So I am helping a bit with preparing a #RedHat#Girlsday at our office in #Munich. And we discussed if we should have some cool thingies to show. So I proposed to bring my 2 #OLPC. The original (and still working!) $100 laptop. Still the cutest little machine that could ...
It was so full of innovation. It could do mesh networking without an access point, even while sleeping. You could use the microphone and speakers on two OLPC, connected via the mesh, to do distance measurements with sound. We used that to measure how tall children are. One OLPC on the floor, one over their head, peep, ping, done :)
@blindcoder I am still proud that we got 2.5 million units into the hands of children at a lot of places.The program itself unfortunately didn't survive the test of time and there are many reasons for its failure, but I do remember all the good times we had and the happy children that felt they are on top of the world in places that were so far from it.
And while Nicholas Negroponte originally had a deal with Microsoft for the OS and software, it fell apart as Microsoft claimed the machine was too cheap und underpowered for their Windows stuff. In comes Red Hat, Fedora and a community of smart people. We made it run on Linux, with Sugar from MIT as user interface. Those were magic times ...
What you need to make it work in the best possible way for education is however some reliable connection the internet. Who can help with that? Who knows how to run stable connections in very remote areas? In came SWIFT. The Belgian Coop that does that heavy lifting in the global financial network. They decided to sponsor the project.
So the EMEA office was for a short period of time located in a castle(!) close to Brussels. That's where you could see Free Software people working hard on making it all work. Where baroque rooms were filled with solar panels to charge OLPCs. It was magic.
I visited them a few times. I unfortunately didn't take pictures of that very confusing, steampunk style place. But it deeply changed the way I feel about Free Software. It connected me to so much more. I'll stop here, before I wander off into fields of missed opportunities and will instead shock myself back into the real world, where these memories still help me on a day to day basis to remind myself of all the good things we can do. #Girlsday will be a blast!
You will read many stories from a very western perspective on how this project failed, how it was a waste of time and resources. And from a western perspective these stories feel right. But then, you haven't seen the light in the eyes of children in Ruanda and other places that got OLPC. That light is what I want to see again and again. And #Girlsday is one way to get there, IMHO. We can do it. We can. We do. #LifeAtRedHat
@jwildeboer As someone who spent about six years of his life working on and with OLPC, I can relate well to this trip down memory lane. (That's also how we met by the way, I think originally via GregDK during an event in Brussels.😊)
But to suggest that OLPC only failed from a Western point of view is also oversimplifying things. It just failed. Full stop. Due to its own hubris and techno solutionism ((c) Evgeny Morozov). Perú should have spent the money on other things, not buying 850,000 XOs.
@jwildeboer I disagree. There's a hundred ways these children's lives (and that of their parents) could have been improved. Techies choose tech, because that's what they knew (if all you have is a hammer...) and Negroponte was a great salesman. So, Perú spent more than $200 million on XO hardware alone and it wasn't money well spent.
@jwildeboer On a more practical note: I still have about a dozen XOs from our Austrian pilot project in a box. So, if you need some more units for your event, then I'll check them over the weekend, see which ones still function, and send them your way.
@jwildeboer@bbbhltz the first time I saw one in person was at linux.conf.au in 2008. I was with a ~5 year old and he excitedly announced there was a kids laptop over there. We naturally all went to investigate.
I have 4 XOs, and all my kids and their friends have all loved using them over the years.
@jwildeboer@bbbhltz This was also the conference where I ended up chatting with Jim Gettys, he really wanted to meet my colleague Martin Langhoff. So I was able to arrange contact. Martin jumped on the next flight to Melbourne, meet with Jim, and that is how Martin ended up working for OLPC.
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