OStatic

The other day Kristin provided a good analysis of the demise of the One Laptop Per Child project, which recently announced drastic staff and development cuts. Today, Robert Buderi reports on a meeting he's just had with Nicholas Negroponte, patriarch of the project, on what OLPC 2.0 might bring. His report follows OLPC's own mission statement for its goals going forward. Here are some of the notable points.

Hindsight, it is said, is always 20/20. The OLPC has traveled a turbulent path for quite some time, with its latest stumble coming in the form of drastic staff and development cuts.

Four years on, many are analyzing the choices the OLPC made, and some contend it was a bad idea all around.

Nicholas Negroponte, who runs the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has confirmed in a wiki post that hard times have hit the OLPC effort. The organization will be cutting its staff by 50 percent and giving salary reductions to the remaining 32 people on board, according to Negroponte. Like many other nonprofits that are facing tough economic times, One Laptop per Child must downsize in order to keep costs in line with fewer financial resources, he says. OLPC will continue to work on a version 2.0, and there will be efforts to pass the Sugar platform onto the community, but the once-ballyhooed low-cost laptop inititiative is a shell of what it was intended to be.