Australia to benefit from the OLPC giveaway program

November 30th will see the commencement of a local “Give 1, Get 1″ program by the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisations Australian subsidiary, with allow both disadvantaged children and geeks alike the opportunity of a new machine.

For each laptop that is purchased a child in either the Pacific Islands or remote Australia will be given an XO laptop by the initiative. There is the facility to order the laptops online at a cost of US$399 (plus GST and shipping).

Although many people think that this work is a great idea there are those that don’t; Jeff Waugh, a local open source luminary who is also currently involved in the program said that the focus locally within the group was to use the power of collaboration to organically grow the adoption of OLPC. He said the US branch of the OLPC organisation was where the “Give 1, Get 1″ was getting most of its support.
Waugh added “The ‘Give 1, Get 1′ program is very much an income thing and raising the number of laptops that they’re producing, so that laptops become cheaper as you produce a lot of them. The true power in the design and the whole idea behind the project is really when you have a group of children in a community or in a school that have them and as a result can learn together through innate collaboration and technology that’s built into the laptops. As an example, the laptops have mesh wireless networking, so you don’t actually need to have a wireless broadband access point or a network and the laptops can talk to each other straight away”, he said.

There were an equivalent number of communities in Australia even though the project had originally been designed for communities in the third world said Waugh.

He said “Our initial focus here in Australia is linking up schools that you probably regard as fairly conventional public schools, but using that as a platform to be able to do better things, much further out, particularity in terms of Western Australia and Northern Territory. We’ve currently got a trial running in NSW. The objective of the trial is to look at deployment of laptops in three schools. One is very far out back, one is a country town and the other is a kind of a respite school where there are counsellors and places where kids can go to take a break from difficult family life.”