About OLPC News

The One Laptop Per Child project is a sprawling initiative with immense potential to improve education on a global scale -- if implemented properly. We at OLPC News do our best to celebrate what is going right, question what is going wrong, and suggest what could be done better. Cute pictures of children with shiny new laptops don't keep us from asking tough questions.

With this open-eyed view, OLPC News is a recognized voice in the OLPC community, even by Nicholas Negroponte himself. The OLPC News blog commands 5,000 readers a day, each spending an average of 4 minutes on the site, and the OLPC News Forum has almost 3,000 members and 22,000 posts on every OLPC-related topic imaginable.

Yet, dear reader, you should know that the editors behind OLPC News are not objective reporters of the latest news. We are most definitely biased. We believe the following:

1. Across the developing world, education systems need to change dramatically to prepare their children for the modern world
2. Children (and adults) learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process
3. Involved teachers, relevant content, and appropriate technology can facilitate both educational change and learning motivation

These changes are happening now, in the deployments and in local communities all around the world. We at OLPC News are doing our part to expand this change by making the OLPC project "open, organized, and transparent," to quote Garrett Goebel's mail to the OLPC developers list.

The OLPC News editorial team (editors-at-olpcnews.com) is:

The Dashing Christoph

Christoph Derndorfer - Co-Editor

Christoph was one of the first members of OLPC Austria, a non-profit group based in Vienna, that supports the One Laptop per Child project via various efforts. Among other things he has co-authored the Activity Handbook, a handbook that helps people get started with software development for the XO-laptop. He has also held presentations on the OLPC project at various events such as Chemnitzer LinuxTage and CeBIT.

Christoph is currently working on his bachelor in computer science at the Vienna University of Technology. He also spent the past few years running a Web site dedicated to small, low-cost and power-efficient computing solutions. His passion for computer technology, and his realization of technology's potential to change people's lives during a year spent in Peru, motivated Christoph to follow the OLPC initiative from the very beginning. He is generally located in Vienna, Austria but currently lives in Washington, DC.

Bryan is never short of opinions

Bryan Berry - Co-Editor

Bryan has been involved in OLPC since 2006 as a grassroots organizer. He was one of the founding members of the OLPC Nepal community and helped found Open Learning Exchange Nepal, the Nepali NGO that is implementing Nepal's OLPC pilots.

Prior to coming to Nepal, he worked for 4 years in the Middle East and China on technology deployment for government agencies. His interest in education stems from his own experiences growing up with several learning disabilities and attending schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the worst performing school districts in the United States.

He lives in Kathmandu, Nepal where he works as a systems engineer for OLE Nepal on Nepal's pilots at Bishwamitra and Bashuki schools.

Yama will see into your soul

Yama Ploskonka - Co-Editor

Yam was raised in the closest thing to a constructi*** household you could think of and found that to be the greatest thing ever, even if he cannot seem to sort out if it ends in -onist o -vist. His first computer was a ZX-Sinclair clone and made his own LOGO interpreter - 16 KB is a lot if you use it well.

After a colorful career of many pursuits he found his calling with OLPC. Now Yama has become an active member of OLPC Sur, the list for OLPC discussion in Spanish, among other OLPC-related activities.

Yama's overall goal is QE4A, quality education for all, which he hopes to achieve with much help from the one laptop per child community.

"Clock-Stopping Hot" Wayan

Wayan Vota - Founder & Publisher

Wayan started OLPC News in 2006 to track the One Laptop Per Child program from a technology implementor's perspective. Since then, he's started the complimentary OLPC Talks and OLPC News Forum, and was a co-founder of the OLPC Learning Club DC.

Wayan has coined the phrase "Clock-Stopping Hot" to refer to the XO-1 Hardware and "4P Computing" to refer to a new class of computing solutions for the developing world. He has commented on OLPC on 60 Minutes, the Economist, and numerous other mainstream media outlets.

Wayan was director of Geekcorps, a Peace Corps for geeks, through 2007, and is now Senior Director of the Inveneo Certified ICT Partner Program, developing a community of ICT practitioners in the developing world. Wayan also consults with infoDev at the World Bank on the Educational Technology Debate. Wayan lives in Washington, DC.

OLPC News has an ever-expanding cadre of contributors and commenters: