Charitable Gift Giving

Every now and again, you come across something that’s just a great idea. The One Laptop per Child XO Laptop (Give a Laptop, Get a Laptop) is one of those ideas.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit charitable organization with a mission to create an affordable computer that could be used by children in the poorest and neediest developing nations.

By providing children with this technology, new ways of learning and education could be opened up to them, and with the proper teaching, help empower them to learn to build up their countries, and to break the chain of poverty. It was an idea spawned by a book by Nicholas Negroponte and others at MIT.

The laptop is not like a traditional laptops you see. First of all, it’s built to be able to be used anywhere in the world, so it’s extremely rugged and draws very low power. It’s built to be open source, so it uses Linux instead of Windows, and has many custom applications designed for learning.

The design is revolutionary–it doesn’t have a hard drive, but it does have networking capabilities. The laptop folds up to “ebook mode” to act as an ebook reader. The screen is specially designed to be readable in sunlight, perfect for outdoor classrooms of continents such as Africa and Asia. Still, for a subnotebook, it contains many surprising features, such as 1GB Flash memory, a microphone and video camera, USB and MMC/SD card slots, and a long-lasting battery.

The stated goal of the non-profit OLPC is to produce a laptop that costs so little that governments around the world can afford to buy them en masse for children in their countries, literally allowing every child everywhere to access technology that can help them learn and make the world a better place. Already,

This holiday season, OLPC and Amazon are offering the “Give a laptop, Get a laptop” program. This was a wildly successful program last year, and this year they’ve improved it. Basically, the way it works is, for a $399 donation, you get two laptops: one which is given to a child in need by the OLPC, and the other which you get for yourself.

It’s a great “starter system” for those with young kids, and it’s great for technology lovers as well, as some really fascinating engineering went into this. But more importantly, you’ll be part of an incredible cause: helping a child in the world’s neediest countries get educated and give them a fighting chance at reaching the potential and opportunities we enjoy and take so much for granted.