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August 29, 2008

My 5 Minute Rule for Documentation

I have a policy which I follow religiously regarding when to document something, which I promote to my co-workers when training them on the staff wikis I create wherever I go -- and trust me, I leave wikis like a trail of breadcrumbs in every organization I touch. I've made wikis for my Peace Corps group, my grad school program, UT's Office of Technology Commercialization, CrisisLink, and Youth Service America, and myself of course.

My rule is that if something takes you more than 5 minutes to figure out, it's worth a few second on the wiki - if absolutely nothing more than to jot down the key ah-ha!s so as to provide a roadmap to others. Ideally you add in a lot more guidance around that, but we all know how documentation generally goes.

But even that 30-second note can remind you, or whoever takes over your position when you move on, with a shortcut through the (re-)learning curve, and it's saved me countless times. And if you do it in the moment of post-revelation euphoria, it gives you a perfect opportunity to reflect on the process and see if, in your excitement of getting something working, you've left out an important step. Really, it's made of win all around.

In that spirit, I don't have a better place to stick this information, so I'll just post it here. I'm generally all for categorization and such, but google will cover my a$$ when I'm lazy.

I just spent far too many minutes (ok, hours) trying to get Drupal to show maps with specific taxonomy terms filtered. I first thought I could just replace the /node after /map with /term/4 or /taxonomy/term/4 - and indeed, this will work, but only if you set up a new view (gmap view type) with (at a bare minimum) Lat/Long as fields and Taxomomy term ID (or name) as an argument. It's that simple (cough) but not clear and I found it exceptionally difficult to google on, though I eventually found a lot of resources on doing maps by taxonomy term by searching google for gmap view.

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August 27, 2008

A Simple Social Media Analogy

This quirky animation compares social media to ice cream to explain the value of basic customer generated content (uin the form of tagging, rating and comments). It does two things - makes you hungry for ice cream, and understand the need to enable your website guests to leave feedback.

(I found this on Richie Zamor's excellent site)

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NPR Covers the OLPC

XP on the XO
OLPC fell short?
Morning Edition's Cyrus Farivar talks about the One Laptop Per Child project:
One Laptop Per Child was an ambitious promise to children in the third world. The project has had trouble with its leadership, finances and competitors. Instead of the legacy of education for third-world children, the One Laptop Per Child program has spurred an industry in low-cost laptops for consumers.


Listen Now [3 min 14 sec]

The broadcast touches on the Pacific Island Nation of Niue, which is the first nation to have universal laptop access for all of its students, but as BetaNews points out, " that number amounts to only 500."

The story also talks about the pilot in Nepal, which has met with government skepticism, but draws parallels to Nepal's earlier literacy campaign which also drew doubt, but created long-term benefits.

Cyrus Farivar interviews the creator of the laptop computer, Lee Felsenstein (Wikipedia entry) for his take on the OLPC. He (rightly) sees its most lasting impact currently as the creation of the sub-notebook/4PC market in the US. The creation of this market has potential long-term benefits for development, but so far none of the new entrants have hit on the durability and non-developed-nation utility that the OLPC XO provides (battery life, sun-readable screen, etc.)


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SuBtle tricks

I enjoy activities that put the 'b" in subtle. This Greasemonkey script for FireFox translates dollar figures in webpages you view into Oil Barrels:

Oil Standard is a Greasemonkey plug-in for Firefox that translates prices from dollars to barrels of oil equivalent, based on current spot prices; this means that the oil equivalent price fluctuates daily. "Networked Performance" art website Turbulence created the script, which works exactly as promised. Hit any web page that shows prices in dollars -- Amazon.com, the New York Times stock pages, even your bank account info -- and Oil Standard will show you how many barrels of oil it would take to match that amount of money.

I think that's ingenious. But I think there's room for improvement and expansion. I think there are tons of further currencies to look into, based on this idea. Easily (temptation to dive into this and hack it out.... increasing), you could not just the oil barrel cost, but the number of terrorist agency recruitments and/or the human loss of life per barrel of oil, calculated on per-annum rates in Iraq, Nigeria, etc. conflicts ... e.g. This iPod costs 6.4 barrels of oil, which translates into .5 terrorist recruitments and the loss of one human life.

Looking at CheapGas would certainly be interesting, to say the least.

With sometimes significantly more difficulty in calculation, you could also try to expose other externalities, such as:

  • Environmental impact of materials / Carbon footprint for imported or non-local food
  • Free trade impact of labor costs
  • Sweatshop labor hours
  • Meals per gallon of ethanol

One of the biggest problems in development is having people understand the impact of their decisions and the policies of their government in the first world/OECD nations. Most American citizens guess that the US spends up to 15% of its budget on foreign aid -- the reality is that it's less than 1%, so it's no surprise when they then presume that it's not doing any good and should be cut back.

This plugin is a good example of how the geekier development professionals can use ICTs as information sharing, and teaching tools to engender support on the home front for development projects abroad.

I wrote this a few years back but never finished it, so today I finally got around to pressing the publih button

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August 21, 2008

Picking Nits with Microsoft over XP-on-XO

XP on the XO
XP on the XO
So after the LaptopMag review of XP on the XO, the W2 Group ("a global marketing services ecosystem that helps CMOs in their new role as builders of communities and content aggregators") sent a letter over to OLPC President Charles Kane Jr. , which was posted on the OLPC Wiki "at Chuck's request". The "clarifications" (I hesitate to use that word in conjunction with the bullet points provided) include gems such as:
The article mentions the 4GB SD card is a San Disk model that it is not the "Extreme III" model with 20bps read/write speed slated to ship on Phase-1 Windows machines. In fact, the pre-production test machine used for evaluation was not using the SD card provided by Microsoft. Microsoft has not provided OLPC with a Windows image on a 4GB SD card nor has Microsoft provided an electronic or OPK for image creation. [Emphasis added]

If that's not the XP-XO version of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," I'm not sure what is. Giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, why the differences in what LaptopMag played with and what Microsoft has been saying? It all boils down to the fact that LaptopMag got a prototype machine that wasn't the latest and greatest, of course:

Based on the system description in the article, it is clear that OLPC organization provided the author with a prototype/development build of an XO system that significantly differs from both the system Microsoft had worked on with the OLPC org, featured in the partnership announcement in May and then subsequently released to manufacturing a few weeks ago (Phase-1 release) as well as the version the two organizations are working on for future release (Phase-2 release). [Emphasis added]

The XP-XO that Microsoft shipped to Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg was much more reflective of reality, and he posted (in haste?) a short blog entry defending XP-on-XO:

Cant' speak to the exclusive nature of Laptop Mag's running an OLPC running XP as I've been running one here for several weeks. I am finding a totally different experience with performance and load times much different and much better than the Laptops folks are getting. I checked with MSFT and it seems there's came from the OLPC folks directly (mine came from MSFT) and our builds it seems are different. Overall, I think the hardware itself is just lacking (my first unit developed keyboard problems after a few days and needed to be swapped out) and the overall performance is hardly going to meet the needs of the uber user. It is much better than the stock OLPC OS IMHO and I imagine much more useful as well.

LaptopMag has since updated their posting with a caveat of " It has been brought to our attention that the XO we saw yesterday at OLPC’s offices was not the final release of the XP software. In fact, OLPC showed us a prototype XO that should significantly differ from the final release to Microsoft manufacturing (RTM) version." .

And remind us that all that free and open BIOS stuff is out the window, and good riddance:

Current tests reconfirm that the commercial BIOS that is planned for shipment with Phase-1 boots Windows in less than 54 seconds.

But what about software? I've yet to see a mention of how the XP-XO will be protected from virii and malware(maybe mount the core system as read-only like the AMD PIC?). As for educational software:

The article says "While Microsoft puts its Learning Essentials on the XO, which include preloaded presentation and report templates, missing are the specialized education programs central to Sugar. There are no learning games preloaded." However, the software stack will be defined on a deal by deal basis.

I think that was meant to come off as a good thing - customized solutions per school/country with specific software installed to meet their goals. However, in the Windows world of paid licensing, I'm sure that cost will factor in to the basis of these "deals," in an inverse Namibia SchoolNet bait-and-switch setup? Let's hope it's the latter; with a "Sugar-on-XP" system, eToys/Squeak, and other open source educational materials that can run in XP.

So, overall, it's not as bad as LaptopMag made it out to be, because they were using the wrong hardware, the wrong software, and all-in-all basically a prototype machine which will never (again) see the light of day. However, some of the redeeming features of the system that LaptopMag had (particularly the ability to remove the SD card and revert to Linux/Sugar) is another artifact of the prototype:

The article states that the SD card (4GB) will require 1.81GB space for Windows and Firefox. In reality, the Windows image with Office 2003 & LE fits in just under 1GB. So, the image referenced in this article was modified from the original image provided to the OLPC org [...] The article states that the entire 1GB NAND storage will be untouched. This is incorrect. The entire 1GB NAND storage will be formatted and used as free space for personal storage on Phase-1 Windows machines.

So, take that SD card out (or have it stolen and sold to a tourist for their camera's storage), and you brick your OLPC. And here I am thinking that having to have removable media in a computer to boot went away when we left the IBM PC jr. and DOS 3.1 floppies at Goodwill's doorstep in the eighties.

So I'm glad that at least most of the problems that LaptopMag reported aren't as serious as they seem; but I remain concerned about the usability of XP for education (beyond "teaching" MS Word / Powerpoint / etc.), and the loss of the natural partnership between open source and education.

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August 20, 2008

RSS is my favorite web magic

Note to techies - this article is intended for the nonprofit crowd and as such is basically an introduction to RSS. There's a few interesting things at the end (RSS->animated gif via feedburner, Yahoo Pipes, and MIT/Google's Exhibit tool).

The Web 2.0 revolution has democratized huge swaths of online technology, making it easier for people who didn't grow up taking computer apart and programming games from themselves out of instructions from 3-2-1 Contact magazine article to contribute to online websites via easy-to-update blogs, wikis, and so on. These are all fantastic tools, mostly free and open. You can also read my overall guide to open source tools for non-profits to get situated in some terminology and theory.

There's one technology embedded in almost all of these systems that lets you track updates, news, events, even changes to a wiki page. These updates can pop up on your desktop, appear in most email clients (but not Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 supports RSS however!), appear in your web browser, and even get embedded on your web page.

This is my favorite web magic, and it's called RSS - Real Simple Syndication. Anywhere you see this symbol, RSS Symbol .))) there's some RSS involved.

Keep reading to learn more about the why and how of RSS for nonprofits!

Why use RSS?

Large RSS Symbol
Beth Kanter, your first stop (yes, even before me!) for social media / web 2.0 for nonprofits and do-gooder information has a nice collection of links and videos explaining the power of RSS to combine website content updates in one place. The video on that page talks specifically about a social RSS "aggregation" tool, but web browsers like Flock, email readers like Thunderbird, other online tools (Google Reader) and many, many programs also support the general idea of collecting RSS feeds and letting you know what's new on your favorite websites.

The same guy who brought you that video has also possibly the most comprehensive, non-technical article on what RSS is and how it can help you out.

I really can't explain it any better than Michael does in that article; so go read it to get started with understanding the amazing, simple power that RSS can provide. It covers everything you need to know about using RSS from a personal perspective to get news.

But why should my organization use RSS?

Well, presumably you have a website, and an audience. You might send out weekly or quarterly newsletters that swim through the maze of spam filters and stale email addresses to let that audience know about what's happening. But why not empower them to find out your updates, as they happen, in a manner easiest for them, with no worries about spam filtering? RSS makes it easy to promote your website to your audience, and - even better - through other websites and web 2.0 tools! If you're worried about this news being "given" away, remember that if someone's really dedicated to the cause, they could copy and paste your content into their website - but with RSS, it shows up, gets updated, and links back to your site, drawing traffic. Suddenly giving things away becomes a key strategy in getting more traffic and a larger audience!

I'd like to cover two key concepts for organizations - publishing your own RSS feed (and what you can do with that), and re-publishing other people's RSS feeds on your website or blog (and why you might want to do that)

Publishing RSS feeds

Most "Content Management Systems" (CMSes) come with built-in RSS capabilities of one form or another. If your organization uses a CMS, you might already be publishing RSS feeds, or could with a simple click in the configuration. If you don't use a CMS, I strongly recommend considering switching as funding and/or staff time allow -- like "public" web 2.0 tools, they democratize the posting of information to your own website by lowering the technical and skill barriers to editing. I personally like Drupal, thanks to its incredible flexibility. Joomla is another fine (and naturally, open source and free) system.

It's possible to hand-code RSS, but really it's more trouble than it's worth. If you have any sort of system that publishes your news updates and press releases, either get a programmer to build RSS capability into it, or switch to using some form of CMS or blogging tool to publish your updates that has it built in.

I mentioned "blogging tool" as a valid way to create RSS feeds. It's true - and you don't even have to change your current website much, or any, depending on the level of integration you want! If your website is a behemoth or your IT/Web guy is non-existent or already overworked, there are many easy and free ways to create your own blog and host it remotely or embed it into your site with a minimum of fuss. Blogspot (part of the vast Google Empire) is probably the easiest to set up (try using a work-specific google account), and with a bit of work you can import its pages into your site. If you do this, you may also have to add a chunk of code in your webpage (preferably in the header section, but it can also work anywhere inside the body for most browsers) that looks like this:

<link href="URL OF YOUR RSS FEED" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="NAME OF YOUR RSS FEED" />

This makes it easier for browsers to "find" your feed, helping people subscribe to it easier.

Finally, if none of these options are available to you, but you still want to create an RSS feed, read MasterNewMedia's toolset on creating feeds from plain websites.

Write Once, Post Everywhere! (i.e. - so now what?)

Now that you have an RSS "Feed" - what are some things you can do with it besides putting it on your website and hoping people subscribe? If you have a Facebook account, you can set it up so that your RSS items are imported as "Notes" automatically. If you use Twitter, TwitterFeed can post your stories into Twitter (but be sure to balance that out with some human entries as well, purely announcement-based twitters rarely are followed!). Many other websites and web 2.0 tools allow you to place your RSS feed on your profile (Ning sites encourage this, and it's also possible in servenet.org profiles)

Naturally, you should consider working with partners and see if they would consider re-publishing your feed on their site somehow (see how below!).

Beyond that, many users will simply prefer subscribing to an RSS feed individually rather than signing up for email updates (which might get spammed, or lost in spam filters), as it gives the user better control over when and how they read news -- it also lets them get updates as you post them, as opposed to quarterly newsletters or visiting your press page constantly. So for what's usually a free and automatic add-on to an existing site, it's a fantastic new channel for outreach and engagement.

Measurement and Evaluation

RSS Feeds are harder to track than normal website hits, depending on how you track website hits - Google Analytics doesn't reliably work with RSS because it depends on javascript, which is rarely supported in RSS readers/aggregators, and essentially never on other websites re-publishing your feed (how to do that yourself is next!).

There are two solutions to this problem - one is using whatever server-side tracking tools your web host hopefully provides to check for unique visitors to RSS ("hits" on the RSS feed will be huge, as some readers will check every 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!). The other is to pipe your RSS through the website FeedBurner, which gives you detailed information about who's reading your RSS feeds and now integrates with Google Analytics.

Showing an RSS feed on your website

So, you've identified a stream of news that you like (perhaps YSA's ServiceWire news?) and want to integrate that feed on your own website. Again, some CMS systems (particularly Drupal) make this easy. If it's not built-in, you can use a little bit of back-end code (a task for your webmaster) to automatically download RSS feeds and make a web page (or part of a page) out of them -- RSS2HTML is a quick and easy PHP script to do this which works on most web servers.

There's also a lot of great interactive "widgets" from Google (If you're using Google Sites), WidgetBox and others that are really easy to provide an RSS link and get a chunk of HTML code that you can insert on your website - a bit of googling around can find one that perfectly suits your needs, but here are two general-purpose javascript-based widgets from WidgetBox, which will work on almost any website. First is a simple reader and a headline scroller.

Feedburner will turn any RSS feed into an animated GIF so you can include it anywhere you can place an image (or can't use javascript or complex HTML) -- even your email signature!

Even more tips and tricks

Still reading? you get a bonus - some super advanced tips! You can do some fancy footwork with RSS using Yahoo Pipes, like filtering, combining, extracting certain data and so on to turn one or many feeds into one custom feed, or a data format called JSON (Javascript Object Notation). You can also extract JSON from Google Spreadsheets, giving you a handy and only slightly geeky way to do easy data visualization using The SIMILE Project, which is a powerful way to do some advanced sorting and mapping without mucking around with too much code (it all works with HTML and javascript, no back-end support necessary!).

The nice guys over at Forum One are presenting on RSS in early September in a seminar called "< href="http://www.forumone.com/content/calendar/detail/2684 ">Web Sites Without Walls: Influential Strategies for Site Syndication." If you still hunger for more RSS goodness.

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August 12, 2008

XP on the OLPC XO, Round Two

While my review of the XP experience was based on dissecting the XP on XO video that the Microsoft Unlimited Potential folks put together, the lucky bastards fine folks over at Laptopmag got to play with the XPXO hands-on last week, and have posted their review, which answers a few of my outstanding questions, but largely supports my criticisms based solely on the video. Over at OLPCNews.com, Christoph has summarized many of the outstanding problems with XP on XO, as well.

The XPXO is slow to boot: "The system took a sluggish 1 minute and 24 seconds to boot; that is about three times the 30 second boot up we have seen on Sugar and 34 seconds longer than the claimed time of 50 seconds."

It comes with some standard XP software (and firefox 2 -- tho 3 would probably be much nicer on the memory), but (at least currently) a paucity of educational software.
It's decent on application launch times, but nothing spectacular, and experiences quite the slowdown if you're multitasking with Office applications :

Displayed on it are the standard Microsoft shortcuts, including the Recycling Bin, Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft Powerpoint, etc. Also downloaded was FireFox 2. While Microsoft puts its Learning Essentials on the XO, which include preloaded presentation and report templates, missing are the specialized education programs central to Sugar. There are no learning games preloaded

Unsurprisingly, it is unable to mesh, but video performs decently (warning: watching the LaptopMag video on XPXO video quality will rickroll you. Seriously.)

They come to the conclusion that XP is not quite ready for primetime on the XO, and I wonder if it ever truly will be. Laptopmag doesn't go into power management or interface concerns (like my complaint about having to choose video codecs before recording in XP, as opposed to the simple approach Sugar Record takes).

The elephant in the room continues to be security. XP Unlimited Potential currently ships with Service Pack 2 (SP3 just started pushing out as an automatic update), SP2 came out over four years ago, on August 25, 2004. Unmentioned in the article is anti-spyware and anti-virus programs being pre-installed and updatable, but at least to me, squinting at the screenshot from laptopmag, it certainly looks like the classic red security shield indicating that some part of the security system isn't working. That's not very promising, and will further degrade speed (and SD card life, I'd imagine).

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August 09, 2008

One old OS per Child

I keep swearing that I'll shift gears and focus more on the good parts of the One Laptop Per Child project like the fusion of public and private interests in India, but then I keep getting pulled in to the stupidity du jour. Of late, that frustration has been Windows XP for the XO, spurred on by Wayan's post at OLPCNews.com on Windows' firmware modifications, and of course my posting on the XP on XO video that got slashdotted.

As a caveat, I have an iron in this fire. At home I have one XP system (formerly my primary computer, now mostly my email archive and mp3 player), my primary Linux (Ubuntu) laptop, a really old Linux (Ubuntu+xfce) laptop, and my OLPC (Sugar/olpc-build 703). I'm unabashedly an open-source evangelist, and I think there's a clear partnership between the non-profit/NGO/development world and F/LOSS -- we're all working to improve the world (on some level). I'm not rabidly anti-MS, but I think it's rarely the right solution, doubly so in low-resource environments, whether that be low- money, electricity, bandwidth or computing power.

That being said, Windows XP, recently released to manufacturing on the XO, has been the standard for home and office operating systems, and by many accounts still is. With its successor Vista stumbling out of the release gate and Mac still catching up at the office, many countries have reportedly been asking for Windows XP by name as part of their educational projects. Certainly there are some reasons why you may want to throw your hat in with Microsoft (though I'd personally argue that - especially in developing country situations - those reasons are not as solid as they initially appear). There's some value in training your students on the office systems they'll most likely encounter at the workplace, for example, and there's a decent chunk of freeware educational games and programs available for Windows.

I think, and not just because of kneejerk anti-microsoft feelings, that Windows XP on the XO is a poor idea, however. If the XO is supposed to be a system used to train children on how to use Windows after they get "real jobs" then there's been a huge miscommunication, bad marketing, or overselling. The XO should not be seen as a cheap laptop (the ongoing disaster of the very sticky "$100 laptop" idea), but as an educational tool (which happens to also have a lot of power under the hood!). It's akin to marketing an overhead projector as a large-format slide projector and having people complain that there's no auto-advance, ignoring the ability to write/draw/erase on transparencies "in real time."

The target age group is 5-16 year olds, not just "high school" age children (who might justifiably want to get some experience with whatever systems they will encounter in jobs or further education). A five year old needs an engaging experience, not a computer that keeps popping up anti-virus definition update notices, is easily infected with malware/spyware, and the like.

And please tell me that there's already a plan to include free anti-virus programs on the XP XOs? Sans recently issued a report that indicates the time to infection for an unpatched Windows XP system not running behind a firewall ranges from four minutes to 16 hours

I don't think it will ever be possible for a hobbyist to install this custom XP build - can you see Microsoft being at all interested in distributing or supporting that stateside? If you're abroad, you could potentially get at least an XP UP (Unlimited Potential) $3 license, but still it wouldn't be the right custom build. Perhaps it'll leak out somewhere as a pirated copy.

That actually raises another few questions. Will XP-on-XO users have to "validate" their Windows copies? What if their connection is down - will it disable/hobble the system? Will XP have any bitfrost-like mechanism to discourage theft (especially since it's now "valuable" as a "real" computer instead of "just" a learning tool (apologies for all the quotes) Is Microsoft also going to be donating an anti-virus subscription with that? You know, one which updates weekly from the Internet?

And, merely from a hardware standpoint, what happens if your SD card breaks (or gets ejected or stolen? I bet there's a good after-market for "lightly used" SD cards sold to tourists for their digital cameras). According to the Laptopmag hands-on, removing the card reverts the XO to Sugar, so that at least is good.

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August 06, 2008

More on OLPC in India

NextBillion reposts an article from Businessweek which clarifies some of the news on OLPC in India:

In 2001, [Negroponte] came to India to promote the Media Lab, but failed to impress New Delhi. Negroponte clearly fell off the India map, when then-Information Technology Minister Arun Shourie dismissed his efforts as "pedagogically suspect" and wanted more accountability. When Negroponte's nonprofit One Laptop per Child foundation approached the Indian government in 2006, his project was again rebuffed by India's then-Education Secretary, Sudeep Banerjee (BusinessWeek.com, 8/16/06).

Two years later, Negroponte is back to open a new office in New Delhi and launch the OLPC program in India on Aug. 4. Despite all the rebuffs, Negroponte's urge to sell in India is stronger than ever. "India is the largest market for us, and I had to be here," he says. More important, Negroponte has a new partner—one of India's politically influential private-sector conglomerates.

This conglomerate, Reliance, is planning to combine state government funding as well as corporate donations in purchasing the laptops. Their model thus far is to sell XOs to NGOs which then donate the XOs to schools. That may sound uninteresting, but take this quote from one of these NGOs -- some thought (and - gasp - teacher training and curricula development!) is going into these more targeted deployments:

"It becomes viable only if you build an ecosystem around the laptop. You have to train teachers and build a curriculum around the XO," says Nitish Rane, of the Swabhimaan NGO that runs schools in rural Maharashtra state. Rane has already deployed 100 XOs and plans to buy 500 more by yearend.

Sadly, it doesn't look like Negroponte is yet willing to un-tether the laptop from education:

The demand for the XOs is also coming from unusual quarters in different sectors. These include insurance agents, census representatives, and even rural outsourcing units eager to deploy the sturdy, easy-to-use laptops. No deal, says Negroponte: He is committed to providing the laptop only for education.

This is at odds with what Reliance has told the Indian press:

Later this year, the XO laptops are expected to hit the retail stores. Sources say Reliance Communications, which partnered OLPC Foundation to conduct an XO pilot project in Maharashtra last year, is looking at retailing these laptops bundled with its CDMA modems.

I'm hopeful to see actual retail sales, but I'm not about to hold my breath. I've always maintained that the central downfall of the OLPC project was their strategy to spread the laptop via large government deals - almost insuring mismanagement, overwhelming numbers of laptops, and underfunded (at best) implementation strategies and curricula integration. In this new model in India, some of these concerns are finally dealt with in an innovative strategy.

Yet, as simply a low-cost computing device that can be sold, you suddenly enable many exciting possibilities, especially with the GPRS-modem-included models rumored to be part of the India deployment, opening up a BoP style approach could provide true sustainability and scale for the XO laptops.

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