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$100 PC Pledges Fail To Meet Minimum
bobthemuse writes, "Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop PC was demonstrated back in May, and a PledgeBank was set up: the goal was to get 100,000 people to purchase an OLPC for $300, allowing the project to send two of the devices to the proposed users. Today the pledge ended and only 3,678 people had signed up." It looks like a mention in Slashback a few weeks ago gave a boost to the effort, but not a big enough one.
This was not an official initiative from the OLPC makers.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I think one reason why there's not much enthusiasm about this program is a difference of philosophies in how to educate the world's children. Generally speaking, people would rather spend $100 to buy books for a bunch of underprivileged children rather than spend it to buy one computer for one child. The applications of computers in grade school education in the US are kind of fuzzy, which makes it difficult to see how useful they would be in a less industrialized society.
Besides all that, there are numerous other costs associated with making these laptops useful. For example, there's maintenance, theft replacement, training for teachers, and development of a standard computer-based curriculum. Many of these costs are recurring, which means that in the long run, these kids could be worse off from having so much money being tossed onto the bonfire trying to maintain a computer-based education program.
This is NOT a failiure of the project itself. It's a failet net-pledge only. The goal of which was pretty unrealistic anyway. I still signed up though... :) ... one can always hope I thought. Anyway:
This is NOT a failiure of the "One Laptop Per Child" project.
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Sell it to slashdot users for $120 (mfg makes a small profit). That way some of the buyers will end up using it to develop OSS educational SW for it. They should also color code the units; say green for students, blue for teachers, and red for developers (the $120 units). That way if you see a green unit for sale on E-bay - you (and E-bay) knows it's stolen property.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I'm part of the team that runs PledgeBank. You might be interested in this experimental Pledge I just put up for people who still want to be involved with OLPC, but on a more realistic and local level. http://www.pledgebank.com/olpchackers The Pledge is unique because it uses a new feature that isn't in general circulation on PledgeBank yet, cascading Pledges. These are global pledges which you sign up to locally, making a mini version of each pledge with a group of other people who live near you. Take a look, even if you don't sign up, and please give us feedback. This is very much an alpha feature, although the pledge is real.
We in rich countries don't give laptops to every one of our kids, yet we seem to think we can tell poor countries that this is what they need. I think of a dozen things that would benefit the poor way before we start thinking about fucking PCs.