OLPC Australia trying to burnish its image

Sam Varghese
Sunday, 09 August 2009 06:32

Opinion and Analysis

Rangan Srikhanta is an enthusiastic young man with one of the most difficult jobs in the country.
He is the executive director of One Laptop per Child Australia, an organisation that is trying to maintain a positive image after its parent organisation, run by Nicholas Negroponte, has suffered a drubbing in the media.

I encountered Srikhanta as a result of intervention by a PR firm. PR people have a great many faults but you have to give them credit for one thing: they are nothing if not persistent.

Following my last piece about OLPC, wherein I made reference to the fact that it seemed impossible to get a response to media queries sent to the Australian arm, I was approached by one of the many personable young women who dot the PR landscape and asked if I would have a chat with Srikhanta.

I have been asked this question many a time over my working life and my attitude has always been the same - I will even talk to the devil and give him/her a patient hearing. It doesn't mean that I will be party to spreading anyone's message and it doesn't mean that I won't ask hard questions. It also does not mean that my opinion will be changed one whit.

Srikhanta and I spoke on the phone for nearly 90 minutes. The organisation, which, Srikhanta tells me was only formally set up in January 2008, recently deployed 100 laptops in remote parts of Australia and announced plans for more deployments in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Since it was set up it has distributed 400 of the little XOs.

I told him that this was a pathetic number, especially since 100 million laptops was the parent organisation's original bold ambition. That's a sixtieth of the Earth's population.

But Srikhanta didn't want to talk about targets. He actually didn't know what the target was - he made reference to a million deployments worldwide - so let me provide some perspective. As of April 25 this year, the OLPC had half a million units either deployed or in the process of being deployed - and that was five percent of the stated target for the end of 2007.

Incidentally, that figure is 0.5 percent of Negroponte's original, flamboyant projection.

Any business which had this kind of record would, no doubt, be considered a failure. But not the OLPC. I see from an OLPC Australia media release that Negroponte is still referred to as a visionary.