Froth

So it begins. The break-up of OLPC’s very own Glimmer Twins, seems to have triggered excessive cases of credit-taking and ill-conceived attempts to name the names of all who define OLPC. Frankly some it is more reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda than an actual attempt at historical accuracy. Either that or people are getting incredibly forgetful. The point being that if you are not going to get it right or be totally honest and frank, don’t even start.

Honestly OLPC is bigger than any two people and a couple of auxiliary egos. Irrevocably forking, rhetoric, and claims of I-was-there-when is not going to get a single child a laptop. Suggesting that OLPC Corporate is claiming a monopoly on this mission or that polarizing interpretations of public (and private) attention-grabbing restatements is a thoughtful and strategic next step is even sillier.

No one that spent time in OLPC’s offices is above criticism and most everyone has not been shy about dishing it out. Likewise everyone has gotten prickly when on the receiving end. Beyond open criticism is honest evaluation of decisions, project management and accountability. If you were in the room when the decision was made either take the criticism as part of the team or stand down. The Nuremberg Defense does not apply. Lets not let other vested interests succeed from the sidelines.

Some things that might get lost:

1. The technical team at OLPC is still ramping up. Hires have been made in the past month. More hiring decisions are expected. Candidate interviews are very active. Interested people should consult the website. (PS - Andres Salomon still works at OLPC).

2. The only recent changes in the corporate membership of the Board of Directors have been for reappointments. The lone exception has been Intel.

3. Agnostic about Learning does not mean OLPC is not prescriptive about constructionist theories. It does mean that there are no mandated starting points, hurdles or end points. None other than OLPC’s 5 Principles.

4. Speaking of the 5 Principles, they emerged not out of a heated debate but in a moment of clarity following a very simple question. “What are the minimum requirements that OLPC will not go back on?” The answers still apply. Check the wiki and page history.

5. The MS debate is a red herring. Wiser people have pointed this out.

6. Ask 5 people to define “Sugar” and you will get 5 different definitions. They will range from just the UI to every bit of the project. Hardware, if possible, aside.

7. Sugar on Windows? Personally I find Doom on the XO more disturbing but thats just me. I can’t say what or how long this would take but I do know it would take new resources and many more people. It would not be a change in this (growing) crew’s course.

8. The two most important questions at OLPC are “Why is this necessary for it to succeed?” and “Does that scale?”

9. One more, “What is success and on what scale should it be measured?”

10. The space between the holes on the XO handle was defined by the spacing of the spokes on the ceiling cable tray in OLPC’s office. Honest.

Apparently people have been waiting to make Give One Get One part of their early holiday shopping.

The XO laptop is not cute but rather a precocious piece of technology. It is a rambunctious and successful (imitation being evidence of it) upward tick in the effort to improve learning around the world. It is a finger-in-the-eye of feature bloat and ever-expanding software footprints. The XO laptop is cool beyond its features because it is the bumble-bee that flies because no one bothered to tell it that it could not. It is a piece of technology that says that you can really think (differently) and often the smartest person in the class is sitting in the back of the room. Its greener, more open and funner than anything you have used before. Using it gives you a chance to stick it back to every hour anyone made you spend memorizing the periodic table, learning to write in cursive and keeping you in at recess for forgetting your book at home.
Plus it allows you to save some deserving child, somewhere, from the same or worse fate. It says that right now (perhaps before December 25) learning can be better, easier and more creative. Carrying a laptop to Starbucks can be better than it ever has been - and more rewarding than walking a puppy in the park ;0 . Plus your T-Mobile HotSpot will be on the house.

one laptop per child is not about celebrity. No one visited BALCO and no back-dated options. Its just about the best, low-fat $399 Kids Meal you’ll ever get.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/designsojourn/313017262/

extra ninja mode! Bonus.

The first batch of 280 B2 XOs arrived at OLPC today. Several hundred will be arriving in a dozen or so countries over the next days and weeks. Delivery will be staggered due to the manufacturing schedule and Chinese New Year. The latest build was 3 times the size of B1 yet the shipping logistics were infinitely smoother. Our shipping partners and Quanta’s logistics team have done a tremendous job.

As OLPC continues to rumble toward mass production, the “impossible task” of building it is both a fate d’complete and a precursor to the heroic effort needed to make olpc happen in-country. The distribution of millions laptops by ship, rail , truck, and camel under less than optimal conditions needs more than the political will and vision of politicians. Fortunately, large-scale distribution and logistics are not impossible but demands the right partner.

OLPC has been incredibly fortunate in the execution of its development model. We have attracted world-class talent directly and from partners (Chi Mei, Red Hat, Quanta, etc) who understand the mission and want to participate in engineering innovative, novel solutions. As the project gained momuntum this motivation spread across industries; hardware, software and content. As the machine become more real, we have attracted assistance (usually pro-bono) from law firms, banks, and business advisors.
Other than scale and reach everything else about OLPC is small. By neccesity the model will expand again to encompass the logistics and deployment phases of the project. In some cases the solutions will need to be as miraculous as the hardware.

The only argument one could make against such an outsourcing approach is if it resulted in a higher cost. Cost in this case is a relative term, which is higher $155 instead of $150 or $155 versus not doing olpc? For some the cost of bringing full utility to olpc or nailing the BOM is more important than the mission. Cost could also be measured in trade-offs - “sure, we’ll do logistics and deployment for you but you need to ship the XO with Quickbooks”.

No fears - the next phase will be as significant as the last.

The benefits of bad traffic and satellite radio (which will not save radio any more than 18 channels of HBO saved TV) is that you can constantly be surprised by music. This is doubly so during the holiday season when you can sample the many attempts of even the most marginal artists to create a new classic carol. A few weeks ago I was treated to Kenny Roger’s “Christmas in America”. Commentary on Patriotic Carols aside, I simply needed to know more about the song. All knowing Google reveals that Kenny is very protective of his artistry - the artist will not reveal his lyrics! I wonder about his agent’s rationale.

Its no secret that OLPC is an open source project. All software that we are developing or co-developing is being released under GPL. In turn this allows us to be agnostic toward particular developers without preventing us from ever shipping redundant applications, and likely ensuring access to valuable proprietary material.

More interesting is the prospect of open sourcing OLPC hardware. Perhaps obvious but not intuitive is the suggestion that we open source our hardware so that local producers. Problematically few local companies have the capacity to build a $4 billion Gen 4 fab. Moreover, laptop as jobs creation is just not good policy. The real economic development comes from improving the opportunities through education. The rising entrepreneurship and research and development will lead to the real emergence of new Silicon Valleys.

But can you open source Business? More than a few bright ideas have never realized their full potential because of poor execution. Without the open source community, the software would have been a shell of what it is today. Likewise the hardware depends on the contributions on more than the effort of OLPC engineers. Well executed olpc can be impactful, brilliantly executed it can be transformative. Can a venture on our mission in this industry embark on a new organizational model without being sandbagged?

About 110 years ago perhaps the most famous editorial of all time was penned. It sought to distinguish between the skepticism of believing in one man instead of investing in the spirit. The editorial staff of the New York Sun observed “[I]n this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measure by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of trust and knowledge.”

Through the entire history of creation we observe the injustice associated with the lack of opportunity and the inequities of legacy. A pantheon of philanthropists have sought to reverse these wrong only to be thwarted by the accelerating disparities between haves and have-nots, the insidious nature of compounding population growth, and these benefactors own mortality. 100 years is never enough.

A basic study of sustainable development will reveal that in order for this to be achievable on a truly global scale in an economically meaningful and environmentally strategic way, the emerging populations will need to technologically leapfrog the rest of the world. The most penetrating and instantaneous way to make this happen is by deploying to the youngest segments of the population. Learning + Longevity.

The staggering scale and size of the numbers associated with one laptop per child (o-l-p-c) has distracted from its objective. The Laptop is dangerously close to overshadowing all that motivated its development. The initiative requires more attention than the tool.

Recently the OLPC Foundation was created. Its ability to sustain the deployment of 1 billion laptops requires an idea bigger than that of the machine itself. Large scale donors of the past can’t do it alone. A new approach to solving poverty and education requires a new bigger idea about philanthropy.

Any ideas?

Unpacking the first, by serial number (AP1), XO was pure fun. To put the record straight the first unpacking was done rather privately by Walter Bender in the confines of a west coast hotel room. However, having a crowd present must have added an extra buzz.

Everyone at OLPC took a turn cutting tape, opening the box, and removing the laptop. Mitch Bradley and I installed the battery and the machine was soon running. The battery did not have a full charge and we quickly moved to AC power (no human power generators, yet!). The keyboard is slightly funky because it is different but the adjustment time is minutes, and should be zero if there is no point for comparison.

Mitch, Dan Williams and Richard Smith quickly installed the latest software image. A browser and pdf reader were installed, and the web was soon our oyster. A steady stream of colleagues, advisors, and visitors stopped by during the day to put the machine through its paces.

Late in the afternoon, I took a few minutes to record a rather base first for such a well-intended machine. I did a little shopping. No plugs here since the site in question should be a sponsor. The transaction was fast (rabbit ears up), the pages loaded neatly and were easy on the eyes.

My time at OLPC has been short but its remarkable to have helped unpack and use this plastic bound bundle of miracles today. I hope everyone that put in so much talent and energy can take in the milestone as we push on.

The first machine (AP1) arrived in Cambridge this morning. A thing of beauty.

Admiring with Lindsay:

To over-state the obvious, the music industry’s approach to Napster was flawed; they fought when the should have bought them out. It probably would have been cheaper too. Basically Metallica choose to fight Medusa. I doubt there is any proof that the industry’s profits have “rebounded” or that “piracy” is on the decline. For every Napster they beheaded, two more popped-up. Rather than fighting the solution, music should have addressed the need.

Attempts to “beat” olpc are likewise misguided. First, because you can’t compete against someone who isn’t.  The only reason OLPC is thinking about laptops is because most everyone else is not. This is the first serious attempt to re-engineer the hardware and software of a system from the ground up in over 20 years. 

Second, the idea of one-laptop-per-child is just too grounded now. Its not a public policy slogan. The IT industry has bought into it. Imagine if Eli Lilly and Abbott said, “Hmm. Affordable Health Care? OK, lets really do it.” Could Pfizer then stop it?

Third, olpc is just another step in the power of social entrepreneurship. Granted the proposed scale makes it rather staggering. OLPC’s Big Idea is no longer the ambition of any one organization.  Eventually the plan will also be duplicated and morphed by others, making it ever harder to stop powerful, affordable, and right-sized computing.

Time will tell whether it also comes to represent a tipping point. After all, would it really be that odd for a massive corporation to miss the point?

Its rare but almost everyone who has been listening to music since 1956 has a favorite “Complete Album”. Post 1985 that would be “Complete CD”. Its that one collection of music by an artist that simply has to be heard all the way through. Stopping it before it is done leaves the listener with musical coitus interruptus.

Since that wonderful hay day of sticking it the music industry and the unavoidable iTunes business model, the chances of recognizing such Complete Albums CDs Downloads will become almost impossible. Perhaps as generationally defining as saying “Album”.

Since July I have a become (re)addicted to the AC/DC’s Back in Black. I listen to it daily. Few things mix better than “Shake a Leg” and long hours of spreadsheet jockeying. And this is exactly what Don McLean meant about the day the music died.