So, you may never have heard of OLPC, but it was quite a thing. OLPC = One Laptop per Child. A project initiated by MIT. Its mission was to change the world – essentially to educate millions of kids that did not have much in the way of educational resources. The basic idea was to make really really cheap laptops and then get them to kids that needed them. The Laptop was pretty innovative at the time as there was no such thing as a ‘small factor’ laptop back then. You just had big, expensive, laptops. OLPC tried to get the price down by innovating in form factor and the attendant technologies like screens…
It was a pretty cool thing.
Anyways… there was an interesting article that a friend passed to me about it. I just landed in NZ, so I’m pretty knackered and can’t quite write what I want to write about this now. But here is the link:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now
I’m writing about it here as I was pretty close to the project. In fact, I facilitated all the documentation and worked closely with Walter Bender and the crew. We (FLOSS Manuals) did a few Book Sprints to create the docs and as it happens I found this old, old vid online from that time:
I found the OLPC project deeply flawed. It was a movement without proper resourcing and an untethered ambitious aim. But I liked Walter and many of the people involved. It was interesting to watch this whole thing unpack slowly infront of me. Anyways… will read the article more thoroughly when I’m more present and make some more comments from my own experience of the project.
continued…. actually, I slurped up a coffee and read the article more closely. It’s pretty accurate. I realised things were topsy with the OLPC when I discovered the reason why we were doing docs (apart from them not having any in the first place) was because the laptops were selling at (something like) $180 a unit, but costing $186 (0r something) per unit in support costs alone. They were making a loss on each machine purely on support costs. It wasn’t a surprise to me as many people needed a manual just to work out how to open it up…
But I have to say, Walter Bender was the real deal. Super smart and humble as pie. He had his heart and vision in the right place, and if he had been supported the OLPC project would not have lived and died as a hardware project. His vision was much greater and worthy but, as the article discussed, didn’t get the traction over the sexy hardware sell.
Anyway… some of the manuals we made are still online 🙂
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/xo/
It was even translated to Farsi and a heap of other languages that are only to be found now in the Internet Archive (eg Greek, Arabic and others). The docs were also available in book form, electronic book, and on the laptops themselves.
