I like to publicize here Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender's response to one blog, a particularly bad documented one by Alanna Shaikh on a UN Foundation-sponsored site (http://www.undispatch.com/node/8859):

First NN response:

''The dream is not over. When OLPC started there were no low cost laptops. We created the category less than four years ago and it now represents almost one third of the world production of latops. I am not aware of too many technologies that have gone from “impossible” to such wide adoption.

The million laptops, our little green ones, that are in the hands of children, are currently in 19 languages and 31 countries. Another million are on their way. Not bad. But even better, these countries include Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, as well as places like the West Bank (and next month Gaza). Even better, eh?

I suggest you look more carefully at Uruguay, Peru and Rwanda. In the case of Uruguay, every child has one. That is pretty amazing. Peru is headed there. Rwanda too. In fact, we have moved our learning group (as of early June) to Kigali perminently, to be in the field and get the kind of feedback you claim we ignore.

Anyway. I do not normally answer press and blogs, because we would spend all our time with words, not actions in the field But you are on a UN site and the UN is our partner. Check out Kofi Annan’s words -- they have been fulfilled. Has it been harder than I expected? Yes. But do you know why? It is not due to what I had anticipated, things like corruption and logistics. It has been due to commercial interests and press, stories like yours.

As a small non-profit, humanitarian organization, it is hard to battle giants who view children as a market, not a mission, and have other agendas. In spite of all that, the change is huge. I no longer hear people arguing against “one laptop per child” as a concept. The issue is purely a matter of funding and there are many ways to do that. Wait and see.

Nicholas Negroponte''

And Walter's one:

''I am writing in response to Alanna Shaikh’s 9/9/09 article, “One Laptop Per Child – The Dream is Over”.

Not only is the dream not over, the OLPC project has created an opportunity for the pursuit of more dreams by many more people.

I was Nicholas Negroponte’s partner in founding One Laptop per Child. As Nicholas has elegantly stated in his response to Ms. Shaikh’s blog, we spawned the netbook market, which is bringing the price of computing within reach of millions more people. In addition, we launch a free software initiative, Sugar Labs, that is putting educational software into the hands of children.

Sugar Labs (www.sugarlabs.org) is an independent outgrowth of OLPC. We are a global community of volunteers—teachers and software developers—whose mission is to bring the advantages of the Sugar learning platform to children everywhere, on any computer. Sugar was designed specially for children and offers a better alternative for young learners than traditional “office-desktop” software. Indeed, nothing in our children’s future has anything to do with office work from 30 years ago.

Ms. Shaikh is mistaken in her assertion that OLPC has abandoned “the special child-friendly OS.” More than 99% of the OLPC laptops in the hands of children run Sugar. Governments prefer Sugar because of its superior quality, openness, built-in collaboration, easy internationalization and localization to indigenous languages, and unbeatable price (free).

Sugar on a Stick, our latest initiative, allows children fortunate enough to have access to a computer at school, in the community, at home (or only the occasional access to a computer in an Internet café) to benefit from Sugar with a simple USB stick, which costs less than US $5. Sugar on a Stick runs on netbooks, but it also runs on hand-me-down computers, typical of those found in schools, that can only limp along running Windows.

We invite you to contact as we will be pleased to answer any of your questions about Sugar, the free learning platform used in schools every day in countries around the world.''

There are ideas that change the world, we see that as we apply them, these kinds of ideas never sleep.

Deep inside a local labs, we have to consider a general internal organization.

These are the proposed objectives of a local labs

* Adapt the technology and pedagogy to an area's culture and resources (e.g, developing activities and content specific to a region)
* Help translate Sugar to the local language(s)
* Support Sugar deployments in area schools
* Create a local community devoted to the Sugar Labs principles, making Sugar more open and sustainable
* Provide for communication,between the local communities and the global Sugar Labs community
* Develop Local content and software that can be used not only for local purposes but also for the overall community
* Host, co-host or partner in the organization of conferences, workshops, talks and meetings related to the use or development of Sugar,

And these are the means proposed to accomplish these objectives.

* A university connection as a local human resource
* A local pilot user group from which to learn
* A local passion or sub-goal that provides a rational for the work
* Bi-directional communication with the global Sugar community and other Sugar Labs
* A sustainable and well-defined entrepreneurship model
* A program to reach out to local free-software community and local industry.
* A marketing program or roadmap

Internally each local labs, have to divide responsibilities between the individuals to achieve objectives, implement programs and with that reach sustainability.

But overall the people involved have to be passionate about education and free software, they have to be passionate about cultural and social changes, they have to share their knowledge and construct innovation starting from the joy of collaboration, because after all, love is better master than duty.

now we have three Local Labs starting around the world, we expect that many would start between this and next year.

* http://co.sugarlabs.org/go/Laboratorios_Azúcar_Colombia Colombia Local Labs
* http://cl.sugarlabs.org/go/Página_Principal Chile Local Labs
* http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs_DC Washington DC Local Labs

As intended from the beginning, SugarLabs is a distributed FLOSS organization, anyone can be part of Sugarlabs and also can found organizations that can support or share the same or similar objectives Sugarlabs is supporting.

Local Labs are organized to supply specific needings of countries where sugar is deployed,
some of them are constituted of volunteers that want to have economic support to be able to help,
in other words they need help to help others, but this organizations although motivated by charity are doing entrepreneurship models to be soustanaible and scalable, to include and not to exclude all learners (parents, teachers, students, developers and deployers).

Although the local labs effort is young we have seen a nascent interest on it, because we are looking for a more independent way of thinking and this thinking has to be applied not only to ideas but also to real life procedures; liberty generates empathy and facilitates inclusion of new supporters and cultivates ideas.

But independence doesn't mean ignoring other people's point of view, and local labs have to have a good communication between them and the overall Sugarlabs that is also composed of local labs,
in a way of saying there is not a centralized Sugarlabs, there is a central place of virtual gathering namely mail-lists, wiki's and IRC channels.

Some orgs (not necessarily FLOSS oriented) have chosen the other way around, they impose all in a centralized way.
but this is not sustainable or scalable and then they have been doing some fragmentation of it's own orgs in entities like nemeorg-LA or nameorg-India or nameorg-USA. and each one independent from the central nameorg but without an straight-trough way of communication between them, in other words, they are now adopting some of the federated way of thinking but without having the advantages of it, the future for these centralized organizations is not too bright because they are exercising the same top-down ideas in all it's fragmented partners, when they try to impose
or ''give'' a solution to different countries or third-parties, they are working ''for'' them and not ''with'' them, this generate opossing forces that act against their progress even from the start, so they have to work not only to solve the problems that it's mission implies but also these pre-existent forces, due to the fact that artificial solutions don't solve the real needs of communities because they ''interpret'' communities needs and don't work side-by-side to solve them.

The first part of this blog talks about the need for a distributed FLOSS organization, the second part would discuss it's organization specifics, what we are lacking and what we are doing well.