Imagine there's no telecoms

by emptypockets

This afternoon, on the outskirts of Lima, in a mountain village a mile and a half above sea level, all 46 children and each of their teachers are wired. Their laptops came courtesy of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and a quarter million other Peruvian children will soon be wired as well, as are children in other pilot programs in Abuja, Nigeria; Villa Cardal, Uruguay; Samkha village, Thailand; Porto Alegre, Brazil; and Khairat, India.

(You can be, too, for $200 and a matching tax-deductible donation to give one to a child somewhere. The give-one-get-one program runs until Dec. 31.)

There are several things to say about this remarkable project, but first let me establish the basics. The OLPC laptops are small, power-efficient laptops built to withstand rugged conditions. Each has a microphone, a camera, a screen that can be viewed in bright daylight or in dark, a small amount of flash memory (no hard drive), and innovative wireless networking capabilities that I'll come back to in a minute.

They are open-source, run linux, and are produced, sold, and distributed by a non-profit academic group as a charitable enterprise -- not by a computer company. From what I can tell, the villages that receive them are poor, but children have clothing, access to clean water, limited electricity (the laptops can be charged from a wide range of voltages, solar panels, or a hand pull), and some educational infrastructure. Rather than sprinkle the laptops throughout the population of developing countries, OLPC is targeting individual villages and saturating them, so that every child in the village has his or her own personal computer to use at school and at home.

A number of criticisms have been leveled against the program, including that the money would be better spent on providing more teachers, and that the program seeks to destroy some natural harmony that exists between poor people and the land (for example, here). With regard to the latter, the ads for the give-one-get-one program, showing a black girl with a laptop perched on her head like a bucket of water, leaves itself particularly open to critique, implying as it does -- to me, anyway -- that the program is targeted to Africa (it's not) and that the recipients are supposed to swap basic resources for new technology and smile.

I'll come back to these two topics -- what you can learn from a computer that you don't learn from a teacher, and whether "living in harmony with nature" is a myth -- in a couple of posts down the road. Right now, though, I'd like to overlook the question of all the good that I think will come out of the project in the future... and look instead at some of the good that, perhaps, already has.

Sometimes, the ultimate goal of a visionary undertaking is, in retrospect, less revolutionary than the way it was achieved. The Apollo moon landing project, for example, arguably accomplished very little direct benefit by putting an American on the moon, but the technology that had to be developed to cram a computer guidance system into a spacecraft in 1969 was revolutionary (see, for example, here and here). Much more recently, the sequencing of a single individual's DNA (both sets of chromosomes!) will also be more significant, in the long run, for how it was done than for the result itself.

Likewise, even if OLPC proves to be a bust -- and, as I'll write in future posts, I think it is likely to be one of the greatest movements of the first quarter of this century -- but even if no good comes of it, the technology of cramming all that potential into such a small, power-efficient package, is remarkable in itself. And of all the technology they drew on, the invention that's most likely to stand the test of time, I think, is mesh networking.

What is mesh networking? As I understand it, mesh networking is to the telecom industry the way bittorent is to AOL. Rather than getting your internet from a single site, mesh networking lets you participate in local ad hoc peer-to-peer networks with your neighbors. (There's more basic info here, and a cute demo -- click on the laptops to activate their antennae, and move them around to see how the network adjusts.)

Just as the Apollo mission didn't invent integrated circuits, OLPC by no means invented the idea of mesh networking. It's an idea that's been in the works for some time, and the OLPC mesh network is just one implementation of it. But, like Apollo did with ICs, OLPC is undertaking a large-scale field test of mesh networking while the technology is still in its infancy.

There have been a couple of grassroots efforts to outflank the telecom-controlled networks in the past, including community wireless and this group, both of which seem to be quiescent.

What are the implications of mesh networks? First, with everyone handing off data from one to the other rather than going through a central trunk, the "net neutrality" issues -- the risk of your telecom provider limiting your access to a site based on payoffs from that site -- are vaporized. (Ironically, the flip side of net neutrality -- providing equal access in urban and rural communities -- becomes much more of an issue.)

Second, many of the privacy and wiretapping issues associated with telecoms today would also vanish, at least in their current form (they may be reborn in an even more menacing form, see below). Even more importantly, I think the way this technology changes privacy may have huge implications for delivering freedom of expression in countries where internet use is censored and controlled by the government.

Finally, it's likely that these kind of dynamic, decentralized networks are better equipped for emergency response and more robust to attacks or disasters that would take down the kind of connection you're using to read this today.

What are the drawbacks? A successful network depends intimately on density of users, making this really an urban or at best suburban technology. It would be great in offices, schools, anywhere that users are near each other, and the more the better. Here in Manhattan, it would be beautiful. But in the countryside, or if introduced in a way where only early adopters have it (rather than in a saturating way as OLPC is delivering), it could disappoint. I'll note that OLPC is developing ~$10 solar-powered repeaters that would extend network connectivity.

Second, there are new kinds of privacy issues: imagine all your mail being delivered to you by being handed from neighbor to neighbor, instead of delivered by the post office. You don't need to worry (as much) about the government peeping, but what about all those neighbors? You'd want to encrypt everything you sent or received. It can be done, but it's another moving part to include in the system and something else to worry about.

Finally, would a decentralized network be vulnerable to new kinds of spam, denial of service attacks, or other malicious exploits? I'm guessing "yes" but I haven't thought it through. Again, each of these problems can be overcome -- but they may require a little more thought and development.

What gets me excited, though, is the prospect of an entirely next-generation way to communicate with your neighbors and (perhaps) people very far away; the idea that this network would be free and open and not controlled by any telecoms; and -- especially -- the idea that kids in mountain villages in Peru, and near rice fields in Thailand, near farming towns in India, will experience this potential revolution before we in the US do. Whether it blossoms in the next couple decades -- and just how it evolves -- may be mostly in the small hands of a generation of extremely rural schoolchildren.

Comments

[JIm Hicks]

Heard about this from C-Span (Q & A 11/27) interview with Negroponte (yes brother of that one - the devil of El Salvador - while being the conduit for the contras and death squads adopted two El S orphans - irony upon irony). This Neg sounds like true do gooder but who knows what lurks.

[Jodi]

emptypockets,

it is a good idea, and as such has seeded a lot of other projects including other very low cost computers. For example India has toyed with the idea of a $10 and then a $15 computer (yes that is what they are talking) and China has one, though I am not sure of the cost. Not to mention Intel's Classmate, which is now being offered for trials and even Microsoft is getting interested because of the potential customer base. ((If Google got into it, that would be wonderful.))

Apple offered to give for a version of it's OS for free, and MS feeling the pressure, offered a reduced XP for $40 but thus far OLPC has stuck to Open Source thinking of keeping the costs low in the future, but now further options have been opened and are being explored.
After at first being antagonistic, Intel, having been embarassed by seeming to act as a roadblock, and also having been lured by the possible vast customer, is also joining OLPC on hardware which is welcome.

The screen for the machine is actually very versatile, and is due to be improved.

Anyway, a vast new area of simple, cheap computers is opening up.

On Privacy concerns, I think that is someone in a different world worrying about situations they can't possibly understand.

Perhaps the idea of "a telephone party line" is repugnant to you emptypockets, but at one time they were well accepted, and appreciated. Perhaps too, the old operator switchboard with a busybody at the controls is anathema to you, but all these things can be dealt with and handled as easily as a young sister listening in on her brothers conversations with their girl friends from the phone in the kitchen.

Don't "swallow the camel, and then choke on a gnat!"

And on a personal level, I am responsible for 10 machines going to little kids in far away places. That is one form of Christmas Giving, that is open to everyone.

[katie Jensen]

Well written post... I enjoyed and appreciated your non judgmental analysis of the pros and cons. Thanks empty pockets!!

[dude]

I bought an XO laptop and joined the OLPC. I think the very attractive thing about it (besides the design geared for kids) is that it is Linux based and therefore open. The program founder points out this is not a hardware enterprise (though often mistaken for one) in the final analysis, but an educational one. The interface is not a Mac or Windows desktop and is not designed to make little office-workers out of the users. I am looking forward to see what it has to offer and anxiously await its arrival for Christmas.

[Ken Muldrew]

If I could make one small point: people in the 3rd world generally have to work when it's light out, and indoor lighting in the morning and evening comes from a wood (or dung) fire. This means that the simple act of reading is beyond reach without consuming fuel that is more useful for other things, in addition to the respiratory problems created by a smoky fire inside a dwelling. The seemingly trivial ability to display written text in a form that can be read in the dark, whether the text is neighborly communication, literature, or technical information, may be the most important product of this wonderful program. I don't want to discount the value of cheap and ready computation, but knowledge comes first and foremost through the written word. I am hopeful that these mesh networks will prove to be shameless and persistent violators of copyright and that books, both important and entertaining, litter the landscape of the 3rd world.

Kudos to Jodi for a good comment and for her generosity. Privacy really is the least worrisome aspect of the lives of people who are being targeted by the OLPC. When they need it, they'll be able to figure out how to get it. And kudos to the OLPC techs for getting wireless to work with linux (that's a joke...really...I know it's not that bad...unless you insist on using a Broadcom 1438 card) ;-)

[Jodi]

Good point about the light in the dwelling, and after dark Ken!

What impressed me most wasn't just that the kids caught on so quickly, but how they helped each other. For them it was not just personal learning, but social learning. Communicating with each other in the class!

... and next the world!

[texas dem]

meraki (sf.meraki.com) is setting up a demo mesh network in the heart of residential San Francisco with some VC backing from Google. They were stalled and quiescent for a long time, but it looks like they've picked up a lot in the last couple months. I might be able to switch to their signal pretty soon.

I can imagine a whole constellation of interests who must not want to see this technology move forward, so it's not surprising that it's slow. In fact, it's surprising that it's happening at all. Under the right conditions, I can imagine the entire city dropping their Comcast subscriptions in a year, which would be a very very very big deal and thus will never go down without a fight.

[MarkusQ]

After following the link to the critique of the OLPC ad, and without an opinion one way or another about OLPC or the ad, I have to say: That critique was a load of racist clap-trap the likes of which I have not seen for a long time. I thought the old "Noble Savage" meme died out two generations ago, but I guess pockets of it are hanging on in the strangest places.

I suppose that the fact that it was posted as a web page, only accessible to computer users isn't some ironic joke but is just a sad reminder of the fact that making such decisions is and always will be part of "The White Man's Burden". At least after telling her she should stay bare foot he stopped short of going into conniptions about her reproductive status.

--MarkusQ