<incom> OLPC (was: Re: From the CES in Las vegas)

[Steve Cisler]

I'd like to remind folks of a now defunct project
instituted by Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab and J.
Sachs during the short time he hung out at Harvard. It
was called "Digital Nations" (circa 2000)and the
saying was that 'no problem exists until Cambridge
(Har/MIT) have discovered it'  

The idea was to get nations to join the lab and
benefit from the collaboration of the researchers and
planners in the member country. Up until that time
most of the lab sponsors were companies (I worked at
Apple when we supported the lab). At that first
meeting Ghana, the state of Alaska, and India were
ready to put their money down.  I told a couple of the
Indian delegation (many from IIT) that MIT should be
paying them to take part, not the other way around.

Besides this ongoing discussion about the XO computer,
there is one out of India/Pakistan as well as the web
log

http://www.olpcnews.com/ in which there's a very
interesting post about the plan to retail the XO if a
buyer will pay for two, one for her and one for a poor
kid in Rwanda or Thailand or some other target
country.

and 

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TamTam:How_to_use_TamTam1

And for a different approach to cheap computers, take
a look at this effort out of Taiwan:

http://www.viapc-1.com/
"empowered connectivity initiative"

Steve Cisler

--- Eduardo Villanueva <evillan at gmail.com> wrote:

I still
> believe that the
> stratospheric hubris of a bunch of techies from the
> MIT is no replacement
> for locally developed solutions to locally diagnosed
> solutions.


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