OLPC no longer wants to change the world

Sam Varghese
Monday, 09 February 2009 04:02

Opinion and Analysis

From wanting to "change the world", the project now wants to make only large-scale deployments. The "change the world" scheme meant that people could buy lots of anything from 100 to 1000 of the little XO laptops for places of their choice.

The project was conceived by the MIT media lab's Nicholas Negroponte and its aim was to provide cheap laptops to underprivileged children. What it produced was a novel gadget known as the XO but it came in at double the intended cost - $US200 instead of $100.

According to the OLPC site, the "Change the world" scheme meant one could donate 100 or more laptops and decide on where they would be deployed.

The change of policy was mentioned in an email from one of the OLPC's mailing lists and cited on a blog called Feeding the Penguins run by Morgan Collett. He works for OLPC and is a member of the Ubuntu South Africa local community team.

The email, from the OLPC's Julia Reynolds, said in part: "Unfortunately, as some of you might have heard "Change the World" aka "Give a School" aka "Give 100, Give 1000" will cease to exist. We are just waiting for the info to be taken off the main website (any second now).

"We are doing this in an effort to refocus back to large-scale deployments that create change in a major way. We WILL honor (sic) all requests that we have received prior to the info being taken off the website. So if you know anyone who is interested, tell them time is of the essence!!"

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