JonCamfieldBlog

So, after xochat went into deep hibernation (though it's back to stay and has its own regional servers), Wayan asked for friends to chat with:

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)

This means that you can use it to chat (or share other activities like write or browse!) with other XO users whenever you're connected to the Internet, instead of waiting until they're in range to interact via the mesh.

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.

Continue reading "DC XO Chat Server" »

Posted by Jon at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Continue reading "Portability vs The World" »

Posted by Jon at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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."

Posted by Jon at 01:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last month I mentioned Ubuntu's Netbook version, designed specifically for the ultraportable, "4PC" market. Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical's CEO, the parent company behind Ubuntu) just blogged more about the interface design for the "netbook" market:

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.

Now, you've got to wonder who those companies are. Could it be Walter Bender's Sugar Labs? Mary Lou Jepsen's Pixel Qi? Sugar is definitely an innovative UI, and PixelQi's tagline is "The future of portable computing is all about the screen," with a strong focus on holistic computer design and user experience. Other candidates could be OEMs like Quanta (which was planning to produce its own version of the XO laptop.

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).

Posted by Jon at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent The Guardian interview with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth reveals this gem:

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.

Posted by Jon at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

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 by Jon at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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 by Jon at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 by Jon at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 by Jon at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 by Jon at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 by Jon at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I updated my OLPC from the shipped build 656 to the release candidate for the muh-anticipated Update.1, here's what I did and what happened:

• from a root terminal, olpc-update candidate-703
  (wait about 30 minutes; you're almost there when it gets to "Verifying")
• Reboot
• OMG your basic activities are all gone! Download the activity pack through at wiki.laptop.org
• Save it to a USB key, and reboot, holding down the "X" gamepad key after the screen comes on during boot
• It will install the activites and shut down -- remove the key or it'll keep installing them on boot and shutting down.
• Your base activites and any you'd added yourself will be back on the next boot. If you'd customized your menu order, though, that's gone.

My SD card wasn't showing up, but shutting down, removing it, rebooting and putting it back in worked. (XP on the XO is closer to reality than we think with all these "reboot and it works" moments!)

So the update was a little complex (I get the desire to separate OS from Activities, but make it two automatic steps folks -- not update, lose the GUI ability to repair or even troubleshoot the problem, and hope people have a spare computer they can download the activities with. It has all the finesse of installing Windows on a computer and having it ask you if it can connect to the Internet to try and download the drivers for the only network card. Right, 'cuz that's gonna work.

Suspend/sleep at least exists on 703; I can tap the power button and it goes into powersave mode (though the wifi light stays on -- probably by design again I realize, but I need to figure out a (hopefully automated) way to sleep/hibernate the laptop for it to really be functional for me.

Also; when will the gamepad keys (pr even Fn-up/pageup/down) scroll the journal? I hate having to click the very tiny scrollbar there.

Posted by Jon at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wayan at OLPCNews.com has an article up on what he's terming "3P computing" (Power, Price, Performance). Some of the commentators and myself would also add "Portability" to the list.

I think there's still a lot to shake out to give this market it's own identity -- something more than an iPhone or PDA, but still less than a full (desktop-replacement-style) laptop. The problem is that there is also a growing small(ish) but high-powered laptop market (the Air, Fujitsu's lifebook, and many of the portable tablet PCs), so the mini-note (HP's working term) or 3P (Wayan's) will have to compete on price as well as a set of features that the high-powered minis can't beat. This I think is where an expanded notion of Portability comes in.

Portability doesn't just mean small, and it doesn't just mean light. It also means ruggedness -- I need to toss it in a bag and go, not spend 10 minutes repacking it in a specially-designed single-use laptop bag. True portability also requires serious low power consumption (one of the three Ps); which high-powered laptops will really face problems with. Low power consumption means more battery life for the same battery weight (adding to the lightness), and it means not searching for an outlet at every layover, coffeeshop, porch, and so on.

I'd love for vendors to also start building in cell-network connectivity (GPRS/EDGE/EV-DO) with some bundled, reasonable, data plans -- continuing the path from hunting for an ethernet jack to the constant hunt for an open wifi signal to just being connected.

Posted by Jon at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Slashdot's wading in to the discussion on what is a low-cost laptop and what features should it have. At least this time no one's calling me a child hater.

Posted by Jon at 01:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

HP, the current #1 global PC seller, has entered the mini/low-cost laptop market:

HP's foray comes in the form of a new computer called a "Mini-Note" that weighs less than 3 pounds with a screen that measures 8.9 inches diagonally. The machines start at under $500 for a Linux-based model. Prices go up for Windows Vista models with faster processors.

The processors HP is using are made by Via Technologies Inc., the distant third-ranked player in the microprocessor space, and come in clock speeds up to 1.6 gigahertz. The inclusion is a big win for Via, which trails Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. by a wide margin in the microprocessor market. HP executives say the only major feature its Mini-Note lacks is an optical drive for ingesting DVDs and CD-ROMs, which can be bought separately.

Interesting decision to go with Via, and odd decision to make it Vista-bloat-compatible. HP, like Intel, is still missing what I see to be the important key in the low-cost mini laptop market. If your new product is essentially the same as other laptops, just smaller and lighter; you're not escaping the pressures that will eventually drive you to adding more or the same. Further, price points at $500 aren't terribly exciting and certainly won't inspire people to start "buying two laptops:— a lightweight one just for Web browsing on the go and the full-power machine for the home or office."

Both HP and Intel seem to be aiming at a sub-notebook market, which I think is a failing proposition -- it will either subsume or get subsumed by the normal laptop market and compete on speed/memory, storage, features (webcams, tablet-mode, etc.) as well as weight and portability. At best there'll be slight market segmentation as one branch goes towards the Air - light but large-screened, and another towards ultra-portability by sacrificing the screen size.

If you want people to buy a second laptop that doesn't overlap their "desktop replacement" style system, you have to go cheaper (under $300 I'd think) and someone has to figure out the use cases for this system. OLPC envisioned a specific use case for their XO and created a machine to fill that niche. HP and Intel can't seem to disconnect their thinking from standard laptop usage, and their products suffer from it.

So what are the use cases for the ultra-portable, low-cost laptop? I can think of a few from my usage of the XO during my daily routines -- lug around the house to surf and IM while doing other things like watch TV, listen to music, or hang out on the porch. Carry into the kitchen to display a recipe. I intend to take it on a plane and hopefully watch a movie or play some old-school games (tetris, etc.) on it. Read documents (on the porch, metro, at the gym, etc.). Take notes.

These use cases suggest the need for portability (light, easy to toss in a bag, reasonably rugged), long (5hrs) battery life, high-contrast screen for reading, tablet mode for gameplay/movies/reading, somewhat protected from the elements (or at least flour-covered fingers), wifi for connectivity wherever, and the XO's handle is fantastic in toting it with me around the house without bothering about a bag. None of these use cases requires much HD space (movies can go on USB keys, it's not my media center), or excessive graphics or power (2D is fine, it just needs to be strong enough to do video playback).

Basically you're trying to hit a sweet spot somewhere between a good PDA and a small laptop. You need enough flexibility, functionality and power that the PDA market won't overlap you (it's gotta be worth carrying around both this device /and/ an iPhone, Treo, or blackberry), low cost enough that people who already are saturated with computing devices still see the need for it, and with its own unique value proposition that there's a reason it's more useful than a normal, more powerful laptop would be.

The XO seems to still, hardware-wise, be the best device in this new paradigm, with the Eee and the Elonex also getting the right idea but not executing fully. Intel and HP, not to mention Fujitsu's LifeBook, all are trapped in the laptop paradigm.

Posted by Jon at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You might say that I've at times been critical of the OLPC project, but rarely do I have anything bad to say about their actual technology. Intel has a new hardware revision out for their Classmate, and it reveals that while they get the implementation angle, they continue to miss the innovation needs:

Intel Corp. unveiled new features for its line of low-cost laptops for schools Wednesday, adding bigger screens and more data storage capacity as the chip maker ratchets up its rivalry with the One Laptop per Child organization, which sells a competing machine.

Well, admittedly, the new screen is nice, since their old screen was really tiny, but where are the much more relevant features of dust and dampness resistance, being able to read the screen in full sunlight, and rugged construction designed to get past the challenges of the developing world? Competing on screen size and harddrive space is what got us to the current state of bloated, heavy, overheating computers today, and it'd be a great thing if we competed on innovation instead of agglomeration in the low-cost laptop market. I, at least, want to see the market for ultra-portable, low-cost, low-power, reasonably-high-function laptops expand, and not merge into merely an ultra-portable market.

OLPCNews of course has some more comparisons between the Classmate 2 and the OLPC XO.

Posted by Jon at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Disclosure: I work at Youth Service America, where Tara Suri is a member of the National Youth Council, a collection of amazing young people who make the likes of most of us tired with just seeing the amount of good they get done on a daily basis. She's a co-founder of HOPE (Helping Orphans Pursue Education) (when she was 13), She was also named Cosmo Girl of the year for 2007, and has recently launched TurnYouWorldAround.org and Aandolan.org, is an accomplished photographer, public speaker, and traveler.

TurnYouWorldAround.org/Aandolan (which means a movement for change in Hindi) is an organization that "implements social-change initiatives and provides youth with the tools to become changemakers." I don't want to spoil the surprise waiting for you if you explore the site for a few minutes.

TurnYouWorldAround/Aandolan's recent project is Connect a Kid, where youth can create projects to fund-raise for OLPC through their school, community, or just friends and family:

[Connect a Kid] is an initiative of Aandolan, an organization started by teens that provides youth with the tools to become change-makers. Having partnered with OLPC, [Connect a Kid] works to raise funds to purchase laptops, and also aims to raise awareness about the need for global education. Youth register --- and then work with friends and family to help kids around the world!

The website and information packet you get post-registration provide fundraising event ideas, action plan outlines, and other useful tools to create, promote, and evaluate project(s). The groundbreaking part of this is that it's a youth-to-youth program, empowering both the recipient of the XO laptop as well as the giver to realize their ability to organize and enact change.

CNN's YPWR (Young People Who Rock) has a blog post up about Tara, and now an interview at cnn.com/video

Posted by Jon at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To reveal the fathomless depths of my geek depravity, one Friday a month I get together with fellow alumni and current students of my International Science and Technology program and we have a journal club, where we've read some papers on a specific topic (last month was science policy and the presidential candidates, this month is genetically-modified food). It's a fun way to spend a Friday night, as it naturally ends up at a bar or restaurant for continued discussion.

Anyhow, so, I've been trying to use my OLPC XO as my carry-around laptop, which means I store PDFs on it, write notes, and so on, and was reading the articles for this Friday on the commute this morning (one PDF kept crashing the Reader activity...), and as I packed up, a fellow commuter asked; "so....is it a laptop? ..word processor?"

I gave her the 10 second speech on OLPCNews, then we intersected again aboveground and I gave her the 30-second; great technology questionable implementation plan speech and pointed her to OLPCNews and Laptop.org.

Having used the XO for a few days now, I'm often frustrated with it, but WOW IS THE SCREEN COOL. Full -- no -- even better readability (in black and white) in full sunlight? You've gotta wonder why all laptops don't have that feature.

Posted by Jon at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Installing xo activities is a snap, up there with OSX's .dmg install process. Installing anything else can be a bit of a pain, as it's command line installation using RedHat's yum system (which at least has fixed dependency checking since last I used it (I started with RH5.2, then left Linux, then got back into it with Debian and have been a Debian/ubuntu user mostly ever since).

The black and white screen mode is amazing. End of story. The screen-rotating button is nice when switching to ebook/tablet mode, though the lack of access to the touchpad in ebook mode can be awkward.

Wifi config is annoying to me, but obviously designed for the expected default use case of meshing with other XOs and a school server, not hopping on an open wifi access-point network.

Every laptop should have a built-in handle, or at least some way to attach one.

The keyboard is still a bitch to use. It's back at hunt and peck speed almost, and I keep not hitting the space bar right, and sometimes it feels like you really have to mash down on the keys - but precisely - to type. I'm sure I'll get the hang of most of it, but my hands are just too big to use the control keys (shift/ctrl/alt/fn) the way I'm used to. Also, the hold-down-key-repeat "feature" seems missing - perhaps by design.

My battery life seems to be around 3 hours with some activity, and doesn't ever hit 100% charge (as soon as I unplug it it's at 97%). Hopefully the update coming out next week will enable sleep and hibernation, which should improve that dramatically.

Overall, impressive, but despite the fact that it's already being rolled out, it's still rough around the edges.

This post typed and posted via OLPC/XO -- blame the keyboard for typoes.

Posted by Jon at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So I got my OLPC around 11am Saturday morning. Finally. Note: the FedEx AltRefTracking never registered that it was on its way, and I never go to the LaptopGiving Status that indicated that the laptop had been shipped.

It took me almost an hour to get it online (unfortunate problems with its wifi interface). Thankfully I've seen enough people figure out how to open it the hard way that that wasn't a problem...

The keyboard is soooooooo tiny, though - very hard to type with. I'll be spending...well, all weekend getting used to it, learning the keyboard, and descending into the long geekery of hacking my OLPC.

P.S. I think my kUbuntu Dell is jealous already.

Posted by Jon at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One month ago today was the last time I heard anything from OLPC about my laptop, ordered back in December:

Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.

So now it's mid to late March, no laptop and no update. At least my XO's status has been changed to the promising "Your donation is at our warehouse and your laptop is in the process of being shipped." at the laptopgiving website, but no label has been printed, as my FedEx status remains "Not found: No information for the following shipments has been received by our system yet. Please try again later"

Dr. Toast, one of the OLPCNews Forum members scripted queries against the LaptopGiving's status page with incredible results, estimating ~24,000 unshipped G1G1 laptops, with other G1-got-zero recipients finding that the "late march" dates are turning into "mid april" -- and rapidly leaving the "early 2008" promise when we all originally bought the things.

Dr. Toast has kept the script running, even though he's now gotten his XO (lucky bast'd), and posts the updated data daily. He analyzes the various "messages" LaptopGiving responds with like mine, or what I hope to upgrade to soon, "Your donation is ready to be shipped and is in our shipping queue. Please check back with us every few days for updates If you have received this same response after several days (2 weeks or more) please contact Donor Services to verify your shipping info". I just left the long, sad status of "Your donation is ready to be shipped and is in our shipping queue. Unfortunately, we are awaiting new laptop inventory to fulfill your donation. We expect additional inventory to reach our warehouse from the last week in February through the end of March..."

One wonders if their system designed by INFOCOM (of Zork fame?) or the fine folks who made Colossal Cave? The fact that Dr. Toast mapped out the OLPC's Maze of Twisty Little Package Shipping is very impressive; but it'd be nice if this had been transparent from the get-go. Also, there's this thing called customer service, too...

Posted by Jon at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What would a "base of the pyramid" approach for the OLPC look like? While the OLPC vision is bottom-up and child-focused, their actual deployment has been top-heavy. There's occasional discussion about releasing the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop into the market to achieve a more bottom-up development, and the OLPC's original selling point to its manufacturers was that even though the profit margins would be slim, the market would be the next billion users (WSJ). So why not go all-in and focus on this record of success in the technology creation/diffusion realm, and apply it in the international development context?

Where the OLPC Project has intersected with the market; it has created new and valuable intellectual property (Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of OLPC, believes so strongly in the new technology that she's created her own for-profit company licensing the OLPC technology). The buzz around the XO has invigorated the ultra-mobile/small/low-power/low-cost laptop market; with Asus' Eee PC, the new Elonex, Fujitsu's newest LifeBook series, and of course Intel's already-existing ClassMate has received much more attention of recent.

BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum has already compared the OLPC to the Classmate from a BoP approach; but only focused on education and implementation:

But one absolutely critical issue that trumps all the others is education -- how best to teach kids at the bottom of the pyramid. So far, the conversation about XO has been dominated by geek stuff, not educational stuff. [...] But where's the debate over digital lesson plans in local languages, team teaching, long-distance education? [...] Intel may be doing better than the XO. A version of Intel's Classmate PC is already on sale in Mexico and elsewhere and it is--this is key--bundled with educational material software and teacher support.

That's all well and good, but it continues an assumption that I'm trying to open up for debate -- is the educational system the best way to distribute the OLPC XO laptops to create sustained development? What would the the OLPC project turn into if changed to a technology-diffusion, base of the pyramid approach with the overall goal of improving communities by closing the "digital divide"?

First off, there are some immediately obvious downsides. The project would not be a one laptop per child; egalitarian, education-focused project anymore, which is a big punch in the gut to the OLPC vision. It wouldn't necessarily be a child-only approach -- children could be encouraged with various incentives, but once you go to the market, turning away customers over 18 won't fly for very long.

However, the current situation is limited pilot projects in mostly urban situations, mostly schools which are on-grid with Internet access available, with Peru leading the way in pushing for remote-rural tests. So a market approach loses something, but might make up for it in spread and long-term impact. A bottom-up approach is still very constructivist; and doesn't necessarily have to lose it's child-centric flavor. If the underlying goal is closing the "digital divide" and helping these countries; what you need is a self-sustaining project, not an infinite series of projects and recurring costs to the government for new laptops.

So what does it take for technology projects to self-sustain; leading to community development? Read on as I explore some possibilities.

Continue reading "Rethinking the OLPC Distribution: A "Base of the Pyramid" approach?" »

Posted by Jon at 03:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Disclaimer: If you take this post seriously, you need to relax.

UPDATE:There are some LOLPCs hiding away at lolnptech!

I've been very let down by the lack of mashups between OLPC and the LOLcat sillyness. Why, you already have 2/3rds of the letters in the name. It can't possibly be any nerdier than LOL Non-Profit Technology; with captions such as "Ur nonprofit iz running on 486 PCs and Windoz 95?! No, srsly! Whut r U rly using?"; or LOLCode; which turns the traditional LOLCats "captions" into (shudder) executable code, such as this "Hello World" routine:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

LolCats even have a wikipedia page and an xkcd comic about them. So I think it can't possibly sink any lower in humor value than the LOLCat phenomenon already has. If you don't get it, don't worry -- you're probably better off than the rest of us. It's basically silly photos of cats with captions explaining what is going through the cat's head at the time. Cats, evidentially, think in short, poorly-spelled, SMS-like grammar-less tidbits. Who knew?

Regardless; I've yet to see any application of this to the OLPC -- what I'll dub; LOLPCs. So, gentle readers, I present you with the first (evar1!1!eleven) LOLPC collection; and invite you to use any one of the available Lolcat creation tools to make more.

Of course, even when attempting humor, we've got to get our digs in. See -- even the laptop wants a solid implementation plan!

This XO seems to be of the opinion that it'd fare better freed of any top-down approach and find its way on the free market (I think it's been reading too much NextBillion.net)
Sometimes, the laptops get lonely when you don't bring them to mesh meetups often enough.
Saving the best for last, Britt Selvitelle gives us some "awww" factor; but also reveals the real motive: "This actually leads to better wireless reception;" begging the question -- is it one laptop per child ... or one child per laptop???

That's out of my system (for now).

This post will also show up over at OLPCNews.com over the weekend -- the comments (complaints? LOLThreads?) will be there.

Updates:
Ivan K's already created a LOLPC wiki page

See also Ethan Zuckerman's ETECH talk on cute cats and digital activism

Continue reading "LOLPC - One LOL per OLPC" »