by Kevin Painting
“The report of my death was an exaggeration” wrote Mark Twain famously on hearing that a journalist had been despatched to find out whether he was still alive.
The same could be said of the one laptop per child (OLPC) project which has attracted a number of obituaries since the announcement that the OLPC XO laptop would start to ship with Microsoft Windows pre-installed.
Some commentators see the latest move as a strategy to boost the flagging sales of the XO laptop. Only in 2006, Nicholas Negroponte had predicted sales of 100 million laptops by this year, although only 500,000 have been delivered. (For free and open source (F/OSS) advocates, shipping laptops with Microsoft Windows was the final straw and several prominent figures resigned from OLPC in protest).
One point on which all commentators agree is that OLPC is an ambitious project with worthy but quite lofty aims. While it is often perceived as technology programme, its mission is quite different and has seen the organisation addressing many different levels from product development, distribution/outreach, to teaching and learning methodologies. (Most organisations content themselves with just one of these activities!) It’s no wonder that the OLPC project has attracted so much scrutiny at different levels.
In any case, the “$100” XO laptop itself has been widely hailed a success in conception and design. This has in turn spurred the development of other low cost rivals. However, competition in this sector is fierce and some commentators have raised doubts over OLPC’s ability as a small organisation to stand up to the big commercial manufacturers.
Perhaps the XO laptop is a victim of its own success, in that the landscape has changed since its inception? This has served to focus attention on the wider objectives of the project. A potentially damaging criticism, articulated in polemical fashion here, is that the roll out of laptops in situations of low infrastructure and support could have unintended consequences, to wit, will the intended target audience actually benefit? Is the laptop the answer to illiteracy in places which cannot afford pens and paper in their schools?
These are complex issues which will no doubt be debated for some time to come. But, more generally, are there lessons to be learned for the promotion of low cost technologies in rural environments which the OLPC project has epitomised? In previous blog postings, we have articulated the tremendous benefits that OLPC and allied technologies could bring to ACP farmers coupled with the huge opportunities for outreach for development organisations such as CTA. We have dubbed this agenda “One Laptop per Farmer” (OLPF) in recognition of the groundbreaking work of OLPC, but like OLPC we recognise that there are a whole host of technological and infrastructural developments which create an environment in which devices like the XO laptop (and mobile devices such as increasingly ubiquitous mobile phones and PDA’s) can flourish. Many of these issues will be discussed at a follow up to WSIS this week in Geneva where the OLPF agenda will be discussed as part of the e-agriculture action line.
Just to cite a few examples of scenarios where low cost, robust devices form part of an “OLPF” agenda. Farmers’ groups and associations could use low cost networked PCs to share downloaded publications and information stored on a hard drive, flash drive or CD-ROM locally, even without an Internet connection. With “store and forward” technologies, farmers could use laptops and mobile phones for email, even VOIP communications offline. Using the same mechanism, information of market prices could be shared. The potential for improving agricultural extension and question and answer services in such a local networked environment is one that deserves particular attention and the OLPC project with allied developments gives grounds for optimism that locally driven solutions with these technologies can win out.
Kevin Painting is Senior Programme Coordinator, ICTs at CTA.
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