Criticism of the OLPC project is easy to find, so I won't repeat much of it here, except to say that I find their whole model obnoxiously paternalistic; it's based on centralized government-controlled institutions (that is, schools), government and NGO subsidies for equipment, dependence on foreign administration and technical service, and a general all-too-familiar neo-colonial obliviousness of the real needs of poor societies rather than the "vision" of a few rich founders. A "children's computer" is of necessity hard to distinguish from a "toy", and the line between children and adults is, I believe, an artificial one. Enforcing this fake distinction just gives poor kids yet another developmental dead end.
The societies of the so-called "developing world" (or "global South" or whatever) desperately needs real, affordable, resilient IT infrastructure, but OLPC isn't the ones giving it to them. See, for example, the UN International Telecom Union report for 2011: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2011/Material/MIS_2011_without_annex_5.pdf Truly affordable and robust decentralized mesh networking is technically attainable, but the political ramifications are pretty intense. We tend to take our "free speech" for granted here in the rich world, but even here all of our communications technologies conform to government-mandated regulation and monitoring policies. In short, the authorities can turn them off. Together with some fellow students at Portland State, I am currently developing a "bottom-up" approach to digital communications technology, engineered around a hard bottom-line per-device price tag of US$20, unsubsidized and no TV or network connection needed. We're not trying to replace broadband, but supplement it with distributed, persistent, self-maintaining localized message-board infrastructure. Here are a few links to technologies and concepts we're working with: http://www.contiki-os.org/ http://www.eluaproject.net/ http://www.zeromq.org/ http://soft.vub.ac.be/amop/research/tuples and http://agentgroup.unimo.it/wiki/index.php/TOTA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital http://villageearth.org/appropriate-technology/appropriate-technology-sourcebook/introduction-to-the-appropriate-technology-sourcebook<http://villageearth.org/> We're still in early stages of this thing, but I'm very serious about it. We're not publicizing it very widely at the moment so we can focus development effort on the hardware prototypes. Once that stabilizes somewhat, we'll be looking at starting some manufacturing co-ops and coordinating open-source software development. If anyone here is interested or wants to know more, please just email me. -- Max On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 8:06 AM, Carl Gundel <[email protected]>wrote: > One very important thing the XO laptop has is mesh networking technology, > and not just for use in the bush. A way to free the general computing > public. An alternate internet free from monopoly control. Now that I say > it more than one would be even better. > > -Carl > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of > David Corking > Sent: Monday, November 14, 2011 10:56 AM > To: Fundamentals of New Computing > Subject: Re: [fonc] OLPC related > > Loup Vaillant wrote: > > So at least, you can salvage your granma's TV, making the whole set a bit > > less expensive. > > Great news! (I don't think those connectors were in the video I saw on > the site.) > > Thinking over what I wrote last night, I am getting much more excited > about the disruptive educational and democratic possibilities of this > device. While the builtin sensors of the XO have the appeal of a > standard platform to develop for, I remembered that the robotics > community has a useful range of USB transducers that makes the > Raspberry Pi an interesting robotics processor. There is even this: > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/USB_Sensor > > David > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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