No, it's not some early George Lucas film, it's the IADB project title for the "Pilot of the One Laptop per Child Model" in Haiti that Wayan gave a great overview of at OLPCNews.com:

In a direct contraction to Nicholas Negroponte guidance at the November, 2005 IADB meeting, where he told Ministers of Education that "To do a pilot project is ridiculous!," the IADB is not only piloting OLPC, they're also going to have objective testing on the efficacy of a one to one education model

It's probably not an accident that the World Bank's InfoDev just published a Handbook on Monitoring and Evaluation of ICT in Education Projects...

I'm interested in the hard costs of the project, which weighs in at a total of $5,100,000USD. You can trace the evolution of the project back to the original November 2007 project summary and watch the numbers dance around as they move towards the final plan of operations, signed in March 2008. Between November and March they realize the need for school servers (at over $1,000USD each), energy and security solutions, as well as increase their setup, implementation, contingency, and measurement costs, (contingency spending alone goes from just under $16k to almost $260k).

Since the 5.1 million total doesn't shift, these costs are taken out of other parts of their implementation plans. IADB's laptop purchase goes from 7,000 to 3,700 (OLPC is providing another 10,000 XOs presumably from G1G1), training and content gets cut down by $200,000, and maintenance gets $30k shaved off.

The end result is focusing on 13,200 students plus 500 teachers (the November plan was for 19,000 students, but didn't have laptops for all of them or any teachers embedded in the budget) in forty communities. The student:teacher ratio would be a respectable, if not quite believable 26.4:1 . I'm creating a spreadsheet to hold all of this information with some formulas to sort it out that you can look at yourself.

What interests me is to see how my cost estimates from November 2006 stack up. I calculated for a 5 year total implementation process, and was using some slightly different numbers (the laptop cost $148 then, for example), which in some ways overlaps with the IADB budget. I tried to honestly extract a "first year" budget from my old numbers and re-arrange the IADB budget to group it into the same categories. the November costs are from the original November 2007 project summary, with the per-laptop costs just dividing by the ran numbers of laptops in the plan (not by the projected numbers of students and teacher recipients, which was a larger number). The March numbers are from the final plan of operations, signed in March 2008, with the per-laptop costs being the total divided by the number of laptops (they fixed the number glitch), and dividing the server costs among the laptops. The 5year projection is not just multiplying that by five, as most of the costs are designed to be one-time implementation costs, but tweaking where necessary to cover maintenance and so forth. The Jon5yr cost is my original guestimate, and the Jon1yr extracts the setup costs and divides the rest of the recurring costs by 5:

Cost Calulations
	November	Nov per-laptop	March	Mar per-laptop	Mar*5yr	Jon1yr	Jon*5yr
Training and content	$696,336	$40.96	$490,743	$35.82	$35.82	$27.60	$138.00
Implementation	$735,664	$43.27	$1,355,827	$98.97	$98.97	$108.00	$108.00
Maintenance	$100,000	$5.88	$71,200	$5.20	$25.99	$7.40	$37.00
Hardware	$3,568,000	$209.88	$3,182,230	$232.28	$282.17	$149.00	$689.00
...Connectivity	$180,000	$10.59	$170,880	$12.47	$62.36	$1.00	$541.00
...Laptops	$3,196,000	$209.88	$2,581,480	$188.43	$188.43	$148.00	$148.00
...non-laptop hardware	$192,000	$11.29	$429,870	$31.38	$31.38	$0.00	$0.00
Sum	$5,100,000	$300.00	$5,100,000	$372.26	$442.94	$292.00	$972.00

You can view the entire spreadsheet to see what went where in detail at this Google Spreadsheet of the OLPC/IADB costs with the formulae visible to see how I constructed my numbers (and the linked PDF files have the original arrangement of the costs if you're so interested).

Now, IADB doesn't break down connectivity very well, so it's unclear what part of that is installation and what part (if any?) is service provision, and it's this figure where my estimates appear way off. IADB calculates $3,000 USD/school for "connectivity" . According to a February Community News email:

Michail had a conference call with SES-Americom. They agreed to provide the (C-Band) space segment and internet termination (via their Maryland teleport) for our upcoming deployment in Haiti.

So I'm going to guess that that's $3k for a VSAT installation with donated bandwidth; with no maintenance budget or money for a paid subscription if the bandwidth donation ever dries up -- does the community have any insight on this?

As for the other "line items", I was $10 over per laptop on total implementation costs, and $2 over on maintenance costs, not bad. If I presume that an Internet connection is free of cost, my original number 972 less five years of Internet access (coming in at $541 using the UN dial-up costs discussed here), I end up $11.94 cents higher than a 5-year projection of the IADB's numbers, (not accounting for the change in the laptop price from $148 to $188).

So if anyone can provide some on-the-ground information about bandwidth costs in Haiti (all the ISP websites I found were broken in one way or another); we can see what the ongoing costs of this project will be.

Posted to ( OLPC ) by Jon on May 22, 2008 at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Check out this video of James Utzschneider walking us through Windows XP on the OLPC XO (Video via OLPCNews.com

XP on the XO

So the good news is it boots faster than Sugar; (1:05 into the video) Good going, folks. Too bad you have to cram in an SD card to make XP and Office work -- so that makes it really difficult if you ever want to upgrade to a larger SD card, view photos from your camera, or any of that, presuming it won't successfully boot without the SD card (but maybe they squeezed the XP Operating system into the onboard NAND flash drive and the SD card holds Office? That'd make more sense, so it's probably not true).

Update Unsurprisingly, it's not true. From James' blog, emphasis added:

As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast." Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.

Recording audio

It goes quickly downhill from there; at 1:36 in, James shows us how to record an audio file on the XPXO. Remember, in Sugar this means pressing the "Record" activity on the bottom toolbar, selecting "Audio" (it defaults to photos, this one "Record" activity records anything -- photos, video, or audio!), and pressing record -- done. In XP, James navigates through 3 submenus of the Start Menu (Start-Programs-Accessories-Entertainment, for you following at home with your own XP, because when I think "record this" I think programs, then accessories, then entertainment!). So after finding the Sound Recorder, he then has to muck with the custom audio properties (Stereo sound and normal compression??) before recording finally. Right. That's intuitive.

Recording video

At 2:20 he loads up Windows Movie Maker to capture video (again, to do this in Sugar, you'd just change from Audio to Video in the Record activity). Again he mucks with compression/quality settings (1/2 MB bitrate and 30 FPS -- really? I just want to press record here). It works and has the standard Windows Movie Maker timeline/video editing capabilities -- providing you have any space to store in or a USB thumbdrive (adding even more to the cost of the XPXO). Besides, the video looks choppy on playback -- probably because too many Windows processes are slowing down the poor XO.

"Sharing"

Speaking of thumbdrives; evidentially he expects teachers using XPXOs to have thumbdrives (at 3:19) and be ready to pass them around their class to share videos/photos/recordings and such. Heck, I don't even let my thumbdrive leave my sight at work. With class sizes of over 30, how long will it take for each student to plug a drive in, have it pop up, copy a video to their desktop (again, providing they have any space left over after Windows and Office), and then finding the "Safely Remove" icon in the taskbar, clicking it, and correctly selecting the thummdrive and not the Windows SD card, and then passing it to the next student. Sharing a video becomes an all-class-session activity. What happened to using the mesh?

Power

Putting the laptop into the tablet configuration in Windows seems to switch it to the no-backlight screen mode (4:00); which I hope is not automatic if a child wants to, I dunno, read a book at night in a house without any other light source? In no-backlight mode, he claims you can use the laptop for 20 hours, which I find hard to believe, but if Windows isn't supporting the mesh network and therefore the wifi is also turned off, it's remotely possible. I watched full-screen video with wifi off on a flight recently and it lasted the full duration of the two and a half hour movie, plus some time left at the end to play the Implode activity (my secret XO addiction) before having to turn off all electronics for landing; so in full, CPU-sleeping screen-off mode, it probably could last that long; maybe us Sugar users should turn off wifi and see how long a backlightless Read activity can last?

Wifi

At 4:50 he shows us how to access a wireless network. Now, as a guy who often gets calls from parents, friends, parents of friends and friends of friends trying to connect to a wireless network in XP, I can safely say that configuring wifi on XP is one of the most confusing tasks ever to be standardized. No mention of support mesh networking, which may mean that the laptops are not connected to even a local network once they leave the access-point connectivity of the school (if there's even good connection at the school; my experience with Jamaican schools built with lots of rebar, cinder blocks, and metal roofing played havoc with omni-directional wifi ranges).

Security ?

Not mentioned in the video of course is the dire need for security software -- anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, anti-phishing and so on that's suddenly very important if you're releasing XP+IE machines to people who haven't developed a callous shell of cynicism and doubt when approached by Nigerian 419 scams, "Your computer is infected" flashing malware banner ads, and the like. By the time you load all of this up, the low-power computer will slow to a barely-usable crawl.

Conclusions

Sugar had its faults; no doubt about it; but it was clean and intuitive with a core belief of an "unlimited ceiling" of upward development -- Sugar was an adult bike with many layers of training wheels that could be removed; with lots of integrated paths to help do just that with eToys teaching programming methods and the various puzzles teaching slowly-more-challenging problem solving skills. Windows is designed against this, with no programming tools built in, and an almost anti-hacker/explorer/fiddler philosophy that goes beyond it merely being "closed source" to putting up impediments to learning any useful skills. Though Laptop.org currently seems down (perhaps under DDOS by annoyed former fans, or being redesigned with all the "Open" language removed; the Archive.org copy reminds us where the OLPC project was originally headed; and how far it's strayed. Nicholas Negroponte can keep saying that the project has remained "very pure" as much as he wants, and claim that "OLPC remains fully committed to our goal: a completely free and open learning platform for the world's children", I think it's safe to say that no one believes it:

XO is built from free and open-source software. Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptop computers on their own terms. While we do not expect every child to become a programmer, we do not want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines. We are using open-document formats for much the same reason: transparency is empowering. The children—and their teachers—will have the freedom to reshape, reinvent, and reapply their software, hardware, and content.

And I certainly don't see how he can with any straight face maintain that "The mission statement of OLPC has not changed in three years"

Posted to ( OLPC ) by Jon on May 16, 2008 at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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I hope it goes just as well as the Intel partnership. What a disaster. OLPCNews and the NYTimes have more information on the story.

Posted to ( OLPC ) by Jon on May 16, 2008 at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Like most in the OLPC community, Ivan Krstić's discussion on the OLPC yesterday left me (almost) speechless, and even Wayan at OLPCNews left it mostly as a repost of Ivan's essay, and slashdot is, well, talking about Australian government issues it seems.

The important parts - 1:1 laptop programs have no studies supporting that they work at all:

As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to "decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget", he's talking about theory. He likes to mention Dakar, but doesn't like to mention how that pilot ended — or that no real facts about the validity of the approach came out of it. And there sure as hell doesn't exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.

Free/Open software is often buggier (by fault of hardware manufacturers) and therefore harder to use, and is not some magic solution to creating constructionist learning using technology

The real insight here is this:

There are three key problems in one-to-one computer programs: choosing a suitable device, getting it to children, and using it to create sustainable learning and teaching experiences. They're listed in order of exponentially increasing difficulty.

OLPC managed the first one, and well, and seems to have opened up interest in the low-cost, "4P" market in general. Deployment and implementation have been, from day one, ignored by OLPC, and I as well as Wayan at OLPCNews have been hitting on the desperate need for implementation plans over and over and over again. It seems like this grand-canyon sized oversight finally got to be too much for some of the core members:

Other than the incredible Carla Gomez-Monroy who worked on setting up the pilots, there was no one hired to work on deployment while I was at OLPC, with Uruguay's and Peru's combined 360,000 laptop rollout in progress. I was parachuted in as the sole OLPC person to deal with Uruguay, and sent to Peru at the last minute. And I'm really good at thinking on my feet, but what the shit do I know about deployment? Right around that time, Walter was demoted and theoretically made the "director of deployment," a position where he directed his expansive team of — himself. Then he left, and get this: now the company has half a million laptops in the wild, with no one even pretending to be officially in charge of deployment. "I quit," Walter told me on the phone after leaving, "because I can't continue to work on a lie."

[...] That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal. Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical fuckup unparalleled in scale.

I put it better myself.

Posted to ( OLPC ) by Jon on May 14, 2008 at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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I read BoingBoing - it provides a steady stream of new and interesting things around the net, and the occasional IT policy tidbit. Lots of people read boingboing as well, giving it a power not unlike the slashdot effect - the ability to direct massive amounts of traffic at a site, taking it down in many cases with the onslaught.

Few sites respond with an attitude as user-friendly and pro-sharing as Gangstagrass which is promoting a rap + bluegrass mashup CD:

HELLO BOING BOING FOLKS - SORRY IF THIS LOADS A LITTLE SLOW, THE SERIES OF TUBES IS A BIT CLOGGED. CLICK HERE FOR A BIT TORRENT DOWNLOAD OF THE ALBUM!

(If you want the torrent, drop by Gangstagrass for the link).

This is totally backwards from what you'd expect. You mean the website doesn't want to sign me up for their email spam? Force me to log in? Track the number of downloads of their album? Instead, they're confident enough in their product that good customers will return to their site at some later date to check out what else they have going on -- but in the meantime, they're creating goodwill and advertising by making sure people who were intrigued enough by the BoingBoing article to click were able to get what they were after. So now I'll listen to it, and if it's good, I'll remember to visit their site again. If it's not, well, they've not lost anything; I wouldn't be a customer anyway in that situation.

This shouldn't be rocket science, but so rarely do I see people thinking in this pro-user/customer/person way that I thought it'd be nice to give GG a tip of the hat.

Also, this is all a very longwinded way to give thanks to at least one person who's always been very pro-person, at least to me, which is Mom. Hi Mom! Happy Mother's Day! :)

Posted to ( IPR ) by Jon on May 11, 2008 at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Unfortunately; this clip seems to focus tightly on his IP statements; leaving out some of his more relevant popoints on "sharing" - centric resource creation and open standards.

Posted to ( Dev/ICT ) by Jon on May 07, 2008 at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Scott McNealy from Sun was hosted by the Center for Global Development to talk about how ideas of openness and sharing work in business and how they can help improve public policy and international development; with a panel discussion. Apologies for typos; I was taking notes on my OLPC.

Introductions: Lawrence McDonald Director of Communications and Policy; CGD

• key cgd ideas; rich world influence dev world beyond foreign assistance; investment, trade and technology (private sector interactions in dev world)
• cgd as pro-innovation thinktank ; tech but not bleeding edge
• firms come to cgd for beyond CSR; Corp engagement whitepaper

Ed Scott; CGD co-founder and board chair

carter admin and BEA founder

• sun based on open (BSD, open firmware board, "birth")
• move to competitive mkt against closed-software cos

Sun / Scott McNealy

• Open Drives Progress: ("sun is about open")
• internet is growing; chinaMobile went from 300M to 450M subscribers; more subs than US citizens; all using internet, mobile as internet access key
  • => critical improtancec of standards; common way; same side of the road
    • not helpful that there's competition on which side of street to drive on; role for govt for standards
  • IP matters "true believer" in patents and copyright done properly to get return on R&D, Sun is 43 worldwide in R&D spending cross-sector
• No one owns language: common language of the internet should be free ("I'd love to own english; I'd even take French") imagine if anyone owned "y" and charged a nickle?
  • not the way the computer industry had been or should go
• Sun cause at start (kept low profile)
  • Eliminate the digital divide w/o harming the planet
    • 70% of globe without connection/google/etc ("sounds good for about 20 minutes but then oyustart to shake')
    • people in the us don't understand poverty; sun not ging to solve maslow / water level needs, but ready tohelp once they're at the it level
    • Sun hs a cause and mission beyond standard capitalistic reqs. --- mission is to outfit the data centers/NOCs
    • strategy - sharing "we invented open source" ; bill joy BSD; NFS, tcp/ip opened from sun and it won; opened tech platform today; ultrasparc now curriculum ref implementation in China
    • 19years cashflow positive with openness
    • sharing will never "win" but will succeed
    • mySQL gets downloads 70k/day (gives a hunting license to upsell); openoffice/stardownload 1M/week (?)
• 5 reasons to be open
  • lower barrier to entry (free less oppcost)
  • increase interop (biggest platform for sun solarisis HP)
  • lower R&D (community help for javaphone roi when I is zero; competiting)
  • more secure (no more secrets; many eyes)
  • Lower exit barriers (zero; how hard to shift from ford to chevy vs english to mandarin, easier to switch)
• Proposal: OpenGov platform for an open source govt tech platform from census/mapping/email/polling/etc.; 26B r&d non-xclusive contribution
  • China adopting; germany interested
  • increase access for citizens, safety/security, cut costs, drive efficiencies
• Open Source Education -- text, online curricula, community developed, 37k mmbers, (curriki) 11k assets already, FREE, social networking; statistical evidence for testing improvements
• $4.3B/yr spent in US on textbooks - why constnt revisions yearly expenditures
• h1b visa cap -- let\s not let the smart people in; sun and java very immigrant focused

standardize on open standards for policy; procurement needs to find an osistandard; refernce implementation; community etc.

economics of eco-reponsibility; 40% of data center cost is power, power per transactionthread (sun very low)

thin clients + virtualization

• Eco: innovate; act; share -- CEO (Eco) Douglas; apply transparency and open source to enviro challenges
  • openeco.org - tracking tools to compare your org to others; community learnig and sharing; all orgs welcome
• "I am a stunning raging capitalist" proprietary code || central planning; open source is about competition of ideas and democracy

Panel Discussion

• ellen miller sunlight foundation crp
  • open govt data; importance of open data? is there a connection?
    • philospohically inconsiderate and counterintuitive
    • bring philosophy of oss to opengov advocates
• dave witzel forumOne cofounder; ex-Banker on sabbatical at CGD
  • policycommons - moving valuesof oss to education; green; also apply to governance

Lawrence McDonald connection of sun mission and dev goals for 2B under $1/day/ Scott McN: importance of competition on pricing model (MC of software is zero, monopoly rent of ms?) bulk of new net users are getting online using java phones, on 2B phones

LMcD policy research - tech policy unexplored field; only some from IP on dec index; what would a pro-dev US tech policy look like?

• Scott; pro-IP; returns to ragig capitalist Ip matters to get R&D investment; but sharing can expode opportunities with right licensing models; ip and open source not mutually excusive
  • phizer; contribute drug dev as open source (ran away)
    • ...you can make a profit off of open source licensing

Audience Questions

• bill sabidoff econ consultant at cgd
  • collective decisions on standards; how collectively decide what's open and what\s proprietary?
    • focus on CostC barrier to exit costs to drive decisions on what's proprietary
• goerge ingrham AED
  • practical lvl of first 3 stepsforgovt openness/
    • attitude adjustment (govt data belongs to people); FOIA is backwards; burden of providing info should be on govt
    • rest by executive order to go open
    • Scott: mandate a balanced budget to motivate openness; need bully pulpit to focus on openness; procurement; restrictions of govt investment
• John richards center for stud... resopnsible...
  • headlinenumber for savings to go open; ~25% on it budget; prob is barrier to exit from proprietary systems => stuck
  • "gazillions"
• why hasn't the market gone already? b/c tipping point/network system/cost of switching + monopoly power; govt has buying and regulatory power
• claudia - policy health markle foundtion; health info sharing
  • if goal is privacy; need tranparent tech choices
  • can't separate tech choice from policy choice
  • Scott: security: who's who + what's what + access

• wiztel: philosphoical agree on openess; how to you get there?
  • Ellen: newer institutions more open to open; struggle for older ngos and extrapolating harder for govt; non-profit will force govt to meet public expectation of online openness
  • sometimes you're the windshield. sometimes the bug -- world book; card catelog. classified ads -- or wikipedia;oogle. ebaycraigslist -- if you want to compete; ,go clear + transparntand fast

cost trends towards marginal costs of zero; free is the new number

govt and ngos should ride the free wave instead of not curriki in india; s.af.; focus on innovation to avoid high costs

random notes

• tweem hashtag #cgdmcnealy : http://m.twemes.com/cgdmcnealy
• yunus blogging youth project yunus social action group .org
• curriki.org

Posted to ( Dev/ICT ) by Jon on May 05, 2008 at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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Somehow, this is exactly like what I expect it should look like:

Courtesy of Nexus's Facebook plugin

All I can say is wow.

Posted to ( Web 2.0 and F/LOSS ) by Jon on May 02, 2008 at 06:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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You may remember Strauss from his NYT article damning the Peace Corps back in January. It made the point that the increasing numbers of volunteers is decreasing the agency's effectiveness and that the agency itself was too stuck on its mission to improve and adapt. Strauss has been a volunteer, and also a country director, with the Peace Corps, and I as a returned volunteer can agree with some of his points.

He's back now in April with a much longer attack in Foreign Policy.com, where he sets up a series of strawmen to knock down.

For example;

“The Peace Corps Is a Potent Diplomatic Weapon”

No. With diplomats stuck inside barricaded compounds or loath to venture from expatriate residential ghettos, a Peace Corps volunteer is likely to be the only representative of the U.S. government that poor, rural populations ever see. As the State Department cuts back on its public diplomacy and cultural exchange programs, the Peace Corps’ predominantly young volunteers wind up carrying more and more of the responsibility for demonstrating that the United States still has good intentions abroad.

He goes on to make the point that the branding of Peace Corps is insufficient and doesn't connect the volunteers on the ground with the foreign policy of the USA -- probably because there's not much connection, and potentially some antagonism. I think this argument falls flat; PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) show the multifaceted America, not just the 51% who won the last presidential election. The fact that they are on the ground and working in solidarity with the local population is probably more valuable than State Department-funded programs will ever be. Of course, Strauss hasn't offered any research or quantitative data, so I don't feel a need to either.

His next strawman is “The Peace Corps Recruits Only the Best and the Brightest” -- and sure, if you have the perseverance and health to get through the application process, you're probably going to be accepted. This may take years and numerous tests and doctor notes, but it will happen. He has a valid point here, and I can only thank him for noting that the agency has one of the highest numbers of political appointees - 29 currently - filling its ranks. My biggest beef here is with the image he pulls from Getty to illustrate the point that PCVs are witless partying fools, to the right. Strauss's caption for this photo is

Best and brightest? As long as applicants meet the minimum standards and are healthy and persistent, the Peace Corps rarely rejects them outright.

If you click through to Getty, you find this description for the photo:

KIANGAN, PHILIPPINES: Wearing an Ifugao tribes outfit, Dustin Butler, (L) an American Peace Corps volunteer based in northern Ifugao province takes part in the celebration of the ten traditional rice rituals in Kiangan, 27 August 2006. American volunteers have been deployed in limited numbers in the country following security threats in certain areas especially in southern Philippines where al-Qaeda linked Islamic militants have kidnapped foreigners. AFP PHOTO / GARBIEL MALAYA (Photo credit should read GABRIEL MALAYA/AFP/Getty Images)

Do PCVs party? No doubt about it. I threw and/or attended quite a few gatherings as a volunteer. It's a tough job, and you need to unwind, decompress, complain about the various systems and institutions, brainstorm on the underlying problems, and just relax. If you're going to ding PCVs for saving up all their "happy hours" for an occasional big party, fine, but don't expect me to want to grab a beer with you after work. Also, no need to abuse a photo of a volunteer integrating himself with his village to make your point.

He complains that Peace Corps doesn't concentrate on the world's poorest countries, and that volunteer numbers rarely match the need (using Mexico as an example). Peace Corps operates only in countries where there's reasonable safety for US citizens to be out and about in country, instead of "stuck inside barricaded compounds or loath to venture from expatriate residential ghettos" as he knocks US diplomats and USAID professionals for. Further, PC only operates on the invitation of a country's government. We actually pressured Mexico into accepting volunteers, and in return they required very specific, business/IT focused volunteers for a very small pilot project.

“The Peace Corps Is a Development Organization” which receives little recognition from development thought leaders. Well, actually, Peace Corps is 1/3rd development and 2/3 cultural exchange (remember the first point you were making?). It's true that Peace Corps has not been effective at evaluating its impact. Neither have big development agencies such as USAID or World Bank. In fact, even the academic crowd has had a difficult time finding statistical evidence of any benefit to foreign aid. If Strauss has actually read William Easterly's book which he notes, he'll find pages and pages of commentary and research on aid effectiveness and measurement problems both "real" and political.

“The Peace Corps Has a Strategy” The Peace Corps has plans, not a strategy. A strategy implies a conclusion, a final goal. The Peace Corps has none. In Washington, plans are already underway to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary in 2011. Celebrating half a century of existence ought to be a dubious benchmark for any development organization, particularly one that actively encourages its volunteers to “work themselves out of a job,” yet has no plans for doing so itself in any of the more than 70 countries where it is currently active.

Again, Peace Corps is on the benign side of most development organizations, particularly the Bank, on this one. I might also point out that there are many countries where volunteers no longer serve -- because the country has "graduated" you might say from having a need for PCVs.

“The Peace Corps Is One of the Greatest Things America Has Ever Done”

Dream on. Today, the Peace Corps remains a Peter Pan organization, afraid to grow up, yet also afraid to question the thinking of its founding fathers. The rush to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign pledge was such that the Peace Corps never learned to crawl, let alone walk, before it set off at a sprinter’s pace. The result is a schizophrenic entity, unsure if it is a development organization, a cheerleader for international goodwill, or a government-sponsored cross-cultural exchange program. In any case, the Peace Corps tries to do too many things in too many places with too few people to really get much of anything done at all. ... Based predominantly on the life-changing experiences volunteers had while serving, the Peace Corps continues to generate strong support from the American people. But for the agency to approach its potential, deep, substantive changes must be made.

So, almost 200,000 US citizens have had life-changing experiences thanks to Peace Corps? It's balancing between being " a development organization, a cheerleader for international goodwill, or a government-sponsored cross-cultural exchange program" -- which sounds like the three goals of the Peace Corps Mission to me, so if it's flittering between those, it's on track.

Does the organization have some problems? No doubt. Are these valid attacks? No. We should work on removing the political appointees from the organization, matching funding increases to politically-motivated requirements to increase volunteer numbers, and hold all organizations working in international development to higher standards of unbiased measurement and evaluation and sustainability goals.

I actually believe that Peace Corps is a potent diplomatic weapon -- a loose cannon of idealistic youth who probably don't agree with the status quo of American foreign policy.

And that's a good thing.

Posted to ( Development Theory ) by Jon on April 29, 2008 at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Global Youth Service Day will be brought to you in live Twitter form with event updates (and locations, to broadcast on TwitterVision.com) throughout the day.

I'm using Swotter to push out the events we have in our Google Spreadsheet (exported to a more SMS-length-friendly format), which is also driving our GYSD-US Map (warning: VERY resource heavy Simile/Exhibit Map Mashup). I love technology that likes to talk together!

It's pushing the events straight through the API, and then a combination of TweetScan and TwitterFeeds are retweeting any #gysd tagged tweets, which was my original gysd/twitter plan

So... we'll see how it goes...

GYSDEvents on Twitter

Posted to ( Hactivismo | Tinkering | Web 2.0 and F/LOSS ) by Jon on April 24, 2008 at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Here is essentially a list of resources from the DC ICT4Dev Meetup on careers (you'll have to do the googling and hyperlinking yourselves. Email me at jon @ joncamfield dot com if you're interested in this in a wiki form.

Organizations

Development organizations with ICT: Chemonics, ACT, DAI, CHF

Orgs with real ict4dev departments: AED, Winrock, RTI (n/ carolina ict+health), Nethope, APCD(?)

For africa: kabissa.org, digitalopportunity.org

News / keeping up with the sector

mobileactive.org, globalgiving.org, kiva, microplace, also see sites under job listing

Job listings

oneworld.net, devnetjobs.org, devex, devgateway

...look at the orgs as well as the jobs to see who's hiring/etc.

EVENTS and networking

un foundation + vodafone sms for change next tues

networking most important, talk tolocal event speakers; set up informational interviews/coffee/mtgs

Volunteering

volunteering as a way to test the waters and get experience

humaninet, geekcorps/iesc, unvolunteers, telecom w/o borders

non-Bank/usaid

care+ibm shared infrastucture for MFIs (af/latam)

InterAction, InterNews, inveneo (low-power PCs), voxiva (health PDAs => national health infrastructure => platform for mobile data collection hiring now from for-profit)

Posted to ( Dev/ICT ) by Jon on April 24, 2008 at 01:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The Big NN sent out an email, reposted at OLPCNews.com, with the current status of OLPC and Sugar, it's UI, to address the issues finding their way out of the woodwork after the recent staff turnover:

Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed. I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices. Our mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the world. Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure Open Source.

He goes on to argue that Sugar needs to be more agnostic, and even run on a mini-Windows:

That said, Sugar needs to be disentangled. I keep using the omelet analogy, claiming it needs to be a fried egg, with distinct yoke and white, rather than having the UI, collaborative tools, power management and radios merge into one amorphous blob. Otherwise, it is impossible to debug and will be limited to the small, albeit growing, world of the XO hardware platform.

I respectfully disagree. I think that the real path to long-term, sustained success of the OLPC project is to keep the hardware and software married tightly together (like Apple) - creating some powerful externalities with smooth operation and not worrying about really insane hardware compatibility. Unlike Apple, but totally open with it. If Microsoft wants to put effort into making a Windows XP that will work on the laptop, fine. If the open source hacker community wants to get Sugar to run as a "normal" window manager on more Linux boxes, or even somehow in a Windows environment, more power to them. But the laptop, with its stated goals of constructivism, need for simplicity, and requirements on the low-power aspects, will do best without wasting time on these side projects. Continue to work on the Red Hat Linux + Sugar implementation and get every nasty hardware/software interface bug out. A non-Mac laptop that sleeps/hibernates/recovers perfectly would be a truly amazing thing in its own right. One that also comes standard with effortless mesh networking, a videocam and mic, stereo speakers, a tablet mode, and so on -- even better. Tied with a GUI that's light on text and focuses on simplicity and clarity -- a great win for the developing world.

That's all possible (if you keep focused on Sugar + Linux + OLPC Hardware), and could be marketed as a bottom of the pyramid style approach in the developing world, and even (with some tweaks for more office style apps) as an ultra-portable "4P" system in the West.

The one thing that's still lacking (tho with piecemeal progress; Nepal's doing a bang-up job) is the educational programming and content layers. Even there, there's a few Activities built in and some content and promise of more content, but it is in need of further attention and even the creation of not only the activities, but some curricula guides to go along with. Again, there's some progress here, but it lags behind the hardware and software.

My favorite line from NN's email remains the following, which I'll quote out of context: "Because of public attention, anything we say will be quoted out of context." In his opening volley, NN says "Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure Open Source." - but in truth it has been advocating constructivism from the start, to the exclusion of any who wanted to use the laptops in more traditional educational models, and (for the most part) doing this through central use of open source software (and hardware). He goes on to clarify that statement, but (a) I need an excuse to quote him out of context and (b) it's a weak defense. Go read Negroponte's email yourself if you want the context :)

Without an equal amount of resources devoted to contextualizing the laptops, it won't matter what they're running -- it will be a laptop project, not an education project; the opposite of their tagline of it being an educational project, not a laptop project. As the organization shifts to deployment mode, they need to continue to focus on the core hardware and existing software stack to work out the last bugs, and start getting more and more educationally-useful activities, content, and curricula available.

Posted to ( OLPC ) by Jon on April 23, 2008 at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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OLPCNews has been ripe with the continuing disintegration of OLPC, from Mary Lou Jepsen who got out just in time, then with Ivan's departure due to differences, and now as the search for a new CEO goes on so that Negroponte can "step aside", now Walter Bender, Mr. Constructivism himself, has resigned.

If this exodus due to internal politics, problems with technology purchasing (XP or Sugar? All F/LOSS or not?) sounds familiar, it is:

Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization ... staffed by highly individualistic industry visionaries from around the world. Besides, altruism has a credibility problem in an industry that thrives on intense commercial competition.

By the end of the Center's first year, Papert had quit, so had American experts Nicholas Negroponte and Bob Lawler. It had become a battlefield, scarred by clashes of management style, personality, and political conviction. It never really recovered.

That quote is from 1983, discussing Negroponte's original Computers-for-education pilot with Apple II computers in Senegal. The more recent news on the OLPC organization is:

But in March, after OLPC's initial run of its $188 laptops reached fewer children than originally envisioned, Bender became head of "deployment."

Officially, OLPC said it was streamlining its organization because the laptop's technology essentially had been built. A different view came from the XO's former top security architect, Ivan Krstić, who wrote on his blog that Bender got demoted. Krstic said OLPC was undergoing a "drastic internal restructuring" and "a radical change in its goals and vision."

Then last week, Bender left the group entirely. That marked a third high-profile departure from OLPC. In addition to Krstić, Mary Lou Jepsen, who had been chief technology officer, left in December.

With Senegal, not much was left once the project fell apart. Let's hope that OLPC has a more lasting legacy with its innovations in 4PC technology and open, educational software -- and maybe an educational computing program will survive as well, but after the fractiousness revealed in the recent email thread, it seems more likely to be survived by various independent projects.

Posted to ( OLPC ) by Jon on April 23, 2008 at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Below the fold are my notes from the Democratizing Development: How Technology is Disrupting Traditional Development Models panel by SID/W at Chemonics on the 15th. Overall it was a very interesting panel with some path-breaking models (especially Kiva's peer-lending system; where anyone can provide microfinance loans through on the ground micro-finance loan institutions to people needing small loans with full feedback and transparency). The speaker from the World Bank was very pro open source, and was involved with linking the Bank to Development Seed to create their BuzzMonitor system to try and hammer into the rest of the Bank that they were not operating in a vacuum. He also seemed pro data-sharing; which would be very interesting, if unlikely, to see happen.

All of the speakers stumbled on the last-mile solution; their solutions never got beyond requiring someone with the time, training, and technology to access websites and do some semi-complex online tasks. With the buzz that MobileActive is getting, I think that there remains a goldmine of low-cost transactions and information sharing that just needs a little development and partnership work put into it to bridge the loan recipients directly back to sites like Kiva.org as a pipeline directly to potential funders.

Read on for my staccato notes.

Continue reading "Notes from "Democratizing Development: How Technology is Disrupting Traditional Development Models"" »

Posted to ( Dev/ICT ) by Jon on April 16, 2008 at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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APCMap has an insightful review of their experiences with Windows XP on the Asus Eee. This isn't (yet) any different version of XP than you'd have on a "normal" PC -- it takes up 2 gigs of the 4G drive, and it's not even up to date:

"Disappointingly, the OS image hasn’t even been updated with the latest versions of Windows Media Player, Windows Live Messenger and so on. This makes for a massive update session the first time the user goes online, and that’s not a good way to start the relationship.

Not only is it a bit cramped on the hard drive, it doesn't even fit well on the screen either (but Everex's CloudBook with the gOS/Linux system is having similar problems):

"It’s as if the Eee PC’s display is a small cut-out window onto a desktop which is slightly taller. You nudge the mouse cursor to the top or bottom of the screen and the display pans up or down accordingly."

With that performance, I'd rather find a way to run a BartsPE liveCD from the hard drive, reducing the footprint to under 640MB. Asus is "prepping a special edition Eee PC that will be preloaded with a cut-down version of XP which is expected to be available within the next eight weeks." however, and it should include current updates and weigh in under 2G (....but not by much).

It seems XP is not only holding on as a desktop OS, but it's getting a new life on mini devices. On the one hand, this will hopefully help convince MS to extend XP's life once again; or at least revisit their approach on OS design to continue to support "low-end" machines. On the other hand, Linux is much better poised to deliver useful, modern, products for low-end machines with their support of older hardware, weirder hardware, and different configurations, and it's make my Penguinista heart warm to see XP continue to fail to deliver a good experience on this growing low-cost; stable performance market.

Posted to ( Dev/ICT ) by Jon on April 15, 2008 at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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