Negroponte: A Laptop for Every Kid

Negroponte: A Laptop for Every Kid Wired News, 17 nov. 2005

Nicholas Negroponte • Founder of MIT Media Lab • Founder Wired magazine • One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) $100 laptop was first presented by Nicholas Negroponte and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society.

Specs: • 7-inch screen that swivels like a tablet PC • an electricity-generating crank that provides 40 minutes of power from a minute of grinding • built-in Wi-Fi with mesh networking support • a microphone, speaker and headset jack  can serve VOIP phone system. • a modest 500-MHz AMD processor • a gig of flash memory for storage

The key • an innovative, low-power LCD screen technology invented by Negroponte's CTO, Mary Lou Jepsen. • "The manufacturers are the toughest audience, and they stopped laughing in September," says Jepsen.

Aanleiding Negroponte: We've been working now with computers and education for 30 years, computers in developing countries for 20 years, and trying to make low-cost machines for 10 years. Now, it was possible to do it.

Open Source • WN: Why the emphasis on open source? Why not use a donated version of Windows or OS X? • Negroponte: Because you want the kids to develop software.... It's hard to propose a $100 laptop for a world community of kids and then not say in the same breath that you're going to depend on the community to make software for it. [C compilers and Make and the whole programming environment]

Open Source • WN: One could argue that it's better to give them something that has more mainstream commercial appeal. • Negroponte: Now be careful there. Fifty percent of the servers on this planet are using either Linux or some kind of Unix derivative.... So 20 percent of the world's servers are already using what I would call perfectly mainstream software. And there are open-source approaches to it that are working just fine. It's not mainstream on the desktop, I'll admit, but we'll make it mainstream on the desktop. We'll push that over the edge.

Scale • WN: Is the goal literally to make computers available to every child that wants one in the world? • Negroponte: It's every child in the world whether they want one or not. They may not know they want one. • WN: You're going to be unleashing a whole new generation of open-source programmers, who otherwise would never, possibly, have gotten their hands on a computer. • Negroponte: I hope so. I hope we unleash half a billion of them.

Viruses? • WN: How long is it going to be before somebody writes a computer virus that takes advantage of this mesh network to start spreading? • Negroponte: You've got to be careful here. That's a little like saying you ought to not teach people how to read and write because they could write messages to each other about how to build a bomb. Anything you tell me that has to do with education, I can tell you how it's not a good idea because they could read a book on how to make a bomb or something.... I'm more worried about the reverse. • I (do) want to make sure we are virus-proof. That you can reboot, so you don't get infected in a way that's really cataclysmic.

Commercial?? We're not trying to do anything commercial, but if they do, and they -- whether the right word is license it, or partner with us ... then we get three benefits from that. • 1. an engineering partnership. • 2. wider distribution • 3. cross-subsidy: commercial machines sold for $225. Let me pretend $25 of that went to One Laptop Per Child, and that lowers the cost of the laptop from $100 down to $75.... ( - anti-dumping laws)

G1G1 To date, donations to the Give One Get One program have averaged US$2 million per day. (12-22 november) Breaking down that figure reveals that about 5000 donations were made per day, which translates into 5000 "given" machines and 5000 "gotten" machines for a total of ~100.000 X0s purchased so far in the past 10 days. If you extrapolate those number until the end of the year we could see up to around 500.000 X0 sales just via G1G1. Nog tot 31 december…

Critique "It's not as simple as 'if you build it, they will use it,'" said Andy Carvin, director of the Digital Divide Network, a community of educators and activists working to include more people in the digital age. For the program to work, training and technical support has to exist -- as well as basic literacy and local content to meet local needs, he said. "Some kids could probably do well on their own, but the majority will need long-term support of some kind," he said. [Laptops for Kids With No Power - Stephen Leahy, Wired: 06.06.05]

Critique Internet access and electricity, not cheap computers, are the real challenges in developing countries, said Wayan Vota, a program manager at Geekcorps, a volunteer organization that teaches communities how to use affordable information and communication technologies. "The $100 laptop is a really cool idea. But the real technology bottleneck is getting an affordable internet connection to the outside world," said Vota. [Laptops for Kids With No Power - Stephen Leahy, Wired: 06.06.05]

Critique Al Hammond, director for the nonprofit World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend project in Washington D.C., worries about customer support in poor, rural areas. "The key is to create something affordable and sufficiently robust to protect against voltage surges, against dust, and against being dropped, and against all the perils of the internet," Hammond said. "Those things are more important if the nearest computer tech is three villages away and you don't have an air-conditioned office to work in." [Low-Cost Laptops for Kids in Need – Associated Press, Wired: 04.03.05]

Critique Like Hammond, Andy Carvin, director of the Newton-based nonprofit Digital Divide Network, applauds the project's goals, calling an extremely low-cost, durable laptop "one of the holy grails of bridging the digital divide." But he said increasingly sophisticated and versatile wireless handhelds may gain favor over laptops as the developing world's online tools of choice. [Low-Cost Laptops for Kids in Need – Associated Press, Wired: 04.03.05]

Negroponte: A Laptop for Every Kid