Slashdot Mirror
Intel Employee Caught Running OLPC News Site
An anonymous reader noted yet another story about credibility and disclosure on-line. An OLPC news site highly critical of the project was run
by an Intel employee who actually is working on a project that competes with the OLPC. Oh, and the site failed to disclose this pretty serious bit of bias. The article talks about the most extreme interpretation ("Intel secretly bankrolls blog that disses competitor") but even the less extreme version ("insider badmouths competitors anonymously at night") is pretty fishy. Just more reasons to never believe anything on-line, including me I guess.
> How many times is this going to happen before corporations realize front organizations don't work on the Internet?
It'll happen about the same time people get tired of porn. That is to say, never. For every article that comes out revealing this sort of thing, how many aren't identified? Obviously it's impossible to say. So it will keep going on.
Bark less. Wag more.
The headline says "caught" as if this person was doing something illegal or unethical. Please explain.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Okay, after being forced to dive into the sources by lousy reporting, here is the story:
Christopher Blizzard has posted to his blog that Wayan Vota, a main writer for OLPC news is the director of Geekcorps. That Wayan Vota writes for OLPC news is not a secret (his name is on every post). And a Google search for "Wayan Vota" turns up the Geekcorps result as its third hit.
Now, on Geekcorps' website, of one their technology partners is listed as Intel.
I don't know about you, but that's enough to convince me that the black helicopters are involved! What a conspiracy.
BTW, is this the Digg effect? I notice more and more looney conspiracy stories over there all the time. Maybe it's spreading.
"never believe anything on-line"? As opposed to believing anything that is printed on dead trees? Just apply the same rule to the internet as to books or newspapers: Use your own brain.
Wayan seems to be replying to every article about this.
His argument seems to be:
It is a coincidence that he is working on a competing product to the OLPC.
It is a coincidence that he started a "personal" project slandering his business rival and getting Google links to the OLPC.
It is simply standard procedure that he is buying negative Google ads to promote his personal site. (You know, the way you buy Google Ads all the time for your personal projects.)
His screeching denials are more damning than anything else.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
He's working on his own version for his employer. He presumably thinks it's better. That would explain why he's working on this project. It would be great if more people who were critical of products created a better version.
It's only a blog. It's not pretending not to have a bias. It's a blog. They're all biassed.
He's allowed to say what he likes. He was critical of the OLPC when Intel were amongst its proponents, so it seems pretty likely that this is his personal opinion. as such it would have been a bad idea to mention his affiliation with Intel since that may have suggested it was the company's views rather than his own.
Slashdot, with its numerous Microsoft bashing and Linux praising articles, is owned by OSTG (or SourceForge, whatever it's called) which has everything to gain from, er, the promotion of Linux and F/OSS.
So, where's the full disclosure on this, hum?
I write bullshit
Nope, I don't think the story is wrong:
US Dept of State
How many times is this going to happen before corporations realize front organizations don't work on the Internet?
Although these things certainly can bring negative backlash when discovered, part of the problem is that these things do sometimes work. Perhaps we should be asking every website to provide a street address, phone number, and ownership report. That would be very difficult to enforce since some would simply host elsewhere. Perhaps a good start would be to require any site advertising on radio or television to provide that information in the ads. (The text size for ads that maybe be shown on secondary SD DTV channels needs to be bumped up too. Many of those channels seem blurrier than NTSC to me, although part of the problem is use of analog satellite sources)
With elections coming in many areas, I would not be surprised to find a number of front organizations providing misinformation online. I've already seen several of the "forward this to your friends" mudslinging emails around. The combination of semi-anonymous and dirt cheap makes these abuses too easy.
It is a bit surprising to see this sort of thing from a company that's doing pretty well with their product lineup. Perhaps it is more about fighting pressure on prices than about getting the business for low cost machines?
Just in case anybody's wondering why Vota hasn't posted anything to explain this... I think he might be a little busy at the moment, since he's getting married today.
Not that that affects any conflict of interest either way, but he is a private citizen who's been running the blog in his spare time for at least a year. Sucks for him that this hits Slashdot today.
For my part, I've been reading olpcnews for a while and I think it's a serious stretch to call it "highly critical" of OLPC. Vota seems to love OLPC in general and has started a forum for Give-One-Get-One donors (like himself) to post hacks, guides, and help for the machines. He's pretty critical of Negroponte, but it seems that that's mostly because he (reasonably) believes that Negroponte's utopian rhetoric harms the project.
I'm not sure I've seen him weigh in strongly either way on Intel, but he's certainly very against seeing Windows on the OLPC, and has posted articles from other authors that are quite critical of Intel. So IMO: pro-Intel bias, maybe. Anti-OLPC bias, no way.
No jokes, please
The olpc news blog attacked the educational objectives of the project from the start, not by critically assessing the years of research and study that went into the plan rather, by completely ignoring not just the research and study but even the advertised objectives and methods written in plain english on the loptop.org web site. How many times does it have to be explained to these people that its not a laptop project dumping laptops on starving third world children, its about the educational concept of constructionism.
It even continues to this day where he posts "news" that there is no news showing that the kids who have so far received laptops are learning when again if he has been following the real news, you know, journalists and reporters actually out in the field finding out for themselves, the educational benefits are beginning to demonstrate themselves in small ways just as they did in the research.
And even if the blog is not closely followed, this guy is being interviewed and quoted all over the radio, even by NPR, as a source for OLPC news. That would be news about OLPC, not the website olpcnews which is a misnomer. Its disgraceful. Even though I stopped reading the guys web site I still had to listen to his crap on the radio when ever the OLPC project comes up in the real news.
Even though there is an obvious conflict of interest, and his site seems to be very biased, I can still see the possibility that he was just creating a blog about something he was interested in. I don't believe that the XO and Classmate were originally competing products as the target kids and communities for the OLPC educational program were outside the realm of Intel's existing educational assistance programs. The problem is that marketing PR, and in the case of Microsoft politics concerning open source software, drove them to "compete" in the OLPC "market" when in fact there is no market, its a charitable non-profit cause. As things were getting ugly in the media between Intel and OLPC he really should have disclosed the conflict of interest that arose.
Jeesh, go visit right now. The lead article's titled "10,000 Give One Get One XO Laptops Going to OLPC Mongolia". Hardly the stuff of astroturfing.
You really want _negative_? Go visit their forums (same site) and read the posts from the hundreds of "Give One Get One" donors who've been out $423.95 for over two months now and still have no XO laptops to show for it, due to OLPC's incompetency and inability to manage the program. _That's_ negative stuff.
Full disclosure: I'm one of those unfortunate donors.
Not disclosing any conflict of interests that you may have, and then later getting found out that the conflicts were not disclosed is far more damaging to your reputation than disclosing them up front. There are any number of cases where not disclosing these conflicts is actually illegal; for example if you are a stock analyst, judge, lobbyist or politician.
People are not as dumb as you might think. If you disclose the potential conflict a reasonable person can evaluate what the potential issues are; if not there is always the question regarding what axe you are grinding. If you disclose a reasonable person would at least feel that he is being told what the viewpoint of the person is.
Senator George Mitchell once said when being evaluated for a position as a special envoy to Ireland to negotiate a settlement between the IRA and British government that the conflicts of interest that you have to worry about are the undisclosed ones.
The fact is that there is no such thing as a completely unbiased observer. The best thing is to know the biases so you can evaluate the work in the correct context.
I also took money from Intel in 2004: they paid my salary for the entire year. Then, when my division was closed, I joined with Nicholas Negroponte to start OLPC. Calling Wayan an Intel employee is like calling me one.
OLPCnews is a great forum for commentary on the OLPC project, they are sometimes critical of OLPC, and like all of us sometimes get things wrong, but they are mostly amazed by and very supportive of OLPC. OLPCnews is certainly helping build the OLPC community that has expanded as a result of OLPC's "Give One, Get One" program.
I think Wayan is doing a terrific job.
- Mary Lou Jepsen
(former Chief Technology Officer of OLPC)
I write of OLPC News. I am not Wayan Vota, but have known him form some months now as we exchange constant emails about subjects. This is a case of real bad reporting on slashdot.
1- Wayan Vota is NOT an 'Intel Employee'. Ok, in some point his company did business with intel, but to call him a paid blogger by intel is a long conspiracy stride by an uninformed net echochamber. He is getting married today, and I think this is not the wedding gift he was expecting.
2 - OLPCnews is not "anti-olpc" or "pro-intel". You have clearly never read o line of that blog. Some headlines:
3 - there is no number 3. Unfortunatley, althought I write for the blog in question my low"Classmate PC: Intel's Two Hour-Long Joke"
"Intel Can't Take the (Low) Heat & Power of OLPC XO"
"Halloween Horror Story: Nigeria Buys Windows XP Classmates"
I challenge anyone to find a post truly complimenting Intel for it's classmate. There are posts criticizing OLPC, but mainly criticizing some negroponte's statements, some of the foundations failures or something that was left unaswered, after all we are an independent news source. But never a post was written against the fundamental idea of one laptop per child and most posts on the XO are clearly praising it.
Alexandre van de sande
blog.wanderingabout.com