The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC) is a Delaware, USA based, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab, set up to oversee The Children’s Machine project and the construction of the XO-1 “$100 laptop”. Both the project and the organization were announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2005. According to the home page of the project’s wiki at laptop.org, “OLPC espouses five core principles: (1) child ownership; (2) low ages; (3) saturation; (4) connection; and (5) free and open source.”
OLPC is funded by a number of sponsor organizations, including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, Red Hat, and most recently Intel. Each company has donated two million dollars.
The organization is chaired by Nicholas Negroponte and its CTO is Mary Lou Jepsen. Other principals of the company include former MIT Media Lab director Walter Bender, who is President of OLPC Software and Content, and Jim Gettys, Vice-President of Software Engineering.
- Formation January 2005
- Type Non-profit
- Headquarters Cambridge, MA
- Chairman Nicholas Negroponte
- Key people Mary Lou Jepsen, Walter Bender, Jim Gettys, Seymour Papert, Alan Kay
Mission:
The goal of the foundation is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves. To that end, OLPC is designing a laptop, educational software, manufacturing base, and distribution system to provide children outside of the first-world with otherwise unavailable technological learning opportunities.
OLPC espouses five core principles:
- Child ownership
- Low ages.
The hardware and software are designed for elementary school children aged 6-12.
- Saturation
- Connection
- Free and open source
” It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”
Participating countries:
The following countries have already “committed” to the project in various ways. However, the commitment is not binding. The laptops will be sold to governments, to be distributed through the ministries of education willing to adopt the policy of “one laptop per child”. The operating system and software will be localized to the languages of the participating countries:
- Argentina
- Brazil (not yet, is in study)
- Cambodia
- Costa Rica
- Dominican Republic
- Egypt
- Greece
- Libya
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Peru
- Rwanda[11]
- Tunisia
- United States of America (specifically the states of Massachusetts and Maine)
- Uruguay
Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney submitted a bill to the legislature to deliver $100 laptops to all children in the state.Nigeria was the first country to order one million laptop computers.
On October 11, 2006 The New York Times reported that OLPC had reached an agreement with the government of Libya to supply laptops to all of its 1.2 million school children. The $250 million deal includes satellite Internet access, one XS (school serve) per school and technical support. Muammar al-Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi has talked of turning the country into the first E-democracy, with citizens participating electronically in government decision-makin
India has rejected the initiative, saying “it would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents”.
Thailand under prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra had committed to the project, however after the 2006 coup d’état the new education minister called the project “not urgent and not in my education reform plan”. According to a spokesman for the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, the laptop will be evaluated with pilot projects before proceeding cautiously.
The project has received criticism due to possible environmental and health impacts of hazardous materials found in computers. Many nations and organizations are working towards the development of “Green Electronics” (e.g. European Union with Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive). While any project on this scale will have environmental impact, OLPC has asserted that it is aiming to use as many environmentally friendly materials as it can; that the laptop and all OLPC-supplied accessories will be fully compliant with the EU’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS); and that the laptop will use an order of magnitude less power than the typical consumer laptops available as of 2007, minimizing the environmental burden of power generation. It is one of eight laptops to receive EPEAT’s Gold rating for environmental performance.
At the UN conference in Tunisia, several African officials, most notably Marthe Dansokho of Cameroon and Mohammed Diop of Mali, were suspicious of the motives of the project and claimed that the project was using an overly American mindset that presented solutions not applicable to specifically African problems. Dansokho said the project demonstrated misplaced priorities, stating that clean water and schools were more important for African women, who, he stated, would not have time to use the computers to research new crops to grow. Diop specifically attacked the project as an attempt to exploit the governments of poor nations by making them pay for hundreds of millions of machines. Additionally, the price of $175/unit does not include the cost of setup, maintenance, training of teachers, or Internet access. Countries adopting the XO-1 must budget for these costs as well.
One criticism has been that the money for purchasing laptops could be more favorably spent on libraries and schools. John Wood, founder of Room to Read, emphasizes affordability and scalability over high-tech solutions. While in favor of the One Laptop per Child initiative for providing education to children in the developing world at a cheaper rate, he has pointed out that a $2,000 library can serve 400 children, costing just $5 a child to bring access to a wide range of books in the local languages (such as Khmer or Nepali) and English; also, a $10,000 school can serve 400–500 children ($20–$25 a child). According to Wood, these are more appropriate solutions for education in the dense forests of Vietnam or rural Cambodia.