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USD100 laptop: 'Fundamentally flawed' 
Wednesday, June 21 2006
by Matthew Clark


The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) scheme is based on a
fundamental misunderstanding of the history of the IT
industry, according to Tony Roberts, chief executive and
founder of UK charity Computer Aid International.







Speaking to silicon.com site ZDNet UK last week, Roberts
claimed that although he would be delighted if the OLPC
scheme proved a success, he had severe reservations about the
strategy underpinning the project.



He said: "The real reason that this won't be successful is
a misunderstanding of the history of technology. They are
looking to introduce a non-standard, untested platform...
which they will only sell to governments. The decision to buy
will be made by politicians who are elected every five years,
and politicians generally don't take the decision to risk
their political future on non-standard technology."





The project aims to develop a portable PC for use by children
in the developing world for around USD100. The price has
risen since the scheme was first announced to around USD135
to USD140.





Speaking at the Red Hat Summit earlier this month, the head
of the OLPC project, Nicholas Negroponte, said past attempts
to give children in developing countries access to PCs have
failed because the children did not see the computers as
their own, and as a result did not engage with them as
expected.

Negroponte said: "People say, 'we just gave a hundred
thousand PCs to schools, and they are still sitting in their
boxes'. The problem is that you gave them to the wrong people
-- the kids don't think they are theirs, and see them as
government property, or they are locked up after school."





But Roberts, who as well as heading up Computer Aid spent
time as an academic lecturing on the historical introduction
of new technologies into societies, said that the OLPC
project was also distracting attention from other worthwhile
technology projects in the developing world. Roberts said:
"At the UN World Summit [where the OLPC prototype was
first displayed last year] there were so many exciting
projects that didn't get any attention because all eyes were
on the OLPC."





Computer Aid has just celebrated shipping its 70,000th PC to
the developing world. 



The organisation, founded in 1998, refurbishes used PCs,
routers, printers and other technology. It then ships them to
a network of organisations in the developing world where they
are distributed to schools, universities and community
groups.





The organisation is looking to expand its remit to include
working with local health clinics to provide e-learning
systems for nurses, and tele-medicine capabilities. Medical
specialists in the developing world are often limited to the
capital city, so by providing more detailed patient
information, medical staff can reduce the need to move
critical patients.





Computer Aid is also involved in a joint project with the UK
Met Office to create the infrastructure to allow weather
information to be collected and analysed locally in the
developing world. At the moment, information collected from
local weather stations is sent to a central office to be
analysed and the information is then fed back.

But, according to Roberts, the centralised system takes too
long, so Computer Aid is helping to equip the local stations
with the means to interpret the information and relay it to
the community more rapidly. 

"This information is critical, it can be the difference
between life or death or someone's livelihood but, at the
moment, the systems just don't work," he said.





If you would like to donate your business' PCs you can find
more information through the Bridge the Digital Divide
project being run by Computer Aid and silicon.com's parent
company, CNET Networks.





Andrew Donoghue writes for ZDNet UK.

Reprinted with permission from href="http://www.silicon.com">Silicon.com