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OLPC Project To Air-Drop Laptops
sl4shd0rk writes "Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project are still going and have a new plan in the works: a laptop air-drop to help facilitate 'self-education' in areas with large poor populations. 'In the first year we'll go in and meet with tribal elders and aid organizations, people not involved with education, but then we let the kids learn,' Negroponte said. All of this work by Negroponte and others was essential, he explained, because market forces were leaving the poor of the world behind. Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world."
It's flying something behind it and I can't quite make it out. It's a large banner and it says T H A N K S... from O... L... P...C! What a sight, ladies and gentlemen. What a sight. The 'copter seems to circling the village now. I guess it's looking for a place to land. No! Something just came out of the back of the helicopter. It's a dark object, perhaps a skydiver plummeting to the earth from only two thousand feet in the air... There's a third... No parachutes yet... Those can't be skydivers. I can't tell just yet what they are but... Oh my God! They're laptops! Oh no! Johnny can you get this? Oh, they're crashing to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the thatched roof of a hut. This is terrible! Everyone's running around pushing each other. Oh my goodness! Oh, the humanity! People are running about. The laptops are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Folks, I don't know how much longer... The crowd is running for their lives. I think I'm going to step inside. I can't stand here and watch this anymore. No, I can't go in there. Children are searching for their mothers and oh, not since the Hindenberg tragedy has there been anything like this. I don't know how much longer I can hold my position here, Johnny. The crowd...
Meanwhile, the largest countries had adopted strategies that offer little for the developing world.
On the contrary. Many of the world's largest countries send massive amounts of aid to the developing world, which is then promptly stolen by corrupt governments of those countries. Zimbabwe used to be a net exporter of food and now they've got almost impossibly-high inflation rates. Maybe we should work on that before air-dropping laptops into these places?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
There's a rising tide of African voices that agree with you since most of that aid never leaves the capitals of the nations being "helped".
Other times the aid ends up trashing the local economy since aid agencies are quite often less concerned with the results of their efforts then with shaking down rich donors.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Negroponte tried a "PC in the wall" experiment in a poor district some years ago. This is being used as an argument for the airdrop strategy, but the experiment was in fact not successfull. The kids in the neighbourhood did learn to use the PC, but to little or no use. They played games but did not learn marketable skills or otherwise improve their quality of life.
In aid and development, To airdrop aid is the very image of a failed strategy. You bring in a celebrity and a tv-team, you throw money at the village, build a well or a lavatory, then write a report and pull out. Your funders want to see results quickly, but development doesn't work that way.
For someone in aid and development it is then obvious that Negroponte does not focus on actually improving things for the kids. Like many caricatured IT developers, he is focused on the product, not the user. He wants to prove that the user interface is so intuitive that you don't have to teach the kids to use it. He wants to show that the laptop is very robust and water proof so he drops it from a helicopter. He is using one of the vilest tricks in the IT-salesman's repertoire: That if you just buy my hardware, everything will be up and running with no extra cost. No running costs on training people to use it, no need to organize the use or for teachers to follow this up. No need to have anything centralized and government-like working for these villages to reap the benefits of IT.
It is a vile mix of PR stunts, naive IT optimism sold to supposedly uninformed savages and an appeal to prevailing ideologies among the western funders. All combined just to sell hardware.
"In the first year we'll go in and meet with tribal elders and aid organizations, people not involved with education, but then we let the kids learn,' Negroponte said"
I'm sure the people of Detroit will be most appreciative.