You might remember the Youtube video of this guy named Matt who did this silly dance and captured it on video everywhere he went a few years ago?
Well.. he's back, with friends.
It's a good video to watch when you worry about things like war, unfair trade practices, poor foreign policy, dictatorship, and so on -- it reminds you that people are globally friendly, silly, happy folk if given a chance. Which is always true, but not always easy to remember.
Last Wednesday, Al Hammond of NextBillion.net fame (who now hangs his hat at Ashoka), presented to the Washington, DC ICT4D Practitioners on two of his initiatives working with the private sector to achieve sustainable positive change. He discussed two great projects -- a low cost rural connectivity pilot in Vietnam getting moving in its first deployments, and the other on base of the pyramid-focused healthcare -- mostly at a conceptual phase but building off existing proven models.
It was a fascinating discussion. I'm a strong supporter of sustainability (otherwise, why bother?) and Al Hammond gives a passionate and convincing argument for the central role of business in creating sustainable solutions. Talking with him beforehand, he mentioned (paraphrasing heavily) comparing the measurable benefits of the past five decades of foreign aid versus the last decade of private sector mobile phone rollouts -- the long-term benefits greatly favor the mobile phones.
I can only imagine that once mBanking really gets rolling, all doubt will be erased that the cell phone has helped the Next Four Billion more than 2.3 trillion dollars in aid. My mind quickly out-paces itself when I begin to ponder mBanking benefits for everyone from rural artisania workers able to take and receive payments for commissioned artwork to p2p payment systems to direct-to-market agricultural benefits...
Now, I have a few outstanding doubts about some parts of these two plans - some scalability and malicious-user problems with the Vietnam model, and some privacy and franchise-enforcement questions with the healthcare idea. Now, I have fewer doubts on both of these concepts, combined, than, say, the OLPC Project (though I strongly believe that a base-of-the-pyramid approach to the OLPC could work well). The huge difference between a BoP, market-driven approach and traditional development is that investors bear the brunt of failed projects, a pleasant change from the recipient country being in deeper debt regardless of the outcomes of debt-financed aid projects. I think traditional development will forever have a role in humanitarian and post-conflict aid, but in infrastructure and service creation, the BoP, private-sector approach will prove long-term much stronger than pure-play foreign aid programs, for the simple reason that it applies reasonable risk management to development projects. What a concept!
Without further ado, my full meeting notes after the jump...
Continue reading "Technology Transformations for the Base of the Pyramid by Al Hammond" »
XO laptop owners need more jabber servers to mesh network on. Every time I look at my empty neighborhood view I am sad. Yet I am not geek enough to run a jabber server solo. I need the help of a jabber expert to set one up for DC.
The super nice folks at Obscure.org set up a jabber server for the DC area, and there are many other community jabber servers listed at Laptop.org wiki list of community jabber servers. Any one server can only handle up to ~150 users at a time, so please choose your community's server (if your community doesn't have one, try setting one up, or contacting Harper Reed of XOChat.org for an XOChat regional server)
It takes a few seconds to set up via the sugar control panel, and works amazingly well. The process is documented over in the OLPCNews forums, and I've included the short-and-sweet instructions in the full article (click below).
Jabber servers can get overwhelmed by too many users, so make sure you connect to one that's near to you (or set up your own Jabber server for your local OLPC users group!) . If you're in DC however, this is a call to action to sign on to dc.olpc.obscure.org, share chat activities and create some online meshy XO community love! Setup instructions, server information for the rest of the world, and some tips and tricks after the jump.
The Associated Press has been rattling sabers of bloggers quoting (even with credit and links) from AP articles, claiming that any quote longer than 5 words costs money:
the AP had a long history of quoting more than 100 words from bloggers -- and not even linking back to the original blog. Now, in a bit of ultimate irony, the AP's own article about this brouhaha quoted (without linking) twenty-two words from TechCrunch. That's 18 words more than the supposed four word "limit" the AP has suggested. With an ironic chance that wide, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington couldn't resist, and asked his lawyer to send a DMCA takedown notice to the Associated Press, along with a bill for $12.50
(via TechDirt)
You can read TechCrunch's hilarious take on this as well, but I'll refrain from quoting them based on their feisty legal department.
The DC area mailing list for nonprofit technologists has been alight with suggestions on what the best portable machine is this past week, debating screen size (gotta be able to see that spreadsheet!), storage, raw computing power, optical drives, and even the need for floppy swap drives.
The general sense is that everyone wants portability, but is unwilling to sacrifice anything to get it. I say bollocks -- you can keep your sore shoulders, I'll make a few minor sacrifices, adapt my lifestyle a bit, and carry on. After the jump is my full response.
I'm sure you're tired of hearing me talk about twitter as an innovative and easy tool for outreach and engagement. So listen instead to Amy Gahran and her conversation with the Mars Phoenix rover - via twitter:
This is one of the smartest uses of Twitter for public outreach I’ve ever seen — giving folks a sense of a personal connection to this high-tech mission to find water (and signs of life) on Mars. (Some members of the Phoenix team are also blogging.) I especially like that Mars Phoenix is replying to questions sent in by its Twitter friends (like me).Makes it all seem so much less… alien!
Business Week has a good article summing up the recent history of the OLPC project and it's difficulties with sales numbers, fading promises, Intel, and its internal strife over the Microsoft decision. None of that information is particularly new, but the article continues and goes in to some insightful problems with the educational model of the 1CC OLPC project; namely, hubris.
Hubris is a longstanding problem in development work, as William Easterly (among many others) has been writing about in sordid detail for years. If you haven't read The Elusive Quest for Growth, go to your library or local bookstore now and grab a copy. It's fascinating, disturbing, and clearly written.
The OLPC project has sadly failed to learn from the many, many missteps in large scale, top-down development projects, as we've been writing about over at OLPCNews.com for years now. Without careful implementation working with in-country experts, the project will never come close to fulfilling the original vision, as Peru is revealing:
Even with these results, the Unified Union of Education Workers of Peru, representing some 320,000 public school teachers, is skeptical. "These laptops aren't part of a comprehensive educational, pedagogical project, and their usefulness is debatable," says Luís Muñoz Alvarado, the union's general secretary. Muñoz never had a chance to explore the laptops, though. In what seems an easily avoidable blunder, the Education Ministry has not explained the program to the union.
So in a haphazardly, too-little-too-late fashion, 1CC is piecing together an implementation plan as they go, which makes about as much since as building an airplane in mid-flight:
Recognizing the need to integrate the laptops into communities, OLPC is scrambling to develop guidelines for deployment based on the experiences in Uruguay and Peru, the two countries with the largest distribution so far. The group is also bringing in consultants to advise countries on how to integrate the PCs. One, Edith Ackermann, a visiting scientist at MIT, says OLPC should have involved more educational experts in creating and testing the applications. Instead, she says, "The hackers took over." The result is some programs are too complex for many children to use. "Now we have to deal with this. I don't know if it's too late," says Ackermann.While some critics have called on OLPC to hire aggressively so it can provide on-the-ground support for dozens of countries at a time, Negroponte and Kane plan instead to rely even more on outsiders. They'll forge alliances with local tech companies and nongovernment organizations that will provide deployment support.
That is one move that OLPC is making correctly -- presuming that those alliances are contractually required to help build a shared and open knowledge base that can create a community of practice and body of knowledge that future implementations of similar projects can take advantage of. OLPC hiring internally to do this work can never be as useful as partnering with existing, local institutions who will continue to be around after the OLPC paratroopers move on to the next implementation. It's almost a sustainable plan, and it looks like there's some work to create a set of best practices:
Although each country has a different situation, they can learn from common experiences. OLPC plans on using Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, to test ideas about how to best integrate the computers with society and to create a template for other countries.
The (lack of) implementation plan is only part of the OLPC hubris on this project. Underlying that is the more insidious educational theory level of the program.
While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it's also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India's education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop "pedagogically suspect," and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: "Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops."
Now, you can argue until the cows come home about pedagogical theories, but at the end of the day you must respect a country's sovereignty and right to choose its own educational track. Despite India and China's different approaches, it would be hard to accuse either country of not achieving some impressive educational outcomes and economic growth by following their current path. To close out with a quote by Easterly regarding the OLPC pedagogy, "It's arrogant of them. You can't just stampede into a country's education system and say, Here's the way to do it."
Almost universally, they’ve [OEMs] asked for standard Ubuntu packages and updates, with an app launcher that’s more suited to new users and has the feeling of a “device” more than a PC.The Asus Eee's "basic" mode had a very device-like feel to it and has done reasonably well with it's Xandros Linux backend, and with Ubuntu's star performance as a Linux desktop for the masses, I can only imagine the UX (User eXperience) will be even better, and the review of the current product at Ars Technica sums it up as:
The implementation is, overall, quite ingenious in many ways, but there are still places where it feels a bit clunky. The project is clearly early in its development and we will likely see the rough spots even out as it evolves.
Beyond just a more device-like application launcher and a tabbed window structure; Mark also mentions "two companies that want more radical user interface innovation":
Canonical is participating directly in the design and implementation of one of those UI’s, and we’re integrating someone else’s UI on an Ubuntu base for the second project. I haven’t seen either of those UI’s, for confidentiality reasons, but I’m told that the teams working on them think they have great ideas that will elevate, in different ways, the state of the art.
Mark concludes;
All in all it will be exciting to see how the netbook era stimulates innovation in the Linux user experience, because there are a lot of companies wanting to build differentiated UI’s on a standard Linux base. And directly or indirectly Canonical will help to bring that innovation to KDE and GNOME and hence to the wider Linux ecosystem.
With any luck, the 4PC market that the OLPC has helped to create will also spawn a new round of UI considerations which traditional software companies (Microsoft and Apple) will be interested in designing for as well, creating functional but light-weight versions of their OS (WinCE hardly counts, Apple's iPhone OS might be a sleeper candidate however).
Some kids had train sets. Actually, I did but it bored me to death. One xmas I got a SpaceWarp. Sure, I started out building the basic design they gave elaborate instructions for, but I got bored with that pretty fast. By the time it finally got dismantled (when my parents moved, natch), I'd rebuilt it at three times the designed height, had created elaborate track-jumping, triple and quadruple loops, and more.
When I saw this reappear after years of being out of production over at ThinkGeek it brought on a wave of nostalgia:
While few of the concepts at the 2.0 nonprofit conference were hardly new to me (Use twitter! uh, ok.); it was good to see where other nonprofits were and what the nonprofit leaders in the space were doing, and what the lessons they had learned were.
Again, trying not to sound snooty here, but the lessons weren't very "new" either, but the way they phrased them were -- instead of speaking about crowdsourcing, peer-production and open source/sharing, the presenters framed the same general concepts in communications and strategy language like message control (it's dead), reader-focused theories of change, stakeholders/champions, voice and vision, and so on. This gives me more relevant vocabulary to use to champion the full-sharing concepts when I speak with nonprofits.
Read on for my run-down and links to even more event notes!
Continue reading "2.0 NonProfit Conference wrap-up and notes" »
No, not the OLPC, but here's a good story about a guy who's been MS-free for a year.
Jon is on vacation this week on the west coast, so don't expect any insight (or email responses!)
TG: Will you be coming out with a tailored version of Ubuntu for the ultraportable sector?MS We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix. We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector.
Though they're working closely with Intel; with any luck a "lightweight" version of Ubuntu would also be a natural fit for the OLPC (and perhaps Intel's Classmate?). Naturally, the OLPC community already has Ubuntu and other Linux versions and/or window managers running on the XO-1, but further developer support on creating an ULPC/4PC desktop system that can compete feature-to-feature with Windows could be a great asset for the anti-XP/MS/Closed source crowd.
The interview reveals two insightful pieces of how the power of community has shaped both Canonical as a business and Ubuntu as a Linux desktop. First is Canonicals "rather unusual way of picking" their original employees:
I simply read a large amount of correspondence between the developers on one of the projects that is key to the way we do Ubuntu, the Debian project. It's amazing how much jumps out in terms of the way people think, the depth of their experience. So open source is not only a great way to develop your own talent and skills, but it's also a great way to get a job, and a great way to go looking for people.
An innovative way to find and pre-screen for the exact style and skillset you are looking for. The details of the deal with Dell are a fantastic vision of the strength of a community to focus on a feature and push for it:
We found out about it after it was a fait accompli. [Dell are] very much a numbers-driven company. They asked their users what they wanted to see. They had a lot of data and that data pointed to us. That was a little unsettling, because we didn't have a relationship. But it was a significant step up in our corporate profile. It will be very interesting to see what we're able to do with companies like Dell, which are aimed at a wider audience. That's my number one challenge: how to make the Linux desktop something that you want to keep on your computer.
Both good ideas to keep in mind for the OLPC community as we face changes and/or outright removal of Sugar, the move to a closed-source XP-based OS, and the general change of the guard at 1CC.
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.
Check out this video of James Utzschneider walking us through Windows XP on the OLPC XO (Video via OLPCNews.com
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.
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"
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