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Ndiyo: Sharing PCs to bridge the digital divide

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OLPC

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 23 Nov 2006 13:55 GMT

...like light bulbs — you can unplug and replace with another if you want to — then we reduce the hardware admin to a minimum, and when you have that and Linux you can do the software admin more easily. We may not have the expertise on the ground but it may be easier to administrate an Ndiyo network remotely. Essentially you're connecting to one PC and managing that one machine.

So where have you got to in terms of demonstrating that your technology can work in the field?
SF: We have had one trial running for two and half years. There is a small NGO in Cambridge called Aidworld that had the first Ndiyo systems. They are non-profit developers and have been thrashing it for a couple of years — doing Java development – not doing heavily intensive graphic stuff but making computers work hard. One of the guys went to Ethiopia and he visited various higher education institutions and came back and said to me, "Everywhere I went I wished I could give them an Ndiyo system". In countries where the price of single PC is high, the number of people who have seen PCs connected together is minimal, so getting network-management expertise is very hard. And if you find someone who can do it, they will get swiped when Cisco opens an office there. The nice thing about Ndiyo is that you don't need to understand networks and net management to use it.

Your system is based on Ubuntu Linux rather than Microsoft Windows. Have you encountered any resistance to the fact that users won't be able to run Microsoft Office and other applications, which are perceived as being tools of economic progress?
SF: That can be an issue. I don't think that is an issue for governments but more for individuals. A friend from India was telling me that call-centre people make most of their money in the evenings selling lessons in Word and PowerPoint to children in the village. There is a slight challenge we have had with some Linux distributions — Ubuntu in particular — in that it doesn't look like Windows; the fact there is no Start menu in the bottom left-hand corner, for example But it's easy to reconfigure so that it does look like that –— we don't want immediate barriers to people coming in and learning.

JN: What we decided was we are in the business of selling a meme [a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another] which is: networked computing doesn't have to be done the way we do it at the moment. One of the ways we could do that is that we could do a classroom in a box — could get a five-screen classroom in there. One of the most innovative uses of Linux in schools is Orwell high school in Suffolk. They have 400 thin clients running — all of them on open source, including Open Office instead of MS office. The thing that surprised me was that they had relatively little difficulty with that. Whereas most people predicted that trying to do non-MS stuff in a high school would end up with the kids moaning. But the school claims that most educational material is web-specific — so all need is a good browser and good web connectivity.

The cost and availability of the technology is important but so is the infrastructure to support — especially power infrastructure. Presumably your thin client approach is a more efficient way for multiple users to access applications?
SF: You can pull out the power plug from the Nivo terminal and it keeps running. You only need constant power to the server because all you have locally on the terminal is pixels. What that means is that if you are somewhere with an unreliable power supply you can use battery back-up or a generator to run your sever. You can use what supply there is to run the terminals — but if that proves to be flaky, you can reboot them much more freely than you can a normal PC — so it is much more robust.

It is also much lower power — around three watts on current machine and five watts if you have a mouse and keyboard plugged in — compared to 60 watts for a typical PC. That can be significant. In some parts of developing world electricity is much cheaper than here, and in some parts more expensive. If you go on UK figures then you can save a fair amount in hardware costs by buying Ndiyo type kit, but in a year or two you can save the same amount in electricity costs. That is what people don't think about — if you're running a 20-seat internet café, you can spend a thousand or a couple of thousand dollars on electricity.

Nicholas Negroponte has said that manufacturing of the OLPC laptop will begin when they have a key number of governments signed up and committed to take orders of the device. Are you working to the same model or do you have a more ground-up approach?
SF: Scale means you can do so much more, so much more quickly. Our stuff can be affordable in small numbers. The design from the word go is that this stuff should be very cheap so that it is nearly insignificant compared to the costs of the keyboard and mouse. At the moment we just have trial units, and we don't...