Despite the recent setbacks and staff-cutting at the One Laptop Per Child project, Cory Doctorow remains adamant that laptop computers, and not just mobiles, are essential to emancipate children in emerging countries:

I believe that the world’s poor will derive lasting, meaningful benefit from widespread access to technology and networks. And I believe that laptop computers will eventually find their way into the hands of practically every child in the developing world, even if the OLPC project shuts its doors tomorrow.

He explains the rationale of the project, and of the use of computers in particular:

“First, the case for laptops as tools for sustainable, appropriate, community-driven development: the original, audacious OLPC plan envisioned its laptops as pedagogical and development wonder-boxes. They were to be wide open and trivially modifiable by their owners, ensuring that inspired young programmers could develop any and all software and hardware add-ons that suited their needs. Their networking stacks were built on the idea of forming ad-hoc meshes that made it easy to connect any OLPC units to one another, and to share Internet connections among them.

In short, the OLPC vision is to deliver to children in the developing world the capacity to play and work together to produce tools and networks and communities at the lowest possible cost, with the highest possible flexibility. Poverty and its associated problems – hunger, poor health, lack of education and disenfranchisement – are fundamentally information problems. Poverty is exacerbated by the high cost of discovering how your peers have solved their agricultural problems, of accessing government services, of communicating with distant relations who have gone to the city to earn on behalf of the family. Poverty and oppression thrive in situations where people can’t communicate cheaply and widely with one another about corruption, injustice and violence.

The success of mobile phones in defraying these co-ordination costs shows just how profoundly technology can change the cycle of poverty. Whether it’s electoral monitors armed with mobile phones who watch the ballots move from the polls to the counting houses in Kenya, the citizen reporters who exposed the brutality in Myanmar, or the fishermen and farmers in Africa and Asia who use networks to find the best market for their goods. A mobile phone network can multiply the food, education, health and democracy that is already there, and be used to bring new resources besides.”

Very importantly, here are the arguments of Cory Doctorow, on the limitations of laptops, followed by the reasons why computers are still essential:

1. On the Limitations of mobile phones:

“But mobile phones are necessarily an interim step. Adding software to most mobile phones is difficult or impossible without the permission of a central carrier, which makes life very hard for local technologists who have a very particular, local itch that needs scratching (and forget about collectively improving the solutions that do get approved – when was the last time you heard of someone downloading an app for her phone, improving it, and republishing it?). Mobile phone use is always metered, limiting their use and exacting a toll on people who can least afford to pay it. Worst of all, the centralised nature of mobile networks means that in times of extremis, governments and natural disasters will wreak havoc on our systems, just as we need them most.”

2. On the necessity for meshworked laptops

“By contrast, an open laptop with mesh networking is designed to be locally customised, to have its lessons broadcast to others who can use them, and to avoid centralised control and vulnerability to bad weather and bad governments. It is designed to be nearly free from operating costs, so that once the initial investment is made, all subsequent use is free, encouraging experimentation and play, from which all manner of innovations may spring.”

Cory then concludes:

“The OLPC detractors who say that the rich, northern minority can’t know what the world’s majority need are right. And that’s why giving the world’s poor access to the tools that they can use in any way they can imagine is so powerful. It’s a break from the centuries-old model of development and aid. It’s an invitation for the world’s majority to simultaneously access all of human knowledge as equal participants in the global conversation, all the while having the power to modify their systems to match their needs.

the OLPC may falter and vanish. But the vision of a world where we can all talk to one another, where we can all modify our tools to suit our needs, where we are not charged a toll for our access to democracy, communities and ideas – that will live on forever.”