Last week, Nicholas Negroponte, the Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) participated in a panel discussion about OLPC in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs). While celebrating many successes of the project, the forum served more as an opportunity for Negroponte to point out flaws in the original distribution plan and to announce the new "Give One Get One," business model.

The so-called, "$100 laptop" was promoted as a key tool to bridge the digital divide and improve education in poor countries. Techies and the media alike were excited by the technical problems the machine sought to overcome as well as the promise of millions of poor school children learning through this powerful tool.  The distribution model seemed simple: each countries government would purchase the computers in lots of one million plus, then distribute these to the schools and finally to the eager students.  Each student would own the laptop.  It would come home with them and be theirs no matter where they were living or forced to move.  OLPC was adamant on this aspect of personal ownership -- that the laptops belonged to the child and not the school.

While technologists and designers worked on the product, Negroponte traveled the globe putting the distribution framework in place.  OLPC needed large orders and production to drive the cost down to the desired 100 USD mark.  His first coup was lining up laptop giant Quanta as the manufacturer of OLPC.  It was key to have a producer who makes over 40% of the world's laptops on board in a project where economies of scale are key. The partnership silenced many critics, but left much work to be done.

For the media, the technology was the story.  OLPC gained prominence as tech stalwarts like Wired featured front page stories about the machine.  There was a lot to love about the laptop, from its design -- focused exclusively on usage by a child with a child-size keyboard and absolute position trackpad that allowed children to draw and create, to its "Sugar" open source and Linux-based operating system, to its ability to run on 2 watts of power (most laptops require 35-40), and most notably and novel, the laptops unique power sources. In fact, Negroponte commented that government officials asked one question, "Where's the crank?"  The crank being an alternative power source that was popularized in a photo accomapanying the Wired article and passed around the net.

The media was completely missing the story of Negroponte's struggle against market and government forces to get his laptop produced and sold.  They caught the tail-end with excessive coverage of the public spat between OLPC and Intel -- maker of their own low-cost "Classmate PC."  The full story of the $100 Laptop's journey from developing world wonder machine to it's current incarnation as product requiring significant marketing and clever PR to survive is yet to be told throughout the mainstream and even tech media world.

OLPC was born as an idealistic project by Negroponte and others at MIT's Media Lab.  Negroponte first saw the possibility of the project when he sent his son to wire the village and run a laptop project with laptops he personally purchased on Ebay in a small village in Cambodia.  The school suddenly became the center of village life in a place where previously the struggle was to retain teachers, let alone students.  Excited children came to school everyday and brought their friends.  At night, homes glowed with the light of the laptop as families gathered around. Negroponte was sold. He conceived of a laptop that would exist just for children like those in rural and impoverished Cambodia.

The laptop would truly represent the beliefs of the Media Lab: it would be open source; it would be developed in a completely open way; end users would be able to provide their own tech support in a communal way; it would be developed for a market that corporations ignored; it would be not-for-profit; production and technological advances would be done in a manner that always brought the price down (the opposite position of large technology firms); and it would be for the kids. Negroponte approached the project with the idealism of the open source world.  With a firm belief that a laptop could change how kids learn to learn.  As he said during the LDCs meeting, "When a child is asked to write a program to make a circle, they have to first figure out what a circle is. They write the program and it never works the first time so you have to debug. Debugging is the closet a child can get to thinking about thinking."

Distribution was the first great obstacle to Negroponte's idealism.  First, it became clear that the poorest countries could not afford to waive school fees or pay all their teachers. They certainly couldn't commit to buying 1 million laptops. OLPC began to target middle-income countries in Latin America and the Middle East as opposed to those in sub-Saharan Africa or rural Asia. It seemed this plan would work as Negroponte secured over 10 key commitments, but as he admitted, "Nobody was actually ready to sign the checks when the time came."

As Negroponte struggled through his distribution problem, outside experts were brought in to help make the plan feasible for more countries. Raul Zambrono, Senior ICT & Governance Policy Adviser for the United Nations Development Programme, offered key advice.  Negroponte was fond of saying, "This is not a LAPTOP project, but an EDUCATION project." Zambrono advised OLPC to think even bigger.  In an interview for this post he commented, "I kept telling Nicholas, this is a DEVELOPMENT project."  Zambrono pressed Negroponte on what he truly hoped to achieve and as Negroponte talked about his high hopes for OLPC, Zambrono realized he was really talking about achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  Zambrono advised, "If you want governments and the development sector to support this than it has to be centered around the MDGs."  Thus, a fledgling partnership between OLPC and UNDP was born. UNDP would create a Request for Proposal (RFP) and governments wishing to purchase laptops would furnish proposals detailing their plans to create infrastructure to support the laptops and how they would use the laptops in effort to achieve the 8 MDGs.

UNDP is the most expansive UN organization as well as the prime agency in promoting and supporting development efforts towards achieving the MDGs.  UNDP could help distribute and localize OLPC through their in country offices, create government partnerships, ensure that the laptops were part of a government's larger development efforts, and offer greater legitimacy to OLPC.  In short, the project would move from laptops and education to massive nationwide efforts encompassing all areas of development -- roads; teacher training; connectivity; community organizing and education; security; anti-corruption; total information access; and of course, technology. Ideally, wealthy nations would help pay for the projects as part of their overall aid packages.

This dream of laptops as a catalyst to achieving the MDGs faltered though as early-adopter nations began defaulting on their financial commitments to purchase laptops.  Suddenly, the price, around 150 USD, began going up instead of down, with only Uruguay following through with a national OLPC program.  Negroponte partially blames technology corporations that grew weary of OLPC's encroachment on emerging markets. India -- a potentially massive client for OLPC --made a deal to develop its own laptop for kids. Intel gained commitments from Brazil to buy Classmate PCs. Negroponte found the project in a position where he had to scale back and create a completely new business model rather than scale up as he had hoped to under the UNDP plan.

Which brings us to the present...OLPC will shift, at least temporarily, to a "Give One Get One (G1G1)" model. Individuals in North America will be asked to buy laptops for their children for 399 USD reversing a previous commitment by OLPC to not sell the laptop in the US. As the slogan says, buyers will get one for their child, and the other 200 dollars will be used to give one to a child in an OLPC target country. The campaign will launch on Nov. 12th and run for a limited time (initially planned for two weeks, but this will likely be extended)  Negroponte can now make much smaller deals with governments and even offer to supplement their purchase through G1G1. OLPC hopes that the model will allow the laptops back into the Least Developed Countries and successful implementation on a small scale will encourage a rapid scaling up, allowing Negroponte to achieve his goal of producing 80-100 million laptops by 2009, a feat that would give OLPC greater than 20% share of the world laptop market. Speaking by phone today, Raul Zambrono expressed reserved optimism that the plans laid by UNDP and OLPC will still come to fruition. In fact, the recent forum was hosted by the Office of the High Representative of Least Developed Countries, signaling a new partnership between LDCs and OLPC, though one with few concrete details and no financial commitment yet.

Regardless of the final outcome, Negroponte can claim some early success and boast surviving a crash-course in world markets and global competition. OLPCs early success, even without the checks being signed, caused large tech manufacturers to speed up their efforts to create products and infrastructure for consumers in poorer countries. These "consumers" came to be seen as valuable customers worth fighting over rather than technological charity cases. Negroponte's public scrap with the likes of Microsoft and Intel clearly showed him when to compromise and when to compete while trying to change the world one laptop at a time; G1G1 laptops will ship with Intel processors and be Windows-ready. Whether at $100 or $400, it still appears the revolution will be computerized, but it likely won't be as Sugary sweet as Negroponte hoped.

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Jason Wojciechowski runs interactive media production for the UN Millennium Campaign.

Related Links

• One Laptop per Child

Links from Article Text

• One Laptop per Child
• Give One Get One
• Quanta
• Wired featured front page stories
• OLPC and Intel
• Classmate PC
• Ebay
• small village in Cambodia
• United Nations Development Programme
• Millennium Development Goals
• India
• Brazil
• Give One Get One
• Office of the High Representative of Least Developed Countries
• Windows-ready
• UN Millennium Campaign