Still, I think it has value, and I’d like to get it to a point where I can reliably use it as a travel computer. It’s small, light, cheap, not enticing to steal and has reasonable battery life, though nowhere near what promised. The default browser is mostly useless, but Opera is a very nice alternative. Skype on there works reasonably well. And I love, love, love the screen.

Some thoughts on my experience so far:

Intuitive?
I’m spatially challenge, but I’m vaguely intelligent. It took me about seven minutes to get the XO opened, and that was with Yaw’s suggestions and both of us puzzling over it. No one I know has opened the darn thing in under two minutes. Some people simply walk away and others come pretty close to snapping the thing in half. I know kids will be in classrooms when they receive them and get instruction and all, but still. I think it’s great that it holds shut really well and has an amazing form factor but… arrows? Hints? Anything? It’s just a frustrating way to get started.

The thing takes A Long Time to boot. Very long. Minutes. The visual feedback doesn’t start right away, so I hard reset the thing in its boot sequence three times thinking it had hung before just letting it do its thing and realizing it just took a while. Now that it hibernates, that might not be such an issue. But still, another source of frustration.

I really like the different zoom levels Sugar has — network level, group level, machine level and app level. But I don’t think it’s very intuitive. Most applications toss you into an environment that’s pretty difficult to discover. My younger brother is 18 and brilliant but I had to spend some significant amount of time explaining Etoys to him (which is not some magical thing. It’s just as clunky as Squeak). Again, this will probably come up in a classroom context where explanation can be given, but I’m disappointed. I thought Sugar was supposed to revolutionize the GUI design world. Far from. Many of the metaphors are the same, just somewhat stylized.

Keyboard mappings are really inconsistent across applications, in my experience. Sometimes the X works to quit, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes copying works, sometimes it doesn’t. Again, irritating. It makes me want to play with balls and hoops because those always do EXACTLY WHAT I EXPECT. Which brings me to my next complaint…

Unpredictable behavior
I stopped using Windows long ago because I felt like I was mostly at the mercy of completely random patterns of behavior. I’d try the same thing five times and get five wildly different results and that was driving me crazy. I’ve never seen anything as bad as the OLPC. We got a machine with build 656. Yaw upgraded to candidate-691. It somehow reverted back to 656. I updated to candidate-691. This morning it was back to 656. I upgraded to candidate-703. Rebooted. Failed at installing activities. Rebooted. Failed again. Rebooted. Back at 656.

At first we could su and get a root shell. At some point su stopped working and we had to click a button. This morning, su worked fine. And now, back at 656, for the first time, I get /bin/su: permission denied and no root shell from the terminal activity. But I can log in as root from the overall terminal.

So I’m trying the 703 upgrade again, but I feel crazy. Maybe this isn’t such a big problem because children will not be expected to perform upgrades on their own machines. Fine. I can buy that. But if there’s some magical sequence of things I keep doing that revert to a previous version, I don’t know what those poor kids will think.

Education?
There’s a fair amount of opportunity for fun on here, and that’s great. A lot of it is somewhat educational or at least provides access to more information and varied experiences. Fine. I’ll buy all that. But when teachers get asked what kids in pilot programs do with their XOs, answers range from “oh, they measure the distance between each other” to “they really like the camera.” Really? That’s the best you can say?

There’s value to learning through osmosis. It’s how I learned almost everything I know about computers — just poking around. But I worry that a lot of the knowledge gained this way won’t really be all that transferable. The applications are… well, toys.

Impact?
Again, the hardware is beautiful, and I’m extremely glad we have it. But I really worry about the impact of this project. The politics of it all have been heartbreaking to watch and the software is far from usable, in my opinion. I wonder whether the overall effect will be positive — what if some governments find themselves short millions of dollars with plenty of paperweights and as just as many hungry mouths to feed? I worry that the reaction will be to move away from funding educational technology programs, which would be a very unfortunate result.

This summer, one of my favorite people ever mentioned somewhat cynically that he was safe in his country because Ghana is relatively poor in natural resources. The entire continent of Africa is fascinating to me because it has been forced to remain (like much of South America) simultaneously so rich in raw materials and so poor in technology to process it. The ethnic, cultural and religious tensions having plagued much of the area for so long are so incredibly easy to exploit for material gain and it’s way too frustrating to me to watch the West continue to do just that, decade after decade. But, so it goes, and I think the only way any of us will ever be able to have any sort of impact is through seeking answers on who is exploiting whom and to what gains.

But. How can I possibly hope to sort it out when China’s providing 90% of arms to the Sudanese army while exploiting its significant oil reserves? What’s the point of aid if UN rations are systematically intercepted by the Janjaweed? How can I make a difference when global warming is quickly turning much of central Africa into the Sahara?

I’m frustrated.

I haven’t been able to vote in my life and it kills me to hear how many people around me who very well could are choosing not to out of a sense of futility. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — we can’t be taking away our own power to make a difference, there are enough external sources trying to do just that already. Our governments can and must act because there no longer is such a thing as a regional conflict.

“There is a perception in the West that refugee camps are temporary.”

For generations, now, we westerners have assumed cultural superiority and attempted to impose our values and core institutions in all other parts of the world. Some chunk of that has been well-meaning — a lot of us are honestly concerned about the health, safety and life expectancy of all global citizens. But even purely altruistic endeavors have failed to make life better for those we’re supposedly helping. This has pretty much been completely baffling to me.

Reading Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty, it seems clear that the problem is just that western countries have been corrupt and lazy in their approach to aid and that if only everyone read the darn book and got excited about it Everything Would Be Fine. By 2015.

Easterly paints a much grimmer picture, but it seems a lot closer to my version of reality. He really helped me understand how it is that with billions of dollars spent on aid, conditions continue to worsen for a lot of people. His argument is essentially that failure of aid efforts can be attributed to leadership being far from those they are attempting to assist and looking primarily for politically helpful, high-visibility projects with no accountability to the poor. The aid industry is full of “Planners” who feel they know what’s best for everyone and would rather have highly advertised meetings than to get someone to shovel shit out of a Lagos ditch.

The great thing about this book is that Easterly lays out a bunch of case studies of things that have worked. There are plenty of examples of “Searchers” who never set out to save the planet but simply worked their darnest to find a localized solution to a localized problem and succeeded. Little things can go a long way, he argues.

One of the reasons I love Seattle so much is that there are a lot of Searchers here trying to find ways to improve everyone’s lives a little. I’m particularly impressed by the University District Service Provider Alliance (maybe just because I know them best). UDSPA loosely brings together a bunch of organizations providing different services for the homeless population. There’s a shelter, there’s a clinic, there’s a meal program… each institution is highly specialized. The loose grouping brings an incredible amount of value to each individual service because they can easily refer patrons to each other and provide consistent information, staffing, safety… most importantly, I think, they can each focus energy on what they do best knowing that someone else is doing an equally good job in other areas. There’s huge value to the Teen Feed program easily being able to alert all other organizations of a violence outbreak. If a shelter volunteer can specifically refer a guest he or she has known for a long time to an acquaintance at the 45th street clinic, the guest can be much more trusting that his/her cocaine habit won’t be revealed to the cops as soon as s/he goes in for help regarding an infection of some sort. Since the education access group knows that they can refer people to local shelters and clinics, they don’t have to worry about providing basic needs and can instead focus on education.

International aid tends to work in a highly centralized fashion. It’s not working. Maybe something should change and maybe there’s something to learn fro UDSPA’s successes.

So. A friend told me this was required reading after The End of Poverty. I agree.

“There is now a regular cycle in the literature on foreign aid and growth. Someone will survey the evidence and find that foreign aid does not produce growth. There will be some to-and-fro in the literature, in the course of which a few studies will find a positive effect of aid on growth. Foreign aid agencies will then seize upon the positive effect, usually focusing on only one study, and will publicize it widely. Researchers will examine the one positive result more carefully and find that it is spurious.”

“…any government that is powerful enough to protect citizens against predators is also powerful enough to be a predator itself.”

“Rich-country politicians control the foreign aid agencies. [...] The big problem already noted is that the principal is the rich-country politician and not the real customers, the poor in poor countries. Voters in the rich country and their representatives are the ones who choose the actions of the foreign aid agency. They love the Big Plans, the promises of easy solutions, the utopian dreams, the side benefits for rich-country political or economic interests, all of which hands the aid agency impossible tasks.”

“The military is even more insulated from the interests of the poor than aid agencies are. People don’t give reliable feedback at gunpoint. Invading soldiers and covert destabilization are not great ways to ascertain local peoples’ interests. The poor on the receiving end have few votes on whether they want the Americans to save them.”

“Nor is self-reliance a magical panacea for poor people — many unlucky poor people, no matter how hardworking, live in states run by gangsters or simply in complex societies that have not yet discovered the elusive path to development. Western assistance, suitably humbled and chastened by the experience of the past, can still play some role in alleviating the sufferings of the poor.”