Quite some years ago, we brought the #OLPC AKA the 100$ laptop to Rwanda [1]. A surprising thing happened. The laptops were often without battery power in the morning. A thing that wasn’t anticipated. It had two reasons. One was the keyboard LED. It was used by the parents to have a light at home. The other was a bigger surprise. The parents used the mesh networking to discuss market prices for their produce. Fascinating. 1/3
With the mesh network built in to the OLPC, a local network that worked without needing a central access point, farmers used the chat function to compare prices offered for their produce and found out that merchants offered different prices. This led to pressure on the merchants to pay better. The government was not amused. And mesh networking became a problem. Ultimately an inspiring story that was never told, IMHO. 2/3
@jwildeboer I think a lot about the fact that we all have pocket communicators with many different radios in them, but if disaster ever strikes, none of them can communicate with each other. The more I think about it, the more it feels like a sign of a world gone mad.
Decentralisation remains an underexplored field in commerce and communication, IMHO. For obvious reasons. Capitalism relies on control and centralisation. Kind of a contradiction, IMHO. A reason why decentralisation and transparency are often touted as goals, but never really implemented. 3/3
(In a flat and open field, the mesh network of an OLPC, that didn’t need the CPU for transmitting network traffic, so still worked when the OLPC was „sleeping“ had a range of up to 4 kilometres)
(And thank you all for being kind and respectful in the comments thus far. The OLPC was (and is) a defining part of my private and professional life. I was only involved on the sidelines but I met people that ware so deeply invested into the ideas. Developers. Children. Teachers. But also aggressive opponents, lobbyists that did everything possible to kill the project. It teached me a lot. And I still feel sad it never lived up to its potential. Maybe it will. I'm still a believer) Me, 2007 :)
Going through my archives, I notice I might have been confused. This goes back even further. This happened 2008 in the pilot in Ethiopia. Rwanda was 2014. At that time the LED was already long gone. My apologies. I have corrected the original toot.
@tomjennings The totally weird thing is that Apple implemented such a thing with Airdrop. It was used in the Hong Kong protests to distribute warnings and calls for demonstrations. Ultimately Apple had to change its implementation after pressure by the Chinese government. @simon
Other than the Briar Project, I know of nothing that addresses handset to handset direct comms. And no one I know is even vaguely interested in it and few, other than activisty tech types, even think the idea has value.
It's maddening. castoff phones on thrift stores, wifi only even, no sim, have more computing power than most people had in 1990. And no interest in them except as commodity platforms for whatever it is we do.
https://laptop.org is still around, though I haven’t been in contact with them since years. They distributed around 3 million laptops to children in total. Mostly unnoticed by us here in the west.
(as expected, the naysayers and opponents are now in the comments trying to turn my thread into negativity. As always. It's the internet :) Well, I still hope I could give some of you some positive food for thought on unintended, but fascinating effects that we observed many years ago when the project started.) 8/8