castanyes blaves

"We aim to reach 100m-200m laptops in 2007", Mr Negroponte

said. Global laptop production is expected to total 47m units this

year.

...

200m laptops for childs in countries like China, India, Brazil,

Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand.

What does that mean?

It means the organizations that form and back the OLPC project are

commited to do something great for the education of the child in these

countries, where day-to-day high-quality scholarization is still

something to tackle.

It means that the UN won't be pushing to pour money to a project with

fuzzy lines that vaguely aims to strenghten the capital in the

Ministries of Education of these countries, but to put great learning

tools in the hands of child which have big energies, to learn and

discover by themselves, and little opportunities, to do so.

It also means to me that there will be a lot of computer companies

worried about what does this means to their businesses. I see it this

way: there are world-wide projects that nowadays are trying to

eradicate malaria from our world of developing countries (some of them

financed by foundations which money comes from a specially big

computer company). A lot of companies would be ready to tackle malaria

with their assets, but they don't do that, simply because there is no

money for them to do that. The OLPC project situation is similar.

So please, don't f*** this project up for the sole reason that you

either:

(a) Don't understand what this project means to you

(b) Don't want to understand what this project means to you but you

are stubbornly afraid of things you don't understand

(c) You think you have a good bragging opportunity to guess what will

make this project fail

I personally think that if in 1 year we leave in a world where 200m

chinese, indian, brazillian, argentinian, egyptian, nigerian and

thailandese kids have that tool for them, this world will be much full

of hope that it those tools never reach their hands.

posted by avilella  # 10:31 AM