Visit to One Laptop Per Child office

Today I visited the OLPC office in Kendall Square with an SDM classmate and teammate of mine in project management, Jeremy Katz. He works at Red Hat Linux and is involved with the OLPC project so was able to link us up with people there. We had a very interesting conversation with Kim Quirk, who is Vp of Support and Development there.

The office itself was just what I was hoping for them - pleasant space with big windows overlooking Cambridge with open layout workstations and a few offices, but many, many OLPC's all over - on the desks, racks of them on bookshelves, hanging mounted in the ceiling, taken apart in many pieces. Fun to see!

We were looking for information on how they managed the project and how the constraints of a very conplex open source project affected the options available to them. Clearly, you can't put the same deadlines on people who aren't on the payroll, and many of the contributors are volunteers, so hitting deadlines can be challenging.

One interesting point is the number of new technologies which were originally pitched to be in it, and how tough that turned out to deliver. They were able to deliver on the shock proof case and the day light readable screen, but many of the tricks they proposed were not able to be fully implemented in the first version (for instance, mesh networking and special security measures). If expectations were managed differently, the media response could have turned out quite differently from the negativity many have given it.

Many more interesting insights offered as well...