[Olpc-open] Why is G1G1 program ending?

[Steve Holton]

On Dec 29, 2007 3:12 AM, Nicole Lee <nicole.lee at students.olin.edu> wrote:

> the G1G1 program is a huge strain on the people directly involved in the
> project, though. there are a lot of benefits, such as the number of
> enthusiastic people brought into the project, eager to get cracking and help
> out.


Would a more limited program be beneficial?

Apple has long run a special program available only to educators, offering a
discount on products headed into an educational setting. I'd propose a
similar system for OLPC to limit the scope:

* Make XO's available only to *educational institutions* (public schools,
private schools, homeschools); at a rate no greater than 1 XO per student
per year.
* Maintain an at-cost (or at-G1G1-cost) volunteer-run spares shop to ensure
broken XO's make it back to the developers for feedback and customers aren't
locked-out by a hardware failure.

This pulls OLPC completely out of the commercial market.
Re-focuses OLPC onto the educational mission.
Greatly limits the size of the OLPC deployments to be managed.
Targets all of the deployment efforts into the kinds of channels OLPC wants
to support; largish deployments to educational settings where a single
coordinator team is already in place.
Builds competency and infrastructure in support of those deployments.
School administrators would act as the  'support firewall'   (aggregating
and answering  questions) as well as the on-site evangelistic sales staff.
-- 
Steve Holton
sph0lt0n at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/attachments/20071229/32d8eaa3/attachment.htm