Afromusing

I am in your OLPC, reverse engineering your Keyboardz

There is a developing story that could prove very embarrassing for Prof. Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC foundation. According Reg Hardware, The OLPC foundation is being sued by Lagos Analysis Corp for copyright infringement.

Lagos CEO Adé G. Oyegbọla tells El Reg that the company’s Konyin Multilingual Keyboard features four shift keys and a software driver specialized to more easily reproduce the uncommon accent marks found in Nigerian languages and dialects. Such diacritic ticks can be unwieldy in traditional keyboards, but are often essential to getting the right message through. (For example, Oyegbọla explains, without the dot below the “o” in Lagos CTO O. Walter Olúwọlé’s name, the meaning becomes “God destroys the house).

Oyegbọla claims that Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who founded the OLPC foundation, purchased two of the company’s keyboards in 2006 and used them to reverse-engineer its keyboard technology.

Reg Hardware includes images of the two keyboards for comparison.
The OLPC Keyboard

The Lagos Analysis Keyboard

You can look at the keyboards yourself and make up your mind. To me the placement of the keys seem very similar and I would even posit that the OLPC keyboard does look like it borrowed something from the Lagos Analysis one. In the reg hardware article, they are yet to receive a substantive answer from OLPC so this story will keep going for a little while at least. I am pulling up a chair ringside to watch what happens. If it is proven that OLPC lifted the design and functionality from Lagos analysis, it is very disingenuous and just plain ‘not cool’. However, this story reminded me that the functionality described is one that contextualizes technology for use in Africa. I think this is important in the future of design for Africans, (by Africans?). Is it possible that Lagos Analysis corp by virtue of being African understood the need for the features described above and thereby designed it with the African languages in mind? Can the Negroponte camp prove that they came up with the keyboard concept and if so, how did they know which special characters are important in African languages? Last year when discussing Hash’s ‘A web Technology idea for Africa’, the question of language being relevant to tech implementation came up. At the time i was not quite sure what the implications of that observation were, but I think it is now clear to me that ‘cultural sensitivity’ is a concept to be applied to web technology and as this case shows…computing.

Cultural sensitivity in technology idea was the brain child of Koranteng Ofosu Amaah’s post, which was later included in the book Best of Technology Writing 2006. It should be required reading for anyone making tech products/services. While flickr is still not too kind to us melanin blessed folks, there are some great examples of culturally sensitive services and products: Check out Ted Kidane’s story of Feedelix from TEDGlobal 2007, Arusha -sms software for Ethiopic languages, and also Suuch Solutions out of Ghana - “kasahorow’s mission is to enable local languages remain a viable form of communication for all aspects of life.” They use Open source software to do this by the way.

I was listening to the digital planet podcast (11/26) where they had a correspondent attend the launch of the OLPC in Abuja, Nigeria. You could hear the excitement and enthusiasm in the children’s voices as they spoke of what they would do with the OLPC. It was a great moment. Now to the questions that started popping into my head like Orville Redenbachers microwave popcorn. When Gareth Mitchell was talking to Bill Thompson, they mentioned how they attended the OLPC launch in Tunis and how a child was crying because they’d been given an OLPC to play with for a time, then it was taken away. That was not a good moment, rather sad really, that kid is probably traumatized right now wherever he or she may be. I mean isn’t that just a little cruel? I know i would wail like a banshee if i was in her shoes. The discussion segued into what it would mean for the children to have a laptop that they would call their own. This got me wondering, that perhaps one of the unintended consequences of the OLPC project is that it would enhance the idea of ‘mine’ rather than ‘ours’. In modern Africa do the age old African values of community and sharing still apply? Would the OLPC idea chip away at the ‘utu’, that is a societal benchmark? Is the Ndiyo project a better thought out model for computer literacy, what with the idea of USB thin clients that I am already a fan of?

(Warning: the post is about to degenerate to something entirely pedantic)
Maybe I am looking at this all wrong, Is Negroponte pimping the ‘education project’ in pursuit of…what? The next generation of Africans to be Ipod toting, consumerist driven, video game obsessed, camping out for days in front of Best buy in Timbuktu_Kabartonjo_jinja of the future? Stomping on each other to get to the newest version of the Zii during an ‘African Thanksgiving blowout!’ sale? I know i am from the begging bowl peoples of Africa, but seriously, i have to draw the line at camping out in front of Best buy. A girls’ got to have some dignity!
O.k, ok how did i get here? I blame fakestevejobs, who has a hilarious take on this whole XO lawsuit mess (via Park Paradigm). I hope the OLPC foundation and Lagos Analysis Corp can sort this soon, or you will likely see next headline on Wall street Journal being… ‘The little laptop that stole’ instead of this ‘The little laptop that could’.

*The title of this post is a riff on this. You can read some background information about the OLPC at African Loft, and see what else Africans are saying on Afrigator.

Posted in: Africa, Fun, Nigeria, Tech, gadgets

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 9:21 am and is filed under Africa, Fun, Nigeria, Tech, gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.