[HN Gopher] One Laptop per Child
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       One Laptop per Child
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2021-07-12 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | salamanderman wrote:
       | If you're interested in a detailed case study of OLPC's rollout,
       | I recommend "The Charisma Machine".
       | 
       | https://www.amazon.com/Charisma-Machine-Legacy-Laptop-Infras...
        
       | aaron695 wrote:
       | You could do a 10 hours course on what OLPC did wrong.
       | 
       | It was a slap in the face to the poor, a slap in the face to
       | hackers.
       | 
       | It did repetitive mistakes made in the education sector,
       | repetitive mistakes in IT you'll see on HN, repetitive mistakes
       | in the NGO sector.
       | 
       | It's hard to think of a thing they did right. Perhaps on the
       | hardware side.
       | 
       | I think the best lesson is at the time no one called the project
       | out. To blame Negroponte is just shifting the NGO/Education/IT
       | communities responsibilities. The same mistakes with OLPC are
       | still being made today.
        
       | gerbler wrote:
       | I participated in the "Give One, Get One" campaign where I bought
       | one and donated one. I used it to read my email for a while - it
       | was super slow but I enjoyed the novelty. It used Sugar OS which
       | was their own Linux flavor (I think).
       | 
       | I was a bit naive about the whole project - I heard Negroponte
       | speak at an event where he was arguing defensively that all a
       | country needs is technology (even ahead of civil society) and I
       | was so disillusioned. I was no expert in this area, but his
       | arguments were very weak. Pretty disappointing and I feel bad for
       | the really kind and generous people who poured so much of their
       | time into this project because it had garnered so much goodwill.
        
         | voldacar wrote:
         | Yeah Negroponte is a grifter. He has been involved in other
         | failed stuff like this too. He is basically a ted talk
         | personified
        
         | blacksmith_tb wrote:
         | I also did G1G1 and used my X0-1 some (though it was pretty
         | slow even by ~2007 standards, Sugar was an interesting idea for
         | a WM / UI, but running all that through Python...). Negroponte
         | may have come off as unrealistic, but they did have some
         | successes with the OLPC in South America, and other pilot
         | projects[1]. It seems like someone could make a rugged chassis
         | like that for an RPi 4 compute module these days.
         | 
         | 1: https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/10/29/84908/given-
         | tabl...
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-12 23:02 UTC)