JonCamfieldBlog

I'll believe it when I see it, but the Times of India is reporting that the promised $10 laptop is closer to a reality, but right now it's as real as the crank on the original XO design.

Who knew cardboard was so exciting?

We're missing the point here, as usual. ICT4D is not about the ICT, it's about the "D" - Development. Use whatever technology is best suited for the problem at hand, don't wait on the next big thing or spend money to develop it, at least starting out. This is why mobile phones are such an attractive tool - amazing install base, even in the developing world, low cost, low-power, but provides limited connectivity and 2-way (limited) data flow.

The $10 laptop?

As technologists in development, we must dampen our tendency to get excited over the technology and instead use our knowledge of all the technology options (not just the newest and shiniest), and get excited instead over the development challenges. Luckily, there's a lot to be excited on.

So, can we now stop gushing over vaporware announcements and get back to work?

Posted by Jon at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This entry is part four in the series, "The XO Files: I Want to Believe in the XO" Read Part I here, then Part II, The New 4PC Market, and its Failings, and Part III: Re-imagining the OLPC Distribution.

The XO Files: I Want To Believe

The beginning of 2009 isn't going so well for the OLPC Foundation over at 1CC, with layoffs and very disappointing G1G1 sales.

To (finally) close up my "I want to believe" series on how things went wrong, and how things could go very right with the OLPC dream, let me offer some resolutions for the Foundation to consider for 2009.

I will decide on a mission statement
That is, "I will accept that OLPC is and has always been a laptop project, not an education project". And that's OK, if presented as such. The world needs a laptop like the XO, and it can still help improve education. But let's agree that the XO is a laptop and not an education miracle, and treat it as such - a wonderfully well-designed and flexible tool that can be used in many contexts in international development projects and in more quotidian ways as well. This opens up more "markets" for the XO, widens the potential scope, and creates a much larger and diverse user-base who can benefit from and contribute back to the ongoing development of the XO.

I will stop overreaching
Negroponte, to extend the X-Files metaphor, is a Fox Mulder, and needs to find a Scully to temper his theories. The "refocusing" he discusses sells the achievements OLPC has made short and sets up a new round of unreachable goals:

• Development of Generation 2.0
• A no-cost connectivity program
• A million digital books
• Passing on the development of the Sugar Operating System to the community.

Christoph has already responded to these in the forums; my favorite is his response to the no-cost connectivity: ""no-cost". HAHAHA,"

But how about stopping with the distraction of the "Next Generation" product, add some incremental changes to the current system, and continue the work of lowering its price point and increasing the adoption of it? Further - a million ebooks, as Christoph also points out, is already the mission of existing projects. If you want to cling to the education mission statement, what about focusing on educational content for the XO instead? This supports the adoption rate by lowering the bar, and is closer to the core (but possibly forgotten and never really true) "education project" goals.

In 2009, OLPC should refocus, realizing that their strategy for improving education is to create the best laptop tool for education . OLPC should seek to partner with anybody and everybody to help get the XO in the hands of educators (and everybody else, I posit).

It's time to let go of the "my way or the highway" style of management and find innovative ways to get the XOs into the hands of children - through education ministries, on-the-ground, socially responsible vendors (think Grameen's Village Phone), international development efforts, and direct, simple sales. Which brings us to the next resolution.

I will sell the XO laptop commercially
So G1G1 didn't go so well this year, coming in at a mere 7% of last year's G1G1 even though it opened up the purchasing to more of the world and went through Amazon. While many blame the management, we also have to remember that there's a global financial slowdown impacting all sectors, and buying a $200 laptop for $400 isn't the easiest purchase to make. We can squarely blame the management of OLPC for their apparent misuse of the Give One side of the purchase for operations money instead of laptop donations (otherwise why would the 7% sales compared with last year matter so much as to cause so many layoffs and refocusing? I welcome anyone to figure out this math puzzle).

I strongly believe that the technology behind the XO is, as Wayan likes to put it, "clock-stopping hot." It's valuable. It's the best travel laptop on the market. Make a new form factor for it, or at least an adultish color scheme, optionally bump up the specs a slight bit, ship it with Ubuntu or pure-RH boot/install USB sticks, and market it to international travelers, hikers (with an extra solar panel charging kit!), parents, kitchen warriors (it makes a great Internet/epicurious.com station in the kitchen), geeks (probably almost saturated market there), and people who just want a reliable, sturdy, and lightweight laptop/netbook.

Drop the Give-one part and sell the damned thing for a modest profit that OLPC can honestly use for operating expenses. Make a for-profit spinoff that donates profits back to the non-profit foundation - find a way, everyone wants one, and your window for getting in to the 4PC netbook market that you almost single-handedly created is closing. Also, sell or license schwag and accessories. There's so much brand potential behind the XO to make a bit of money to support the Foundation that it's ridiculous not to capitalize on at least some chunk of that. At the very least, aggressively promote the licensing of the technology - especially the screen - to other netbook manufacturers and make some dough off of that, while at the same time spreading the technology to the field. If the end goal is to get low-cost, rugged laptops to the children of the world, one way is just to have many low-cost, competing options that governments and development workers can use in their projects.

I will listen to the community
OLPC has done a passable job with creating and abusingworking with its community, but it rarely listened to that community, as Yama Ploskonka has gone into with greater detail. It's time to change that, and make sure that OLPC at least listens and responds to the community at large. Some issues of the community may be pet peeves that do not impact (or are costly distractions) to getting a cheap laptop available to support international development and education, but some ideas might lead to cost savings, new opportunities, or even faster and also better software development cycles, as gregdek suggests.

Posted by Jon at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, and continues with a discussion of modules, then talks about getting content into the map.

Remember back in Part II where I mentioned the Views and Panels module?

Views gives you very precise control over what shows up on new maps you can show up. Even better, use can create "arguments" that can be passed through the URL to further define what shows up. For example, I created a view whose base URL was /gysd/map/ -- if you go there, you get a listing of years to choose from (do you want to see events from GYSD 2008? GYSD 2009?) If you click on 2008, the url is now /gysd/map/2008 - and you see all the events for that year. I then created some other map options to list by country, state, and so on, so there's another path that goes like this: /gysd/map-by-location/2008/us/FL . If I cut that one off at 2008/, I'd see a listing of all the countries I had data for. If I cut it at us/ , I'd see all the regions (states) with data. You could also set a map up with zip codes, taxonomies, and so on. Drupal 6's Views2 is an order of magnitude more powerful that Views1, and alone it's a reason to upgrade to D6.

To create a map view, you have to first (after installing the views modules above, and creating a new view) select GMap View from the Page view set of options (under View Type). This enables the map functionality. I put information into the Header section to guide users in the navigation process.

In Fields, you get the option of what data you pass to the view. Think of views as lenses that you can see your whole site through, but best used to explore a few pieces of data from your site in a controlled way with. At the very least, you have to pass the Node Title and the latitude and longitude information to the map view (or it won't know what to place or where to place anything). You can add more later, and control what is actually visible to the user using custom CSS code (I hid the lat/long numbers).

Arguments are what I discussed above. Start out with none and add more as you want to customize your map and the user's path and ability to view specific subsets of your map data.

Filters are super important - this is where you tell the view what content types (or taxonomies, etc.) to show. I created a filter to only show the "GYSD Event" content type. Also highly recommended is filtering on published content only if you have any workflow set up. You can also expose filters to the user to allow them to filter in real time on taxomonies (or whatever). Right now, I'm in the process of working on this - where are arguments and url paths more useful, and where are user-exposed filters more useful?

If views are meta-approaches to looking at content, panels are a meta-approach to looking at and presenting views (or lower-level content, of course). You can combine maps and lists within the same panel kind of like being able to present multiple web-pages linked together inside of one. You have to first create panes for the panel that translate the panel options into options for each pane. For example, the view could have a url like map/2008/us/TX to show 2008-only events in Texas, and the panel url could be simply map/tx - you'd need to tell the pane what arguments from the panel (argument #1 is tx) correspond to which arguments for the view (the view expects the third argument to deal with states, so you have to set the first and second to static (2008 and 'us'), and then tell the pane to translate the first panel argument into the third view argument. Make sense? Great! Huh? No? Well, yeah. It's a bit complex, but remember that you're basically having one web page with one set of arguments and filters talk to any number of separate views - each previously their own page with their own filters and arguments. The panes setup lets you translate between them without having to make all your views specifically formatted in the exact same way. It's the standard geek problem - in making something very flexible and easy, you end up with a very complex sounding system. I find it easiest to understand these decisions after having understood the problem they're meant to solve.

I'll continue this discussion after I can get some sample data in from 2008 (node_import remains unavailable for D6) or new data for 2009 events. Happy holidays and happy hacking!

Posted by Jon at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People always come to me for advice on computers and technology options over the giftmas season. To head this off somewhat at the pass, let me remind everyone that my advice from the end of last year's season still stands: get a Mac. Really.

Posted by Jon at 05:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been a while since I posted on my Drupal Mapping project, and that's partially because I've been spending some time getting a great site that aggregates and re-publishes news for the volunteer service world together at ServiceWire.org using Drupal 6, FeedAPI, Views, and some other fun tricks - you can follow it on Twitter at @ServiceWire - it posts about once an hour or so with news about volunteer service and service-learning.

Anyhow, my experience working with D6 and the newest Views module have convinced me that as long as most of the tools I need for the map are available on D6, it's time to move. So I'm rebuilding from scratch (bad luck with upgrades of recent, and I'd like to apply and cement my recently gained knowledge). Unfortunately, the Node_import module - key to a lot of the testing I want to do on the map and views - is not quite ready, so I'm waiting for that to release an update that works with Location and CCK, and in a holding pattern until then.

Posted by Jon at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Initial reports are now showing up on news sites; this very light-on-details article on BBC seems to be the first up on major news sites - but it's been burning up the SMS and immediate-update "microblog" site, Twitter, for over an hour.

We're seeing a human tragedy and the slow emergence of an amazingly powerful social tool - real time citizen reporting. People are sending in reports, pictures, and videos of on-the-ground events as they unfold, scooping all major news sources - because what traditional media outlet could possibly keep up with a reaction time measured merely by the speed of information?

Old media has a never-ending struggle to maintain its relevance - this is going to be big. Where were you when "CNN Headline News" became outdated?

Update Speaking of CNN being outdated; Global Voices now has an article on Mumbai up, based largely on Twitter sources

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For the past year or so, I've repeatedly been trying to bring up what I see as a huge, gaping hole in any project which uses Microsoft products for an ICT4Development rollout - computer viruses. Windows XP, when connected to the Internet sans protection, lasts as few as four minutes before becoming infected, and rarely more than a day. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of OLPC XOs running Windows (with no mention of anti-virus software to date), and you have a nightmare scenario pretty rapidly.

The much-debated VitalWave TCO paper we discussed at the World Bank, which argued that the higher cost of Linux administrators balanced out licensing costs for discounted Microsoft and anti-virus software, even admitted the significant costs of purchasing and maintaining a subscription to anti-virus tools

If Microsoft wants to continue to capture the developing world market, this is going to be a barrier. They can drop their own licensing costs for the XP Starter Edition (which at this point is zero cost to them) down, and hand out older Office software; but the initial and subscription costs for anti-virus software are not (directly) under MS's control. Regardless, having anti-virus protection directly impacts the functionality of the device - if installed, A-V can slow a less powerful computer down to a crawl during a scan and at startup, but the consequences of not having it can render the system absolutely useless.

So it comes as little surprise that Microsoft has announced a free anti-virus software for XP and Vista that targets lower-powered systems (cough, like the OLPC?) to address both these problems and lower the cost barrier for adopting MS:

Code-named “Morro,” this streamlined solution will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs. As part of Microsoft’s move to focus on this simplified offering, the company also announced today that it will discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service effective June 30, 2009.

“Customers around the world have told us that they need comprehensive, ongoing protection from new and existing threats, and we take that concern seriously,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft. “This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware.”

This is something they simply had to do or risk losing emerging markets to Linux-based systems. It will be interesting to see how this affects the anti-virus market in general, and the big (and expensive) players specifically -- will they come out with low-cost or "free" versions, work on a developing-world-only edition? Work closer with OEMs and institutions to buy large license blocks (i.e. work with Ministries of education to supply a blanket license to all their systems)?

As an advocate of open source for development, it saddens me that this barrier has been removed (technically, will be - it could be vaporware still) -- but having seen the disatrous landscape of unprotected systems in the developing world, I am hopeful that this will reduce the impact that malware has on existing Windows systems.

Posted by Jon at 03:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, and continues with a discussion of modules.

So now we have the basic setup and are ready to start on the map - placeholders for content, maps, and actual content, and it's time to forge ahead with improving the user experience and information architecture (at the same time, even!).

I also just came across another blog article at around the same level of detail that covers other aspects of Drupal, which I haven't touched on much here for a more articles-rich site. Check it out: http://dejitarob.wordpress.com/2007/11/26/how-i-used-drupal-to-build-tampa-bay-indymedia/ . Along similar lines, I stumbled across a series by IBM that gives a surprisingly clear overview of the next level in to Drupal geekery, without flooding you with information: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource5/

Create custom content types and taxonomies for the events

I created one content type with required location information for the events, and a few others for participant roles (to link in organizations running events in a more controlled fashion than a free text field). I'm planning to use node_import to pull those in from our database (and by database, I of course really mean excel spreadsheets). I set it up so that any logged-in user can add content to these types, but it won't be automatically published (allowing for some oversight and cleansing of poorly inputted information). This step lets me sort, manage, and delete items with better precision, which becomes Really Useful if you're going to run some batch imports - the first few I can almost guarantee will be wrong in some insidious ways.

Then I created a few taxonomies to support further categorization of my events (did they receive grant money to run the event? Did the event fit into one of the MDG categories?? ), but this isn't strictly necessary (though it can add more dimensions to searching and map presentations once you get into the views, below). It's a LOT easier to do this well, ahead of time, than to go back and fix it later.

Taxonomies (and the difference between Content Types and Taxonomies, and taxonomies internally) can get hairy to grok. My brain understands taxonomies best as super-configurable dimensions of data that you can apply pretty flexibly to your content. Content Types are one dimension that is specifically useful to manage user permission and back-end content management with (logged in users can post X, but only administrators can post Y, for example). You've got to balance the tempation to over-taxonomize your site with the user experience (how many drop-downs, multi-selects and free tagging fields do they really want to deal with every time they create content??). You can have a taxonomy apply to only specific content types, which I found handy with the map, as there was a set of categories really useful to the map data, but I wouldn't want to force them on blog entries.

Testing, 1...2...3...

Finally, I imported last year's event data, just so I could see how the map works. you can always go through and delete it all if you must, later (before the site goes live, hopefully!). Note: using the latest version of the location module seems to muck with the node_import module's way to figure out which fields it can import into - see http://drupal.org/node/307677 for a potential workaround. Lesson: Be ready for some oddities when using beta releases!

Actually, I got on #drupal and #drupal-support (chat rooms on irc.freenode.net) and ran into the head Locations module developer who pointed me to a code patch that fixed all my problems. It's things like that that make me love the open source culture.

Even so, as the Location is in the middle of a massive code change that throws these errors once in a while when you're setting up filters based on location information. Right now I recommend watching the forums - most of it works, and it will all work a lot better than the previous stable release, you'll just have to be careful around some of the rough edges.

It took me a few rounds of "import, field-match, peek at the map, delete it all, start over again" before I got to a mostly-happy point with the imported data. If you're starting fresh, it's a lot easier, and you don't have to worry about the various problems I was encountering with some bad formatting errors and inconsistent data in the import file. Instead, you get to go through the Create Content tool that your end users will be using to post a few sample entries.

A note on Gmap configuration and "geocoding"

Geocoding is the art of matching an address to a Latitude/Longitude on the map, and it works best in the USA and a few other nations. GMap provides a (somewhat hard to use) tool that lets users click a map to select their location, or you can point them to a third party map tool that walks them through finding their Lat/Long to input back in your site. If you find a better solution - let me know!

Once you have a few map points in, click on the "Node Locations" navigation option and they should show up -- your first map!

Next up: slicing and dicing the map to show custom fields and specific types of data, not just everything!

Posted by Jon at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The video archive of last Thursday's discussion at the World Bank on the total cost of ICT4E projects is now online at the Bank's eDevelopment thematic group blog

Posted by Jon at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Come by for a lively discussion on TCO (that I get to start out!)

From the world bank:

EVENT REMINDER
A World Bank ICT and Education Community of Interest Discussion, in coordination
with
the e-Development Thematic Group, infoDev and the DC-based Technology Salon

How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): A Study of Models of Affordable Computing for
Schools in Developing Countries

The event will be webcast live via http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live and archived for later viewing online.

Speakers: Karen Coppock, PhD., VP of Consulting Services, and Brendan Smith, Senior Consultant, Vital Wave Consulting
Discussant: Jon Camfield, Director of ICT, Youth Service America

11am - 12:30pm EST (GMT- 5 hours)
6 November 2008
Location: The World Bank "J" Building, 701 18th Street, NW, room J-B1-075

"Total cost of ownership" (TCO) is often underestimated, sometimes grossly, when calculating costs of ICT in education initiatives in developing countries. Estimates of initial costs to purchase equipment to overall costs over time vary widely; typically they lie between 10-25% of total cost. That said, there is a dearth of reliable data, and useful tools, to help guide education decisionmakers in their assessments of the true costs of educational technology initiatives.

A recent whitepaper from Vital Wave Consulting, "Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials", and accompanying case study of ICT in education initiatives in India, provide further insight and perspective on this important and often controversial issue. The white paper discusses key issues related to technology use in education and presents several major findings, including:

• Academic research and private-sector investment decisions indicate that computers in schools contribute to improved academic outcomes, boost a nation's economic competitiveness, and attract job-creating economic investments.Governments need to consider the entire cost of school computing solutions, rather than merely the initial expenses. A total cost of ownership model takes into account recurrent and hidden costs such as teacher training, support and maintenance, and the cost of replacing
  hardware over a five-year period.
• Support and training are recurrent costs that constitute two of the three largest costs in the total cost of ownership model. They are greater than hardware costs and much higher than software fees.
• Ultra-low cost computers and Linux-based solutions are relatively equal in cost to traditional hardware and proprietary software solutions because they require higher labor and replacement costs over a five-year period., The total cost of ownership for different computer types and software platforms is relatively consistent.

Please note that this independent study was commissioned by Microsoft.

Come join what we hope to be a lively presentation and discussion of the findings of this study, their potential implications, and the underlying methodologies and assumptions underpinning the models explored in this work.

We will kick off the discussion with comments from Jon Camfield, Director of Information and Communication Technologies at YSA (Youth Service America), who has co-authored an update to the TCO Tool for schools developed by the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI). This tool, "Deploying 1:1 educational models in large scale: a practical budgeting tool based on TCO", is
available for free use under a Creative Commons License and is currently being utilized as part of planning processes in Rwanda, drawing on lessons learned from its earlier use elsewhere in Africa, most notably in Namibia.

For more information:

Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials
Affordable Computing for Schools in India: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Case Study
http://www.vitalwaveconsulting.com/insights/articles-presentations.htm

infoDev Knowledge Map: ICTs in Education: Costs
http://infodev.org/en/Publication.159.html

GeSCI TCO Tool
http://www.gesci.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=43

Logistics for participation in Washington DC:
Registration is required for outside participants / non-World Bank staff.
Please leave sufficient time (~ 15 minutes) to be processed through World Bank security.
The J building is located 1/2 block off Pennsylvania Ave., entrance on 18th Street, NW..

Posted by Jon at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you see irregularities, call 1-866-our-vote for help and to report problems, and follow the current reports at OurVoteLive. Text your zip to Twitter Vote Report to send in polling problems.

Now - let's see some change!

Posted by Jon at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll be leading the discussion at the World Bank this Thursday with a presentation by Vital Wave Consulting on their recent TCO calculations for low-cost computing models (both lab- and 1:1 computing approaches).

Come by or watch the event live online! (rsvp below).

A World Bank ICT and Education Community of Interest Discussion (EduTech), in collaboration with the World Bank e-Development Thematic Group, infoDev and the Technology Salon invite you to a seminar/live webcast:

How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): A Study of Models of Affordable Computing for
Schools in Developing Countries

11am - 12:30pm (Washington DC time)
6 November 2008

The seminar will be streamed live and recorded for on demand viewing.

LIVE WEBCAST: http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live

Some more information about the background of TCO calculations on the OLPC at OLPCNews.com, as well as a discussion on different models.

Continue reading "World Bank webcast: How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?" »

Posted by Jon at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Drupal by itself is pretty powerful, but where it really shines is when you start plugging in the modules which have been developed for it. There are hundreds (if not thousands), and the first mistake I made on my first Drupal install was to just start clicking away before I'd learned the ropes. Luckily, this is what sandbox installs are made from, so a few database drops and folder deletions later I could start from scratch (again).

To get this all working, I now present you with the modules I activated or installed for the map project:

Core Optional modules enabled

• Blog/BlogAPI (if you want blog entries, and to enable usage of third party tools like the Flock Browser as blog-writing clients)
• Taxonomy (This may or may not be actually "optional"
• Profile (If you want user profiles)
• Menu (Handy for working with your menus / user experience)

Modules downloaded and installed

• Location - (Location, Gmap, Gmap location, Gmap Views Integration -- you can't have a map without locations and a map provider)
• Event (if you want the Map points to also have start/end dates or (separately?) provide calendar info)

Advanced modules (do these later!)

• Node Import (if you have CSVs of events to batch-import)
• Views (Views, Views RSS, Views Theme Wizard, Views UI -- more about views and panels later)
• Location Views -- you can't have a map without this stuff!)
• Image (if you want users to attach photos)
• Panels (panel pages, mini panels, panel nodes, views panels)
• CCK (Fieldgroup, Text, Option Widgets; only if you want to add and filter on custom fields outside of what the above modules provide - try it without first; K.I.S.S.)

Some General Drupal Modules (Which I just think are useful)

• Adsense (basic) (make money through Google Ads)
• Google analytics (track pageviews)
• Share (easy javascript applet that makes it easy for visitors to copy content to their Facebook / social bookmarking / etc. sites)
• Spam (Great tool for detecting and managing spam)
• Captcha (Used to be the best tool to filter out spammers, still helps, but annoys many users
• Community Tags; Tagadelic (Fun tagging tools)

After installing all those, you'll have to do a bit of initial work - setting up your domain's Gmap API Key and Analytics settings, default GMap preferences (autozoom, and open the info window when a marker is clicked, in my case). Make sure you click through the administration-by-module page and at least peek into the settings for all these modules to give you an idea of what can and can't be tweaked from the module settings page. Captcha requires you to upload some fonts to work well, and needs access to a decent image library (usually not a problem). Spam needs some tweaking.

This is a good time to take a short jaunt through all of Drupal, post some content, play and learn about URL shortcuts, menus, and blocks, and how they work together on your pages. You might also check out a few of the different Drupal themes (many good themes are available for free), and generally get your feet wet in Drupal. I for example added the Google Translate applet (as a block) so that any page could be translated through Google's Translation tool.

Posted by Jon at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is my "journal" of work in creating a user-modifiable map of the Global Youth Service Day events taking place around the world. The goal was to create a map that staff non-techies could manage, non-techie youth and organizations from around the world could add to, and still (a) work and (b) be friendly to the techies managing it, allowing for mass import and so on.

The GYSD Map in progress!

This is the first part of a series of entries (four or five probably). This first one covers the overview and core software I'm using, and some discussion of why I've chosen what I have. The next entry will cover modules and initial configuration work.

This guide is going to be a bit on the techie side, and I presume at least a bit of Drupal and webhosting experience when going through it, but nothing you can't google for help on from the community. As a caveat, I'm also relatively new to drupal, this is only my third foray into the more complex worlds it offers.

I'm writing it down all in one place because almost every step I took fulfilled my 5 minute documentation rule (http://www.joncamfield.com/blog/2008/08/my_5_minute_rule_for_documenta.html), and because mapping is just darned useful as a visualization tool. I don't think it's totally unreasonable for any nonprofit to reproduce my steps and get their own map, but having a techie on hand would certainly help.

Continue reading "How I made a map for Global Youth Service Day 2009" »

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

OLPC Upgrading - like an old defrag!

The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly, and it even included a good chunk of activities, which saved a big post-upgrade time sink in Update.1

As for the new Sugar itself - first and foremost - amazing job. Great improvements on the UX/UI, suspend is fantabulous, the wifi connection system is much, much improved ... alt-tabbing, even copy/paste is better. This is a usable interface in ways that the previous stable builds were not, and it's hard to explain all of the polish that's been added -- the best I can explain is like moving from Microsoft to Mac or Linux/KDE -- things are different and a bit confusing at first, but then you realize that what's new is simply all the things you used to wish Microsoft did, and eventually gave up wishing. The interface provides a much more natural response to your actions.

OK, with the fanboy dedication out of the way, some things that annoy me:

Hidden/non-broadcast ESSIDs (wireless networks) are still a royal pain to connect to. Would it really be that hard to list the networks that are available but without ESSID and allow us to try to connect by entering the ESSID manually (in the GUI) -- even better, it could then "remember" the network association and ESSID going forward and have the discovered networks show up "starred" like encrypted networks do.

Speaking of starred encrypted networks, somewhere in the transition from Update.1 (When access to encrypted networks worked great) to 8.2.0, my XO stopped remembering the passwords. It stars "trusted" networks, but forces me to re-authenticate every time I connect, even when it's just coming back from a short suspend. It could at least remember the encryption type (ascii/hex/passkey, open/shared)??

...And so far, that's all my griping. The whole OS feels faster and more responsive, and just overall more put-together. It's a great relief to see such strong work being put forth even after the XP-on-XO hubub and the fallout at 1CC.

Update: it's remembering my work's hidden network so far!

Posted by Jon at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm currently using the laptop as the interim solution / testbed for the LAS idea. It's struggling to run amarok, but works nicely with qiv running a slideshow on top of it, usually.

I think I fixed it, but it had a habit of randomly creating a playlist after it was done playing whatever we'd asked it to - i.e. selecting songs at random from our libraries. It's cute, until it pulls up an audiobook chapter, or Chainsaws and Children (a metal/rave CD I won at Defcon many years ago for knowing that the Battle of Hastings did not occur on a power-of-two year (like 1024). And they all said that a liberal education was a worthless pursuit!)

Posted by Jon at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CropScience.org has a great paper on the potential use of social media and Internet access for rural farmers. What sets it apart from most Social Media for Development writings is that is takes a serious look at what must be in place for a project of this scope to work.

It compares farmers in Uganda and Australia, which is less ridiculous than it sounds. The Australian farmers - with training and a significantly higher support network (from government regulations all the way to average numbers of computers/100 people;

There are many technical links in the chain needed to connect a rural person to the Internet, and no-one takes responsibility for all of them. A lack of access may be caused by problems with the national or local telecommunications infrastructure, the ISP, the computer or the software being used (Easdown 1999). In rural Australia this is enough to put farmers off using the Internet, but it can be a major headache for Internet project managers in Africa. [...] A promising alternative for some rural communities in Africa is the use of mobile telephony to access the Internet (Gerster and Zimmerman 2003). In Uganda the mobile phone services of MTN are widespread even in remote rural areas, and in many African countries the number of mobile subscribers exceeds those linked to the fixed network. Innovative African projects such as Foodnet in Uganda have made use of this to develop an online system using mobile telephony for farmers to access price information via messages (SMS) and information on commodity prices can easily be sent via teletext.

The authors hit on key elements of ICT-for-ag (and, really, any ICT4D/Poverty alleviation project), suggesting the costs and complications of Internet access, the time and skills needed, gender roles, and the need for social support networks, and naturally the lower level infrastructural needs:

For the Internet to be an effective means for farmers to access useful information three complementary things need to be in place. Government policies are needed to support and develop physical Internet access in rural areas. Farmers need to be skilled and supported in learning how to use the Internet and contextualizing its information, and institutions need to produce information in forms that are compatible with the way that farmers learn.

With all this hassle - why even bother?

The nature of social media and online tools provide a great match with the context-specific, experiential learning needs of farmers in ways that traditional 1-way media and Training&Visits/T&V ag extension efforts fall short of. If created in a social space and as part of a larger ag info ecosystem, it can provide a great tool:

The Internet will be of most use to cropping farmers when providers of agricultural information use it less like a library and more like an interactive field day. It is not its scarcity but the local contextualization of information that makes it valuable for farmers. The huge volume of information available on the Internet is of less value to farmers than the opportunities for interactivity with others that it provides to help make local sense of that information.

...But it's not going to be as easy as setting up a ning or drupal site and calling it a day.

Posted by Jon at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I admit it. I have a Windows laptop at home. For a very long time, it was my primary system.

For the past year or so, I've been using a Linux laptop as my daily system, reverting to the Windows system for reliable video and HD audio -- basically, it was my media system, which just happened to also have all my email, files, and whatnot.

Since moving in with my girlfriend (who's an ardent Mac user), we've been trying to find a neutral solution to our media needs. I refuse to use iTunes, but am so far not very happy with XMMS / AmaroK on Linux. Frankly, I like Winamp. It has amazing capabilities, a good Media Library with search/filtering (and complex boolean logic) for automatic playlists, it's fully supoprted by my remote control, and with WAWI I can control it over the Internets too. Plus, it's easy to set it up to stream to one or more ice/shoutcast servers and rebroadcast that over the LAN or the Internet.

It shouldn't be ... that hard to recreate this on a Linux box. Right?

I have two pretty low-power boxes available - an AMD PIC that I'm in the process of putting a DamnSmallLinux on, and my workhorse Dell Latitude that I bought at a dot-com assets auction. It's been with me to Venezuela and Jamaica, and is celebrating it's 10th birthday this year. It has Ubuntu on it with a clean gnome desktop, but KDE extentions installed to support amaroK. I'd reinstall the whole thing, but the sound config is a dark art that took me weeks and lots of luck last time I got it working (and I'm all out of candles).

So the laptop system is currently "working," but it's pretty painfully slow and has some odd problems - the playlist likes to randomize itself from my library after a while, the audio volume (in the system) likes to lower itself, and remote connections to the GUI have been, thus far, unsuccessful. I haven't even tried getting the interactive Amarok web interface to work decently or LIRC to talk to my USB/IR/remote.

I'm sure it's all possible. I'd just occasionally like it to also be easy (without my gf constantly trying to pull me over to the Dark Side.

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

This is pure brilliance, courtesy BoingBoing:

This giant billboard, posing hard questions for Sarah Palin, was lit up across the road from her LA rally site on Saturday: you could send your own Palin questions to it via SMS. Nice technology use from the California Dems.

Posted by Jon at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thin Clients - a.k.a. "dumb terminals" have a long history in computing, and tend to come up every few years (seems to be a ten year cycle) as the Grand Solution to Desktop Computing, promising mind-numbingly easy centralized configuration and software maintenance, simplified licensing, and low-cost, low-profile desktop terminals that provide enough power for almost all users without wasting resources.

With the current interest in low-cost computing devices like the OLPC XO among many others, the World Bank's InfoDev group have put out a short thought piece on thin client computing and the developing world, with a new twist - OS virtualization:

The Macedonian Government’s “Computer for every student” initiative chose a solution based on “desktop virtualization” where the computer power of each PC is shared by seven students, each of whom has their own screen, keyboard, mouse and virtual desktop. The solution, provided by nComputing, a US company, works out at US$70 per student “seat” (excluding monitor etc) and runs open source software using LINUX. The advantages for the schools include the low initial capital costs, but also a reduced budget for electricity, air conditioning, maintenance and training. When the system needs upgrading, the costs are less than 15 per cent of what would have accrued if a PC had been supplied to every student.

Virtualization provides a much richer experience than most thin client interfaces, so it's possible that this trend will finally catch on as a longer-term approach to lowering the cost of 1:1 computing programs, especially when using open source, per-seat-license-cost-free solutions like Linux-based desktops.

For a fascinating look into the potential power of virtualization as a tool (in this case, as a web and database server component, paired with cloud computing) check out Codepad.org's Steven Hazel discussing some server-ninja working with scaling Codepad through virtual servers.

A parting thought - remote desktop works surprisingly well from OLPC XOs. Their high resolution makes up for their small screen size (if you have good close-up vision, at least!); so it's not impossible to see them as a thin client low-cost hardware solution; where you can enjoy many benefits of the OLPC's rugged design but also leverage a centrally managed desktop + software solution, with an "offline" mode of Sugar (or Ubuntu/XFCE...)

Posted by Jon at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Chavez likes Intel -- but not Windows? (BBC)

Venezuela is buying the portable computers as part of a $3bn (£1.66bn) bilateral trade deal with Portugal that also covers housing and utilities. Portugal is manufacturing the blue and white laptops under licence from Intel and are broadly based on the chip maker's design of its Classmate computer. [...]

The deal with Venezuela follows an agreement between Intel and Portugal, signed in August for Classmate machines.

Under that deal Portugal agreed to buy 500,000 machines to enable every six-to-10-year-old in the country to get one.

It sounds like this is an extension of Portugal's original tender for 500,000 laptops, but whether the hardware changed discussed are merely the same ones already mentioned or not is uncertain, but the article does hint that it will be further hardware-customized for Venezuela. The BBC article describes the modified Classmate as:

Dubbed Magalhaes (Magellan), the laptops will have on board low-power Intel Atom chips designed for laptops. They will also sport digital cameras and a broadband net connection.

It is somewhaimplied in the article that the Magellan won't have wifi on-board, but I can hardly imagine that is true. As for the software, the original Portugal deal made it clear that there would be a choice between Windows or Ubuntu Linux, and Sugar has been ported for the very similar Classmate 2. Venezuela is going to go their own way: "The machines will run a version of Linux developed in Venezuela."

It seems like they're going to an awfully lot of work to create an XO without buying them from OLPC.

Posted by Jon at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That's three grand, not third generation. A (possibly biased) report by Vital Wave pegs the 5 year TCO of the OLPC at $2,700. That's even more than my estimate of $972/laptop from back in 2006, which got me in NewsForge and called a racist child-hater in Slashdot.

More discussion over at OLPCNews.com

Posted by Jon at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week's Technology Salon was on information sharing and ways to use social media and peer-generated content in international development. Less of a lecture and more of a roundtable discussion, lots of interesting ideas were floated, from using Peace Corps volunteers as on-the-ground information resources to running contests for ways to use technology in development scenarios.

The most interesting part however was hearing back from veterans in the field on their views of the challenges faced in information sharing among contractors competing for RFPs based on their internal expertise and knowledge, and limiting effects that might have on their participation as well as potentially increased participation by smaller contract organizations looking to get a foot in the door.

I believe the biggest challenge (beyond access and literacy) in social media and development is connecting the entrepreneurs doing exciting work on the ground - generating innovative approaches and best practices that could be scaled or re-applied in other situations - with the large development agencies and contracting organizations. The large players have the capacity to build the sharing sites and to connect people to them, but will inevitably focus on their employees and partners, and not the most valuable sources of information - the NGOs and beneficiaries on the ground.

Posted by Jon at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Day 2 was slightly less enervating regarding the blatant Microsoft plugs (only about 40 direct plugs, compared to the first day, where I lost count)

Edward Granger-Happ presented on NetHope, a consortia or co-op of NPOs and NGOs to share consulting and support service around ICT to maximize the ICT impact while minimizing the costs - NPOs are mission and not profit driven, and rarely is the mission technology-related. This led into the next panel on Making the Case for ICT4D.

The panel hit on some of the promises and challenges in ICT projects. Samia Melhem, from the World Bank's Global ICT group and chair of the eDev thematic group argued for horizontal services in eGovernance - shared networks and servers as well as epayment processor that all government agencies could use. Clearly, an obvious, cost-saving approach. The 900 lb gorilla of course being what platforms these could be, and what things could be shared and collaborated upon with NPOs - why not OSS? It never ceases to amaze me the continued lip service to the importance of sharing and collaboration, but using technology built on commercial, anti-sharing platforms. I'll skip my normal rant, but I spoke with Edward Granger-Happ afterwards; and he argued that NGOs should focus their limited tech budgets on 80% solutions and be happy with what comes out of the box. I respectfully disagree. Open Source solutions may only be 75% there "out of the box" but are capable of much more customization without a hard requirement for cash to develop. Admittedly, and Edward's response, MS technologists are cheaper and easier to find than OSS experts. That however is partially a self-fulfilling network effect, and partially a problem of not knowing the OSS culture and where to look for support. There was an infuriatingly choppy remote panel presentation via MSN's video chat feature (Seriously? Use Skype. Please.)

Microsoft Research presented the lunch plenary; and it was one of the least Microsoft-fanboyish presentation of the conference. He focused on solid research and outputs in Indian ICT projects, and summed up his thoughts on ICT4D in three points - a reminder to put the D before ICT; realizing that there are many different forms of ICT4D at many levels, and to calculate the opportunity costs of going with a technological solution instead of other solutions (as he did in one project where posters came very close to a video training project at a lower startup cost).

The sessions in Day 2 inevitably began to revisit the same themes - the need for more patient money, the need for scalability in solutions, and the need to focus on development before ICT - a note that resonates clearly with me. I was cheered to hear a microfinance supporter voice concerns about the need for regulation and risk management in mobile banking.

Overall, I don't think I'll attend the conference as a full-day immersion next year, if at all. By the end of Day 2 I was weary of the one-sided Microsoft solutions being presented, and it overshadowed some of the genuinely good presentations during the conference.

Posted by Jon at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The conference opened with presentations by three hard hitting visionaries -- Counsellor Lisa Chiles, the senior most career officer at USAID; Michael Rawding from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, and Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. Coordinator for information technology and foreign policy. Chiles provided an overview of the promises of technology, focusing on finding low-hanging fruits in education where a modest, well-directed investment can dramatically help an underfunded education system. Rawding spoke on the Microsoft roadmap for developing countries; a mix of market expansion and market creation (I mean, philanthropic work). Gross reminded us that the world is changing in unpredictable ways due to technology, and creating a global, mobile workforce where people are no longer (I'd argue, slightly less) bound to grow up to do the same work their parents do.

The rest of the day was largely panels - on ICT for disaster preparedness and relief, mobile banking, PPPs (Public-Private Partnerships) eHealth.

ICT and disaster response was mainly a show-and-tell of various tools and websites (all leveraging Microsoft technology). Absent was any discussion or mention of Sahana (an open source, quick-deployment disaster information management system) or the amazing work done using ning.com (Web 2.0 and quasi-open-source) to provide coordinated responses and information about the hurricanes this season.

Mobile banking has amazing potential, but throughout the panel the constant conjunction with microfinance - another fantastic concept that's working - in specific models - in the field. I felt a push towards credit/debt throughout the panel, with mobile phones as the way to create a vast new credit market among the next billion. That seems disingenuous and risky, especially coming off of our current credit and banking crisis in the US; we clearly are under-regulating the stability of the credit market, and not only opening up the poorest people in the world to that risk, but encouraging them to accumulate debt, is asking for a disaster.

The lunch plenary was by the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which I continue to have mixed feelings about. I see the value in stricter ties of funding to success, especially for nations which are doing well but still developing. I support their lip-service to require countries to own their development work and to support that through grants instead of loans. I think that the MCC is more politically motivated and even more the carrot at the end of the stick of US foreign policy than AID is. Their criteria with which they judge countries is clearly in line with the State Department - which makes sense prima facie, but undermines their "ownership" clause - you can own your development process, as long as you follow our instructions and adopt our goals. Also a general note to MCC - when you cherry pick the countries you work with on their existing successes, you don't get to compare their continued success in your programs to other countries. It's like picking A students to make them A+ students and bragging that after your program, all your students are A and A+ students, while all the other students are mostly C and B students.

The evening sessions on PPP (Public-Private Partnerships) and eHealth were good but hardly new information - sharing health records and the importance of making partnerships - yes, technology is improving and easing these transitions and connections.

My notes through the day are interspersed with a slowly growing number of meta-comments along the lines of "STOP WITH THE MICROSOFT ADS" -- the conference was put on and paid for by Microsoft, so I was expecting some amount of MS placement and such, but as the day wore on, and every speaker was a Microsoft partner extolling the wonders of Microsoft, it wore thin and had the lasting impact of reducing Microsoft's credibility - are they so scared of alternate viewpoints and technologies that they don't show up on the agenda at their conference?

Posted by Jon at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MobileActive has a great entry on a handful of low cost, low-barrier ways to go mobile, from Twitter to desktop "guerilla" SMS campaigns (best run in developing nations with more lenient SMS rules). Having taken down Jamaica's email->SMS gateway (...a few times...) with a homebrew system for Peace Corps Volunteers to share activity and security tips, it's great to see some better programmed and managed systems (finally!).

Posted by Jon at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This entry is the third in the four-part series, "The XO Files: I Want to Believe" Read Part I here, and
Part II, The New 4PC Market, and its Failings

The XO Files: I Want To Believe

Part III: Re-imagining the OLPC Distribution

Concern over the original distribution plan was what got me writing for OLPCNews.com. The belligerent anti-pilot-project attitude, the requirement to buy the laptops in lots of 1million units, and the hushed discussions about the costs beyond the "$100" laptop. What has OLPC done and what should it continue to change to make XO deployment smoother and more successful?

Rapid, bulk deployment is not a good model to introduce technology, particularly in a resource-constrained environment. If you look at case studies of technology diffusion or successful ICT4D deployments (the Grameen Bank Village Pay Phone Project for example), you see the very social process of technology adoption, as people judge their usage of a new technology based not only on features and promises, but about lived experiences of their friends and networks. Duncan Watts's Six Degrees takes the network theory approach to this, and Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation drives it home with extensive case studies, and the classic "Diffusion of Innovation" graph:

Among individuals, there is a normal curve distribution of the groups in any diffusion process, which are innovators, the creators of new technologies; early adopters, those who are most likely to begin using a new technology first; the early majority who will adopt next, and then the late majority and laggards. The most important actors in innovation diffusion are the change agents, who are generally external entities bringing new technology to a community and the opinion leaders within each community, who have immense influence over the adoption of a new technology by their peers.

Not to belabor the point, what can you do with a million laptops?. It's an overwhelming number to absorb into an educational system without any prior experience with the OLPC XO, not to mention 1:1 laptop usage or computing in general. Add the fact that both the hardware and software were (then, slightly less so now) new and untested, and you're externalizing a lot of risk onto governments, which are most likely already in debt for other projects that haven't paid off as promised.

Even accepting that risk and going forward, pilot projects serve more purposes. Pilots do not just to make sure the technology "works" and that there's some return on the investment (in the form of improved test scores, attendance and participation, etc.). A pilot project can and should also develop local best practices, curricula, and on-the-ground educators with experience using the XO in a classroom. To be fair to OLPC, their plans in 2006 were to open up the distribution to a wider audience (this hasn't quite happened as yet) after the initial launch:

The key to the OLPC vision will be scale, which is why the group will initially make the computers available only to governments that place bulk orders of more than 1m units. The seven launch countries are expected to order up to 10m units in 2007. With time, this will change. “After the 2007 launch, as little as eight to 10 months later, we will open this to all non-governmental organisations, countries, states within countries, right down to school districts,” said Mr Negroponte. (Limbach 2006)

Unsurprisingly, this initial approach fell through, and they've moved towards the follow-on plan. After a set of handshakes, the orders didn't materialize, and after telling people who wanted to run pilot projects "...screw you, go to the back of the line", Nicholas Negroponte and OLPC have been recently implementing much more reasonably sized pilot projects, instead of waiting for an implementation miracle.

Ideally, OLPC would have started out pitching hundreds of small pilot projects, and engaging not only governments but also NGOs, individual schools/school districts, and even communities. The project was exciting enough and the per-unit cost low enough that many of these organizations would have engaged and become (hopefully) champions, local experts, and global examples, leading to more and larger deployments in a more organic and long-term sustainable fashion.

The current situation with modestly sized pilots in a manageable number of countries is a much more sane approach. This is revealing some of the weaknesses and gaps of the technology (as there always are), and is generating the highly important localized content. Still, there's much that could be improved with very little effort.

Before G1G1, you had to be a hotshot software developer committed to helping out with Sugar projects to get an XO to work with. This helps with the technological side of the equation, but why not send some units to top-notch educators around the world to start exploring use cases, creating curricula modules, and sending feedback on classroom-level usability? The dream of the XO as a "Trojan Horse" entering the classroom as a textbook replacement but empowering children to use it at home for learning and exploration is a wonderful vision. At the end of the day, however, the teacher is the gateway to the classroom, and if he or she suspects the children are using the XO to chat during class, cheat, or so on, they will rapidly get banned. As such there has to be some teacher training on how to leverage the XO and be involved. G1G1 enables some educators access to the laptops, but some free (or at least at-cost) XOs to more educators globally could only spur more interest, open, shared curricula plans, and community efforts.

The restriction of G1G1 2007 to North American donors was unfortunate, but hopefully G1G1 2008 will be more open. Creating a global community of "early adopters" is key, beyond merely adding to the cadre of software developers (of course, whether that matters now with the move towards Windows XP is another question). A global community will find innovative ways to use the XO, contribute to debugging, and content translation and creation. At the very least, the experience will reveal remaining gaps in the software and UI through common tech support problems.

Fixing Distribution

OLPC needs to go further, to match innovation in distribution with their innovation in design. The goals are to improve education worldwide at a fundamental, constructivist way. The needs are high production runs to keep the costs low (ish).

An ongoing G1G1 with the ability for anyone in the world to order an XO would be a good start. OLPC might have to be careful managing the non-profit side of that, but worst case is they spin off a small, focused for-profit company that manages selling and limited support -- which can provide even further feedback as to which features users find interesting and what are common requests (though, at the end of the day, I feel strongly that the XO should retain its design focus on low-cost and education-in-developing-world needs).

Another option is to refactor the OLPC as a "base of the pyramid" style technology, selling it through financing and providing training to small businesses and entrepreneurs interested in bringing a portable cybercafe to their village, or in creating citizen media reports.

In short, OLPC needs to look at new ways to get the XO into more hands - more users, more educators, more children, more entrepreneurs, more developers. This creates a better infrastructure of content/guides/curricula for current and future deployments, helps in bug-testing, translation/localization, and creates a larger community like we already see in the global grassroots organizations and learning clubs, and on the OLPCNews forums. These might not all march to the tune of the 1CC drums, but might just be the crowd the XO needs to thrive.

Posted by Jon at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This entry is part two in the series, "The XO Files: I Want to Believe in the XO" Read Part I about the Laptop Project / Education Project disconnect here.

The XO Files: I Want To Believe

Part II: The New 4PC Market, and its Failings

The OLPC XO is a path-breaking, jaw-dropping piece of technology. And not just any traditional, consumer-focused (faster, shinier) way, but in specific and strategic areas that make the laptop perfect for developing world situations where it might be damp or dusty, the sun might be your light source at school, and you probably don't have reliable electricity at home. It happens to be that those same constraints also produce technological solutions that make the XO attractive to a certain set of users who want a no-frills, but highly functional laptop (like world travelers), as I mentioned in Part I -- it's lightweight, rugged, and low-power (solar chargeable), but powerful enough to connect to faint wifi, play movies, or review digital photos.

These features come with drawbacks - the long battery life required a processor that's simply not as fast as common laptop processors. The cost constraints meant a smaller screen design, a "hard drive" that's microscopic in comparison to most, and much RAM. Still, the laptop still performs admirably - or at least well enough - for most usage.

Unfortunately, unless you happen to be a top-notch software developer, or were willing to pay twice the cost of the laptop to participate in the frustratingly opaque and slow Give-One-Get-One program of 2007 (G1G1 2008 starts up in November), you just simply couldn't get an XO - they were intentionally and adamantly not commercially available, despite the strong demand and buzz on their features. Naturally, markets abhor demand as nature abhors a vacuum, and existing niche company "netbooks" and stepped in, with bigger companies rolling out "mini-notes" soon thereafter.

The scions of OLPC

The biggest legacy of the OLPC project may be to have created a market for more portable laptops, offering functionality that even the most powerful smartphones won't provide due mainly to their size, but focusing not on clock speed but travel-friendly features - the "4P" Computers featuring (long-lasting, low-wattage) Power, (high utility) Performance, (lightweight and rugged) Portability, and (low) Price. Lilliputing and Gizmodo have both been discussing this:

Nicholas Negroponte and his little laptop that could certainly sparked a revolution. Without the OLPC, it’s unlikely that we would have the Intel Classmate PC, the Asus Eee PC, or any of the dozens of cheap ultraportable consumer-oriented laptops that make life worth living.

The Economist also weighs in as well on the market that the OLPC opened up:

Hardly any models costing $500 or less were available when the XO burst onto the scene, but now there is a wide selection of such machines, from familiar makers such as HP and Intel, and from relative newcomers such as Asus and Pioneer Computers. By raising the very possibility of a $100 laptop, the XO presented the industry with a challenge. [...] All of these new machines are being aimed at consumers in the rich world, who like the idea of a computer that can be taken anywhere, as well as being sold for educational use in poor countries. The $100 laptop has been a success—just not, so far, in the way its makers intended.

Market Failures?

With this vibrant new 4P laptop market, why do we even need the OLPC Foundation anymore? The Economist hints at the exact problem - the new 4P laptops are consumer-focused. Lacking is the attention to developing-world situations and the ruggedness, ease of repair, long lifespan and low cost those require. This is the second trap of talking about the technology itself. Not only is the project confused by the lack of distinction between being an education project, but by talking tech (like, admittedly, this post has done itself), you start down the path of commercial laptops, and the market dynamics of dealing with customers easily swayed by larger numbers (faster processors, bigger hard drives, more RAM, bigger screens...), and are less interested in accepting the trade-offs that make the laptop useful outside of industrialized parts of the world.

I posit that there remains a niche -- but still significant -- consumer market for the XO, more or less as-is, which could bolster the goals of the project by providing a larger community of developers, content creators and engaged users. The next segment delves into the missteps of the original and current distribution plans, and suggests revisiting the XO "deployment" strategy.

The XO Files: I Want To Believe

Posted by Jon at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

The XO Files: I Want To Believe

I Want To Believe: Part I: Laptop project or education project?

The XO, despite anything else, remains an amazing chunk of technology and an exemplary model of innovation for change. Ethan Zuckerman focused on the amazing feats of engineering possible with a bit of foresight, some tight cost and design constraints, and some really smart people:

It's got bunny ears - antenni for the 802.11s wireless radios, which are designed to self-assemble meshes with other laptops. The ears fold down to cover the USB, power and mic ports, an excellent design for the sorts of dusty environments I can imagine the device used in. [...] Ever since Nicholas outlined the engineering challenges of building a good hinge, I've been fascinated by the different ways people attach screens to laptops. [...] The machine still needs to be miserly with power to be usable as a human-charged device. And this is where the team have worked some serious magic. [...] The machine draws [0.5 watts ] in ebook mode, using a black and white display. The display [...] can store a black and white image and display it without any assistance from the CPU, again allowing the CPU to shut down and save power.

Technology paired with idealism does not a development project make; there is a huge gap between creating and pushing out a technology and creating a vibrant, community-led, sustainable change on the ground. This canyon between Boston and the Global South is the leitmotif of the many obstacles the OLPC project has faced. With his nigh-trademark prescience, Ethan Zuckerman pointed out an aspect of this disconnect that has proven to be a serious problem in the current "marketing" of the machine -- and why Windows XP is now the default OS, driving away many of the early XO software developers:

Getting across the distinction that this is a children's laptop, not just a cheap laptop, is a surprisingly difficult task. When I last wrote about the laptop on Worldchanging, a number of commenters mentioned that they'd like one of the computers as a backup or travel computer - I suspect they might feel differently after playing with one of the current prototypes.

The difficulty of course is that the XO is a great travel laptop; it's lightweight to make your shoulders happy, rugged enough to toss in your daypack for a hike, the sun-readable screen means you can use it outdoors, the SD card slot makes it a great way to review digital camera photos, the antennae can pick up even a faint wifi signal, and the USB slots and headphone jack make a handy movie-viewing box. I've even seen people use it as a VOIP/SIP phone to make low-cost international calls. The low-power possibilities (especially if you deactivate wifi) means it will last for hours on one charge, and can be topped up using a portable solar cell.

Without diving further into the amazing technology (which we'll discuss in Part II), you can see how hard it is to "sell" the XO laptop without gushing about the amazing laptop features it sports "under the hood". The failure to drive home that the XO is a children's educational device, not a laptop, is why people ask questions like "Does it run MS Office?"

"When I went to Egypt for the first time, I met separately with the minister of communications, minister of education, minister of science and technology, and the prime minister, and each one of them, within the first three sentences, said, 'Can you run Windows?'" Negroponte says. [Technology Review, May 2008, emphasis added]

Would you ask if a Speak-n-Spell ran Windows? No, but the Speak-n-Spell was still a reasonably powerful "computer" in many ways, as Wikipedia reminds us: "The Speak & Spell used the first single-chip voice synthesizer, the TI TMS5100, which utilized a 10th-order linear predictive coding (LPC) model and the electronic DSP logic," and it even was able to interface with early desktop computers.

Speak-n-Spell: The 1980s OLPC XO?

But that's how the OLPC Foundation treated it, talked about it, and it's how the world saw it. Despite the repeated (but now defunct) mantra by the Foundation that it was an education project, not a laptop project, their actions focused on the engineering and distribution of the technology, and not on the custom, per-country curricula integration and teacher training that an educational project would need. It should have been an education project, but in design, execution, and promotion, was a technology project, and now it must compete, not as a selfless work to support global education, but as a low-cost laptop in an increasingly crowded market that it itself helped to create, which will be the topic of the next entry.

Posted by Jon at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (6)

Worldchanging's Jeremy Faludi calls it "reverse-leapfrogging", but is looking for a better name. It's reviving or importing concepts that used to exist:

Green architects in the last twenty years have learned passive-solar design tricks from pre-industrial buildings, both historic ones in their own countries and contemporary buildings in non-industrial societies. (For instance, cool towers come from vernacular middle-eastern architecture.)

Realizing and embracing innovations that were dropped as déclassé, needlessly efficient, our simply outmoded by newer technology; but were in fact ideal adaptations to certain constrained environments:

A newer example that may be successful (it's too early to call yet), is the Texxi service in Liverpool (see Green Car Congress for a good writeup on it). It is what happens when a Central American "Colectivo" (basically a group taxi, filling a somewhat fuzzy niche between normal taxis and buses) gets wired.

In my travels I've always been amazed at local innovations - Jamaica had "route" taxis which followed a (mostly) constrained route, collected a standard fare, but were more nimble than the bus system, and buildings there, like some colonial-age houses here, were built to be cool even in the hot and humid Jamaican midday. And I've always been impressed by the rural bus systems in Latin America and the Caribbean - no set schedule, but incredibly efficient (they leave when they're full) and with an amazing reach. More flippantly, "bag juice" - flavored sugar water (and sometimes real juice) frozen to a firm slushy consistency in a small sealed bag. Low waste, and a great "personal AC" unit to place on your neck and wrists to cool down (and melt the juice to drink!)

Gardening is another simple thing that's really fallen off (confession: I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) - simple, economical, with huge rewards in taste and nutrition, not to mention removing some of your food from the oil-thirsty global transport business.

Local, walkable and livable neighborhood design is something else we threw out with cars and highways, and also worth recovering. If you have to drive to get to everything from the grocer to your work, you also unravel the cohesiveness of your neighborhood where you'd run into neighbors at the corner store, make a lasting friendship with its proprietor, and get a touch of exercise in each day as well.

What else have we lost in the past generation that's worth resurrecting?

Posted by Jon at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)