Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 07 May 2008 16:52
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 4
It's quite characteristic of the cultural cringe that prevails in Australia that a man who works in America, Barry Vercoe, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is coming to the country next week to lobby for the local branch of the One Laptop Per Child project.
For the uninitiated,
OLPC is a project masterminded by MIT media labs chief Nicholas Negroponte to supply laptops to children; it has morphed from a $US100 laptop to a $US188 model and had a fair number of hiccups in its short existence.
Vercoe, a New Zealander,
it has been reported, will be meeting representatives of government to try and convince them to agree to a launch for OLPC Australia on the sidelines of the
2008 Future Summit.
The summit is an annual gabfest which is organised by
ADC (Australian Davos Connection Limited), "a wholly Australian, non-political, not-for-profit leadership organisation which brings together leaders from business, government, the public sector, academia and the broader community to improve their understanding of key issues affecting Australia."
ADC was initially formed to promote the World Economic Forum within Australia.
There are five others on the
OLPC Australia board, apart from Vercoe - Geoffrey Anson, an IT sales, marketing and management person; Vadim Gerasimov, an engineer at Google Australia who works on software development for the OLPC in his spare time; Rangan Srikhanta, an analyst with Deloitte Touche Tomatsu; Jeff Waugh, media spokesman for the GNOME project and a principal consultant with Waugh Partners; and Pia Waugh, a consultant with Waugh Partners.
