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Quite some years ago (2006-08), we brought the AKA the 100$ laptop to Ethiopia as pilot. A surprising thing happened. The laptops were often without battery power in the morning. A thing that wasn’t anticipated. It had two reasons. One was the keyboard LED (it was removed in later series). It was used by the parents to have a light at home. The other was a bigger surprise. The parents used the mesh networking to discuss market prices for their produce. Fascinating. 1/8

With the mesh network built in to the OLPC, a local network that worked without needing a central access point (or the CPU), farmers used the chat function to compare prices offered for their produce and found out that merchants offered different prices. Draining the batteries while their kids were sleeping. This led to pressure on the merchants to pay better. The government was not amused. And mesh networking became a problem. Ultimately an inspiring story that was never told, IMHO. 2/8

Decentralisation remains an underexplored field in commerce and communication, IMHO. For obvious reasons. Capitalism relies on control and centralisation. Kind of a contradiction, IMHO. A reason why decentralisation and transparency are often touted as goals, but never really implemented. 3/8

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

(In a flat and open field, the mesh network of an OLPC, that didn’t need the CPU for transmitting network traffic, so still worked when the OLPC was „sleeping“ had a range of up to 4 kilometres) 4/8

Going through my archives, I notice I might have been confused. This goes back even further. This happened 2006-08 in the pilot in Ethiopia. Rwanda was 2014. At that time the LED was already long gone. My apologies. I have corrected the original toot. 5/8

(Thank you all for being kind and respectful in the comments thus far. The OLPC was (and is) a defining part of my private and professional life. I was only involved on the sidelines but I met people that were so deeply invested into the ideas. Developers. Children. Teachers. But also aggressive opponents, lobbyists that did everything possible to kill the project. It teached me a lot. And I still feel sad it never lived up to its potential. Maybe it will. I'm still a believer) Me, 2007 :) 6/8

laptop.org is still around, though I haven’t been in contact with them since years. They distributed around 3 million laptops to children in total. Mostly unnoticed by us here in the west. 7/8

laptop.orgOLPC – More than a laptop

(as expected, the naysayers and opponents are now in the comments trying to turn my thread into negativity. As always. It's the internet :) Well, I still hope I could give some of you some positive food for thought on unintended, but fascinating effects that we observed many years ago when the project started.) 8/8

Meanwhile, I am sourcing the rather unusual DC power plugs for the OLPC. They are 5,5x1,7x9,5mm DC barrel plugs [1]. Once I get hold of a 10 pack of them, I can build adapter cables using USB-C PD as the OLPC is happy to work with anything between 11-18V DC. Wouldn't that be cool? 10 OLPC from 16 years ago, powered with USB-C? :)

[1] wiki.laptop.org/go/Battery_and

Which is not as cool as the cow power solution for the OLPC, tested in one of the pilots in Khairat (India) back in the days :) wiki.laptop.org/go/Cow_Power

@jwildeboer such a good idea and wished there was an equivalent item now.

@luke @jwildeboer

Chromebook hardware is *very* cheap these days and can be reflashed into a functioning Linux system pretty easily. So it wouldn't be *impossible* to maintain the software stack for something like this as a FOSS project.

(I occasionally see bulk lots of out-of-support Chromebooks on EBay for ~$40 per computer and I keep thinking that there's potential there.)

@suetanvil @luke @jwildeboer at least on the chromebook I have, the wifi chip isn't capable of p2p modes, iirc.

@jwildeboer I would call this the "BytesWagon"
Compute/Comm for the masses!

@jwildeboer I never got to see one in person. I did get to buy a knock off from HP and installed Ubuntu on it. Used it for web development.

The ideas sparked from the OLPC live on.

@wtrmt Whenever you're in Munich, happy to meet and bring one or two along for you to fiddle with :)

@jwildeboer wow! That is so kind of you! Regards from a fellow nerd, from far away, in Chile. I hope to go to Germany and meet you!

@jwildeboer we gave away OLPC machines at linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne.

I was also a huge fan of the program and sorry it did not reach its full potential. But I believe it changed computing. Cheaper laptops made it more accessible to more people. The eepc and chromebooks came after.

I’ve lost track of what’s happening with sugar. I should revisit it all.

lwn.net/Articles/267113/

lwn.netA moment from LCA2008 [LWN.net]

@kattekrab "The little machine that could" will always come to mind whenever I see one :)

@kattekrab @jwildeboer I remember hearing about this project! It was a great idea. I got an eepc in 2009 to play with, and my non-verbal 2 year old son started using it regularly. Without permission. He worked it all out by himself. He’d go straight to the eepc every time I kicked him off the Mac. That kid went on to build a 1980s video game emulator with a Raspberry Pi by himself in 2021 (COVID lockdown boredom project).

@jwildeboer I'm still sad on a regular basis that the PixelQi technology died on the vine.

@jwildeboer Thank you so much for sharing this. Amazing things I didn't know.

@jwildeboer
This was so amazing. The whole OLPC idea, the latptops, this story and the amazing use-case you just described. Thanks for sharing.

p.s. I'm a programmer & a tech blogger from Iran, covered the OLPC news ~2007 :D jadi.net/2007/05/%DB%8C%DA%A9-

Thanks again.

@CGdoppelpunkt It's still around :) In total around 3 million laptops have been distributed over the years. laptop.org/aboutolpc/

laptop.orgAbout OLPC – OLPC

@jwildeboer Ik herinner het me. Wat een prachtig idee was het. En hoe jammer dat het zo werd tegengewerkt. Maar wat hielp het de boeren!!!

@Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: what has become of this initiative? i haven't heard anything about it since quite some time ...

@jwildeboer The ending of Red Hat's involvement in that project was also seemingly marked by the end of Red Hat trying to bring Linux to kids in general. It was really sad to me because if things had been different, Fedora might be the reference platform for the Raspberry Pi instead...

@Conan_Kudo We continued to support Sugar on a stick for many years in the Fedora community. fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_o The main reason we didn’t became the default OS on the raspberry is that it isn’t really an open platform, IMHO.

fedoraproject.orgSugar on a Stick - Fedora Project Wiki

@jwildeboer @Conan_Kudo Not really, no. Any x86 machine is less open than a RaspberryPi, and I don't see Fedora having a problem with that.

@mripard @jwildeboer @Conan_Kudo the first Raspberry Pi boards needed lots of binary blobs and patched code to run Linux. It's only in the last 5 years or so that they run anything close to mainline Linux.

The Pidora project (Fedora on Raspberry Pi) was run out of Toronto by some friends of mine. It was extremely difficult to get the distro built and packaged. In the end, they had to abandon the project

I had so many ARM SBCs that were dropped by their makers. VIA APC, anyone?

@scruss @mripard @jwildeboer What do you mean "needed"? It still does. And the integration work is still a mess, even now.

@Conan_Kudo @jwildeboer this was despite best efforts for the Open Technology group at Seneca College to build and maintain Fedora for the Raspberry Pi. Plenty support for the (then) Raspberry Pi foundation, little to none from Red Hat.

@jwildeboer wow, never knew it was that many. Thanks for giving some more background info on that project; I knew of it, bit not a whole lot about it.

@jwildeboer To counterbalance the naysayers. OLPC was one of the projects that happened early in my time when I got interested in open source and it was always a project I found extremely interesting.
Up to your thread today I always thought OLPC had been a totally failed project and today I learned that they actually shipped a lot of machines, so thanks for that!

@jwildeboer for what it's worth: I rarely take the time to check the various answers so most of the time I just read what you post. Which I value. Thank you.

@jwildeboer I’ve still got my two. Both work, other the batteries dead in one. They were really cool devices for their time (even if that keyboard is a little too diminutive for adult hands).

@jwildeboer we're working with them at @EndlessOS! ☺️ A lot of those ideas and legacy live on through our work.

@jwildeboer I remember OLPC bringing a bunch of XO's to linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne to give away to a bunch of people with instructions to "please do something wonderful" with them, or pass them on to people who may do so. I loved the thought, though not sure what happened with them. flickr.com/photos/chrissamuel/

Flickrphoto2008-01-30T10:57:52-000039.JPGBy Chris_Samuel

@jwildeboer I remember Microsoft doing its best to kill off cheap, affordable, widely available Linux laptops. What a horrible thing it was to watch this and how it was killed.

@jwildeboer
I appreciate all your work, I had never heard of it but your heart seems to be in the right place, thank you!

@jwildeboer Software Freedom Day, Melbourne
Hosted by LUV (Linux Users Victoria) & others at The Hub, Melbourne, 2008SEP20.

Hens teeth. Just a few years later the #RPi came out ☺️

#OLPC / #laptop / #computers <flickr.com/photos/bootload/alb>

@jwildeboer
Hey Jan, great to read your story about #OLPC here :-)
Back then, I have been excited about this project and other meshwork thingies like freifunk.net/en/ #freifunk
Nowadays a new round of meshwork thingies is on the horizon with mobile phone Quintus? by volla.com and #Holochain
holochain.org
blog.holochain.org/mobile-holo

But this is nö more in the lane of 'One Laptop Per Child' as it is 6 times more expensive.
Did you have hands-on experience with this hardware or software back then?

@anlomedad

freifunk.netfreifunk.netFreifunk steht für freie Kommunikation in digitalen Datennetzen

@jwildeboer @OLPC #meshNetwork is something we should really get as default in all #laptops and #phones. I will try to keep an eye on #IEEE802.11s

@paoloredaelli @jwildeboer some years ago mesh networking in phones was a no-go, because it would drain their battery too quickly. Lately I was very surprised to see a Gl.inet XE300 travel router last for 8 hours on its integrated 5000mAh battery with a #Freifunk firmware with #11s + #batman_adv (and no user traffic). So maybe portable 24/7 mesh networking devices in your pocket or bag is on the table again these days.
I'm wondering what #OLPC's experience with 11s and battery life was.

@jwildeboer what an astonishing device! Feels like something straight out of Walkaway. A sense of sorrow that our devices aren't nearly like this :(

@jwildeboer 4km is amazing for the tech and power budget of the device such as it was at the time. Coming from an Amateur Radio background, I should dig into some of the current mesh network apps and see what I can dig up.

@jwildeboer

How does that work?!?!? Does the mesh subsystem have its own processor with access to the keyboard and screen?

(Yes, *this* is the part I'm fixating on.)