Archive for the ‘conference’ tag
OLPC Conference in Sydney, NSW
This coming Sunday, June 1st (which is tomorrow), the newly-established One Laptop Per Child, Australia crew will be hosting a conference in Sydney. I’ve got another volunteer opportunity this weekend (more on that in another post), which makes getting to New South Wales virtually impossible. Otherwise, I’d probably be there. Maybe. I don’t know… meh.
My hesitancy stems form the fact that OLPC News (among others–TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Engadget), has been reporting on what appears to be a major shift in OLPC values. It seems that Nicholas Negroponte–the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and the proverbial grandfather of the OLPC project–has agreed to align himself and the initiative with Microsoft. The new generation of OLPC laptops will all include simplified versions of Windows XP.
The problem here, of course, is that this will happen at the expense of Sugar Labs, the newly-formed company that created the educational, open-source, GNU/Linux-based operating system that currently lives, albeit temporarily, on the OLPC XO 1. Moreover, this is a relatively clear departure from the stated constructionist mission of the whole OLPC project in that the use of proprietary software (Windows XP) subjects children, it is sometimes said, to “a regime of social control.” Windows, which makes up over 90% of all operating systems in use worldwide, represents a more hierarchical, capitalistic, top-down instructionism. Or at least that’s what the OLPC fans are saying online.
Honestly, I’m on the fence about all this. The idealism behind Sugar, etc., is certainly admirable, but it may be a little foolish in the face of global poverty. There’s a tendency in the privileged world (ie, the United States) to confuse techy, middle-class intellectual discussions with reality. I would venture to suggest, however, that the heated debates taking place online now have very little to do with the impoverishment experienced everyday in the ‘developing’ world. Trying to choose between constructionism and instructionism, for instance, is a radically different bargain than choosing between your child’s education and food for the family.
My understanding here, also, is that the OLPC project moved towards XP precisely because poor countries were demanding it. Whether correct or not, government and community leaders in the ‘developing’ world felt that independent, open-source software like Sugar’s wouldn’t be as useful as XP. They wanted their youth to learn on an operating system that was considered ’standard’ around the globe, and common to practices within business, government, education, NGO, etc., of wealthier countries.
Despite the fact that it emboldens Microsoft’s monopoly, and contradicts the premise of the open-source OLPC project, I can’t blame the disenfranchized and impoverished for wanting XP. They are making pragmatic decisions that reflect difficult, real-world circumstances. In this regard, I suppose I would rather protect and promote the rights of marginalized people to make (potentially) bad decisions, than force-feed them an idea that may not be useful. I mean, the technology isn’t as important as the people.
However this conflict is resolved within the OLPC community, I do think it behooves social justice activists to educate themselves simultaneously about technological alternatives and real-world contexts. Not every good idea is a workable one. Were it so, we’d have discarded with neoliberalism a long damn time ago.
