developerWorks: You're listening to developerWorks interviews where we feature conversations with technical luminaries and thought leaders from a variety of disciplines on topics of interest to technology professionals. I'm your host, Scott Laningham. Our guest today is Walter Bender, President of Software and Content for the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. He is former Executive Director of the Media Lab, has a Bachelor's degree from Harvard, a Master's from MIT. He studies new information technologies, particularly those that affect people directly, and has participated in much of the pioneering research in the field of electronic publishing and personalized interactive multimedia.

Walter, it's a real pleasure to have you join us. Thanks for doing this today.

Bender: Oh, it's my pleasure. It's a great opportunity to reach a lot of people with news about the project.

developerWorks: Now, I know you have a lengthy history of involvement with IBM. Maybe you could tell us a little about that first.

Bender: Well, I used to work at the Architecture Machine Group at M.I.T. before we started the Media Lab. And even back then we were working with IBM on things like user interaction and the like. I used to go down to Boca in the early days of the PC once a month to work on various aspects of that. Long history of working with IBM, and it's been generally a real pleasure.

developerWorks: Well, this is great. It's good to have this chance to visit a little bit. Now, I would imagine that most of our audience has heard about One Laptop Per Child, but maybe you could summarize the vision again for us and describe how you got involved with it.

Bender: Sure. So One Laptop Per Child is actually a project about the transformation of education. It's really about giving children who don't have the opportunity for learning that opportunity. So it's about access, it's about equity, and it's about giving the next generation of children in the developing world a bright and open future.

So what we're doing is we're trying to provide for these children a connected laptop computer, because we think that's the most efficient and effective way to give them access to knowledge and give them a vehicle, tools for learning. There are one billion school aged children in the developing world, and a lot of these kids, if they go to school at all, school is under a tree somewhere. There are very few textbooks. There's really not much opportunity for these kids. And giving them both access to great and powerful ideas through the form of things like electronic books but also giving them the ability not just to explore information but to express with that information, to really put it to use, that's really what we're about.

developerWorks: Well, and I know in that kind of a setting that you described -- everything from sitting under a tree to rural or suburban settings, maybe that don't have all of the luxuries of some settings -- this obviously is a different kind of machine with a different kind of content, software and functionality. It's a different vision than just another laptop that you might go pull off the shelf at Circuit City, isn't it?

Bender: Yes, absolutely. There were a number of different things that we really had to think about within the context of the problem we're trying to solve. And some of the basic ones are things like power. So the typical laptop runs 20, 30, 40 watts, but when power is a real premium -- which it is for most of these kids and actually most schools even in the developed world -- we designed a laptop that runs on average two watts. So it brings it down within the realm of things like human-generated power, and solar. We have a very robust system for powering the laptop so that it will survive sort of a dirty 35-year-old truck engine generator, things like that.

Another thing that we needed to do was we needed to get these kids on line. And we're building a mesh network that is self configured so that automatically when the laptops come out of the box all the children and teachers within a community are talking to each other. So we build the last mile network automatically. It's a zero configuration network. And then we're working with the different countries to then provide gateways at the schools. The last mile comes for free, and then a shared gateway out for the Internet.

Another thing we did was around the display, because as I mentioned a lot of kids spend a lot of time outdoors in the sunlight and so we designed a laptop, it's the first laptop that was designed to be used outdoors actually. So it has a sunlight readable display that's 200 dpi, it's absolutely beautiful. It's a wonderful way to read a book. And it's also quite robust to the weather. We designed it to withstand the heat of a Libyan desert and the rains in a monsoon. And we designed it to be robust to what children do, because children are bouncing around and dropping things. And so we think we've got a pretty decent tool for these kids.

And the other thing we had to do is we also had to design it so that it was at a price that was within reach of the governments of these countries. We haven't hit the $100 price range yet. Our target is to hit that price sometime towards the end of next year or sometime in 2009. But we're well under $200 per laptop, and our pledge is to continue to drive the price down.

developerWorks: You know, there's a great time line on the One Laptop Per Child or OLPC Web site explaining the path of events that began, really, well before your offices opened in March of last year, I think it was, right?

Bender: Right, right.

developerWorks: And as I read it, it felt like I was following the unfoldment of very much a global idea with elements of diplomacy, of technology, evangelism around a vision -- so many things beyond simply the creation of a durable and affordable laptop. And I assume that makes your approach to software and content ... it's really impacted by much of that, and it must feel really daunting at times, I would think.

Bender: Well, the idea of One Laptop Per Child really dates back to the early 1960s, when Seymore Papper started to explore the use of technology for learning and for children. And it was something that even ... You know, we were exploring this idea with IBM in the mid eighties. We had set up a school in Jamaica Plain, part of Boston, with the IBM PC Junior as a one to one computing program. So some of those ideas go back quite a long ways.

But it is a global project. And it's a project that by its very nature, and I think by the very nature of learning requires a different approach to software and a different approach to content. Everything we're doing we're trying to do in a free and open way -- free as in speech, not as in beer. So we're using Linux as our core. But even things like the e-book reader in the laptop, the native format for the e-book reader in the laptop is not pdf, it's actually a wiki. And so we're going to hopefully raise a generation of children who think that every single page of every single book supports a discussion thread. And that's the notion of collaboration and the critical process is fundamental to learning. And it's going to be fundamental to the design of the machine.

And one of the things that I really like about software development in general is the whole debug process. There's a lot of learning that happens in debugging. And there's a lot of learning that happens in the open source community just by the nature of the openness of the discussion around software and software development. And it's that kind of spirit that I want to infect the learning industry with. The education industry is a much more closed and more proprietary industry than the software industry and so getting them to evolve along with the laptop is one of our sub goals.

developerWorks: So open source is not simply just a foundational role in with the OS here, with the Linux-based OS and participants like Wikipedia, but you really want that vision to permeate everything that's going on with it then?

Bender: Yes. I'm agnostic about proprietary software except when it comes to learning. And then I really think it has to be open. If the kids and the teachers aren't able to wholly appropriate everything they're doing with the machine, then I think that we're sending them the wrong message. Learning has to be about the appropriation of knowledge. And so we need to make every corner of the machine be able to be taken by the children.

developerWorks: So the application is a tool; it's not the end goal of something that you're trying to learn how to use then.

Bender: Right. Right. We want the children to grow with the machine and have the machine grow with them.

developerWorks: Now, what about some of the criticisms that range from a laptop being a luxury that's not as high priority as certain life necessities, to the idea that governments can't be trusted with this and the flow of money will ultimately run against the better intentions of the initiative? How do you answer those challenges?

Bender: Well, first of all, I like to make an analogy to immunology, and this actually...this analogy originated with Jonas Salk. A vaccine is not a cure; a vaccine is an agency to allow your body to generate a cure. And the laptop is not a cure; the laptop is an agent that's going to allow children to engage in learning. And the other thing is that we really, you don't ever apply a vaccine just locally; you have to apply a vaccine globally and to scale in order for it to be effective. And with the laptop project we're really taking this scale and global nature of it quite seriously. It has to represent a cultural change.

Now, in terms of the criticism, certainly if you're starving you need food. And if you're at war, you need peace. But after that, it's hard to argue that learning isn't sort of the next thing on the list, that it's pretty fundamental to solving most problems is engaging in learning, is to combat ignorance, to engage people in being creative, being expressive, being entrepreneurial. And we really think that the laptop is the most effective way of doing that. I don't think that anyone would argue that knowledge workers shouldn't have access to computing and computation and connectivity, that it's the pathway to learning and development.

And Seymour Papert argues that perhaps education is also knowledge work, so why would we not want to give equitable access to those tools for quality education to every child? So to some degree it's a matter of equity, to some degree it's a matter of efficiency, and to some degree it's a matter of, can the world afford to lose another generation to ignorance? I don't think we can. I think we really want to give these children opportunity.

developerWorks: When you say that, it makes me think of the commonly recited quote of, "if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day; if you teach him to fish you feed him for life." And there's some of that going on in what you're talking about here, right?

Bender: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. But in effect again that goes back to why we think that having this be open is so important, because if they don't have access to the lake or the stream or the river, even if they know how to fish, they're not going to do any fishing.

developerWorks: Right.

Bender: So we really need to make knowledge be widespread and open for these children. And we think that having them be part of the global knowledge economy is really critical. And this is the tool to do it. This is the way to reach those children and give them that opportunity.

Now, in terms of the other criticism you mentioned, the one of can we trust government and will there be graft and et cetera. Well, certainly in every ... You're always going to find bad people in every society. And there will be a certain amount of theft, and a certain amount of graft in any large deployment. But you know, we've got to work through that, and we've got to set our goals to reach as many children as we can and do this in as sensible a thoughtful a manner as we can.

We put a lot of thought into our security model, for example. And anti theft mechanisms, et cetera; we're not doing this naively by any means. But ultimately the goal is to reach the children and certain places maybe there's going to be more of an overhead associated with that than in others. But I think we can do this.

developerWorks: How are things progressing on that front? How would you describe the state along the development and release curve that you're at right now?

Bender: Well, and we've been pushing a very aggressive development cycle. We're just about to have our beta three machines which include a processor upgrade. And we hope to actually start manufacturing at the end of the summer, so we'll start actually delivering machines. We've got a number of our beta two machines out in the field now in the hands of children. So we're starting to get lots of feedback on both the hardware and software from kids in the developing world who are taking these laptops home, using them with their families, with their parents, et cetera. So it's starting to really happen.

And we've got an equally aggressive program in terms of software. We've got a Linux core. We're using Fedora as our base operating system, but on top of that we've got a lot of developers involved. A lot of patient developers, because some of our tools aren't as advanced as they will be. But nonetheless there are thousands of people now out there working on the software platform. And things are really coming together.

developerWorks: Are there ways for people to participate that are especially inspired by what you're talking about? Are there things that you would say developers could check out or look towards opportunities around this?

Bender: Absolutely. Our whole process has been very open as well. And all our tools are out in the open. We've got a big get tree full of all the source, and we've got a number of mailing lists and a very active IRC channel. You can find this if you go to our wiki which is wiki.laptop.org. It's all laid out there. We support emulators on virtually any platform for the UI. And you know, bring us your projects, start projects. It's really an exciting opportunity to reach a lot of kids.

developerWorks: Now, Walter, how is the laptop powered again? Is it a hand crank generator? Is that how it was originally designed?

Bender: Well, what we did, in the original design the crank was on board, but now we moved the crank off board on to the power brick.

developerWorks: Okay.

Bender: And so there is a battery in the laptop, and we've got a number of different scenarios. We've been working with our battery manufacturer on a gang charger that would sit at school. We've got a solar powered option. We've got a crank. We've got a pulley system. We're looking at a lot of different ways of powering this thing. We also, we expect and we hope that they're going to be a number of indigenous solutions that emerge, that local power generation is local so we want to be robust in light of whatever the kids throw at this thing. So one of the things we've done is we've built a power system that's not only efficient but also very robust.

developerWorks: That's great. So you mean there could be hand crank scenarios, there's the bicycle pedaling scenarios, solar scenarios. All kinds of scenarios.

Bender: Windmills. You name it.

developerWorks: Water generation?

Bender: Yes, whatever is out in the field.

developerWorks: Do you see some of this spilling over into the commercial market soon? Because obviously there are a lot of people, including me, that would love to have some of this flexibility to go more remote with the laptop.

Bender: Right. Well, I haven't met anybody who's seen our display who doesn't want that display for their laptop. Just the idea you can sit outside in full sun light and use your computer is amazing to me that it hasn't happened in the past. In terms of the power, just in terms of being environmentally sensitive, that we've taken an order of magnitude out of the power required to run a laptop I think is an important lesson for the whole industry.

developerWorks: Absolutely.

Bender: And then the other thing is the way in which we're approaching the whole user interface for the laptop. I think there's going to be a lot of interest in that because what we've done is we've taken a lot of lessons from the way in which people use the Internet. And we've migrated a lot of that collaborative activity that you see on the Net into the desktop experience. Because we know that every single one of our laptops is going to be connected to this mesh network, we can leverage that directly. So collaboration is not the exception, it's central to the whole experience.

developerWorks: I guess what I was wondering is, do you think that some of these ideas and these advancements will be finding their way into more commercial products in the near future?

Bender: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean they're fundamentally sound ideas. And so they make as much sense for a child or an adult in the developed world as in the developing world. It's just where we chose to apply it. But it will definitely happen.

developerWorks: Some of them could be very game changing. And it's quite interesting to consider that a project like One Laptop Per Child -- developing a laptop that can be a resource for children in less advantaged situations -- would actually be the impetus for bringing these kinds of advancements to the rest of us, isn't it?

Bender: Yes, but that's funny, that's how things end up happening usually. It's not an atypical scenario for development.

developerWorks: Any closing thoughts, Walter? Anything you'd like to say that I didn't prompt you to say?

Bender: I'd love to have the broader community get involved in the project, bring ideas in terms of software, in terms of content, in terms of activities to engage children in learning. And, again, it's an open project, and we enjoy your input, critique and help.

developerWorks: Walter, this has been really enjoyable. And thanks so much for making time for us today.

Bender: Okay. You're quite welcome. Thanks, Scott.

developerWorks: Our guest again has been Walter Bender, President of Software and Content for the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. Find out more about One Laptop Per Child at laptop.org. Also, find out a lot more about open source software development at ibm.com/developerworks. Just look for the open source link in the left nav. That's it for this edition of developerWorks interviews. I'm Scott Laningham. Thanks for listening.

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About the author

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

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