Posted on May 02, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, People: Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte has finally found his new CEO for One laptop Per Child. After a year of fruitless searching, he's tapped Charles Kane, OLPC's CFO and a former software company executive, to lead the organization on a daily basis.

mako xo laptop
Charles Kane of OLPC

And what does Charles say about OLPC's mission, now that he's running the show? According to Technology Review, Charles is very clear: it’s a laptop project.

"The OLPC mission is a great endeavor, but the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible," he said. "Whether that technology is from one operating system or another, one piece of hardware or another, or supplied or supported by one consulting company or another doesn't matter."

"It's about getting it into kids' hands," he continued. "Anything that is contrary to that objective, and limits that objective, is against what the program stands for."

Now what might Charles be referring to when he talks about things limiting the program? Charles doesn't say explicitly, but we can always look to Nicholas Negroponte, still Chairman of OLPC, for an answer. And he's very clear on what he finds as a distraction to One Laptop Per Child's success:
"I think that means and ends, as often happens, got confused," he says. "The mission is learning and children. The means of achieving that were, amongst others, open source and constructionism.

In the process of doing that, open source in particular became an end in itself, and we made decisions along the way to remain very pure in open source that were not in the long-term interest of the project."

So kids, there you have it. The time, effort, energy, and passion of an entire global network of FOSS experts and supporters who have coded and promoted thousands of hours for OLPC, are actually a hindrance to success.

Now why is that? How could that be? Oh, let us have our Dear Leader tell us what he believes is the true roadblocks to XO laptop adoption:

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An empty OLPC soul
"When I went to Egypt for the first time, I met separately with the minister of communications, minister of education, minister of science and technology, and the prime minister, and each one of them, within the first three sentences, said, 'Can you run Windows?'" Negroponte says.

One future possibility is a "dual-boot" version of the OLPC machine, in which either Windows or Linux can be launched at start-up. If such a scheme were to materialize, Negroponte says, "I expect we will do a massive rollout in Egypt."

Yes, Nicholas, with Windows XO, you will have a massive roll out of low-cost laptops. It will be a great win for you, for Quanta, and maybe even for the OLPC organization.

Its only too bad you'll be celebrating alone.

The children, constructionist educators, and the entire FOSS community that brought you to this point, will not be cheering. In fact, I date this week as the beginning of the end for Open Source support of the OLPC organization. It sure marks the end for me.

Walter, you want a blog?

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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.

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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:

Bender:: 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.

A Game-Changing Opportunity

OLPC presented us with a whole new way to think about education in the developing world: Constructionism personified as an Open Source educational software stack running on a rugged, efficient and affordable laptop. While we all may not agree on exactly how to achieve that goal, the very idea was revolutionary.

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Software and hardware visionaries

Many of us invested our hearts and minds into OLPC because it was an Open Source software project. Here was the chance to wean entire countries off the thought that proprietary business software is appropriate for every situation.

Others got excited that the hardware was designed specifically for poor communities where electricity and air conditioning are rare. No more expensive generators spewing exhaust to support overbuilt and then fan-cooled processors.

Put those two ideas together in a nonprofit education project and you have a global movement that actually delivered a Sugar/Linux software stack on the XO laptop - a targeted learning combination that is specifically designed to do one thing and one thing well: educate children in resource poor environments.

Being agnostic isn't disruptive

Walter is right about Windows XP on the XO laptop. It isn't disruptive. It makes the XO a rugged general purpose computer, one use case of which could be education. Sugar on other platforms is a great addition to those distributions. But alone, it isn't disruptive either.

The real prescription for change, the idea that had us all foaming with tech-lust, was the combination of education-specific Open Source software running on clock-stopping hot technology to empower education in the developing world. To change any part of that equation this late in the game represents a fundamental shift in the project and is alienating all of us who wanted to be part of a disruptive movement.

Windows XP on the XO can be educational, and Sugar on other platforms is beneficial, but neither alone is the OLPC we signed up for.

OLPC, the movement

On the bright side, no matter what Dark Side that Nicholas Negroponte turns to, Ivan Krstić is right:

olpc uruguay
OLPC is more than Negroponte
Perhaps most of all, remember that OLPC is not just a company, but also an eponymous movement. We owe Nicholas a collective debt of gratitude for starting it, but good movements are far larger than their leaders.

Richard Stallman started the free software movement and helped it get on its feet, but the movement now has a life of its own — one most assuredly not beholden to Stallman’s opinions and proclamations. The One Laptop per Child movement is no different.

Nicholas and Walter made people care about using technology to help education in the developing world on a global scale, and forced the industry’s hand on catering to that market despite the razor-thin margins it promises. That was noble and revolutionary of them, but the genie is now out of the bottle and taking on a life of its own.

So true, Ivan, so true.

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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:
[Walter] Bender already has new plans: to launch an independent effort to further the development of the XOs' homegrown software, known as Sugar, and get it to run on Linux computers other than XOs. "Sugar is in a narrow place and it is ripe to be unleashed," he wrote in an e-mail exchange.
Unleashing Sugar onto the Classmate PC for example, so that soon, the entire 4P Computing space could utilize constructionist learning methodologies to expand education in the developing world. But that's not the focus of Nicholas Negroponte. In the very same article, he discredits the Open Source community's contributions to OLPC as a hindrance to his goal, XO laptop sales:
Negroponte said he was mainly concerned with putting as many laptops as possible in children's hands. He lamented that an overriding insistence on open-source had hampered the XOs, saying Sugar "grew amorphously" and "didn't have a software architect who did it in a crisp way." For instance, the laptops do not support Flash animation, widely used on the Web.

"There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community," he said. "One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist."

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If it sells more XO's...
Worse, from my perspective as a pragmatic Open Source advocate who believes that Sugar is the educational aspect to the XO laptop, and without it, OLPC becomes just another 4PC vender, Negroponte offered windows on his aspirations for the XO OS:
As a result, Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a "dual-boot" option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar. One current hang-up is whether the necessary hardware would add $7 to $12 to an XO's cost, taking the project even further away from its eventual goal of producing the machines for less than $100.

Eventually, Negroponte added, Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it.

And here you thought that Windows XO was only an April Fools joke. What is no joke is the real split that's happening right now inside the greater OLPC community.

I believe that soon the vibrant FOSS developer community will be much smaller yet more focused on Sugar as an education tool for any computing platform, just optimized for the XO. OLPC, the formal organization, will still be relevant, just somewhere the level of Asus or Classmate OEM's - interesting as a targeted 4PC platform, but not worth the hype of a game-changing market maker.

Update: Check out the Developer List debate if you want to watch the split happen in real time.

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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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Posted on April 16, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

I've heard a rumor that One Laptop Per Child is very near to announcing a new CEO. Nicholas Negroponte may finally found someone to take over the day-to-day leadership of OLPC. As as I told Techlife, OLPC needs a seasoned technology executive or a strong primary education practitioner.
will poole olpc
While he would not be my first choice, it seems like Will Poole might be OLPC's man. Today he announced his retirement amid a leadership shuffle at Microsoft. He's leaving the Unlimited Potential Group, Microsoft's emerging markets strategy division "to pursue philanthropic and entrepreneurial interests". Might that sound like OLPC to you too?

No matter who might become OLPC's next CEO, I still say that it would foretell Nicholas Negroponte's exit. But before he goes, OLPC News readers need to vote.

You need to decide would make the best Nicholas Negroponte for a day. You get only one vote, but like LesleyT, feel free to get your friends to stuff the ballot for your favorite course of action. $50 in XOexplosion gear is up for the top three Negropontes.

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Posted on April 04, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Countries: USA

Where is OLPC America? The organization and its leadership are conspicuously silent since Nicholas Negroponte's announcement.

In this void, communities across the United States are charging ahead with low-cost laptop programs. They are making changes at the city and state level to introduce the XO laptop into school systems, often without a full understanding of the costs or benefits of an OLPC-empower learning shift.
olpc Birmingham
Birmingham Starts 1,000 laptop Pilot

Congratulations to Mayor Larry Langford and the children of Birmingham, Alabama! They'll be participating in the first large-scale One Laptop Per Child program in America. Yesterday the Birmingham Board of Education accepted 1,000 XO laptop computers for a pilot program at Glen Iris and possibly one other elementary school. The Birmingham News announced that:
The first 1,000 computers, called XO laptops, are part of an initiative by Mayor Larry Langford and the Birmingham City Council to put laptop computers in the hands of first- through eighth-graders in the city school system.
Yet before anyone reaches for the champagne, remember this is a pilot program, the board has not accepted all 15,000 low-cost laptops that the city agreed to buy from OLPC. In addition, it will be a crash-pilot, from April 15 to September, that will need to show results by August, when the other 14,000 XO's are secluded to arrive from Quanta.

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

negroponte
Empty seats at OLPC HQ
There is a massive reorganization happening at One Laptop Per Child. It started when Mary Lou Jepsen left with these key parting words:
"My job was simply done," she says. "I was responsible for the hardware, and I got it into mass production." She also says that working on a project like OLPC takes a toll. "The OLPC is like the Peace Corps. You go in for a couple of years, and it's really hard, but really rewarding."
The change then accelerated when Nicholas Negroponte both went searching for a CEO and reorganized the organization into four operating units; technology, deployment, market development and fund-raising, and administration.

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Posted on March 20, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

Post Accuracy Update:
While I wrote this post in good faith and feel it was accurate at the time, the OLPC website currently lists Gary Dillabough and Joe Jacobson as still on OLPC's Board of Directors. I may have been incorrect in my observations or the Laptop.org website was refreshed subsequent to publication. Either way, this post is now inaccurate - only Seymour Papert has left the Board, and that's for health reasons. May he get well and apologies for any confusion.
End Update
I was looking at the Laptop.org site today, bemoaning the loss of Ivan Krstić and Mary Lou Jepsen, my two favorite people at One Laptop Per Child, and I noticed they weren't the only ones removed from the OLPC people page.

Taking a closer look, and comparing it to the archived version, there are four other absences that stand out. Gone from the listing of OLPC's advisors and Board of Directors, are:
  1. Mitchel Resnick, MIT, advisors
  2. Gary Dillabough, eBay, Board of Directors
  3. Joe Jacobson, MIT, Board of Directors
  4. Seymour Papert, MIT, Board of Directors (still an advisor)
Now I am not sure what their absence signifies, but now Nicholas Negroponte is the only Board Member with a direct connection to the MIT Media Lab.

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Posted on March 19, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership

Oh. My. God. I don’t even know what to say right now. I can only quote Ivan's Krstić's own explanation while the shock still works through my brain:
vsat dance
No more Ivan on roofs?!
Not long ago, OLPC undertook a drastic internal restructuring coupled with what, despite official claims to the contrary, is a radical change in its goals and vision from those that were shared with me when I was invited to join the project.

Adding insult to injury, I was asked to stop working with Walter Bender, without a doubt one of the most stunningly thoughtful and competent people I’ve ever worked with. Following Walter’s demotion from OLPC presidency, I was to report instead to a manager with no technical or engineering background who was put in charge of all OLPC technology.

I cannot subscribe to the organization’s new aims or structure in good faith, nor can I reconcile them with my personal ethic. Having exhausted other options, three weeks ago I resigned my post at OLPC.
Oh what have you done One Laptop Per Child?!

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Posted on January 18, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Countries: USA

mike ford
The same Mike Ford?
Just who is the new executive director of OLPC America? That is the question I ask myself as I look for references to "Mike Ford" + OLPC.

The Birmingham News says that Nicholas Negroponte appointed Mike Ford to lead One Laptop Per Child's foray into USA distribution of XO laptops to school systems (no individual sales, contrary to reports). And the US News elaborates on OLPC America's priorities:
:But only those states showing the most need will have first dibs on the $200 computers. "We want to be efficient and fair," says Mike Ford, executive director of the new One Laptop Per Child branch in Washington, D.C.
But the only other reference to Mike Ford and OLPC is this participant list from a La Organización Juventud Ecuatoriana learning workshop, which lists Mike as from Pittsburgh, not DC.

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Posted on January 10, 2008 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Sales Talk: Products


Mary Lou Jepsen's XO laptop
I love me some Mary Lou Jepsen. I feel she (almost) single-handedly made One Laptop Per Child's XO Laptop a reality. She has every right to brag to Groklaw that:
"When I started in January 2005, many people thought [OLPC] was a joke, including Craig Barrett and Bill Gates. I took it from that stage -- just an idea of a $100 laptop -- through invention, design and partnering and to delivery.

The laptop is in high volume mass production, it's the lowest cost laptop ever made, the lowest power laptop ever made, it's the greenest laptop ever made, it's the only sunlight-readable laptop on the market,"
And now its looking like she left OLPC just in time to start Pixel Qi, a company she founded to commercialize OLPC technology.

Cutting edge technology the self-described "hardware chick" is going to sell to rich notebook computer buyers to support better educations in poor countries:

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Posted on December 31, 2007 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership


Mary Lou Jepsen of OLPC
I am very sad to learn that today is Mary Lou Jepsen's last day at One Laptop Per Child. From Walter Bender's Community News:
Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts as she chases after her next miracle in display technology.

Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year.
Mary Lou was more that an employee, she was the foundation of OLPC. She designed the dual mode screen that made the XO laptop possible.

Then, in what I still think is an under-reported feat, she made the XO the greenest laptop ever made. In her own words:

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Posted on December 21, 2007 by Alexandre Van de Sande in Countries: Brazil, Sales Talk: Competition, People: Leadership

classmate pc olpc xo
Classmate PC over OLPC XO?
The Brazilian auction to purchase 150,000 computers for children is on currently on hold after the end of the first round which ended on December 19th. Positivo Informática won the first round of biding with the lowest offer, 98 millions of Reais, 6 million less than OLPC had offered.

No one has had access to details of each proposal but the most probable culprit were customs duties in Brazil which, along with all the maintenance and warranties, brought the total of each XO to $387,39, twenty dollars over the winning model. Positivo had by it's side decades olds tax policies that favors local assembly with lower taxes on electronics components, not ready made equipment.

The model offered by Positivo is still unknown but Intel has already congratulated them for winning, which led all to believe that it's a newer version of the Classmate PC with built-in camera and mesh networking.

To bring yet more confusion to the issue, in the same morning that the auction began was issued an official statement freeing all candidates of the taxes, but no one, neither the candidates or the auction judges, were informed about it.

Currently the fate of the 150,000 laptops are unknown. The judges consider the price high but the rules allow exclusive negotiations with Positivo Informática - the lowest bidder.

Jaime Balbino, a fervent OLPC supporter made an interview with David Cavallo, the main representative of the OLPC in Brazil. They talked about the influence of Brazil in the development of the model advocated by OLPC, the Brazilian development policy, competition against monopolies of technology, the bidding (won by Positive Computing) and the future of the entity without the expansion of the Brazilian experience.

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Posted on December 02, 2007 by Guest Writer in People: Leadership, Implementation: Schools, Countries: Uruguay


Who's the happiest kid here?
Ivan Krstić, the guy behind the BitFrost system which is key to security in OLPC's XO laptop, wrote on his blog Saturday an inspiring story about the laptops' first deployment, in Uraguay.

In Krstić's words, his badgering about the details of securely deploying the new XOs drew an unanticipated reaction from Nicholas Negroponte:
"Well, we'll just mail you along with the first laptop shipment, and then you can be sure just how things will work."
Krstić went (as a passenger, not as mail), and helped deal with shipping hassles at the airport, as well as reflashing 200 machines with a newer version of the OS and some custom software specific to Uraguay.

There are some well-linked technical details of interest. It took about 12 minutes, he writes, to complete the entire process of reflashing each box of 5 laptops, once the custom image was prepared. The IBM x3105 servers (running Debian) providing some of the infrastructure. There are three kinds of wireless access points to be used:

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Posted on November 30, 2007 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, People: Negroponte, Commentary: Press

Wow! OLPC Foundation now has its own YouTube channel and Nicholas Negroponte has just gone off the deep end of hubris. In his flagship video on why governments should spend millions on the XO laptop when their population may be poor, starving, or even lack clean water, Negroponte has announced that:
[The XO laptop] is probably the only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really had to look at how to eliminate poverty, create peace, and work on the environment, I can't think of a better way to do it.

I love me some clock stopping hot XO technology, but an instant middle class? World peace? An end to global warming? Might that be a bit of a stretch for a little green computer? And a slight egotistical leap for a MIT professor? I say we take this conversation to the comments section, where we can make OLPC News in the mold of Walter Bender's XO-enabled classroom:
We're giving them this environment where they can be expressive, they can be critics, they can engage in discourse and dialogue, and beat up on ideas, and that is where learning happens.
Especially since OLPC has turned off comments on the videos themselves - stifling the very debate they promote.

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