After 5 years of work, OLPC are ready to start rolling out the XO-1 laptop to children in developing countries. Those are the children who live in villages without water, electricity, and sometimes even decent medical care.
It sounds like insanity. And opinion is divided about whether it is in fact insanity or not. Is the XO-1 an imperialistic, American artefact? Will its batteries and screens pollute the environment? Should the money be spent on libraries, and clean water? Will it be used to surf porn? Will it drive black market crime?
The answer to all of those questions is “yes – to a degree”. But none of those problems are insurmountable.
The real question is: does anyone want it?
The XO-1 doesn’t run Windows: it runs a special operating system of its own with an interface called Sugar. It does have a web browser, PDF reader and the like. But you can’t run MS Word on it. Sugars look cute and has some clever thinking behind it. But there’s some doubt about it.
One very strong argument says that prospective users in developing countries don’t want a “non-transferrable skill”. They want to learn Windows, because Windows is what the rest of the world uses, and Windows skills will get them a job when they leave school. This could be a problem. Even though they are now part of the OLPC initiative, Intel is continuing with is Classmate programme – a PC with some of the same characteristics as the XO-1 but able to run Windows. Add to that a massive base of downloadable Windows software, the classmate looks tempting.
But the lack of Windows OS may also be the XO-1’s saving grace. The modern desktop interface that we know is a complicated beast with lots of cultural and no-so-easy-to-learn assumptions embedded in it. Windows is ok for kids, but not fantastic. Sugar bypasses those issues. Designed and tested with kids in the real context of use, it’s likely to work well because it will fit properly into the lives of the people it’s aimed at.
To be a real success, the XO-1 needs to build a community of its own. The children and teachers who use it need to be able to create new things and share with each other. This looks like it could well happen. There are authoring/development solutions called eToys, Scratch and Squeak. And the mesh network allows XO-1’s to communciate with each other to pass new ideas and information on.
My money’s on it
If the children learn how to make the XO-1 do things that children love – communicate, play and invent – I think XO-1 will be a success. It won’t matter if it’s an American imperialist plot, or diverts money away from libraries. Gripes about it will be incidental to the market demand for an empowered and empowering, self-oragnising, kid-powered network of many millions of nodes. And controlling it will be all but impossible.
I’m probably an idealistic, techno-centric, Western fool. But I really hope that’s how it works out.