The first generation laptop from OLPC, called the XO, is promoted as being very low cost, and child friendly. With a rugged green outer casing and an eminently practical user interface, it certainly looks the part.The laptops aren’t USD 100 yet. In fact, they are available for approximately USD 188,with USD 100 is a benchmark that OLPC expects to achieve when its machines reach a certain level of mass production. Seeing as mass production on the XO only started in November 2007, the 100 USD mark may be some way off.

One Laptop per Child is a non-profit orgnisation created by Nicholas Negroponte to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently affordable to potentially provide every child in the world access to new channels of learning and sharing. In 2004, founder Negroponte decided the time was ripe to take action, noting that technology had sufficiently matured to translate a connected affordable laptop from conjecture to reality. The OLPC initiative was first formally introduced at the 2005 World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

The OLPC way is to eradicate poverty by combating the digital divide through low cost, easily available technology. What differentiates this project from others, and from vendors touting application A or computing platform B as the next big cure for world hunger, is how OLPC is marketed – or rather not marketed.

OLPC is no frills. It does not have the budget or inclination to market its laptops to individuals (though it recently started a Give One Get One Scheme for US and Candian consumers). The onus is on national governments to fully manage implementation the way they see fit. OLPC’s primary focus is on selling their laptops to governments. This makes the project a bit different from other interventions where vendors are expected to get minutely involved with the intricacies of implementation. This is not to say that OLPC does not encourage people to get involved. A quick look at the OLPC wikki reveals interest from a gamut of civil society bodies, individual volunteers, charities. But OLPC thinks that directly liaisoning with every interested party will only serve to divert resources from the prime directive of manufacturing the cheapest laptops possible. All interested parties are instead invited to volunteer for OLPC in different capacities, or get in touch with their national government to become involved in pilots and implementations contribute to content development or testing, and help form and translate content bundles.

The XO laptop is the basic building block on which OLPC wants to offer one laptop per child for nations in Central and South America,Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.According to OLPC, the project basics make economic sense. Given that public education expenditure is low in developing countries, a 20 to 30 USD per annum investment offers a learning opportunity to help children catch up. OLPC reckons that providing millions of laptops is faster and less expensive than building and equipping a large number of schools and training and hiring faculty and administrators. The child then is the central lynchpin in the OLPC intervention model.

The XO laptop is a crucial product driving the OLPC scheme, but it is only a technological artefact. As educators, practitioners and almost anyone linked to education realises, technology is only as good as the content it uses. Fortunately, OLPC has thought that angle out. The scheme is designed around the idea of free sharing of knowledge. A stated OLPC goal is to empower children to share and recreate what they learn, and build on the materials they are given. The scheme encourages collaboration,with each XO laptop being designed with a built-in wireless router that can connect to the internet as well as to nearby XOs.

OLPC envisions clusters of laptops being used at many levels involved in creating storing and finding content to make sharing easy. The programme aims to offer access to libraries of knowledge and content on which to build further.

At many levels, from clusters of laptops to digital libraries at schools, OLPC tools for creating, storing, and finding content are designed to make sharing easy. The idea is to have a collaborative network, where student experimentation with new ideas built on existing information in turn contributes to the content base that can be shared by others. OLPC is not just a low-cost laptop scheme, it is a complex experiment in technology mediated social networking. Such networks will spawn around larger OLPC servers distributed to schools other orgnisations through the government, and will ideally help generate new flows of interaction and knowledge creation through communities of learning.

OLPC also aims to provide access to libraries of knowledge, ideas, experiments, and art that others have created and attempted, as a window into the world and as examples and references on which to build. As children study new areas and add new ideas and experiments, they will be able to update the knowledge they share with those around them.

Economically, the marginal cost of replicating and distributing existing information via networks of XO laptops is close to zero, rendering it a cheaper alternative to the publishing and manual distribution of content. It is the low marginal cost of electronic distribution that makes it viable to create electronic repositories of information. Curators will help to present comprehensible subsets of reference materials and cultural archives, to the choice of core software tools for creation, to the orgnisation and amplification across the network of great local collaborations.

OLPC wants to extend the curation of content at every level. The scheme surmises that children will learn to organise and curate knowledge by creating collections for themselves and for one another, and countries and teachers will curate collections for their children and students. The Journal and Library will let children tag materials and associate them with collections from the moment of creation. Further, a curator community will help identify and build collections of excellent resources for children in each subject, and connect XO users with wider global communities in the wider world that are already creating and organizing free knowledge.

The first 1,000 laptops were built in mid-November 2006 for destructive testing and distribution to developers. The second 3,500 units were manufactured earlier this year and were distributed to schools in nine countries: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Pakistan, Thailand and Uruguay. Several thousand additional units were manufactured in the summer of 2007. These units were distributed to developers and children in Peru, Ethiopia, Romania, Paraguay, and Mexico. High-volume production began on November 5, 2007 in China.

Is the OLPC project with its XO brainchild the solution to the Middle East’s digital divide. The answer is not straightforward. For starters, there are no signs of the XO in Middle East countries. Further, the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are faced not with an economic divide that prohibits access to technology, but a literacy divide that means available technology is not utilised effectively. Nevertheless, for the less liquid governments of countries like Syria, Jordan and Egypt, the low cost XO may prove to be a powerful bridge across the technology chasm.