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One Laptop Per Egyptian Child
Submitted by whirlpool on Tue, 22/11/2005 - 22:40.
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Egypt and Nigeria are going to be one of the first countries to benefit from the ambitious MIT project to produce a 100$ (~580EGP) laptop. This was announced by Nicholas Negroponte. The project was unveiled by Kofi Annan during the WSIS.
An excellent video by Andy Carvin has lots of information about the first prototype from the WSIS. (18.3 MB)
The laptop will by powered by a specially modified GNU/Linux distribution. You can read technical details about the hardware and software here and here. Since technically how they are going to make a laptop so cheap is not the scope of this post. Although, I think some of you will find the technical details cool. In short the computer will contain specially produced components, since they are both no longer available at the market or quite novel in design.
Folks as you know this initiative is probably the most ambitious and most daring initiative to bridge the digital divide. The laptops will be a property of the child. Every child will own such laptop. The product will not be sold, but will be distributed by the ministry of education through the same channels of school books.
You also have to be aware that the design of the project. The MIT, the hardware and the software all guarantee technological independence. What I mean is that there is no monopoly benefiting from such project. There are companies funding the development, but there are no strings attached. AFAIK.
As you know there have been governmental projects to bring more computers to more people. Namely the Computer for Every House project by Egyptian telecom. We all know that this project was a for big profit initiative. Although the monthly installments were low the computers ended up costing 1000 EGP more than the ones sold in computer shops.
I hope that this project would be successful in Egypt. I also hope that corruption would refrain from hurting this project. It would be a shame if the project succeeds in other developing countries and fails here.
I18n
This laptop will not be distributed with a latin only keyboard and an English interface. So a key software component here is Arabic language support.
From Ethan Zuckerman's informative worldchanging post:
- I didn't get to see the software being designed to operate the machine, but learned a bit more about the team working on it. A small team of Red Hat engineers are customizing a Red Hat distro to the processor and hardware specifications of the machine. They're doing some work on the GUI as well, as are Alan Kay and Seymour Papert - the total development team is about 18 people, including Kay's students at the media lab. The machine will come with tools to encourage students to experiment with programming, including Squeak (a graphical environment for the Smalltalk programming language) and Logo. The plan is to make the software available online in a few months so that testers can bang on it and suggest features.
- Localizing the software for different languages, learning styles and environments is going to require local production of software, which Negroponte appears to be planning for.
?
What would be the role of Arabeyes and EGLUG ? What is it exactly EGLUG and Arabeyes can do to help ?
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Don't bother
This thing won't take off.
For this thing to work, it requires a social environment where a family regards its primary objective as the furthering of the welfare of the child; otherwise, how do you think a govt. employee can justify spending 4 or 5 months' worth of salary on something like this?
Assuming this is the case (which it isn't), then the family provider (usu. father) will need a clear vision of how this machine will give his child a clear economic advantage or edge. The fact is that the logical link between computer skills and economic betterment is tenuous enough for it to be easily missed. Most fathers are going to say something like "What is my son going to do with a computer, play games? Why should he learn to program, he should learn how to make furniture or fix plumbing, those people make money."
Negroponte is right that reduced cost makes for improved access to computing facilities, but he's wrong that this automatically means the cost of a new computer. It's clear that he either hasn't lived in a developing environment for long or, if he has, he's failed to adapt his beliefs to the facts on the ground.
The only way to reduce costs of computing access is to prolong the employment lifecycle of hardware and induce rapid hardware turnover. In other words, letting "obsolete" hardware trickle down in cost and ownership.
If my theory is correct, which I'll bet the farm it is, then we'll have Moore and Gates and the Nvidia/ATI marketing departments to thank for bringing computers to the masses.
-- Panem et *burp* circenses
I am sorry for bumping
I am sorry for bumping this old threat. I was simply wondering what the result of this program was. Was it a successful one? If not, I really think you should start it all over again. Now you can find cheap laptops. At least cheaper than they were in 2005. It was a brilliant idea and I hope you didn’t give up to it!