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I have previously blogged about MIT’s “One Laptop Per Child” project. Spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte, the project aims to develop a small, linux-based laptop costed at less than $100 for use by students in schools in the developing world.
I am interested in seeing if the Second Life metaverse is a useful space to develop support and education about projects like these. My idea is to create a Second Life simulcrum of the $100 laptop which would be given out to SL residents for free as a way of raising awareness of the project, and other similar education tech initiatives.
To facilitate this, I am looking for an object designer to create a custom laptop along the lines of the “green machine” prototype pictured here. A notecard would be included with the laptop containing information about the OLPC project, as well as links to other projects that people can participate in and contribute to if they wish.
Ideally, I’d like to find some one to do the object scripting work pro-bono. The designer would get the credit, obviously, and could include a link to their shop in the notecard that would come with each laptop. However if that isn’t enough incentive, I could probably scrape together some funds from somewhere.
This is not officially associated with MIT or any other non-profit. It’s just something I think would be neat to develop. I’ve contacted a couple of laptop object designers and sent out some details to the SL educators email group I’m subscribed to.
The more complicated version of this would be to sell the laptop and have the proceeds go toward a worthy education / tech cause. But that might be more headache than its worth. I’m not really interested in starting an e-commerce business. I just think it would be a fun way to open some people’s minds to cool tech out there.
We’ll see if I get any takers.