Midway through a recent OLPC News Meetup, we came up with a fun idea for a new contest:

If I could be Nicholas Negroponte for a day...
In 100 words or less, tell us what you would do with and for OLPC if you could be Nicholas Negroponte for just one day.

The rules are pretty simple:

1. You can entry as many times as you want
2. OLPC News Forum readers will vote on the entries
3. The best three responses split $50 in XOexplosion gear
4. The deadline is April 15th

The contest started March 28th, and a few people are already dreaming about a special day at One Laptop Per Child. Here's what they would do if they were in charge of our favorite education program:

• fyoder says: I would initiate the development of "XO Teachers' Edition", a dual boot machine with both Sugar and Xubuntu on an 8 GB SD, with the actual objective of selling tons of them to the developed world and making a load of money to fund OLPC so that it can scale up and do things professionally in pursuit of its core objective of improving education in the developing world.
• kentsin says: Put the eee mother board in place of the OLPC's. Invite users (children) into the development process. Allow other companies to ship their os with the school server for easy replace the sugar (why not let the user decide?). Allow asus and others to use the OLPC LCD on their products. Add a touch screen to OLPC.
• Tiktaalik says: Release the XO Laptop for commercial sale so that more programmers can get on board. It's no fun developing for Sugar if you don't have an XO Laptop, and sales of the laptop are now closed, so there is a limited and dwindling supply of programmers interested in the project. This is the biggest problem that needs to be fixed.

But enough about them. What would you do if you could lead OLPC? Go on, get imaginative now and Be Nicholas Negroponte for a day on the forum.

Comments on this post are closed.