OLPC News 100 Laptop XO Fundraising Drive

OLPCnews.com or more specifically Wayan Vota and Alexandre Van de Sande from OLPCnews have started a fund-raising campaign to support one local OLPC effort via the OLPC's "give many" initiative!

I'm not going to go into any details here because you can find them in Alexandre's article but basically they want to collect $21.400 which leaves exactly $20.000 after the processing fees of $1.400 have been paid. Thanks to "give many" 20K gives you 100 X0s, 60 of them will go to whatever educational institution you (or rather your local OLPC "learning club" - as they call it) decide on and 40 go towards a school designated by OLPC. The great thing is that the OLPCnews.com readers will have a say in the decision of where the 60 laptops as they're involved in the decision and discussion process surrounding the campaign.

They have even created a very nice video to promote their efforts and I've embedded it here for your viewing pleasure:


I certainly think this is an outstanding initiative and once I receive my money for December I'll certainly be making my $100 contribution via their Fundable page.

However I also have to add that this initiative shows that there's clearly a need to improve the current distribution- and purchasing-system that OLPC is using at the moment. I definitely think there are many aspects that need to be improved. The three most important examples for me include:

(a) bring "give 1, get" 1 to Europe and the rest of the world
(b) improve communication with the public about G1G1, especially when it comes to details such as estimated (and realistic) time of shipping
(c) set up a program that allows developers, educators, universities, students, local groups (such as OLPC Austria, etc. to have easy and reliable access to X0 hardware when needed [on a sidenote I'd say that the immediate demand we here at OLPC Austria have in order to improve and facilitate our own developments and to support various groups that are forming at universities are at least 10 ~ 15 laptops; however I also know that OLPC is currently working on setting up a new developers program and I hope to have more information about that in ~2 weeks]

Anyway, I hope you'll also support the "OLPC News 100 Laptop XO Fundraising Drive" for now!