[Grassroots-l] localized or "international" keyboard ?

[Steve Holton]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 5:43 PM,  <s.boutayeb at free.fr> wrote:
> The difficulty in this discussion is to understand that we are dealing here with
> a subjective issue: while it's fully understandable, from a cost perspective and
> for rationalisation purposes, to unify an industrial product like the XO, the
> deployment of laptops in countries with unusual keyboard dispositions will fail
> with no doubt.
>
> Let me give you a real world example: a few days ago, our grassroot organisation
> "OLPC France" experimented the first program called "Discovery action" which
> consisted in  lending a "demo set" with one XO, some documentation, etc. to a
> school. This is a very small action, but we are confident, that we will manage
> very soon to undertake greater actions with more XOs and more partners.
>
> So, the first school teacher, a very capable and experimented person, discovered
> the XO (may be one of the first XOs in a school in France) with her pupils aged
> 6-7 years, last Saturday. They played around with the funny green laptop, for
> example with the Speak activity and were surprised by the funny guy saying
> "petit ours" whith the funny accent.
>
> Today, two days later, it's the school director's turn, who will be
> experimenting with the XO for one or two more days. But, before the teacher gave
> the XO to her "director", she said: "anyway, this will not work". "- What do you
> mean?". "You know, it's not an AZERTY type keyboard."
> Azerty referring to the layout of the French keyboard.
> To understand the reaction of this smart teacher is that whe have to deal with
> irrational persons who will stick to their habits.

There are no irrational people; everyone believes their own actions to
be completely rational. There are only those we cannot understand, and
label 'irrational' for our own benefit. ;-)

> Consequently, yes localized keyboards are indispensable, but if rational
> considerations conduct to the decisions to ship standard keyboards to all
> countries, the responsability of the local grassroots communities and the
> partners whith wich they will manage to work on this issue will be to adapt an
> inadequate product to irrational people (we have not other product and no other
> people). We'll have to deal with that irrationalism, paradoxally, especially
> here in France, in the country of rationalism. Either through local repair
> centers either with localization sets including a screwdriver, a spare keyboard
> or with a printing solution...

There are two issues being discussed here:

1. Is it important to give children an educational tool localized for
their language?
2. Is it important to localize these XO's so that they are more
effective for fund raising?

Most people (most rational people?) agree the first is essential.
But it is cost prohibitive to localize XO's for a G1G1-type program
where the most common usages will be:

a) as demonstration units
b) re-tasked by geeks into laptop computers
c) given to the elderly as a first computer

Yes, a localized keyboard is critical for a laptop computer, and the
XO will be a less effective fund raiser as a laptop computer without
localization. But that's why it is so critical for OLPC to make
absolutely crystal clear that these XO's are not laptop computers,
that they are intended as educational devices for children in specific
locales (where the localization *is* complete) but that they are
/still/ really neat and really worthwhile even so.

Let the geeks do the localizing (they will anyway) and we could use their help.

-- 
Steve Holton
sph0lt0n at gmail.com