'Til All Are One

There appears to be much con­fu­sion amongst the press and the gen­eral popu­lace regard­ing the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject, which I blogged about earlier. This art­icle in the Mur­doch press, for example, has stim­u­lated some of these mis­con­cep­tions. They stem from the false assump­tion that the OLPC is a com­put­ing pro­ject. “Don’t these kids deserve food, water, cloth­ing and shel­ter first?”, some people ask.

The fact is that the OLPC is far more than a simple com­put­ing pro­ject. It is an edu­ca­tion pro­ject, or more broadly, a devel­op­ment pro­ject. The com­puter is merely the tool to enable edu­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity. How can one learn when a text­book costs more than an aver­age weekly wage? Ima­gine if you could inter­act with your text­book, in the form of games and exer­cises. Ima­gine if you could learn to write your own soft­ware for this device, and dis­trib­ute it to help oth­ers in your com­munity. You can cre­ate your own art­works, write your own novel or make your own music. Wire­less mesh net­work­ing allows the dis­tri­bu­tion of data between com­puters, and even the shar­ing of one Inter­net con­nec­tion across a vil­liage. For many house­holds, the key­board lights will be the only form of arti­fi­cial light­ing. The pos­sib­il­it­ies are effect­ively limitless.

The point that I am try­ing to make is that it is not the com­puter that is import­ant, it is what you can do with it that truly mat­ters. The com­puter is an ena­bler, a tool that allows people to ulti­mately cre­ate their own live­li­hoods and futures. There’s no point in keep­ing people depend­ent on handouts. Let’s encour­age them to stand on their own feet.

Back in the developed world, I was able to attend a panel dis­cus­sion for NSW ICT for the forth­com­ing state elec­tion. Pia made some good ana­lysis of the event. In sum­mary, the rep­res­ent­at­ive for the Lib­eral Party was com­pletely and utterly use­less when the ques­tion turned to open stand­ards and FLOSS. Moreover, both sides (Labour and Lib­eral) would seem­ingly delib­er­ately con­fuse open stand­ards and open source when ques­tioned about them. The key when ques­tion­ing such people is to not men­tion open stand­ards and open source together. Force them to address the issues sep­ar­ately, or they will con­flate the two. The City of Munich was dis­par­agingly referred to sev­eral times as an extreme case. What dis­turbs me is that there was spe­cific­ally strong emphasis on NSW as a pro­curer and con­sumer of ICT, rather than as a pro­du­cer. So while pro­jects like the OLPC can pro­mote local edu­ca­tion and industry, the NSW gov­ern­ment wants to keep us depend­ent upon for­eign providers.

There was enough at LCA to be excited about to give you heart pal­pit­a­tions. If I was forced to single out one thing, it would have to be the One Laptop Per Child Pro­ject (OLPC).

One of my primary interests has been the inter­ac­tions between people and tech­no­logy, and I have long felt that there has been scant atten­tion payed to how this oper­ates in devel­op­ing coun­tries. Sus­tain­able devel­op­ment is a vital goal, and an import­ant part of this ongo­ing pro­cess is the use of appro­pri­ate tech­no­logy. This can range from bare hands and rudi­ment­ary tools to com­plex com­pu­ta­tional and engin­eer­ing infra­struc­ture. The key is to select what is most applic­able in a given situation.

So-​​called ‘developed’ regions of the world might be able to accom­mod­ate expens­ive, dis­pos­able and inef­fi­cient tech­no­lo­gies and meth­od­o­lo­gies. This has guided policy, R&D, pro­duc­tion, dis­tri­bu­tion and use within this part of the world. The play­ing field is entirely dif­fer­ent in devel­op­ing regions, and so solu­tions need to be craf­ted with their needs in mind.

You can’t expect to suc­cess­fully shoe­horn a solu­tion designed for Sydney onto Mogadishu, or even onto Man­in­grida. To date, how­ever, most approaches try to do just that. This only works to an extent, if at all. In many cases it would be bet­ter to rethink things from the ground-​​up to come up with some­thing more appro­pri­ate. This doesn’t mean that you’re throw­ing out the baby with the bathwa­ter. Suc­cess­ful designs often base them­selves upon exist­ing policies, tech­no­lo­gies and ideas, and then pro­ceed to modify or redesign parts to fit their goals. The OLPC is a prime example of such an endeavour.

Whether it is suc­cess­ful or not is another mat­ter. That remains up to the gov­ern­ments which pur­chase and dis­trib­ute them, and the com­munit­ies which accept them. The greatest chal­lenge of the OLPC isn’t tech­nical, it’s socio-​​political.

What do you do when you’re in the city and need to kill some time? Watch­ing a film soun­ded like a fair option to me. The cine­matic mas­ter­piece (!), ‘Epic Movie’, caught my eye. I wasn’t expect­ing much from it at all, so I placed myself into Low Expect­a­tions Mode™, grit­ted my teeth, and went in. It went accord­ing to plan, with the LEM buf­fer­ing me some­what from almost-​​certain disappointment.

One thing struck me, how­ever. I was sit­ting through the clos­ing cred­its, and I noticed an attri­bu­tion to a char­ac­ter named ‘Steve Irwin’. That’s strange, I thought. I didn’t remem­ber a Steve Irwin char­ac­ter. The clos­ing cred­its were punc­tu­ated by short video clips, each fol­lowed by a change in music as the stand­ard cred­its scrolling returned. A minute later, the screen flickered for a split-​​second, the cred­its returned, and the music sud­denly changed. Did they cut some­thing out? At the end, there was still no sign of Steve.

Was the Steve Irwin scene removed some­where between the film stu­dio and Hoyts? It could not have been done by the stu­dio — the cut was far too ama­teur­ish for that (although I might be giv­ing them too much credit, given the mediocre qual­ity of the film). While I under­stand that Steve Irwin died not too long ago, in my opin­ion that is no excuse for any­one to tell me what I can and can­not watch. The cinema prob­ably cal­cu­lated that the risk of pub­lic back­lash from main­tain­ing the scene would be greater than the oppos­i­tion to cen­sor­ship. If so, they were prob­ably right. That still doesn’t change the fact that I paid money to view a title that has been rendered incom­plete at the (likely per­ceived) behest of extremists.

Cen­sor­ship has its place in soci­ety, but this is going too far. Within reason, a free and open flow of inform­a­tion is the hall­mark of a healthy demo­cracy. Of course, the per­cep­tions of what exactly ‘reason’ is is debat­able, and that’s what lies at the heart of such debates. I prefer to err on the side of open­ness, in the same vein as ‘inno­cent until proven guilty’. I don’t like being told what to think, and what I can view. If I wanted that, I’d be using Win­dows Vista with all of its Digital Restric­tions Man­age­ment nonsense.

There’s always the chance that I’m com­pletely off the mark with my accus­a­tions. I’d appre­ci­ate it if someone could verify/​dispel my claims.

Is it already Feb­ru­ary? Janu­ary must have been the busiest month of all time for me. My birth­day was on the 6^th, and I still haven’t been able to do any­thing about it. My fam­ily and friends have been bug­ging me about it since Decem­ber. If any of them are read­ing this, I’m sorry.

The chaos of Janu­ary has car­ried into Feb­ru­ary, I’m afraid. This write-​​up of my Janu­ary escapades would be best split into sev­eral parts, so view this post as one of a few.

linux​.conf​.au (LCA) was extraordin­ar­ily enjoy­able. I had volun­teered to help with a few activ­it­ies, and most of my time was spent as part of the Audio/​Visual Team. My job con­sisted of sit­ting in lec­ture theatres and encod­ing video (passed to me in the form of DVDs) to Ogg The­ora on my laptop. The exer­cise was a tre­mend­ous stress test of some of the hard­ware, and I’m glad that it passed with fly­ing col­ours. ffmpeg2theora doesn’t take advant­age of SMP, so I engaged my Core 2 Duo CPU with two video streams in parallel.

Unfor­tu­nately, I was so focused on transcod­ing that I was not able to appre­ci­ate the present­a­tions occur­ring dir­ectly in front of me. I’ll have to go back and watch the videos of those talks, which were likely transcoded by myself. On a pos­it­ive note, our transcod­ing efforts meant that we were able to make video avail­able online even before the con­fer­ence was over. There was plenty more to transcode after the event, so my duties didn’t sud­denly end on the 19^th of Janu­ary. It’s amaz­ing to see that only two weeks after the clos­ing of LCA we are on the cusp of final­isa­tion. All that’s left are a few ‘prob­lem’ videos and some doc­u­ment­a­tion writing.

Silvia expertly man­aged our rag-​​tag team of volun­teers to deliver some first-​​class res­ults. I hon­estly feel that we set a bench­mark for future free soft­ware events, not just in Aus­tralia but also around the world, and I am very proud to have been a part of it. Through Linux Aus­tralia, we have pur­chased equip­ment and for­mu­lated meth­ods that will be car­ried on into the future. We have proven that qual­ity video pro­duc­tions can be achieved on a mod­est budget, using entirely free software.

Aside from other mis­cel­laneous volun­teer duties at LCA, I took part in the Open Day, spend­ing most of my time at the Ubuntu-​​Au stand. I also briefly covered for Chris Smart at the Make the Move stand. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Pia and com­pany, Open Day was a resound­ing suc­cess. I believe that it has firmly estab­lished itself as a per­man­ent fix­ture at future LCAs. It was truly encour­aging to see luminar­ies like Keith Pack­ard and Jim Gettys as exhib­it­ors, inter­act­ing with the gen­eral populace.

Events like LCA are always spe­cial because of the people you meet. I had the priv­ilege of inter­act­ing with many people for whom I hold a great deal of respect. Pla­cing faces to IRC nicks is always fun, as is catch­ing up with friends whom I don’t see often.

No write-​​up of LCA would be com­plete without an expres­sion of grat­it­ude and con­grat­u­la­tions to the Seven Team for a job well done. So thank you Jeff, Pia, Sara, Jamie, Ben, Lind­say and John!

My one regret is that I opted to not reside on cam­pus for the dur­a­tion of the con­fer­ence. You can­not fully enjoy your­self on a night out while wor­ry­ing about how you will get home. It meant that I had to wake up earlier to catch the bus-​​train-​​bus com­bin­a­tion to get to UNSW, and even then I missed some of the morn­ing A/​V Team meet­ings. The buses to Cent­ral from Anzac Parade end at around 22:45, and woe betide you if you miss them. On one night, it took me close to two hours to get home. Reli­ance upon pub­lic trans­port is a major hindrance upon after-​​hours activ­it­ies, and cur­tails the time that would be bet­ter spent catch­ing up on some sorely-​​needed sleep.

LotD:  Get a First Life