When I donated to OLPC last December, I knew it would take some time to receive an XO. OLPC had taken the care to explain they had problems getting the XO to ship due to delays in production. I was eager to try out the XO and provide a review, followed by a look at the learning and teaching community that was growing behind the laptop. We now know that OLPC has had more problems than production delays. There were management and deployment issues, internal visions and ideological conflicts, fierce competition from big manufacturers, etc. By March, I suspected there were managing difficulties in the Give-one, Get-one program and after five emails that never really answered my questions, I called them to have a shipping status update.

The phone conversation with someone from OLPC’s support was very confusing. Obviously, the person I was speaking with, a very nice lady by the way, had no idea what was going on and had very few answers for me. Basically, she said she had no way to verify if an XO had been sent to me or not. So I called FEDEX and they confirmed that they had a package sent for me. However, they had to return it to the sender after keeping it for two weeks. FEDEX told me they were missing information to clear customs with my package and finally deliver it to me. For two weeks, they tried to reach the sender, in this case, a company handling shipping stocks for OLPC, so I was told, without success. Nobody returned any calls or emails. FEDEX returned the package.

I wrote an email again to OLPC and this time, my email was handled differently. I received a reply informing me to contact a different email address within OLPC. I did and this time I got a more satisfactory answer: someone looked into it and I would be receiving an XO with the next shipment. Two weeks later, I got confirmation that I will finally receive an XO today.

Apparently, OLPC is planning another round of Give-one, Get-one and hopefully they will have solved these issues by then. In my last post, I explained what I think are the main issues with OLPC and the XO, but I still believe in the original mission. (psst, it has a lot to do with education and less about hardware deployment)

Unboxing coming up!