The Longest Now


Lead discussions about sustainable education
Thursday October 16th 2008, 10:56 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

A bunch of OLPCers and Sugar designers and enthusiasts have been talking about the need for broader discussions on sustainable education, social progress, and the value of one laptop per child in different walks of life. 

If these issues matter to you, please speak about them.  Lead discussions in your communities about the influence and meaning of [lower-case] olpc, and how it could be a useful tool for (or barrier to) the work of others, and to related organizations and projects.  OLPCers want to hear more from those travelling similar roads — both literally, in bringing sustainable education and poverty alleviation to rural parts of the world, and figuratively, in bringing like-minded people together to address the major inequities of our time.

What communities are you a part of where these issues matter?  Is this already being discussed?  If so, help inform people about what OLPC is doing in the field : things are changing rapidly these days, with 300,000 children 7-14 using their XOs to learn every week, and twice as many laptops at some stage of delivery.  What will this mean to  communities not yet affected?  To power, agriculture, economics, local business?
This is change the whole world will feel, and it should be addressed from all sides.  (I already feel it in the traffic distribution to my websites, to youtube videos about the project, in the language and age distribution of applications to XO software repositories).  We are tripling the installed base of Scratch.  We are doubling the number of physical offline subsets of Wikipedia in English, and increasing it by a magnitude in Spanish.  Please consider how this will affect your own work to improve equity and sustainable progress around the world, for better or for worse — and make your voice heard.
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Tip jar for wordiness. For instance, see the appropedia post about people who think of OLPC as a possibly harmful subsidy project : http://blogs.appropedia.org/2008/10/11/subsidies-hurting-africa/

The specifics raised of how other subsidies have hurt africa are useful to bear in mind, but don’t apply to olpc today. That said, it would be interesting to frame a set of guidelines for avoiding unintentional subsidy-harm for development projects of all types

Comment by metasj 10.16.08 @ 11:24 pm

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