 Quite some years ago (2006-08), we brought the #OLPC AKA the 100$ laptop to Ethiopia as pilot. A surprising thing happened. The laptops were often without battery power in the morning. A thing that wasn’t anticipated. It had two reasons. One was the keyboard LED (it was removed in later series). It was used by the parents to have a light at home. The other was a bigger surprise. The parents used the mesh networking to discuss market prices for their produce. Fascinating. 1/8  92 comments
Decentralisation remains an underexplored field in commerce and communication, IMHO. For obvious reasons. Capitalism relies on control and centralisation. Kind of a contradiction, IMHO. A reason why decentralisation and transparency are often touted as goals, but never really implemented. 3/3 (In a flat and open field, the mesh network of an OLPC, that didn’t need the CPU for transmitting network traffic, so still worked when the OLPC was „sleeping“ had a range of up to 4 kilometres)  Going through my archives, I notice I might have been confused. This goes back even further. This happened 2008 in the pilot in Ethiopia. Rwanda was 2014. At that time the LED was already long gone. My apologies. I have corrected the original toot. (And thank you all for being kind and respectful in the comments thus far. The OLPC was (and is) a defining part of my private and professional life. I was only involved on the sidelines but I met people that ware so deeply invested into the ideas. Developers. Children. Teachers. But also aggressive opponents, lobbyists that did everything possible to kill the project. It teached me a lot. And I still feel sad it never lived up to its potential. Maybe it will. I'm still a believer) Me, 2007 :)  @jwildeboer I never got to see one in person. I did get to buy a knock off from HP and installed Ubuntu on it. Used it for web development. The ideas sparked from the OLPC live on. @wtrmt Whenever you're in Munich, happy to meet and bring one or two along for you to fiddle with :) @jwildeboer wow! That is so kind of you! Regards from a fellow nerd, from far away, in Chile. I hope to go to Germany and meet you! @jwildeboer we gave away OLPC machines at linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne. I was also a huge fan of the program and sorry it did not reach its full potential. But I believe it changed computing. Cheaper laptops made it more accessible to more people. The eepc and chromebooks came after. I’ve lost track of what’s happening with sugar. I should revisit it all. @kattekrab "The little machine that could" will always come to mind whenever I see one :)  @jwildeboer I'm still sad on a regular basis that the PixelQi technology died on the vine. @jwildeboer I've loved learning your behind the scenes stories on the OLPC, today. The device may not be in production, but the dream behind it lives on. @jwildeboer Thank you so much for sharing this. Amazing things I didn't know.  @CGdoppelpunkt It's still around :) In total around 3 million laptops have been distributed over the years. https://laptop.org/aboutolpc/  @jwildeboer this story is extraordinarily stupid (as far as the government goes) because the goal of #OLPC was to improve education, and then the government fumes because their population starts to make educated decisions... @DJGummikuh It’s IMHO one of the reasons we never saw the OLPC concept being introduced in a western country. I tried at the time. But we were always destroyed by government agencies with the „it doesn’t run Microsoft Office“ argument. @jwildeboer yeah I also remember there was a huge outcry that it would destroy the mobile devices market and people should rather pay hundreds of Euros for Hardware they don't need to "not upset the market" 🤮 @jwildeboer @DJGummikuh I cannot stress enough how much I hate MS Office and MS in general, specially when we consider the vast amounts of taxpayer money that goes to that putrid hole in government hw and sw. There should be a hunting season for lobbyists, like other invasive predator species. It's impossible to get rid of them, but they can be controlled like other predators.  @DJGummikuh @jwildeboer Similar to something my kid's first grade teacher said about US education: "Yeah, they talk a lot about critical thinking, but they don't like it when the kids use it on them." @jwildeboer I think a lot about the fact that we all have pocket communicators with many different radios in them, but if disaster ever strikes, none of them can communicate with each other. The more I think about it, the more it feels like a sign of a world gone mad.  @simon Do have a look at Briar. Though it’s a shame that such functionality isn’t *mandated* for every mobile sold.  Other than the Briar Project, I know of nothing that addresses handset to handset direct comms. And no one I know is even vaguely interested in it and few, other than activisty tech types, even think the idea has value. It's maddening. castoff phones on thrift stores, wifi only even, no sim, have more computing power than most people had in 1990. And no interest in them except as commodity platforms for whatever it is we do. @tomjennings The totally weird thing is that Apple implemented such a thing with Airdrop. It was used in the Hong Kong protests to distribute warnings and calls for demonstrations. Ultimately Apple had to change its implementation after pressure by the Chinese government. @simon  @jwildeboer @tomjennings @simon Did not know about Apple changing implementation - now I wonder how long I’ve been assuming Bluetooth where there was actually an internet involved. @tomjennings But what would have been the commercial and government/regulatory incentives to make this happen? Telcos want to be able to charge you, and governments like knowing where you are and who you talk to. @jwildeboer I was wondering what happened to #OLPC just last week. Thanks for this information.  @jwildeboer while OLPC was not really meant to be catch up, I was amazed by this technology, and mesh networking was part of it for this reason.As gov not being amused because of pressure towards merchants.....LOL  @jwildeboer I love this story. Do you have a citation? If this is a stupid question and you're somehow someone that was on the ground relating a personal narrative I apologize. @vees I am sure there are some articles about it out there that I don't have in my archives. I can only offer you my assurance that this happened. I was involved in the coordination and discussions with the core developers that solved these problems on site and beyond. So are you saying the government was part of the problem and wanted to keep the farmers in the dark? @blacklight447 They run Fedora with the Sugar UI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_(desktop_environment) @jwildeboer I saw it at a CCCamp many years ago and I was deeply impressed.  Tja, heute gibt es Android-Smartphones für den gleichen Preis und mit einem darauf installierten Freifunk-Mesh müsste sich das umsetzen lassen, was der OLPC leisten sollte. Ich habe einen hier. Mir wollte er nie zeigen, dass eines der installierten Programme auch real funktioniert, vielleicht war er ja ausgelastet, nach nicht vorhandenen Mesh-Kontakten zu suchen. Aber schön zu hören, dass er wenigstens in Rwanda nützlich war. @Life_is Die 10 OLPC die ich habe bauen problemlos ihr Mesh und letztens hatten wir 10 Kinder, die damit fleissig und begeistert Musik gemacht haben. @antifarben  @jwildeboer @Life_is @antifarben Dann sind es aber TLPA (ten laptops per adult) 🦆. (Aber ja, die Dinger waren echt cool!) @marcel Die Programme darauf sind auch sehr cool — es wäre toll, sie in Linux Distros integriert zu bekommen. Oder sind sie das schon? @jwildeboer @Life_is @antifarben  I think that "keyboard light problem" speaks to a need to have cheap solar rechargeable LED lamps. @JeffGrigg From today's perspective — sure. But this was back in 2008 ... @jwildeboer The keyboard LED was really good, by the way. I used it to type in many a night. (before I started attaching an external keyboard with which I could touch type blindly)  @jwildeboer @jwildeboer If I remember right, everything was open source. I wonder if this could be implemented on modern circuitry. I think a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W would be more powerful than much of the architecture. @jwildeboer  I remember the OLPC project very well. I read everything I could find on it. I vividly remember first reading about it in Wired and Papert and Nicholas Negroponte’s writings. It was a fascinating project @jwildeboer have you got citations for Ethiopia and the mesh? I have similar stories but involving a different country and not using the mesh (it never really lived up to expectations, and I'm not sure the radio on the device had enough power to push it 4km) @jwildeboer The OLPC is a fascinating piece of engineering history. Do you have more inside information on the screen technology? @jwildeboer maybe it's time to revive it again? Cause nowadays hardware should be even cheaper and less energy consuming nor? @jwildeboer I remember taking delivery of a pallet with 100 of them for linux.conf.au in 2008 and unboxing them all to upgrade them (to stop a bug breaking the conference wifi) and re-packing them to give them all away to developers :-)  @jwildeboer this is awesome. Are you aware of a similar mesh networking technology that's still available for current day computers? Sounds like this should get much more attention from the OS community. |
Gregory's Server
With the mesh network built in to the OLPC, a local network that worked without needing a central access point (or the CPU), farmers used the chat function to compare prices offered for their produce and found out that merchants offered different prices. Draining the batteries while their kids were sleeping. This led to pressure on the merchants to pay better. The government was not amused. And mesh networking became a problem. Ultimately an inspiring story that was never told, IMHO. 2/3