Posted on April 30, 2008 by Guest Writer in Software: Windows

Your host is Benjamin Mako Hill who graciously allowed this re-publishing of his original post from Copyrighteous for OLPC News.

In the last week, Nicholas Negroponte gave this unfortunate interview decrying "open source fundamentalism" and hinting the possibility of a warmer relationship with Microsoft. Predictably, this has elicited an ongoing response by OLPC News and on the OLPC development mailing lists.

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Ben Mako Hill and XO laptop

Just a few days before Negroponte's statements hit the press, I gave a talk at Penguicon called Laptop Liberation where I talked about why I thought that OLPC's use of a free software operating system and embrace of free software principles was essential for the initiative's success and its own goals of education reform and empowerment. I've been saying similar things for some time.

My main point boiled down to something that, appropriately enough, Nicholas Negroponte was fond of saying back when the project was still called the $100 laptop: an extremely cheap laptop is not a matter of if, but of when and how. This technology will define the terms on which students communicate, collaborate, create, and learn. These terms are dictated by those with the ability to change the software -- by those with access to computers, the source necessary to make changes, and the freedom to share and collaborate.

Constructionism -- OLPC's educational philosophy -- is about putting powerful tools and control over those tools into the hands of learners. It is about learning through exploration and creation -- about shaping one's own educational environment. Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles.

Indeed, OLPC's stated commitment to free software did not happen by accident. OLPC convincingly argued that a free system was essential for creating a learning environment that could be used, tweaked, reinvented, and reapplied by its young users. Through these processes, the XO becomes a force for learning about computation and an environment through which children and their communities can use technology on their terms and in ways that are appropriate and self-directed.

We know that laptop recipients will benefit from being able to fix, improve, and translate the software on their laptops into their own languages and contexts. Much more importantly, however, are all of the uses for the laptops that OLPC has not -- and can not -- think up.

gabe olpc
A future constructionist learner

OLPC is a powerful tool for learning, but ultimate power is only in the hands of those that can freely use, change, and collaborate in defining the terms of their learning environments. In its commitment to software freedom, OLPC chose not to be arrogant by assuming that it knows how its users will use their laptops. Flexible environments designed for constructionist learning and a free software platform protect against this arrogance.

Constructionism and free software, implemented and taught in a classroom, offer a profound potential for exploration, creation, and learning. If you don't like something, change it. If something doesn't work right, fix it. Free software and constructionism put learners in charge of their educational environment in the most explicit and important way possible. They create a culture of empowerment. Creation, collaboration, and critical engagement becomes the norm.

OLPC does not get to choose if educational technology happens. If we work hard at it though we might get to influence the "how" and the "who." Proprietary software vendors like Microsoft want the "who" to be them. With free software, users can be in power. What's at stake is nothing less than autonomy. We can help foster a world where technology is under the control of its users, and where learning is under the terms of its students -- a world where every laptop owner has freedom through control over the technology they use to communicate, collaborate, create, and learn.

This, to me, is the promise of OLPC and its mission. It is the reason I've been involved and in support of the project since nearly day one. It is the reason I left Canonical and Ubuntu to come back to school at MIT to be closer to the then nascent unincorporated project. It is the reason that OLPC's embrace of constructionist philosophy is so deeply important to its mission and the reason that its mission needs to continue to be executed with free and open source software. It is why OLPC needs to be uncompromising about software freedom.

As an adviser and sometimes contractor to OLPC, OLPC does not need to listen to me. But I hope, for all our sake, that they do.

Update: Richard Stallman and the FSF have published another essay on the same topic focused more on pure free software (i.e., less education specific) objections.

Your host is Benjamin Mako Hill who graciously allowed this re-publishing of his original post from Copyrighteous for OLPC News. Hill is an OPLC adviser and contractor and a director of the Free Software Foundation.

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Posted on April 29, 2008 by Yama Ploskonka in Use Cases: Education

gabe olpc
Gabe, focused on XO activities

Let's begin with a warm-up test on what the OLPC should be about. Choose the right answer out of each pair:

  1. Developing Countries parents want their kids to take pictures and write down their thoughts
  2. D.C. parents want their kids to learn English

  3. I'd say music creativity is essential for every kid to to be educated in
  4. I'd say grammar and spelling is essential for every kid to be educated in

  5. the biggest challenge to development is widespread corruption
  6. the biggest challenge to development is that children don't get to explore, experiment and express themselves
Look for the official answers on "Content" on the wiki seems almost like an afterthought. The 'educators' list is pretty much inactive.

The main problem that our Matter of Education has to deal with is to actually give chances to kids to achieve their giftings beyond what their current educational system can offer. OLPC, and/or other such initiatives are to be the "bridge" that have-nots can take to get what the "haves", well, have.

To solve learning inequity is our community's duty.

Humor me for a minute and let me take the easy ones out of the way. Writing and language arts are life skills. Those who struggle with these will find their inability to communicate according to convention makes them less effective trainers, leaders, teachers.

OLPC, as currently exists, incorporates Language Arts training? No. Should it? Yes. English is the de facto lingua franca that connects ideas and ideals in our world in our day. The role that Latin has in the previous sentence is the role that terms and expressions in the English language have in every other language now, especially in matters relating to science, technology, manufacture, business.

If you don't depend on it outright, your speech and notes are peppered with it. Besides parent, teachers and administrators want to have better English training for the kids and even themselves. Is it part of the current OLPC? No. Should it be? Yes.


An anti-corruption tool?

Corruption Management

This is clearly my favorite trainable skill. Just as in the more popular field of risk management, it is unlikely that corruption will ever be totally eradicated. Even in such paragons of development and civilization as Scandinavia and the Netherlands it will rear its ugly head from time to time. The real issue with corruption worldwide is that it is arguably the number one factor that establishes, serves and protects injustice, abuse, exploitation, and ultimately poverty and all its children.

Aid for development that is not fighting corruption is often its very life, what makes corruption thrive. The canonical water well project with ineffective accounts, where most pumps end up sold away and the last one turns out to be "owned" by the village chief, not only denies water to the village but also reinforces patterns of successful dishonesty, without even gaining any goodwill for the donor country.

I believe that we can agree that corruption has to be fought, by all means available, especially education. Yet, if the general trend I have perceived is anything, I suspect there isn't much support for doing it with the XO. One argument that will be parroted is that this is the One Laptop per Child, and corruption is a grownup thing.

Refuting this notion is easy. First, corruption is everybody's problem. Next, corruption breeds in untruth, sheepish compromise, and bullying/abuse scenarios, and none of these is age-dependent. We clearly can and should develop suitable training resources on the XO to learn to recognize truth and also to prevent bullying, a real problem in many places.

To learn to stand up with what is truth is harder. I haven't yet found anything that beats experiential education done right, which sadly is quite high maintenance.


An easy button will not help

The XO is for grownups too

Early corruption avoidance should be addressed among kids. Yet the most important point is to recognize, accept and implement grownup-directed training and content in the XO - of course besides better and more for kids themselves.

This, among others, for the very obvious reason that the home XO might be the only twenty-first century educational tool that will enter many a hut, cabin or hovel, and quite a few community leader's homes. And hopefully, the XO will be the one that is not held hostage by the corrupt shackling a people.

Finally, this is simply something that needs doing. As such, it is really deeply irrelevant if the OLPC has right now corruption management as an educational goal, because it doesn't matter how many of those green thingies a country buys or is given, doesn't matter how much international aid it gets, neither whether missionaries, teachers or volunteers move in.

What matters is that we turn this training into a priority, fast track OLPC project. As long as corruption is not addressed an its endemic rule broken, there is no chance a people will develop and become what it can become, respect the environment and hold its own to protect itself, treat its sick, raise its young unto righteousness, and generally make true that having faith in better times ahead is real, rather than empty, meaningless fiction.

Yamandú was teacher in several countries for over 15 years and wrote a book on Uruguayan Education.

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Posted on April 28, 2008 by Guest Writer in Content: Education

I am Dave Wallace and I like to do visual astronomy and night sky photography while traveling.

starchart olpc
StarChart on the XO laptop

For this purpose, a full-blown planetarium program with its ability to show telescopic views, invisibly-dim objects and control telescopes was overkill. What I wanted was simply a program for the XO laptop that could answer the question:

"What's overhead next week and 5000 miles from here?"
So my StarChart Activity was designed with those requirements in mind.

Design:

The program's catalog is small on purpose: If you're limited to the Mark One Human Eyeball, keeping track of all the stars in the Tycho catalog is way overkill. So my catalog only contains data for the 1800 brightest stars, the moon, the sun and six of the planets.

Setting the time for some other location or for some future or past instant requires that the user enter the time and zone offset -- this avoids having the program try to predict the correct time zone. "Right now" is easier, so I have the option of plotting the sky as of "now" (and updating the plot once a minute).

Setting location can be very approximate for a whole-sky chart. Knowing your location to within a couple of degrees of latitude and longitude is more than sufficient. I allow several options with respect to display color, provide the ability to show the chart in "star chart traditional" (east on the left) or "map" (east on the right) orientation, show or hide the constellation stick-figures and let the user choose how many stars to plot by their brightness.

Planned Improvements:

The ability to share the activity data is not currently implemented. And I want to re-format the toolbars so all controls are still visible when the screen is rotated. Those two additions will complete "version one".

For version two, I'm tempted to extend the program to make it useful for an observer with binoculars. This means the observer has both magnification and greater light-gathering capability than the program is currently set up for. So I'd need to add the ability to show just a selected, small patch of the sky on demand and I'd have to show dimmer objects.

The catalog would therefore have to include about 10,000 more stars and represent the brighter Deep Sky Objects. I'd also like to be able to show the name of a selected star and of its constellation. This would be a teaching aid.

Educational Use:

Besides being an aid for viewing the night sky, the star chart can show how the sky looks from somewhere else and/or at some other time. You can demonstrate what it means to live on a round, rotating planet.

You can show that the sky moves one way as the year progresses while the moon moves the other at about 13 times the rate. You can show how the planets seem to move roughly in the same path. You can even show that the moon will occult the planets and eclipse the sun. Even if your inside

I suppose it even could be used to teach Python programming for the XO. At least it helped me learn to do it! You can read about my adventures in programming the StarChart Activity on the OLPC News Forum.

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Posted on April 27, 2008 by Guest Writer in People: Negroponte

As I agree with Bibek Paudel, I've re-posted his email from Sugar Listserv
olpc negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC
Hi all. While I personally think it is bad for OLPC to switch to Windows XP, here a few observations that I have made:

1. Any development/education project meant for third world countries is best when it is natively grown. A top down approach where some guy in Boston teaches us how to change things in our neighbourhood is never likely to understand and respect our situation and problems. He has other priorities.

A bottom-up approach should be devised where grassroot organizations from different parts of the world collaborate to form a mother organization that works in their benefit. Compare this to Nepal's political situation where every other politician/media claims to represent the people and be working for them. Things won't that way in technology too.

2. Nicholas Negroponte is a man hungry of some position in history of business and humanity, both. He thinks increasing the sales of laptops is more important than the growing impact it is creating. Selling a quarter of a million of laptops is a success by any means for any profit-organization. I don't understand how it is not sufficient in case of a first-of-its-kind project by a non-profit organization.

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Posted on April 25, 2008 by Wayan Vota in Software: Applications

skype olpc
Skype on the XO laptop
Do you have an XO laptop? Do you hunger to make free-to-cheap phone calls? Then let me introduce you to the world's largest mobile phone: Skype on the XO laptop.

That's right, you too can have a little piece of software on your XO that makes communicating with people around the world easy and fun. And One Laptop Per Child made the XO laptop a winner for third-world Skyping for Holden Bonwit:
In fact, if the conditions are perfect, don't even add the headset to the OLPC, just use the Built in microphone, speakers, and webcam!

For the audiophiles out there, it turns out that the XO laptop gives way better filtering of background noise (I'm in a 20' x 30' concrete room)! Way to go OLPC team! I would have thought it would be standard due to both computers running Skype brand software, but there is a repeatable difference!
Now if you want Skype on your XO laptop, be sure to start with the Wiki instructions, which sound simple, but can be confusing for Linux newbies:

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Posted on April 24, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

In his first detailed interview since leaving One Laptop Per Child, Walter Bender expanded on why he left OLPC and what his plans are for Sugar in a conversation with Wade Roush of Xconomy.
bender olpc
Walter Bender + XO laptop
To Walter, Microsoft Windows is not really the issue; it's the opportunity to educate the world on what education can be. Just listen to what he feels is Nicholas Negroponte's change in direction:
Then it's a matter of what's next. And what's next for me is to continue to work on the software tools for learning - to broaden their scope and applicability. What's next for OLPC? I would rather OLPC answer for themselves.

Nicholas has made it clear, at least to me, that OLPC needs to be strategically agnostic about learning - that it can't be prescriptive about learning. So that's his opinion and that's where he's taking OLPC, and that's not what I want to do, so I left.

Xconomy: When you say "agnostic about learning," what I take that to mean is that there's a feeling that the XO Laptop should run Windows, and not just Linux and Sugar.

Bender: I think it's pretty obvious and was obvious from the very beginning that it's a lot easier to cater to people's comfort than to be disruptive. Nicholas had that wonderful quote in BusinessWeek about a month ago - that OLPC is going to stop acting like a terrorist and start emulating Microsoft.

If you read between the lines, the idea is to stop trying to be disruptive and to start trying to make things comfortable for decision-makers. And that's a marketing strategy, and one that I think has been adopted by many laptop manufacturers.

Personally, I think that the customer is not always right, and that a role that a non-profit can play is to try to demonstrate better ways of doing things and let the market follow them. But that is a minority opinion, so I left to do my own thing.
For me, personally, that's exactly why I've followed OLPC so closely for the last two years - it represented a disruptive shift in the whole technology industry and its relationship to the developing world.

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Posted on April 24, 2008 by Guest Writer in People: Negroponte


Walter Bender and Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas, with all due respect, I think you're pretty seriously mischaracterizing the nature of One Laptop Per Child's problems. Laying the blame for OLPC's shortcomings at the feet of "open source fundamentalists" is misinformed at best and deliberately disingenuous at worst.

Now, to be clear: when you say that "Sugar needs to run on many platforms," I completely agree with you. I couldn't possibly agree more. But moving from that point, which is clearly correct, to an ad hominem attack on the open source community as a whole, is a frustrating and dangerous non-sequitor, and a slap in the face to the people who have been your most strident supporters for many years now.

When a man like Walter Bender walks away from your shared dream because he feels like you are choosing the wrong path, then maybe you should consider being a bit more introspective, instead of lashing out at the big bad free software fundies.

Did Walter, your friend for 30 years, the guy with whom you built the MIT Media Lab, turn into a fundamentalist whack job over night? Really?

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Posted on April 24, 2008 by Wayan Vota in Use Cases: User Groups

The next OLPC Learning Club DC meeting will be at the Arlington Career Center in Virginia this Saturday:
olpc learning club
OLPC Learning Club DC
What: Family XO Mesh Meetup
When: Saturday, April 26th, 2008, 10 am to 1 pm
Where: Arlington Career Center
816 South Walter Reed Drive,
Arlington, VA 22204
(Contact Page, Map, Bus Info) Facebook page
Mike Lee will distill several years of visits to the MIT Media Lab into a photo log on the culture of innovation and invention that gave rise to the One Laptop Per Child project. To make more tangible some of the lab's work, several commercially available products from spinoff companies and sponsors will be demonstrated including the Ambient Orb, Clocky, LEGO Mindstorms, Scratch Sensor Board, Hyperscore, and E-ink.

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Posted on April 24, 2008 by Guest Writer in People: Negroponte

One Laptop Per Child needs high quality software on its machines, but the amount of abuse ladled out over OLPC's developer community is incredible. First they are called "terrorists", and then it was "fundamentalists".
olpc windows xo
The future XO OS?
Nicholas Negroponte now seems to think that all of Sugar's problems can be solved by outsourcing a Sugar-on-Windows port to developers in Uruguay, who will be funded by Microsoft.

In a clever rhetorical trick, this allows OLPC to continue to insist that it "gets no money from Microsoft" and that it "pays no money to Windows developers" even though it employs a number of people who (presently and in the future) work full- or part-time on supporting the Windows-on-XO effort.

Any competent management team would realize that this fanciful porting effort spells nothing but years of delay, while time is spent refactoring Sugar for the port (and not adding needed features!); Negroponte apparently exists in a dream world where Microsoft is a benevolent software company which both cares about the world's children and plays nicely with its smaller "partners".

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Posted on April 23, 2008 by Guest Writer in People: Negroponte


Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC
Nicholas Negroponte's email attachment to the Community News listserv

Yes, OLPC’s commitment to Sugar has changed. It is now larger, not smaller. Contrary to inferences drawn by Walter’s departure, the press and venerable sources such as OLPC News, we are scaling Sugar up, not down. Let me explain.

Sugar is a very good idea, less than perfectly executed. I attribute our weakness to unrealistic development goals and practices. Our mission has never changed. It has been to bring connected laptops for learning to children in the poorest and most remote locations of the world. Our mission has never been to advocate the perfect learning model or pure Open Source.

I believe the best educational tool is constructionism and the best software development method is Open Source. In some cases those are best achieved like the Trojan Horse, versus direct confrontation or isolating ourselves with perfection.

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Posted on April 23, 2008 by Edward Cherlin in People: Negroponte

olpc negroponte
What will Negroponte say now?
OK, it's semi-official. Nicholas Negroponte is thinking out loud, where we can hear him, about running only XP on the XO.
"Eventually Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it."
Notice the words "eventually" and "might". The deal is not done, or it appears even under serious discussion with Microsoft, so it isn't fully official yet. Negroponte is famous for shooting off his mouth like this. But if he means it, I'm going to start the fork of Sugar myself.
Negroponte said he was mainly concerned with putting as many laptops as possible in children's hands.
I have written about this before. Negroponte is attempting to optimize on only one variable out of the full equation, and that only in the short term. Another major variable is source code availability for student programmers. Yes for Linux and Open Source generally, no for Windows.

Then there is cost, which is necessarily higher for Windows, because it requires more hardware than Linux. Language support is possible for any community in Linux, but in Windows it depends on the good will of Microsoft, or rather the bottom line market analysis results that Microsoft works from.

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Posted on April 23, 2008 by Guest Writer in Hardware: Keyboard


Stop the keyboard madness!
I am Richard Smith of One Laptop Per Child. Recently some posts of mine have been taken and twisted a bit in various blogs and Slashdot to indicate that the keyboard failures are "widespread". I would like to clarify what I see as incorrect info about the failure rates of the OLPC keyboard.

OLPC does not have evidence that the keyboard failures are widespread like the blog posts I've seen indicate. The overall RMA return rate of all XO problems is less than 1%. Verified keyboard problems are a small part of that.

Correlating the RMA data to the actual failure rate of the keyboard is a bit more difficult because many people with the problem have discovered it outside of the 30 day RMA window. Its also hard to get a good estimate of how many unique users there are in the forums that reported keyboard problems.

Continue reading "OLPC Keyboard Failure Rates"

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Posted on April 22, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Software: Windows

Walter Bender's departure has marked a new evolution of the One laptop Per Child program. The battle for the very soul of OLPC is now out in the open with two distinct groups forming:

One laptop, two ideas
  1. Walter Bender will be leading a one laptop per child global education movement focused on constructionism, as personified through Sugar, the Open Source user interface developed specifically for children.
  2. Nicholas Negroponte will be leading a One Laptop Per Child laptop project focused on expanding XO sales worldwide, using whatever means necessary to achieve that.
We've all felt this dichotomy from the beginning, but only now are we really seeing the split, and its leaders emerge. I noticed the early signs when I read Walter Bender's last wiki posts on OLPC's success metrics:
This requires consensus on what is customer success. More laptop orders? Children learning?

If OLPC were a for-profit enterprise, one could argue that the customer is always right. Where does one draw the line? I thought the mission was learning, not selling laptops.
At the time, these comments suggested that Walter was growing disillusioned with a shift to a laptop sales priority. But with his resignation letter's focus on Open Source fresh in my memory, I read Brian Bergstein's report on the situation and I see a larger departure

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Posted on April 22, 2008 by Guest Writer in Content: Education, Countries: Nepal


What we're working to change
Ah, I can still remember the day we got the first computers in our school. Not just any school mind, but my school. And not just any of my schools, but my primary school. The school where even the lightest of impressions would burn into your naked soul until it hit the bone.

There, in that school all of a sudden we found a computer upon a table. No-one of us younglings knew exactly how it got there or what it was for... Yes computing of course; the meaning of which overlapped pretty much with game playing, although very few of us had actually played with or owned a computer.

Oh how the black magic of the thing attracted us like flies. It was a PC of sorts, but not of the Intel variety. Nor was it any of the MSX-y variety which I had come across before. But it had a tape-drive, just like the MSX. And it took forever to load anything.

But it would keep you amused by making funny screachy sounds as it did so. A bit like a demented robot. And that is about all I remember, because this wonderful educational device fell flat on it's face at the end of the eighties. I think it sort of landed there by magic, at that odd place at the end of the class.

And the teachers of my school sort of hoped it would sorcer itself away. Which it did after two months. In a puff of smoke, never to be heard of again. To great delight of said teachers who never actually tried to use it to educate us.

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Posted on April 21, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

olpc walter bender
Looking in from afar
Walter Bender has finally spoken on his resignation from One Laptop Per Child. In an email to me, he says he doesn't know about any plans for Windows XP on the XO laptop, so my fears of a Microsoft take-over of OLPC may be unfounded.

In his exit statement on Community News, Walter's thoughts are focused on Open Source software:
The OLPC Association is making headway getting laptops into the hands of children and it is encouraging to see that other non-profit and for-profit organizations are following suit.

My personal interest is in helping build a community of developers, educators, and learners dedicated to advancing the quality of free and open source software for learning and the sharing of pedagogical approaches in this community by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement.
In his goal, I think we all can welcome Walter to the vibrant one laptop per child volunteer community who strongly support an open education project.

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Posted on April 21, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

olpc walter bender
Seeking his own XO clarity
When I posted that Walter Bender is the former President of Software and Content for One Laptop Per Child, I thought he had just moved to Deployment. Now I've heard an even more shocking development:

Walter Bender resigned from OLPC!

Apparently, rumor has it that Nicholas Negroponte is close to abandoning Sugar and Linux in favor of Microsoft XP, to spur sales of the XO laptop. Negroponte thinks that many more laptops need to be sold and a partnership with Microsoft is the way to achieve that goal.

Walter Bender disagreed with this near-total abandonment of the original mission - constructionism as children learning learning to create life-long exploration and collaboration through open information and communication technologies. And so he walked away from OLPC the organization for one laptop per child, the global movement.

Personally, I think I'm going into shock for a bit. As I've made clear, I feel that XP on the XO is the end of OLPC as an education project. If OLPC falls to the Dark Side, I may just join Walter Bender in resignation.

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Posted on April 21, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

olpc walter bender
What's your view, Walter?
Back when Ivan Krstić resigned from One Laptop Per Child, we first heard the rumor that Walter Bender, President of Software and Content for OLPC was "demoted".

At the time, I thought Ivan was being a little dramatic. Walter is still listed as President on Laptop.org and he was still active in the Community News, and on the software development listservs.

Since then, I've noticed that Kim Quirk is now publishing the Technology Team Details and in browsing the wiki, I came across this change to Walter Bender's profile:
Walter Bender is the former president of One Laptop per Child Software and Content: the organization coordinating and developing software and content for the Children's Machine computer.
Whoa! With the revision's IP address leading back to OLPC headquarters, it looks like the rumors are true. OLPC has been reorganized. Kim Quirk is now leading software development while Walter Bender is re-assigned to Deployment.

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