One laptop Per Child

I have in my pocket a small article about the project One laptop Per Child (OLPC), that I meant to post from long time ago. The wrinkled article talks more about the design of the laptop (very nice in my opinion) and its designer (Yves Behar).

But during my time in Buenos Aires (January 2007), reading a magazine while I was accompanying my mother to her doctor's appointment, I stumble with another article about this project and its implementation in Argentina. I thought .. ok is not accident too much OLPC ... let's investigate more about this topic !

I read first the article in Argentina (Information Technology, Magazine # 116, Page 6, Dec 2006) and they where mentioning that Intel offered an alternative (the ClassMate) to the laptop developed by the MIT for the project (the X0-1).

When I came back home and had access to the Internet I went back to the source, the OLPC web page .

The original idea of the project was develop a 100$US that will be distributed to children from developing nations. Read more about the vission progress at the project website, too.

The 100 dollars, became kind of a label. Affordable is the rationale, but so far for Argentina that price will represent ~138 $US (I don't know the reason for the increase). They are not decided yet about if go with the Intel or MIT's version. Our uruguyan neighbours according to the OLPC committed to the project on Dec 2006.

In Argentina the OLPC project is overseed by the organism called educ.ar

According with an interview (in spanish) published in Aug 2007 with, Laura Serra, the project director of educ.ar; she mentioned that the Argentinean government position to see if they will join the project was:

• transparency in the purchase process (we had some ugly experiences with corruption between government and prestigious companies as IBM),
• Have access to a reasonable amount of computers to do a pilot test,
• Have access to a final product to explore their definitive features.

Some issues regarding the implementation of the pilot (i.e. some adapters were not what was needed in Argentina, having a very earlier version to test) are making the piloting smaller as initially thought.

This article in the OLPC website point some concerns about implementation. Even though the interviewee is not the current education minister, I am sure that are still worries in the government minds.

Seems that a quick and smooth implementation will still take some time at least in Argentina.

After so many years in Accenture I should know better that is not the object but the implementation the key for success (sigh !).