[IAEP] Brazil deployment

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> David Farning wrote:
>> Does anyone have information or contacts on the Brazilian referred to in http://lwn.net/Articles/280419/ ?
>
> The article presents UCA (One Computer per Student) as a subproject
> within ProInfo, but this wasn't the case the last time I checked.
> PronInfo is a government program from the 1990s which evolved from
> previous projects going all the way back to the mid 1980s. The focus has
> been on computer labs and teacher training.
>
> UCA was started in 2005 to evaluate the OLPC proposal and several pilot
> programs were started in selected schools. Three different machines were
> tested: OLPC XO B2, Intel Classmate 1 and the Encore Mobilis. In
> December of 2007 the government tried to buy 150,000 more machines for a
> pilot program involving 300 schools. The Classmate from Positivo won the
> public "auction" with an offer of $360 per laptop while OLPC came in
> third at $420 per XO. The government was unhappy with the result and
> cancelled the whole thing. They are supposed to try again this November
> and hope to get a better price this time.

There is rather more to the story. One of the biggest problems was
that the government was proposing not to charge the usual 100% import
duty on educational computers, but the agency that proposed that had
not communicated it to the agency in charge of the bid process, nor to
the legislature, which would have had to approve the change first. So
the entire bid process was in confusion the whole time.

$420 is what you would expect for a $189 laptop at 100% duty, with
school servers and a little of this and that on top. The lower bids
were evidently below cost, which is a serious issue for a project that
may be locked into a specific line of hardware at the real price for
many years to come.

The answers you get depend very sensitively on the questions you ask.
If Brazil had asked for mesh networking and collaborative software,
the XO would have been the only answer. No doubt there would have been
accusations in such a case of the bid being "wired" to a preselected
outcome. But if you don't ask, you may not get at all.

> I keep a list of links relating to this in
> http://www.merlintec.com:8080/laptop (the page is in Portuguese; sorry
> about that).



> If you need more information, I would be happy to help.
>
> -- Jecel
>
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



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