t know what laptop-tablet-robot to invest in for my kids. I don’t trust the brands anymore. I’m not alone: the people through the European Commission have become so angry they have made it compulsory by law that the gsm/laptop etc. manufacturers HAVE to use one of 4 plugs that are interchangeable. We are FED UP with all these ever changing adaptors-, headphone-, etc. plugs.
I prefer to give my money and time and knowledge to the open community initiative OLPC, and so should you.