One Laptop Per Child
Just read this article about the One Laptop Per Child project. The article concentrates mostly on the technicalities of producing a laptop for $100 US however what struck me was how this will change the Internet. Currently most the people on the Internet are relatively well off Europeans and Americans. With this initiative to give 5-10 million laptops to children in India, China, Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Egypt, and Nigeria by Q1 2007 things start to get much more interesting. The Internet as a whole gets very much more diverse with ideas from many more perspective entering the shared consciousness.
Robert Metcalf’s law states that the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network. However if all these nodes (people) are pumping out the same or similar ideas then, I’m sure, this places a dampening effect on the value/power of the network. You only have to look at a blog aggregator to see the ideas on the Internet seem to be part of a small closed system, there is a feedback loop going on but the loop is still too small to really amplify and evolve the ideas to their full potential. Now if you add 10 million nodes to the network from very different backgrounds you have a larger set of seed and mutation points to develop ideas.
I’m excited by this and applaud Google, Red Hat, AMD, Brightstar, News Corp and Nortel Networks for each donating $2 million US to the project. Oh and the laptop will run Linux.