There is a fever going around the open source community lately over the One Laptop Per Child project. For those who are not familiar, OLPC is a project to create and sell a $100 laptop to poor communities, for use by children. The story goes that by giving these kids access to first world technology, they will be better equipped for the electronic economy of the 21st century, or something like that.
Everything I read about OLPC is setting off warning bells. The techie in me worries about the design philosophy. In order to avoid paying fees to Microsoft, the laptop will run a custom built distribution of Linux with its own new interface. I have no confidence that the interface will be particularly good, and more importantly, the OLPC experience will have little relation to that of a “real” computer. We don’t need new paradigms; we don’t need to reinvent the wheel because we have a scheme to save the world.
Even worse, the project has been milking its strange new interface for publicity — they apparently think it is an asset! Thankfully, Microsoft has gotten Windows CE to run on the laptop, which is a promising development, and I imagine some of the countries that purchase the laptop will opt to have WinCE preinstalled instead of the Linux distribution.
The more fundamental problem with OLPC is the notion that one road out of poverty for poor nations is giving children cheap access to technology. I can understand why people who love computers would feel that everyone should have a computer, but come on. Education is enormously important to economic growth and poverty reduction, but the countries which moved into sustained economic growth did not do so by giving students laptops! (How do I know? Because many of these countries experienced a shift in growth before laptops existed: see South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, etc.)
If rich countries really want to help, they should consider much more carefully what poor countries need. Is it laptops? Last I checked, careful studies had shown medical interventions to be quite effective in increasing school attendance and even aptitude (kids who are sick when they are very young tend to do worse in school when they are older.) Are there any studies showing that laptops in schools increase aptitude? Are there any studies about laptops in schools in poor countries, at all?
It is noble to want to help the poor, but if we are going to devote a limited amount of resources to help, then we should make sure to maximize the benefit the poor receive from those resources. By this metric, OLPC fails miserably. It is a very nice but fundamentally flawed idea. If it does fail, I just hope that people aren’t discouraged from helping out in general.