User:Mokurai/Earth Treasury

Earth Treasury has no corporate connection with OLPC, the maker of the $100 Laptop. They just let us use their Wiki.--Mokurai 02:51, 3 June 2007 (EDT)

This page is a place-holder until Earth Treasury can create its own Web site. Silicon Valley Linux User Group (SVLUG) has offered space on its server for this site.

Mission

The mission of Earth Treasury is

• To piggyback on OLPC's computer program in education, in order to further health, economic opportunity, human rights, and anything else in the way of sustainable development.
• To lobby the US Congress and the various state and territorial legislatures to buy into the OLPC program.
• To support all other national OLPC groups, whether part of OLPC or independent like ourselves.

in more detail:

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an educational program providing computers for purchase by governments, along with Free Software, Free Textbooks, and other educational content for the conventional K-12 curriculum. This is an excellent antipoverty program which by itself would have major impacts on health, economic development, and many other major global issues. But we can go much further. We need to

• Connect schools
• Support and encourage social networking among schoolchildren
• Support and encourage language learning among schoolchildren
• Rework the curriculum to make use of the computer power and human resources thus made available
• Teach the essentials of sustainable international business, including e-commerce and the true theory of Free Markets
• Recruit other partners for the children in commerce, appropriate technology, trade law, and other areas
• Provide microfinancing for such enterprises
• Integrate this with social and spiritual development programs based on the Gandhian principles of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement

Thus we can help schoolchildren work their way through secondary (and perhaps even earlier) education, making it possible for many more of them to attend school, qualify for jobs when they graduate, or create viable jobs for others. We can increase economic growth, redirect it to sustainable ends, and provide tax revenues for expanding this and other anti-poverty programs and for sustainable development in general. Unlike foreign aid and NGO programs, OLPC will become self-funding, and so will the businesses of the children.

The current globalization movement is based on several economic fallacies, chief among them that giving corporations free access to all countries, but restricting people, somehow constitutes a Free Market. The OLPC XO computer in the hands of millions, and eventually a billion or so children, creates a completely different economic situation.

• The computer grants access to many markets, particularly to e-commerce. It enables the full range of possible international partnerships and other trade arrangements.
• The computer grants access to market information, whether from formal exchanges, legally mandated financial filings, or simply the description and asking price for every item on every commercial Web site.
• The computer is the essential production technology of the Information Age. It also makes it possible to contact the purveyors of every material production technology at the point where a business opportunity has been identified and funded.
• The billion children and their families and communities will not be in a position to impose prices on the market, but must take prices from the interplay of supply and demand.
• The products of these children and others will not in general be endowed with special rights. Although much that they sell will be culturally unique, and protected by copyright and other so-called "Intellectual Property" laws (actually grants of temporary licenses), consumers will be able to buy music, clothing, art, and other such items from a wide range of sources. Cartels will be hard to form, easy to break, and not permitted among Earth Treasury participants.
• The children will have access to capital, initially from outside sources, but soon from their own banks and other financial institutions.

What all this means is the possibility of creation of the largest actually Free Market in human history. But the conditions created by availability of computers are not guaranteed to obtain, and in particular are not the automatic creation of market forces. Economic theory requires these conditions in order to deduce the efficiency of markets in resource allocation and other benefits, not the other way around. These conditions will only continue to obtain if the forces of technology and society are directed to maintaining them, and not to extending the privileges which corporations have historically demanded from governments. This in turn is possible only if the children come to understand the nature of the problem and the opportunity, and if they and their communities can be brought together to act on them.

This is a massive undertaking, for the highest stakes in human history. Like many who went before us, we cannot see our way through to the end, but like many who did not shirk equally daunting challenges, we can see our way forward from here, and have no proper choice but to take it.

Programs

• Link schools around the world
• Teach children to do business together.
• Teach the genuine free market, not the nonsense in which corporations get to go freely into any country, but people don't.
• Telemedicine
• Demonstrate the XO to anybody who should get involved with OLPC.
• Anyone can participate. We have 101 Things To Do.

Volunteers

We need some volunteers to take care of various business. Send me an email.

• I'll go and invite some people. Done. I'll go invite some more.--Mokurai 00:48, 3 January 2007 (EST)
• We need writers, speakers, publicists, a graphic artist, lobbyists, and others. You can suggest other tasks, particularly if you are volunteering to do them.
• We'll get a mailing list together as soon as there are enough of us to justify it. Done.
• Web site with t-shirts, an Amazon link, and donations through Paypal and other means.
• We need to move from a volunteer association to a non-profit corporation at some point. In process with lawyers.
• We should put on a conference. I have signed on as a board member of WIRE AFRICA. We have a conference in December 2007.
• I'm going to make a page that makes is absolutely brainless to lobby our government officials. Oh wait, I did that. Here it is:

OLPC4USAlobbying. Won't someone please help tidy it up a smidge? --Mrknuffke 13:58, 21 January 2007 (EST)

OLPC says that we can use the OLPC Wiki for our business. Please put the following category link on any page that is specific to Earth Treasury.

[[Category:Earth Treasury]]

See also

• Africa Wiki
• Linking Schools
• International business
• Cultural preservation
• Moviemaking
• Community Building

OLPC4USA FAQ