OLPC is, I suspect, only on slow-cook because it hasn’t built some basic infrastructure. Similar projects have a gforge or other community development environment. OLPC doesn’t, and program development, community formation, thus suffer in the ways you would expect.

Enthusiasm fades for many reasons. Slow-cook provides the ability to survive bad managerial and technical decisions which could kill a commercial project. But it thus also removes the urgency to address them. Which can be both good and bad.

A key insight of OLPC is that time isn’t free — it costs 300k kids per day.

For OLPC, a key question is: “How can we optimize a system – technical and social – that gives us the largest and most varied pool of stable, volunteer-maintained, open-source, kid-hackable educational Activities possible? Gforge, workshops, bounties, documentation, toolchains, access… through any means possible, how would you maximize the number of Activites that meet the above criteria?” http://blog.melchua.com/2008/09/28/forging-a-software-development-community/

My son’s use separate USB-connected mice instead of the mousepads, which are too spasmodic to use.

We haven’t upgraded the system software — we’re still using whatever came with it when it was prepped for G1G1-Xmas-of-2007-edition.

They’ve benefited a lot from their XOs already, and I hope that their current explorations into editing and coding instead of just playing are going to accelerate.

My favorite example is Javascript. IIRC, Brendan Eich “invented” it back in 96 (?) due to the need for some scripting in Netscape Navigator. Maybe JS didn’t back then have all the features it does today, but certainly the idea of something like gmail could have been implemented back then. But it took a long time for the idea of javascript as an application platform to “slow cook” here: the platform was there, but no one had really implemented applications to put javascript through its paces, because up to some point in time, there was no JS standard.

Unfortunately on the time scale of the Internet/Blog news cycle of hours/days no such judgements can be made. I have seen criticism about Google’s android being “late to the party” but I find that to be impatient consumerist BS. Only time will tell if Android will be a success. Anything really good is worth *waiting* for, I would say, if it’s a good idea whose time has come. And I think the mobile space (vendors and consumers) is hungry for a more open platform than Apple’s hegemony over the iPhone. Let’s let the iPhone vs. Android thing slow cook and see what comes out.

I hope you’re right about Alan Kay — it’s interesting to see so much OLPC development work take place on its eToys/Squeak implementation, even though that seemed to be a bit of an afterthought to Sugar.

I think there’s a significant problem with applying your “slow-cooked” thesis to the OLPC project: they didn’t start small, they didn’t try to grow organically. Instead they did all the fundamental design and development in secrecy, then had big press conferences where they could boast about how open they were — “Look, you can mess with the chrome!”. They attempted to push it fully-formed into the world while it was still an infant — and instead of devoting OLPC resources to improving it, they held another press conference to debut a new vaporware laptop!

Their fundamental plan of making software for ‘other’ people was incredibly condescending — it’s not Unix/Smalltalk/Mozilla, it’s Vista. I have great respect for OLPC’s questioning of WIMP, but I don’t like the process they used to do so one bit.

Their biggest problem overall was probably Negroponte, he just kept fueling new PR blitzes like clockwork, that were increasingly more disconnected from reality. It probably would’ve been a huge disaster if he had managed to live up to his expectations and sell millions in the first year. 100,000 pissy G1G1 purchasers are nothing in comparison.

The fate of the OLPC foundation is awful depressing, hopefully a stable organization can form outside its shadow, and do the real work of slow-cooking. Walter Bender’s SugarLabs might become what I’m hoping for, though they’ll have to do a lot of work to really make Sugar usable. I hold out a lot of hope for Alan Kay’s ongoing NSF grant project, he’s managed to keep the OLPC hype away from it, while still publishing fairly often (see vpri.org).