For the past year, we have been running a Give Many large-scale donation program with little fanfare, for groups that wish to buy XOs in hundreds and thousands for their own school or regional projects.

This week we rolled out a more detailed program for targeted donations, tentatively called Change the World — so now you have a choice : Give a laptop, Get a laptop, Change the World. (A bit anticlimactic for the Simply Give donors, but they don’t seem to mind.)

We have a sense of what it takes to support these independent projects, and are working to remove barriers to entry.  The cost of starting a 100-laptop project in the neediest parts of the world is now under $220 per laptop, including shipping to an international airport, a spare parts kit, and explicit invitations for organizers to the learning and deployment workshops that we organize a few times each year.

We have dropped price tiering by quantity — so 100 laptops cost the same per machine as 1000 — and we are offering a discount for projects targeting the 50 Least Developed Countries and OLPC’s partner countries (the cost for projects in other parts of the world is $259 per laptop) .

There is a growing FAQ on our Wiki with more information; other thoughts after the jump.

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There’s a lot going on that’s too short for the blog, and today I started working on a list of one-line daily notes, including a site of the day (today: Mexico’s free-content site about their OLPC deployment and plans) and an article of the day (today: the Yay-bee-see content bundle that was just posted yesterday by the prolific Ben Sittler.  After a bit of polish tonight, perhaps I’ll make it into a single collated blog post as well.  Props to Walter Vermeir, whose lovely Wikizine has been an inspiration to me for some time.

One point of particular interest: Amazon’s conversion rates (the number of people who follow OLPC’s referrer link and buy something) jumped to 3.5% yesterday; update Dec 1: and was at 4.5% over the past weekend.  That’s a good sign.  And after a slow launch of laptop.org/global, we’re now seeing thousands of people referred to the international G1G1 page each day as well.

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G1G1 will be global this year, available (via laptop.org/global) in every country where the XO has passed certification and labelling requirements.

This is an initial list of countries we will be shipping to.  To send a laptop to anywhere but the US, you’ll need to enter your information via amazon.co.uk, and (for now) pay roughly 50 GBP in shipping. Update: we are working on reducing the shipping costs for the EU and Canada.

We are adding to this list all the time.  If you don’t see your country listed, and can help us work through the requirements where you live, let me know.  You can preorder a G1G1 laptop directed to any address in the world where UPS ships, excluding the six embargoed countries below.  We prioritize the countries in which we quicken the certification process based partly on the level of interest and the number of preorders, so make your interest known!

You can currently receive your G1G1 “Get” machines in any of the following countries:

North America : Canada, the United States

Central & South America : Haiti, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay

Europe : Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom

Middle East : Iraq APO addresses

Africa : Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda

Asia : Afghanistan, Mongolia, Nepal, Australia.

Countries where you will not be able to receive G1G1 machines:

Countries under embargo in the US : Cuba, Iran, Iraq (except for APO addresses),  North Korea. the Sudan, and Syria.

All machines shipped this year will be US/International keyboards.  Details to come on the available adapters; UK, and US adapters will be available; some EU recipients will also receive or will need to get a US-to-EU converter.

Australia is getting final certification this week, and launching their own G1G1 OZ.  Updates coming and contacts still needed for: APO addresses for Fulbright scholars and military deployments overseas, South Africa, Bolivia, India, Pakistan, China, Taiwan, and Russia… as well as most other African countries.

Nicholas was interviewed on the Charlie Rose program on NPR this week. It ended up being a pretty cool 12 minute piece on the state of the OLPC program.

Clip of the last time Nicholas was on Charlie Rose in 2005 after the jump.
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