Talk:OLPC Ghana

Bonsaaso, Millennium Villages roll-out, Follow-up on the above report/evaluation youtube

The people in the youtube on a certain moment state "none of the 5 OLPC core principles were followed." To me, the video is another clear manual on how to make a (olpc) project fail, create confusion and leave all with a hangover: (what follows is ironic)

1. the youtube video reports on the deployment in 2 completely different places: one deployment in a 4th grade class in a rural school - the Millennium Village Bonsaaso and another deployment in a 4th grade class in a town, being both in Ghana. If the viewer is not careful, there is a high risk to extrapolate the failure of one to the other and visa versa, seeing more negative and than positive.
2. make a project too small
3. do not take into account the complex situation in which the project has to find fertile ground. Don't underestimate the impact of gender issues, class issues, ethnicity realities, religion, etc.
4. make sure the project is underfinanced
5. make sure not all the kids have an XO to spur stealing by kids from other schools
6. make sure there is no local capacity, and the support team should be preferably in another continent and make them be from another time zone so there is no coaching is possible when both are awake at the same time.
7. of course don't look for local strategic partners to work with the teachers, parents, leaders, ... . In fact, don't take time to get to know the local realities. Do not get a local ICT university involved.
8. do not put the useful ebooks on the XO's, e.g. all the school books for all grades, comic-books, books on how to make money, learn to make soap, why it is important to wash your hands after toilet or going to prepare food or eat, ...
9. don't explain how a PV panel works, what it is for, nor how it interlinks with a battery. In a sunny country like Ghana, don't provide the kids with portable PV panels to charge their XO's and their parent's gsm's, ..
10. Never explain how to open an XO nor repair it. If you do, make sure there are no spare parts, so any repair training given becomes completely useless.
11. Leave linux training over to Windows trained people
12. Make sure local people understand they don't have to bear any responsibility, yet allow them to just sit back and lean in their chairs because other people from another continent will come and do everything for them, ... . Maybe you should tell them the story of the 7 little dwarfs who come out and do everything?
13. Do not use twinning projects with a university in your developed country and do not involve the diaspora from the country in your country
14. When you are in ICT, behave like a god. After all you create, so you can also have the pleasure of killing, collateral damage is too banale for you to consider, ... . You may change your name into Caesar, Olympus, Zeus or something.
15. ... --SvenAERTS 00:40, 8 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the verbal sabotage. Do you have anything positive to say? --Quozl 01:30, 8 April 2014 (UTC).

Leaving the youtube just like that without any comment would be the worst. I found it the best way to follow-up the youtube report. --SvenAERTS 07:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I can't find too much positive to say about this deployment. You? I loved the comment of the governmental person: "let's not continue, because it would make us dependent on spare parts from olpc". Microsoft approoved technology is preferable?! Tragic ! --SvenAERTS 07:53, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I think your advocacy and selection bias is getting in the way of the engineering realities. OLPC would not want deployments to be unaware of the issue of spare parts. There are minimum order quantities, imposed on OLPC by chip vendors. The way we reduce this risk for deployments is to include a small percentage of extra laptops in each order, enough to cover expected and observed component failure rates. For very large deployments, they can generally afford to make large spare parts orders. --Quozl 22:44, 9 April 2014 (UTC).

1. I agree and I keep repeating it everywhere: The minimum order quantities OLPC demands are built-in wisdom not to go to small with a project. Use, foresee extra XO's because they WILL BE the spare parts in smaller deployments. --SvenAERTS 11:44, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

2. I don't understand "your advocacy and selection bias is getting in the way of the engineering realities." --SvenAERTS 11:44, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Deployment Status Stalled on government politics (corruption charges), despite the agreement.

Strange, I'd think an XO-XS deployment would mean guaranteed re-election for the minister of education. Therefore I'd think the minister of education would use all its power to get the XO-XS deployment go to a full scale deployment or at least to the whole region where the minister came from/is voting for the minister? --SvenAERTS 13:58, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

This sounds like wild speculation and wishful thinking. Have you any data? I doubt that a deployment of laptops would have any significant effect on re-election of a parliamentarian. There are much stronger political forces at play. The update that changed the status was by User:Sj in November 2009. It may be out of date, but it is the last data we have recorded publically. --Quozl 04:52, 19 December 2013 (UTC)

XO Sugar interface

--SvenAERTS 13:58, 18 December 2013 (UTC) I found the discussion page and this article just like that, without any signature, so I added a title, so I could put my topi here too.

Hi

The OLPC are doing some fantastic work, with the XO and the sugar interface I have a couple of thoughts though about the transition of using an XO , its sugar interface and Linux.

I guess the concept of the sugar interface is that that the usual GUI of most operating systems is too intimidating for children. I can see that , yet when I see my four year old daughter start fiddling with the dvd player when my wife & I , turn our backs makes me wonder! When she has the motivation because she wants to start a new dvd , she will just figure out the controls & just DO IT! In other words I wonder if we are under estimating children and should maybe present a stripped down but “usual format” GUI instead of the sugar interface on PC’s

The other thing is going from using a Linux system to another Linux system , I’m not keen on the XO with a fedora core since the command line codes are not compatible with the command line for the main stream Linux OS Ubuntu. Eg “apt-get” for Ubuntu as opposed to “yum” for Fedora. I see the use of the XO not just as a learning tool but as a stepping stone to main stream Linux, avoiding other very costly operating $ystems.

Anyway I have been playing around with sugar on old pc hardware because I can appreciate the idea of continuity. http://www.nkran.net/sugar.jsp shows my attempts at installing sugar on Simply Mepis Linux operating system; what I like about this idea it that it gives the opportunity of being able to use the sugar interface for children, or the Simply Mepis interface for older children. Also the core is Debian and under the hood has many similarities to Ubuntu, at least on the command line they both use “apt-get instal …”