OLPC:News/Archive 4
Week of December, 14th
G1G1 Brussels: The campaign officially went global last week as the first pallets of XOs arrived at OLPC Europe. Adam Holt deplaned from Boston at almost the same moment, and went straight to work on the repackaging assembly line, which hard-laboring OLPCers there call “The Sweatshop.” The French OLPC Foundation program, known as Un chez toi, un chez moi, is building momentum. They’ve created a viral action to get to the maximum number of people in a minimum amount of time, and have produced supplementary Zimi videos in 13 languages on Dailymotion (http://www.dailymotion.com/olpcfoundation/video/x7f7jj_onelaptop-per-child-zimis-story-fu_school). As we reported last week, they also have a French TV star video on the Dailymotion France homepage (http://www.dailymotion.com/fr/featured). Articles have started to appear: http://www.mood-for.fr/one-laptop-per-child-france-olpc/. Their objective is 1725 new orders in the next two weeks. The European country that books the highest sales gets a red XO. This publication contains confidential information. Distributing or forwarding it beyond the intended recipients, either in part or in its entirety, is strictly prohibited. If you have any questions about this notice please contact robert@laptop.org.
In the UK, Daniel Drake has been working with Racepoint UK, which has secured one big TV spot just before Christmas, plus two radio spots with Nicholas and three significant print spots. The Dutch group has set up meetings for next week. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPCNL_meetings. Christophe in Austria is working on a program for Amazon’s Germanlanguage webpage, Amazon.de, which will debut next week. In Belgium, OLPC began the SWIFT internal project of G1G3 and conducted demonstrations and seminars at the various SWIFT campuses. In its second week of "telephone boom" for G100(0), the OLPC team contacted 200 corporations with first calls, and had promising results from four of them.
Cambridge: The Change the World (CTW) program is creating a new opportunity for OLPC to reach a wider audience interested in bringing XOs to the world’s children. Under CTW, with a minimum donation of 100 XOs an individual, organization, business or any other donor can now be an active member of the global XO community, with support from OLPC. Jennifer Amaya, Nia Lewis, Julia Reynolds, Darah Tappitake, Mel Chua, Reuben Caron and Frances Hopkins have devoted considerable time over the past two weeks to building a foundation for the program. They’ve ascertained that the key audiences for CTW are teachers, charity groups, corporate sponsors, and people in all of our communities. To hone their message’s tone and content, the CTW team reflected on why an OLPC experience is unique. They went back to the basics, focusing on the elements of an XO program that make learning about the learners, and enable the learners to connect with the world around them. [...]
Week of December, 7th
Development
Perú: Rodrigo Arboleda traveled to Lima and Cuzco to advance on purchase orders for the provinces of Cuzco, Callao, Tumbes and Aucash. He met in Lima with local representative of Tumbes Province. He also met with Jose Miguel Morales, chairman of the Entrepreneurs for Education Foundation, which is working with groups of Peruvian miners to put XOs in mining town schools.
Next, Rodrigo traveled high into the Andes to Cuzco with Oscar Becerra and Raul Díaz Chavez, who is the Peruvian vice minister of education. The three met with the provincial governor, Hugo González, who renewed his pledge to buy 190,000 laptops, 50,000 of them ASAP. Also in Cuzco, Rodrigo helped celebrate the arrival of 4,000 more machines destined for provincial school children. Many of the kids who attended the affair had to travel ten hours on mules, and then by bus, from their remote villages. Rodrigo expects Cuzco’s governor will catalyze action from his counterparts in Callao and Aucash, where Oscar is finalizing similar pledges.
Colombia: Rodrigo then joined Nicholas aboard a Colombian military aircraft to La Macarena, where the Army just deployed 700 machines (Weekend, November 9th and 23rd).
For decades a stronghold of the FARC guerrillas. La Macarena had no TV, no roads and, until recently, no Internet access. Now, thanks to a collaborative effort among OLPC, the ministry of defense and the ministry of telecommunications, there are 700 XOs in the hands of La Macarena’s school children, and the town is fully connected to the world. Children who once knew only killings, kidnappings, land mines, extortion and death can see a ray of hope in their lives. Nicholas gave several TV and other media interviews, met with civic leaders and NGOs and was accompanied by Jason Wishnow from TED, who is going to produce a video of the visit.
Europe: The grassroot groups all gathered in Brussels for the weekend to make plans for G1G1 across the continent. OLPC France has produced a video featuring the French TV star Gérard Klein to promote the OLPC project and the G1G1 in France. See it here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/k3BzeizM7iZn6ARUiF . Next Wednesday OLPC France will hold a press conference with AMD where Walter De Brouwer hopes to show the video. They also sent out a promotional press announcement: http://olpcfrance.org/xo . The Brussels office began this week to contact the 150 largest European companies with a special offer for G100(0) http://www.olpceu.org/content/initiatives/g100g1000.html Before the end of the year, the 500 biggest corporations in Europe will have been contacted.
Walter gave a talk at the European Commission's Inclusion Days in Vienna entitled "Lessons in educational terrorism." http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/cf/person.cfm?personid=16051&eventId =einc08 Nirj Deva addressed the parliament in PNG about the XO, and together with Michael and Barry successfully persuaded the government to make the XO a priority (Weekend, November 30). OLPC Europe will be their representative in Brussels and approach the EU formally about EDF funding with help from the ACP secretariat. Sam Lounis and Giuila D'Amico attended the annual conference of CSR Europe, the association of CSR departments of European companies. A lot of valuable new contacts came out of the meeting. OLPC Europe now has agreements with seven countries to do cross-border tax deductions for charity at a fixed processing fee. By the end of next year, they hope to have 10 to 20. The Swift internal employee G1G3 starts next week.
Learning
Brazil: Juliano Bittencourt participated in a São Paulo meeting of the five Brazilian 1:1 schools. In the spring of last year, the Brazilian government selected five schools in the country to test different models of educational laptops donated by three vendors. OLPC donated laptops to two schools; one in São Paulo and other in Porto Alegre. Intel donated Classmates to one school in the city of Piraí and another in Palmas. An Asian vendor, Encore, donated 40 laptops to a single classroom in a school in Brasilia. The three-day meeting included the teachers, principals and students of the five schools, plus representatives from the ministry of education, President Lula’s office and several universities involved in the Brazilian 1:1 initiative. [...]
Perú: Carla Gòmez Monroy spent the week in country. She planned on working with teachers and students on community-based projects at a secondary school in Tarapoto City. She also visited schools, met with teachers, advised the locals on technical issues and helped with the repair of machines.
As parents in San Pedro de Cumbaza, Perú, held a meeting, their children shot video of the proceedings with their XOs.
Paraguay: Vicenta Cano, the pedagogical advisor to Paraguay Educa, reports that they are putting the teacher training and the pedagogical vision of the project in sync. The workshops for Caacupé's teachers will happen during the vacation period; the first from December 9th to the 23rd, and the second from February 9th to the 16th.
Cambridge: Cynthia Solomon, Brian Jordan, Nia Lewis and Julia Reynolds assembled photos from the laptop countries for tailor-made presentations to last year’s G1G1 donors. The hope is that the real images and stories will help inspire people to donate again this year - despite the sour economic climate - as they see the incredibly positive results already achieved. Claudia, Julia, Cynthia, Brian, and Barbara met with David Sengeh to a discuss a 30 machine deployment in Sierra Leone that will begin in a few weeks. Literacy is a key issue and they will work on ways for using laptops to help develop different literacies among the participants. They brainstormed with David the possibilities for the project in terms of saturation, target population, high school students/tutors and possible activities (applications) for the students. They also discussed what data David needs to gather in order to measure impact.
Week of November, 30th
Give One Get One OLPC is adding two new donor options this weekend, Give 100 and Give 1000, which allow individuals, groups or companies to send laptops anywhere in the world. The difference between G100 and G1000 is not price-per-laptop but the support that OLPC will offer afterward (detailed at laptop.org). However, there is a pricing difference for the 50 least developed nations and the rest of the world, a per laptop cost of $219 and $259, respectively. We also added a mechanism to acknowledge somebody (with either a physical or electronic card) in whose behalf you gave a laptop. The general flow between OLPC and Amazon is illustrated below:
Development
Papua New Guinea: It was a momentous week for the ongoing effort in Oceania as Papua New Guinea (PNG) embraced OLPC to boost basic education and economic development in this poor South Pacific nation. In a keynote speech before a major international conference in the ramshackle capital of Port Moresby, the island country's acting prime minister, Dr. Puka Temu, told attendees that OLPC “will bring enormous benefits,” to PNG. It “will cover over 7,000 educational institutions from elementary to secondary schools,” Temu said, and “benefit over 1,160,000 children and 35,700 teachers." Several small-scale pilot projects, deploying OLPC-donated machines, have been underway in PNG since earlier this year. [...]
Argentina: Antonio Battro met with the governor Santa Fe province, Dr. Hermes Binner, and his staff. Binner told Antonio he is willing to launch OLPC in Santa Fe, beginning with the first schools next March. Crucial to Binner’s decision is the example of his friend, President Tabaré Vásquez of Uruguay, and the enthusiastic report of the CEIBAL experience made by Lilia Puig, a former member of the Argentinian House of Representatives, who recently visited Montevideo with David Asteggiano, Santa Fe’s secretary of state for science, technology and innovation. [...]
Week of November, 23rd
OLPC chose buzz over bang for the opening days of the G1G1 launch. There was minimal fanfare from major broadcasting or print media, but plenty of word-of-mouth and chatter in the trade press, and an air of excitement in the blogosphere. Now broadcast ads will begin to run, and a full-fledged media campaign soon will start. Unlike last year’s campaign, which began with a splash and then attenuated rapidly, we expect to build interest, and sales, as we move ahead. A cornerstone of the strategy is our nationwide billboard effort, which is much more extensive than last year’s. Here’s a map of the deployments: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=10077270797530438 4594.00045b09ae1350c559d9e&z=4 Meantime, OLPC Europe is getting ready for global G1G1. As they await price, shipping and delivery instructions from Boston, the grassroots groups of Austria, Germany, France, Holland and four other European countries working together on the media front. Thanks to loyal fans in Israel, Greece, UK, Dubai, Jordan, Portugal, Italy and Spain and with the important help of AMD - a media team has been set up and is waiting (patiently) to get started.
Development
Washington DC: Nicholas participated on Monday in three CNN shoots (domestic, international and on-line), as well as a Fox News segment. That night, he did a 20second segment with PBS’s Charlie Rose. Also on Monday, Nicholas attended a small meeting - 20 people in all - hosted by Bob Zoelnick of the World Bank to discuss the role of ICT in development. All the usual suspects, besides OLPC, were there. Unfortunately, the conversation turned very anachronistic, with participants harping back to digital literacy as an end, rather than a means. Job creation through outsourcing was regarded as a new and good idea. Nicholas tried to emphasize that the World Bank should try to foster a nationwide culture of learning learning in the young, rather than help establish a few more industrial parks for young entrants to the job markets. [...]
Brussels: Walter De Brouwer reports that during European Development Days in Strasbourg OLPC Europe met with the head of the international affairs department for the city of Bonn, and did a presentation and demo of the XO. They also spoke to Gaudentia Kabaka, the Tanzanian deputy minister for higher education, science and technology, and met President Marc Ravalomanana of Madagascar. . On the corporate front, they held a conference call with Allianz SE, which is highly interested in OLPC and wants to cooperate with us. The chairman of the Industrial Design Institute of Poland will work to arrange a meeting in January between OLPC Europe and the Polish minister of education, as well the prime minister.
Week of November, 16th
G1G1 begins
Last week was a blur in Cambridge, New York and throughout OLPC world wide as we prepared for our first global campaign. Beginning with a Monday morning “war room” session in Patmos, 1CC deployed every available hand to ensure that all will be ready for tomorrow’s launch.
Everyone on the team contributed to G1G1 in some way, and everyone’s ready to jump into action should any new technical challenges suddenly pop up. Seth Woodworth, C. Scott Ananian, Christian Schmidt, Stefan Unterhauser, SJ Klein, Eben Eliason and Henry Hardy worked many hours on servers and new content for laptop.org. The site went live on Friday afternoon. Check it out: http://laptop.org. Great job everyone!
Mel Chua, Adam Holt, Frances Hopkins and SJ organized volunteers to restructure, review and update the many Frequently Asked Questions that have been collected over the last year, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ . Paul Fox helped manage and send email thank you notes to last year's G1G1 donors, as well as to this year's list of interested people. More than a hundred thousand messages went out. SJ has helped manage many of the community efforts, website and news efforts ahead of the launch.
Eben created a Global G1G1 GoogleMap which allows everyone to post the location of their XO. In just a few days the map has been viewed more than 41,000 times, primarily by last year's G1G1 participants who received their email thank yous. Add your XO at http://www.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=114558805698125207804.00 0001132ad0d5f3d14f8&z=0 (A direct link from laptop.org will be added shortly).
Adam and Kim Quirk helped prepare the Amazon storefront. They worked on everything from policy statements to help pages, links, terms and conditions, and release management. Many hours were spent on the phone with the very patient and helpful people from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The storefronts will be live at six am Monday, EST. Mel announced that community testers have set themselves a short term goal of having all 28 G1G1 shipping Activities documented and tested before Christmas. She also reports that work on scripts for configuring XO/XS test beds now has some community volunteers. Our thanks go out to those volunteers!
Along with just about everyone else in the office, the test team was involved in a number of G1G1 activities, from organizing video footage to updating support documentation. We have deployed a new machine at the MIT colo in anticipation of the G1G1 campaign. A major effort to prepare the website, wiki and infrastructure for increased traffic has been underway, as well. The infrastructure changes meant that OLPC’s primary public-facing machines and services were unavailable from approximately 16:30 to 21:30 Tuesday, November 11th. Web, wiki, and mail services were impacted. Scott Ananian spent much of the week shoring up web services in advance of the launch. Our wiki and web site are now running in well-documented virtual hosts, from content version-controlled in git. Our wiki now sits behind a reverse proxy, in a configuration closely matching that used by the Wikimedia Foundation for Wikipedia. We also have in place low-bandwidth fallbacks in case of high load. Work will continue to gradually unload and untangle the over taxed pedal.laptop.org.
A highlight of the week was a visit to 1CC by Tom Brady, quarterback for the New England Patriots, who came by to shoot a video for G1G1. The XO amazed him. Brady asked if some machines could be sent to his sister’s school in California, as well as a second shipment to his other sister, who is working in Uganda. Our pro bono partners at Racepoint, Mediacom and Taxi have devised an impressive media campaign. Several new videos begin tonight (Sunday) on the OLPC You Tube channel, as well as on Google TV, laptop.org and elsewhere, and they include an excellent animation on our mission. New content will debut throughout the week.
FaceBook members can join the OLPC cause and invite their friends to do the same. Additional FaceBook and Google gadgets will be updated in the next few days. Tomorrow, G1G1 will be featured on more than 4,000 billboards and other outdoor venues nationwide. Commercials will air on all major broadcast channels, cable and on radio. Newspapers and magazines will begin with print ads.
Don’t miss Nicholas tomorrow night on PBS with Charlie Rose, who is devoting his program to OLPC. It also will run on charlierose.com. If you’re near Boston on Thursday night, the 20th, come to Hall D of the Science Center at Harvard to hear Nicholas and Calestous Juma speak. The topic of the 7:00-9:00 program is “One Laptop per Child: Changing the World.” The OLPC staff will put on demonstrations. Sponsors include the Harvard College Global Hunger Initiative and multiple other Harvard groups. Light meals will be provided. OLPC’s regular business proceeded apace as well: Development Arkansas: Nicholas spent a morning with the senior Walmart management at their Bentonville headquarters exploring a broad agenda that ranged from the Foundation to their 4000 retail stores to on-line sales and logistics. The next step is a more focused discussion. The idea is an agreement, if we have one at all, by 1/1/09.
Week of November, 9th
G1G1 has gone global. Nicholas announced to delegates at the World of Health IT conference in Copenhagen last week that all 27 EU member states would take part this year. Meanwhile, the SWIFT company in Brussels said that G1G1 will be promoted internally - as G3G1 - throughout its worldwide operations, including the company’s major east Asian offices in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. With re-launch just eight days away, there will be an all-hands meeting in Patmos on Monday at 11:00 to discuss status and to solicit ideas. As Ed Sullivan used to say, this is going to be a really big show. We will have more than 3,000 billboards and outdoor spots ready to go up next week in many different locations throughout the United States. Mediacom continues to solicit national and local television, radio, digital and print space for G1G1 commercials and messaging. Two commercials to run on Google TV, major television stations and elsewhere are wrapping in South Africa. [...]
Week of November, 2nd
Antonio Battro presented Pope Benedict XVI with an XO on Friday at the Vatican. The occasion was a papal audience for the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which Antonio is a member. They spoke about OLPC’s philosophy and objectives in the developing world. Benedict seemed deeply pleased by our work. Antonio is in Rome to address a plenary session of the academy. Development New York City: John Lennon will be a spokesperson of sorts for OLPC in the upcoming G1G1 campaign – with Yoko Ono’s blessing. Taxi is preparing scripts and working on special effects to present Lennon in his own voice on 15- and 30-second videos. Lennon will say that he could only imagine what you can do now. In parallel, MediaCom, with one of the world’s largest media communications agency networks, is working on placing TV, print and web ads.
Also in New York, Nicholas and Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked off the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s bi-annual meeting at the Waldorf Astoria. Attendees heard an appeal for pro bono ad space in weeklies and dailies. The same afternoon, Nicholas was the closing speaker at Ad Age and Creativity's annual "Ideas” conference.
Brussels: Walter De Brouwer brings news from around the world: In Central Asia, the government of Kazakhstan wants to meet OLPC in Astana in the coming weeks to discuss contract issues. The project under discussion involves 25,000 laptops, but depending upon negotiations the number of machines could rise. (A small XO pilot already is up and running in Astana.) The Benin and Botswana delegations were impressed with what they learned at the ACP meetings. Benin is arranging a follow-up meeting for November in Strasbourg. Botswana has invited a team to meet with its prime minister in Gaborone. Caribbean. This week Louis Michel, the EU commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, announced a renewed collaboration with Cuba for education aid. The OLPC Europe team had several meetings with the Cuban delegation. Among the victims of hurricanes Gustav and Ike was the Cuban education infrastructure; 40 percent of the island’s schools were damaged. There is a possibility of a major OLPC deployment. In the Pacific, OLPC Europe has finished its preliminary work for Michael Hutak and Barry Vercoe from Brussels Vanuatu seems ready to make an order of 40,000 units as discussed with the Minister of Education, Charlot Salwai, and Director General Daniel Lamoureux. Also Raelyn Esau, the deputy director of policy & planning at the Tongan ministry of education, and Josefa Natau, director of the ministry of education of Fiji, were enthusiastic about going forward with OLPC. Michael and Barry will follow up. Europe. Bonn’s mayor, Bärbel Dieckmann, has invited OLPC to make an official presentation and discuss Bonn’s support of sister cities.
Afghanistan: The ministries of education and IT will be working closely with Roshan, the country’s leading cellular provider. They have agreed to provide connectivity for the program, including all hardware infrastructure and one year of internet access. The MOE has also partnered with Paiwastoon, a leading Linux/Open Source provider in Afghanistan. Their CEO, Mike Dawson, attended the OLPC May event in Cambridge. Paiwastoon will lead the localization into Dari/Pashto. Dr. Habib Khan is working with a technical assistant, Salman Minhas, who has helped with Dari/Pashto translations. In the next few weeks, Dr. Habib and Salman will travel to Kabul to hold teacher preparation workshops. Dates for travel will be determined, following the installation of a new education minister and depending upon staff availability.
Palestine: After several months of working with USAID in the West Bank and Gaza, we have secured official donation numbers and approval to ship XOs from both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government. The Palestinian ministry of education has been working on teacher preparation and deployment plans, and eagerly awaits the first bulk shipment of XOs. Representatives of the MOE have attended the past few OLPC Cambridge workshops.
Perú: Ongoing production of their order had been interrupted by Perú’s inability to secure a competent shipping vendor. Robert Fadel, Gustavo Marrioto, Rodrigo Arboleda and Jeff Mandell spoke by telephone with Oscar Becerra, Hernan Pachas and their extended teams. The group discussed pricing for new orders, ordering opportunities for provincial governments as well as deployment, and, of course, shipping. The immediate solution is that Perú will be quoted the CIF Price as Ex-Works, but it will include free shipping. This, apparently, absolves them from the need to issue an RFP for a shipping vendor. OLPC and Perú will revise their current framework agreement to update the above and other terms. Perú will develop an internal process for the consolidation of provincial government orders. Perú remains firmly committed to OLPC and is discussing a 500,000 unit order in 2009. Production: The chart on the following page details OLPC shipments over the past year. This chart is not a sales or a production forecast but actual distributions of XOs. Because of the chart’s scale not all deployments are shown; however, it does reflect nearly 99% of all XOs built as of October 24. The numbers in the “In Country” and “Kids” columns overlap. Also a built XO is either “In- Country” or “In-Transit”. Do not reproduce or republish this chart without first contacting Robert Fadel.
Week of October, 26th
Development
New York City: Nicholas met with Joel I. Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the largest public school system in the United States. There are more than 1.1 million students in New York’s 1420 public schools, as well as 80,000 teachers. PS 5 in the Bronx (PK-5, 682 students) is fully operational; all kids in all classes have their own XOs. A second school is about to begin saturation deployment. The discussion with Klein included how to rollout all kids in NYC, including options such as doing all first graders, versus doing grades one to three in one third of the schools. A curious detail emerged. NYC classifies laptops as having a 3-year life expectancy and thus they are not eligible as capital equipment expenditure. The federal government requires five years. This puts the XO in a unique position.
Brussels: OLPC Europe spent the week at the ACP Secretariat, meeting with, and do demos for, ministers of education gathered for the annual council. They spoke with teams from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia, Djibouti, Lesotho, Swaziland and Togo, plus advisors from Burkina Faso, Ivory Cost, Mali, Gabon, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Seychelles, Botswana and Mauritania. Discussions were initiated with the ministers of education from Cuba and Dominican Republic. OLPC Europe renewed acquaintances with the MOE’s of Barbados and Jamaica, and also did demos for those from Fiji, Vanuatu and the Philippines.
ACP representatives from Mozambique, and Togo, check out the XO.
The meetings all went very well. Countries in the southern part of Africa will coordinate together in order to use the Regional Envelopes of the EU development budget. The group will include South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi, all of whom have already submitted proposals. Contracts will follow. Thursday Carla Gòmez Monroy had an OLPC and XO training session with the SWIFT ambassadors. On Friday, Walter De Brouwer and Giulia D’Amici attended the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) hosted in Cagliari, Sardinia. The IGF was strategically hosted in Sardinia in preparation of the G8 countries which will convene there in June of next year. IGF will submit a discussion agenda to the next G8. Walter gave a talk on the "ultimate openness" of OLPC towards the "lock-in" of other projects. During the Forum, OLPC met Carlo Prado, Special Advisor to Gilbert Gills, the former Brazilian minister of culture. Gills will take the OLPC message back to Brazil and will talk to President Lula.