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Monday, November 13, 2006 Part I: Philanthropy's New PrototypeThe cofounder of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to make $100 laptops available to poor children throughout the world. The next few months will be critical in determining whether the One Laptop per Child project succeeds. By James Surowiecki
In the decades after the Civil War, libraries were scarce in much of the United States. Many towns had no library at all, and those libraries that did exist were typically small and private, run by clubs or lodges that had scraped together collections of books to lend to their members or, on occasion, to outsiders who paid a fee for borrowing privileges. For the most part, towns did not have library buildings; book collections were housed instead in cheap offices or in unused space in public buildings. Even in bigger cities, it was often difficult to borrow books. Until the very end of the 19th century, Pittsburgh, for instance, had just one private lending library, and it struggled to stay afloat. And few people, if any, took seriously the idea that every town in the country should have a public library where citizens would have free and equal access to books. Andrew Carnegie changed all that. Carnegie was an embodiment of the American Dream; born poor in Scotland, he had emigrated to the United States and built a fortune in the steel industry, turning himself into one of the country's wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. As Carnegie told it, when he was a young boy, he'd had to work instead of going to school. But a wealthy local man named Colonel Anderson had put together a small library of about 400 books, and every Saturday, Carnegie was allowed to read and borrow some of them. The experience, Carnegie wrote later, convinced him that there was no more productive way to help children develop than to build public libraries. And so, beginning in the 1880s, he set out to do just that, in towns all across the country. Strictly speaking, Carnegie began his campaign outside the United States; his first library, built in 1881, was in his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. The first library he built in the United States, eight years later, opened in Braddock, PA, where Carnegie Steel had one of its biggest mills. A year later came the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, PA. The Allegheny library was important because it was the first funded according to the model that Carnegie would follow thereafter: instead of simply paying for and endowing the library, he offered the town a large initial grant on the condition that it agree to pay for the library's operations thereafter. (In what came to be known as the "Carnegie formula," towns generally committed to an annual budget--for maintenance, new books, and so on--that equaled 10 percent of Carnegie's original gift.) These were, in other words, to be genuinely public libraries, dependent not on the largesse of a single person but on communities' willingness to subsidize their own access to knowledge. That willingness was not always easy to inspire; in some towns it was actually illegal at first to use tax money to pay for libraries. But as more towns accepted Carnegie's deal, and as it became evident that the libraries were generally very popular once they were built, more towns decided that they, too, needed free libraries. By the time he died in 1919, some 30 years after the Allegheny library opened, Carnegie had given away $350 million of his fortune; he spent more than $60 million of it to build more than 2,800 libraries, including almost 2,000 in the United States and almost 700 in Great Britain. His donations had so effectively revolutionized public opinion that by the middle of the 20th century, it was the rare American town that dared go without a public library.
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Part III: Philanthropy's New Prototype
11/15/2006
Comments
gabrielg01 on 11/13/2006 at 12:38 AM
292
http://www.palm.com/us/products/handhelds/z22/
...and we are talking about a commercial product, which is supposed to generate profits. That means that if you were to sell this PDA at philantropy prices it would cost much, much less...perhaps $50? Then you could use the $50 difference to attach a larger screen and keyboard to turn it more into a laptop format. It could run simple programs, and it could read ebooks. There you have it.
SVE on 11/14/2006 at 2:02 AM
42
As many firms have sadly found out in the past, a particular price point is never a good enough reason or unique enough value proposition for customers to adopt a whole new architecture. Low price is an unsustainable advantage. The incumbents can eventually match any price point with their existing design approaches. It just takes time and steady improvement.
To justify any new type of laptop, you have to do something that the incumbents cannot match, or be in a space that they are vacating. But here, the incumbents are reducing their prices, adding wireless communications, and improving their power consumptions. $100 price is not some big new revolution.
mattharper on 11/14/2006 at 4:35 PM
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gabrielg01 on 11/14/2006 at 11:44 PM
292
I think this "laptop" is in fact just a reinvention of the wheel, a reinvention of the PDA in fact: small screen, low power chipset, flash memory, SD card slot etc. The only real difference is the physical format of the device. It's a bit of an exaggeration to call this a laptop. But call it what you want.
And 2 more things:
1) if you want to help the 3rd world with real laptops, you can just gather up the old laptops for free, refurbish them, and send them overseas. There is a well established precedent for this with cell phones. You can donate your old cell phone to foundations, and they will refurbish it, and send it to Africa. I believe this will be done with laptops too.
2) People in extremely poor or devastated areas have other, more urgent priorities: like clean water, food, basic medication, physical security from bandits or marauding militias. When you're starving, and your village is hit by cholera you won't care for a laptop. In fact a radio or a cell phone is a million times more useful, because you can use it to ask for help.
ssargent on 11/26/2006 at 2:30 AM
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OLD COMPUTERS WILL NOT WORK. THESE LAPTOPS ARE MADE SO THEY ARE HARD TO BREAK. PEOPLE IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES ARE NOT USE TO WORKING WITH LAPTOPS OR THEIR FRAGILITY AND DO NOT HAVE THE MONEY TO GET A NEW ONE IF IT BREAKS. PDA'S AND CELL PHONES CAN SUFFER FROM THIS SAME PROBLEM.
ALSO, Read the part about how it can be powered mechanically (reinventing the power wheel). Which is another distinction between this laptop and cellphones, pda's, and refurbished laptops.
Finally, you bring ridiculous things like choleral outbreaks. You really think that the western world will ever commit to feeding all the hungry and curing all the sick in the world. maybe their better off getting a laptop and reading about sanitation techniques and methods of building water filters from simple materials to prevent outbreaks instead of just waiting for western countries to drop medicine on them.
As for militias, maybe they could download some instructions on explosive making off the internet to defend themselves (I'm being facetious). I'm not sure that all poor people are inherently in physical danger so I'm not sure why militias are the deal breaker on this one.
As for food, lots of food production knowledge can be procured online or distributed on a disc with the laptops. You clearly favor dependency over giving people the information to help themselves. I'm not saying we can't give them food or medicine or anything else in addition to laptops. Mostly it seems like you are engaging in shallow criticism in your search for something to say.
If you really think this is such a terrible idea maybe you should design a better laptop homie. Not saying this is the greatest thing ever or that it's going to solve all the world's problems, but it sure isn't a bad idea.
DMercer on 12/14/2006 at 11:25 AM
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"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."
Give them medicines, food, etc., and you'll make them dependent upon you for them, and resentful of you when it's not available.
Give them access to education, teach them, and you give them something they can call their own for generations to come.
plasticdoc on 11/14/2006 at 12:51 AM
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grausc01 on 11/15/2006 at 9:44 AM
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pelo8280 on 12/31/2006 at 9:53 AM
1
As for the mp3 player, I don't know about $50, but you might be interested in iPod Linux: http://ipodlinux.org/
anonymous on 11/22/2006 at 12:10 PM
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clboling on 01/02/2007 at 12:13 PM
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Viswakarma on 01/04/2007 at 3:56 AM
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rayalu on 01/06/2007 at 4:39 AM
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sitamraju on 01/07/2007 at 2:04 AM
1