[dundee] OLPC BBC report

[Arron M Finnon]

I suppose i'm going to jump in here. I kinda of heard these arguments
before but seems as i'm very passionate about the OLPC project i've
kinda of looked into them.


Firstly I think Gary mentioned about it being backed by a billion dollar
industry player, verse charity. Well yeah I could kinda of sway to what
your saying however, the project is spun out of MiT, It's backed and
partnered by AMD, Nortel, Ebay, Google, Red Hat, Marvel, Quanta to name
a few. Where I believe that the ClassMate is a pure intel project with
maybe our very good friends at microsoft helping out. If it's longevity
of the organisations surely having 8 of the worlds major players, and
dare I say the real madrid of computing is better than just having just
the wayne rooney of it.


The real question I suppose is if you see the OLPC as a laptop project
or an education project? I think if you see it as a laptop project then
yeah you can equate it to giving a fish and letting a family eat for a
night, if you see it as a education project then you can see it as not
just giving them the fishing rod, the net's, the boat but the worlds
oceans to choose from too.


It's well documented in famine struggled countries that dropping food on
to them has long lasting damage to their future economy and leads to
having further, and further food drops being required. I agree that you
can't let people starve what ever the reason. But imagine if your the
only rice supplier in your micro-economy and then the western world in
the name of caring drops your product for free, and you, your family,
your employees, their familes and more importantly your local expertise
goes out of business. I'm a believer in Sir Tom Hunters concept of
micro-economies in developing worlds. By having lots of micro-economies
trading with each other, resources expertise, and local empowerment
grow. With this a local governments elected by local villagers have a
better and more bespoke understanding of what their locale needs.
Instead of monies and resources filtering down the chain, they filter
up. Hazels point about giving the kids a chance to become local players
in their countries fight to get out of poverty, is kinda of the angle
i'm on here. By having doctors, nurses, lawyers, computer programmers,
mathematicians, economists, being taught at a local level, taking these
skills to the wider world. Learning from the wider world and bringing
them back to there countries is where I think the long lasting rescue
package actually lives. However trade needs to be opened and there will
never be an argument from me for it not being opened.


It's not about them being able to go to wikipedia, but the teacher being
able to teach hundreds of kids where before they would have only taught
a handful of the lucky ones. It's our job to argue the communications
technology should be free not just for them but to us all. It's our gift
to the future and all of it's children.


When you look at Bill Gates answer originally to the OLPC it was a
mobile/pda device with a limited almost Intranet capabilities. The OLPC
may not be the answer to teaching the world to read and write, but it
may be the answer to getting us all to sing in perfect harmony. 


In closing, I think that there has been many valuable points raised on
this in a short space of time, and each and every one of them is a valid
for debate. Long live discussing this topic, we might actually get some
really answers without the sandal wearing spin (which by the read of
this post i'm guilty of too)


Finux signing off, and hoping only friendly not flamey responses.  Tin
foil hat removed, and cold head exposed.