Negroponte’s ivory towers crumble: The OLPC’s travails

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.

so writes Ivan Krstić, who resigned as the director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project recently.

As this Ars Technica article on the issue points out, the XO laptop has been plagued with a litany of issues, from its rising cost of production to the many ways in which is has simply NOT sold according to early hype and expectation. The articles ends by saying that “At this stage, it seems unlikely that OLPC will be able to fulfill all of its ambitious goals.”

That’s putting it lightly.

Also read my other articles exploring the potential and pitfalls of the OLPC:
Porn on the “$100″ PC
ICT4Peace, OLPC and Technology for Social Change – A conversation with Paul Currion
To be or not to be – The $100 laptop
From the Sinclair ZX81 to OLPC’s Sugar

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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One thought on “Negroponte’s ivory towers crumble: The OLPC’s travails”

  1. Pingback: The XO comes to Sri Lanka « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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