Donation Vs Generation

"It is good to get OLPC Laptop deployed in country, it is even better if we get it for free" But wait! Is it really as good if we get it for free? I don't think so. I feel there must be some paying mechanism, either pre-paid or post-paid. The essence of OLPC implementation in country like ours should be as a system rather than as a product or tool.

Papa will you buy it for me?

The demand should be from the community themselves, but awareness is necessary to create that demand. We focused on same thing and got overwhelming response at CAN info tech '08. I bet we could have easily sell couple thousands of XOs there. Situation is definitely different at remote places. With fewer way to reach them, and aware them. I wonder what will be the consequence of distributing laptops to kids without proper community awareness and with zero liabilities to community.

schemes like G1G1 might not be as suitable for our economy but selling laptops in bulk to urban private school won't hurt either. Since government is keen on moving the OLPC concept forward they should atleast play the role of implementer and leader with large community base supporting them at back. OLPC could be integrated in current government plan to mobilize graduate student to villages in order to facilitate education. Thousand of students graduating in technical discipline per year, if can be mobilized on little fraction to volunteer in OLPC will surely become large technical support base on long run. These schemes could fundamentally save deployment and development cost off the project.

We are waiting!!

Coming to the point I started first, what I think will be best is have three mechanism for XO distribution from Government perspective. SELL, SUBSIDY or SERVICE. In Subsidy version of distribution mechanism government could get the payment of laptops in term basis or provide loan from micro finance. In service model government get eventually paid by asking guardians to do social service or help certain aspect of project for certain period. In this way government and community will benefit on long run and there will be less financial burden to both government as well as community. This mechanism could also help sustainability of project.

These are all my calculation which may or may not coincide with all, but local level fund generation will certainly be effective then 100% donated laptop, atleast from ownership and sustainability point of view.

Richard Stallman on the OLPC Laptop

Richard M Stallman (popularly known as rms), the founder of the GNU project and President of Free Software Foundation was in Southern India this January. On his regular advocacy tour, he gave talks in different locations where people thronged to get a glimpse of him and hear what he had to say about issues relating to free software.

We caught up with him for an hour long interview while he was in the city of Hyderabad. RMS heaped praises for the One Laptop Per Child Project. He is even contemplating making a switch to XO, the flagship machine of the project, from his "old thinkpad". Stallman went on to say that the OLPC laptop has given people a way to use the free BIOS. Lack of a widely available free BIOS has remained a major issue in the free software community. Stallman has always stressed for the need to use free softwares in educational institutes. The OLPC project has only made him happier.

He is, however dissatisfied with the wireless networking system used in the XO. Since it uses a proprietary technology, he plans to remove it and use a separate device when he needs to make wireless communication with others.

You can download this one-minute audio clip (ogg-vorbis) of our interview with him where he talks about the OLPC laptop.

Nepali Keyboard

Today, we received a XO keyboard with Nepali letters printed on it. We had sent this draft keyboard layout few months ago to OLPC international and voila, the Nepali printed keyboard is here..

However this layout is still in draft phase and we're working on more scientific layout.. But still, it was good to finally see a XO keyboard with Nepali letters printed over it. We quickly grabbed one of the XOs in our development lab and replaced the English-only version.

Ankur replacing the keyboard


English-only and English-Nepali Keyboard


Looks good huh!

First XO laptop in Nepal through Simply Give program

Simply Give donation program has brought the first XO Laptop to Nepal. The lucky one is Prajesh Dulal. Jane Smith (USA) has contributed the laptop. Today he came to OLPC Nepal office for learning how to use this beautiful machine.

Prajesh seems happy with his XO


Using camera


Shankar teaching how to use the laptop


Laptop Manual and Thank you letter signed by Nicholas Negroponte

Now we need to see the impact of this laptop on Prajesh. Although he's not from rural part and also has access to computer at his school, it'll still be interesting to monitor how and for what purposes he uses this laptop.