OLPC: one bad idea per child

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 21 February 2008 20:06

Opinion and Analysis

There are times when an issue can gnaw away at your internals to the extent that it starts bothering you. And you can't prevent feelings of guilt arising when you are constantly reminded about something or the other, something which you have and others, in distant lands, do not.
For instance, we have personal computers and poorer denizens of this earth do not.

Development agencies are very good at exploiting this sense of guilt - which is fairly common in the West. These agencies have do-good agendas, well-meaning no doubt, but more focused on their own survival than anything else. One thing common to practically all these agencies is that they actually believe that Western technology can alleviate any and all problems in the Third World.

How does one get rid of the guilt? How do you handle it when you pass a beggar at Flinders Street Station? (that's one of the bigger train stations in Melbourne). Simple, throw a couple of coins down and the guilt is temporarily assuaged.

Similarly, with these agencies, ads of poor children drinking water from a filthy stream are a good way to bring in a stream of donations, which in turn help to keep said agency running. It pays wages for a number of people who can then salve their consciences by convincing themselves that they are doing "good". Helps them to sleep at night, I guess.

And so we come to the One Laptop Per Child project. Not exactly built on the same lines as a project aimed at development in a poorer country, but exploiting many of the same feelings. The initial stated goal was to supply laptops that would cost $US100 to children in underdeveloped countries - Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, and Pakistan were those which initially signed up to participate.

Associating the project with the idea of "open source" was a wonderful way to get people involved - Red Hat supplies a customised GNU/Linux distribution for the XO - but that idea has now been diluted to some extent by the intrusion of Microsoft which is developing a version of Windows XP to run on the little laptop.

Microsoft knows that catching them young is key to creating a whole new generation of Windows users - people who have no choice but to accept whatever the company dishes out.