I worked at a high school in a relatively small (electrified) village in West Africa. After some months of working there I was telling my principal that I would keep in touch with my family by email, usually at a cyber cafe in a nearby city. To my surprise he told me I could just use the school computers, which I had never seen or heard of.<p>"But don't tell any of the other teachers I let you do this."<p>So he gave me the key to the one building in the school that was locked, which contained six (!) working computers that had been donated by some European organization, all with dial-up internet access. The room was also full of brand new textbooks, which the children didn't have access to. In fact, the room's only real purpose seemed to be as a home for a large colony of bats.<p>When I asked the obvious question "why aren't you using any of this?!" the answer was that no one knew how to use the computers, and that they were waiting for an IT teacher to get transferred to the school.<p>Eventually the students were given access to the books, though this seems to have been looked upon very skeptically because the administration wasn't sure how they were going to let the students use them in a way that they wouldn't end up ruining them (by getting them wet, writing in them, etc).<p>It's important to understand that scenarios like this do occur and also how they work, if you're giving away free stuff to developing nations. My rule of thumb is that if you don't want to put any thought into how your donation is making the world a better place, it's probable that it either won't be used at all, or it will just be resold. The latter possibility at least in my mind is not so bad, but others may not be so happy about that outcome.
I wonder about doing this with older Android phones. Once rooted they are powerful platforms with multi-core processors and every wireless tech imaginable pre-integrated. They are insanely power efficient as well. I guess the point is to get children access to full on business platforms so this is not the same thing. But still, many have USB/Bluetooth keyboard/mouse support. So, it's still very similar.
Free Geek is a great organization. Like this guy, I knew very little about Linux or programming before volunteering there. Fast forward five years and I spend all day monkeying with Linux boxes at work. Free Geek was a perfect introduction to this wonderful world.
This is amazing. You won't like to hear this, but this guy is probably doing more important work (literally world-changing) than about 95% of Silicon Valley startup employees reading hackernews.
I smile thinking these guys will be as productive and probably use these laptops longer than most people in the 'developed' world.<p>Only drawback, power consumption; something that may matter more for them than for us.
I am on freecycle.org. I keep seeing request from this one guy that request for any old computers that are being "recycled" because it is too old. He rebuilds them, and then, donates it to families that are not able to afford a computer. Occasionally, he would put the rebuilt computers back into freecycle.org as a "freecycled" item.
Very nice story. FreeGeek has been a fixture here in Portland for many years doing great work in the community, promoting open-source long before gaining wide acceptance enjoyed today.<p>FreeGeek sells stuff to the general public--I have several laptops I bought there for my business. A real asset is the steady volume of old components on hand, things like floppy disk and optical drives, controllers, IDE and SCSI cables, the kinds of items that are needed to keep equipment running, or necessary for reading old archives.<p>I keep thinking, one of these days, when I have the time, I'll volunteer at the Geek. I anticipate it will be a very rewarding experience.