Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Mon 20 Nov 2006 01:28 PM PST  

Monday, November 13, 2006

Part I: Philanthropy's New Prototype

The cofounder of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to make $100 laptops available to poor children throughout the world. The next few months will be critical in determining whether the One Laptop per Child project succeeds.

By James Surowiecki

Illustration by Tara Hardy, Colagene.com

Multimedia •  OLPC Prototypes

In the decades after the Civil War, libraries were scarce in much of the United States. Many towns had no library at all, and those libraries that did exist were typically small and private, run by clubs or lodges that had scraped together collections of books to lend to their members or, on occasion, to outsiders who paid a fee for borrowing privileges. For the most part, towns did not have library buildings; book collections were housed instead in cheap offices or in unused space in public buildings. Even in bigger cities, it was often difficult to borrow books. Until the very end of the 19th century, Pittsburgh, for instance, had just one private lending library, and it struggled to stay afloat. And few people, if any, took seriously the idea that every town in the country should have a public library where citizens would have free and equal access to books.

Andrew Carnegie changed all that. Carnegie was an embodiment of the American Dream; born poor in Scotland, he had emigrated to the United States and built a fortune in the steel industry, turning himself into one of the country's wealthiest and most powerful businessmen. As Carnegie told it, when he was a young boy, he'd had to work instead of going to school. But a wealthy local man named Colonel Anderson had put together a small library of about 400 books, and every Saturday, Carnegie was allowed to read and borrow some of them. The experience, Carnegie wrote later, convinced him that there was no more productive way to help children develop than to build public libraries. And so, beginning in the 1880s, he set out to do just that, in towns all across the country.

Strictly speaking, Carnegie began his campaign outside the United States; his first library, built in 1881, was in his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland. The first library he built in the United States, eight years later, opened in ­Braddock, PA, where Carnegie Steel had one of its biggest mills. A year later came the Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, PA. The Allegheny library was important because it was the first funded according to the model that Carnegie would follow thereafter: instead of simply paying for and endowing the library, he offered the town a large initial grant on the condition that it agree to pay for the library's operations thereafter. (In what came to be known as the "Carnegie formula," towns generally committed to an annual budget--for maintenance, new books, and so on--that equaled 10 percent of Carnegie's original gift.) These were, in other words, to be genuinely public libraries, dependent not on the largesse of a single person but on communities' willingness to subsidize their own access to knowledge.

That willingness was not always easy to inspire; in some towns it was actually illegal at first to use tax money to pay for libraries. But as more towns accepted Carnegie's deal, and as it became evident that the libraries were generally very popular once they were built, more towns decided that they, too, needed free libraries. By the time he died in 1919, some 30 years after the Allegheny library opened, Carnegie had given away $350 million of his fortune; he spent more than $60 million of it to build more than 2,800 libraries, including almost 2,000 in the United States and almost 700 in Great Britain. His donations had so effectively revolu­tionized public opinion that by the middle of the 20th century, it was the rare American town that dared go without a public library.

Carnegie is usually talked about today as a precursor to people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, multi­billionaires who have dedicated most of their wealth to philanthropic endeavors. But when you look at the way Carnegie built libraries--seeding institutions around the country and encouraging local involvement in the hope of convincing people of the virtues of free access to knowledge--what it calls to mind most is not Gates's prodigious effort to fund the fight against infectious diseases but, rather, an endeavor called One Laptop per Child (OLPC)--or, as it's colloquially known, the $100 laptop.

The $100 laptop sprang from the fertile, utopian mind of tech guru Nicholas Negroponte, who is the cofounder and chairman emeritus of the MIT Media Lab, a successful venture capitalist, and the author of Being Digital, the 1995 paean to the digital economy. The concept behind the project, which Negroponte unveiled at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, less than two years ago, is as simple as its name: give all children in the developing world laptop computers of their own. If we achieved that, he believes, we could bridge what's usually termed the "digital divide." The laptops would offer children everywhere the opportunity to benefit from the Internet and would enable them to work with and learn from each other in new ways. OLPC, the nonprofit organization that Negroponte set up to manage the project, has taken responsibility for designing the computer and engaging an outside manufacturer to produce it. But the nonprofit is not going to buy the computers. That, at least for now, is the responsibility of governments, and Negroponte has said that the $100 laptop will not go into production until he has firm commitments from governments to buy at least five million units. Would (or should) any government be willing to lay out the cash? Negroponte answers that question with characteristic bluntness. "Look at the math: even the poorest country spends about $200 per year per child. We've estimated what a connected, unlimited-Internet-access $100 laptop will cost to own and run: $30 per year. That has got to be the very best investment you can make. Period."

Despite the appeal of this vision, Negroponte's project has attracted skepticism as well as support. In part, that's because of Negroponte himself, whose self-assured optimism makes him a permanent lightning rod. More than that, though, OLPC is effectively trying to do two dramatic things at the same time. It's trying to lower the cost of computing to the point where it's accessible to the world's poor--which is to say, to most of the world's population. And it's trying to succeed with a new model of philanthropy, albeit one that harks back to Carnegie--blending private, nonprofit, and governmental interests to create a project of vast scale and scope on a budget that is, even by philanthropic standards, surprisingly small.

Of course, this will only work if OLPC can deliver on its promise, and the problem is that at this moment you cannot buy anything resembling a computer, much less a portable one, for a hundred dollars. OLPC had to design and build an entirely new kind of laptop from scratch--one that would endure rough handling, function even in the absence of a steady power supply, and allow easy networking and Internet access, and whose readable if small screen would use startlingly inexpensive technology. Not surprisingly, critics doubted that it was possible. Yet in the past year, Negroponte has lined up an impressive array of partners to furnish the innards of the computer, including AMD and Red Hat, while Quanta, the Taiwanese manufacturer that currently makes around a third of the world's laptops, is on board to manufacture the machines.

OLPC designers claim to have cracked the toughest problems they faced. When the laptop is not plugged in, it can be powered by means of a foot pedal (or pull string, depending on the final decision) that will generate 10 minutes of power for every minute of exertion. Out of the box, the laptops will connect with one another to form a mesh network that will make each computer a transmission node, allowing the laptops to talk to each other and greatly magnifying the range of any Internet connection. And the screen will have both a high-resolution black-and-white mode, in which it will be readable even in bright sun, and a backlit, lower-resolution color mode. The designers say the display will be at least as readable as today's LCD screens but use far less power, and they expect it to cost about $35, which is roughly a quarter of what a typical screen costs today. It will be a very small screen for a laptop--seven and a half inches--but if it works, it will represent a genuine engineering breakthrough.

Nevertheless, the $100 laptop is not yet a reality. (In fact, the name is something of a misnomer: for more than a year now, Negroponte has been predicting an initial cost of closer to $150, though he expects that, as with most electronic products, the laptop's price will fall as time goes on and units are produced in greater volume.) OLPC has yet to demonstrate a working version of the laptop; Negroponte says that the first working models, so-called B machines, will come off the assembly line in November, after which they'll be put through a torture course of testing in five developing countries--Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Thailand, and Nigeria--to see how they hold up. And even if they do work, the task of persuading governments to buy them still remains. Negroponte has made real progress on this front. In October, Libya signed a memorandum of understanding that effectively commits it to buying a million laptops, assuming the B machines pass their tests, and the other four test nations seem nearly as likely to sign up if the machines work as planned. But five million laptops is, by OLPC's self-defined standards, just a start. No matter how well things go in the next few months, Negroponte can almost certainly count on continuing to spend a great deal of time negotiating with government ministers around the globe. In that sense, just as we're waiting to see whether OLPC's laptop will work, we're waiting to see whether its "business" model will work, too. If it doesn't, the project will be remembered as an interesting side note in the history of computing. If it does, OLPC will become integral to one of the more remarkable narratives of the past decade: the revolution in philanthropy.

Part II of this story will be published November 14.

James Surowiecki is the financial columnist at the New Yorker and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

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