Other ideas

Green Hardware

Some Ideas from WorldChanging: "...We typically discuss organic polymer electronics (OPE) as a feature of the fabrication future, but the clean leapfrog application is important, too. The production of OPE is much cleaner than traditional electronics, and the materials themselves contain few if any heavy metals. Recent OPE developments include a microprocessor able to run at around 100MHz (far slower than today's fastest laptops, but easily fast enough for the kinds of basic information and communication tasks described for the OLPC project), a variety of slower circuit and sub-processor plastics, an organic polymer battery and even a colorful, fast flat-panel display. Even the solar panels often suggested as an add-on for the hundred dollar laptop could be made with organic polymer materials."

Wonderful Idea But Long-Term Support Needed

Having worked in Africa for several years and seen many, many "donation" programs fail due to lack of service, support and follow up, I must suggest that this program will not work unless there is a commitment to long-term support of each laptop. Here's an example: a brand-new x-ray machine donated by the Japanese government after much hoopla and press sat useless for 10 years after an easily repairable part broke and there was no money to fix it. If laptops are going to be donated, there needs to be thought put into what happens when something goes wrong with them. It would be a shame to see thousands of laptops sitting useless once something goes wrong with them. Service programs must be included in any equipment donation if the program is to have long-term sustainability.

Laura Hendrix

lhamilton_114@hotmail.com

---

This is an important suggestion. How can this service programme be realized? The topic needs its own page.

Laptop Service Programme Ideas

Rollout and Community Building

Rollout and Community Building Ideas are now in their own page.

Rollout and Community Building Ideas

Resistance To Malware

When so much good work is being done it's sad to mention those who would attempt to destroy some of it but, working as a security consultant, it seems inevitable that individuals will find pleasure in developing ways of messing up the laptops. Wireless communications will be as good at spreading viruses, trojans, etc - collectively often referred to as "malware" - as children catching colds from each other.

We therefore need a multi-pronged approach to this potential risk such as, for example:

• Limit the scope of impact of any malware: This could be done using a mixture of Linux access controls, clear separation of data from executable code with controls on what can be executed, and by "sandboxing" anything that is communicated over the WLAN
• Detect and respond to any suspicious system behaviour: Identify, for example, a laptop trying to send a "payload" to many other machines. Virus protection in the form we know it would be infeasible, however, because of the problems of distributing updates
• Provide a simple and quick means of reinitialising a laptop: In the worst case scenario, it should be able to revert laptops to a known state eg, by a clean restart from a protected ROM. I say "protected" as any laptop ROM is most likely to be EEPROM to allow for upgrades and this immediately opens the opportunity for someone to try and corrupt that EEPROM.

Clearly reinitialisation is undesirable except in the worst circumstances as kids risk losing any work stored in their laptop. A possible way round this is to provide simple backup to external storage such as a USB memory device.

Anyway, I could go on but I'd be interested in other people's views. You may already have been thinking about this!

Richard Lewis, London, England

Skills Database

I, and I'm sure others with valuable skills, would like to support the olpc project but can't find an appropriate slot in the existing listed set of activities. So, like ships passing in the night, you may be losing potentially valuable people simply because you didn't know you needed them at the time. Worse, when you do need those skills you can't find them anywhere.

How about developing a list (database) of potential volunteers arranged by skills on whom you could draw if and when you needed it? A private list to avoid it being used as a job-finding marketplace.

Potential volunteers could be asked to send a short paragraph describing their skills and what they would be interested in doing which could then be put into the skills database. You could even use a standard web form to submit the information in the way you want.

Also, given the difficulty in correctly classifying people's skills, it might also be worthwhile using a desktop search engine (mentioning no names!) which would allow you find combinations of key words that you might not otherwise have used.

Richard Lewis, London, England

THE MILLENNIUM GIFT ETHIOPIA

The discussion is moved to OLPC ethiopia

Ethiopia የሺህ ዓመት ስጦታ ኢትዮጵያ

1. Poorest country in the world
2. Lowest computer penetration in the world
3. Lowest Internet and mobile penetration in the world
4. Uses unique alphabet
5. Uses unique calendar

• which needs some amount of development investment by software companies. The likely hood of that happening is slim due to problem no1 above. No one would invest on a market that has no money.

Even if computers trickle in to Ethiopia some how (which is not happening) they are of no use for an ordinary Ethiopian child who do not understand much English. The software companies will not be rushing to build computers for Ethiopian children since there will not be money in it. The present system is condemns every Ethiopian child to computer darkness, for forseeable future.

light in the tunnel

But we are in a very unique time, and opportunity has presented itself to change all this. For those who do not know, at the moment the calender year in Ethiopia is 1998. The Ethiopian millennium comes on September 11th 2008. (Don’t mind the date. You cannot imagine how painful for Ethiopians that dreadful day was.) That means the Ethiopian Millennium is going to be in about one and half year from now. And there are about 1.5 million Ethiopians living abroad. Most of those Ethiopians are educated and could help in many ways. Out of those Ethiopians with the most conservative estimate about 100 000 will be celebrating the Ethiopian millennium in Ethiopia.

What The Millennium Gift Project does?

The millennium gift project for the next one and half year prepares a gift of one laptop computer by one travelling Ethiopian for one Ethiopian child to be presented for the millennium celebration.

This project organizes a massive localization and translation project with the participation of all capable Ethiopians, free and open source software developers, institutions such as universities and colleges. Helping with organizing, coding, translating, identifying recipients and donors and contributing money.

The software’s to be localized and translated to at least one Ethiopian language are

• Ubuntu Linux Dapper drake (because of the launchpad at Ubuntu facility *Edubuntu
• Amharic wikipedia
• Amharic Wiktionary

Hardware

• One laptop per child computer
• Any laptop computer
• Any capable desktop computer
• Servers for schools
• Communication and Networking Equipment

Recipients

• Schools
• Classes
• Students

Teferra 05:12, 27 May 2006 (EDT)

External link

Here is a link to a webspace about Ethiopian computing.

http://www.geez.org/

Ethiopic page in this wiki

• Ethiopic

OLPC Ethiopia page in this wiki

• OLPC Ethiopia

The addition of the OLPC Ethiopia page has not been done by the management. It is simply another member of the community adding the page so that you have somewhere to place more information in the hope that it helps your campaign.

Which languages or languages are to be used?

Which languages or languages are to be used?

Do they all use the Ethiopic script?

 100-Dollar Laptop: UN Secretary General’s Office 
 shouldn’t be used for exploiting the poor
 more info on Discussion page