'Til All Are One

We had a query about run­ning Skype and WebEx on XOs.

Get­ting Skype to work is quite straight­for­ward.

WebEx requires Java, which is trick­ier.

Note that I only tested to the point of being able to run a test applet in Fire­fox. If any­one wants to try WebEx, please let me know of your experiences.

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.