One Laptop Per Child News

The last time we checked in with One Laptop Per Greek Child, they were looking for volunteers to help with OLPC localization into Greek.

It now sounds like Thodoros Karounos of Metsovio University and coordinator of the OLPC Greece Initiative Committee has his hands full with contributors like Simos Xenitellis. HomeBoy MediaNews reports that:

The Greek project associated with OLPC has many volunteers, including 250 people with programming, translation and other skills and another 250 primary and secondary school teachers. The team includes lawyers, PhDs, English teachers and one young student who is in the sixth grade of primary school.

Why might so many volunteers be needed? The Greek team is in a race against the clock. Greece has set a target of 20,000 computers for 300 schools by September and MiDWaN says 15,000 computers could be Children's Machine XO's for "dimotiko" (the sixth grade of primary school) and "gymnasio" (the second class of junior high school), focusing on mathematics and physics.

A full OLPC Greece implementation would mark a dramatic shift in the target market for One Laptop Per Child. Greece is not Brazil or Nigeria, its part of the European Union and its education system is relatively well developed. Might this be the first move by Quanta Computer to enter the "developed" world market?

The Financial Times reports that Quanta Computer is exploring ultra-low-cost (~200 USD) computer production targeting developed markets in the next 12 months.

Michael Wang, Quanta's president, said on Tuesday that the concepts developed through the OLPC project could be applied to create commercially viable machines that are cheaper than anything on the market so far.

"We will definitely at the right time launch a commercialised product similar to the OLPC," he said in an interview with the Financial Times, adding that several of Quanta's customers were seeking to launch such a product.

So maybe this is a solution to the ever-preset problem of OLPC eBay sales, rumors of OLPC retail sales, and a whole other way to get the Children's Machine XO in USA schools: direct parental purchase of OLPC-equivalents through normal retail channels.

Tags: Dimotiko | Gymnasio | Metsovio University | OLPC Greece | Quanta Computer | Thodoros Karounos |

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Last fall, did you head the call for Volunteers for a low-cost Greek laptop by the OLPC Greek Development Team to start localizing One Laptop Per Greek Child?

Volunteers with the time and disposition to get involved in localising the low-cost laptop for school pupils for the Greek market, currently being developed by the international non-profit organisation "One Laptop per Child (OLPC)" on the initiative of the founder of the MIT Media Lab, Prof. N. Negroponte, are being sought by [the Secretariat for the Information Society] to localise the computer for the Greek market.

From that call, did you join the olpc@ellak.gr mailing list? If so, you could've been helping the likes of Simos Xenitellis in his efforts to localize the OLPC XO into Greek.

Then you may have been lucky enough to attend the presentation of the Children's Machine XO at Makedonia University in person, instead of watching it via YouTube video:

Yeah, its all Greek to me too, but that's just the point. Localization is going to be a major challenge for OLPC as English is not the first language of the majority of the world's populace. Or as Jim Gettys points out:

With Libya, Nigeria, and Rwanda on board, we minimally have to have support for Arabic, English, Yoruba, Hausa, Kinyarwanda, and probably Kiswahili (Swahili), which is commonly spoken as a second language among > 30 million people in east Africa according to Ethnologue. Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili appear to be the most challenging at the moment.

At least one country we are talking to has at least 11 languages of > 1 million speakers, some with more than 10 million speakers.

So, learned speakers of the world's languages, its time to help localize OLPC. The list is long and the time is short.

Tags: Ethnologue | Jim Gettys | Localization | Makedonia University | OLPC Greece | OLPC XO | Simos Xenitellis |

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