The Longest Now

One Laptop per Child is launching its second Give One/Get One (G1G1) program on November 17, 2008.  Last year’s program supported the production of over 150,000 XOs.  This year the delivery of the laptops in the USA will be handled through Amazon.com.

The laptops will run the latest release of Sugar on a Linux-based Fedora Core operating system. (It will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports.) For answers to frequently asked questions, and for other XO giving programs, see XO giving and the G1G1 FAQ.

== Details ==

This year’s Give One/Get One campaign will begin in November and will become an on-going program. Amazon will distribute the “get” laptops and are providing their services at cost. You can see the developing OLPC storefront at http://laptop.org/xo. The program details will be similar to those from last year:

$199 to give a laptop to a child in the developing world.
and/or
$399 to give a laptop to a child in the developing world and get a laptop.

The tagline for the campaign is “Give a Laptop. Get a Laptop. Change the World.” We are focusing on sharing images and experiences from members of gen-XO, particularly from OLPC’s largest deployments.
Media and other material to help spread the word are available from our community media page and our Flickr stream.

This time last year, we did not yet know how our young project would fare under the demands and needs of large deployments. Today there are hundreds of thousands of children using their XOs every day, including over a quarter of all young students in Uruguay.  Roughly twenty thousand students from Uruguay alone visit our wiki each week.  Meanwhile, Peru is distributing XOs to over 10,000 schools.

You can help spread the word. We will be making a big splash on Nov 17 with PR and advertising to run in donated media across all media platforms: TV, Cinema, Radio, Print, Out of Home and online, and advertising will run through Dec 26, for the holiday giving season.

We want to supplement that with personal outreach over local community and social benefit groups interested in changing education and addressing the root causes of poverty around the world. Help us identify groups to contact.  G1G1 is an opportunity for us to forge new alliances and seed new educational initiatives, at home and abroad.

We are setting up a separate mailing list for people who want to be reminded when it launches.   For the moment, please watch this page for updates: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_2008

== Spread the word! ==

Join our community mailing list, grassroots@lists.laptop.org, to discuss new ideas for spreading the word about the campaign, and to request materials for local outreach efforts.

Some ongoing projects that need help:

* Social site updates — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace : there are OLPC accounts on many of these sites which need maintenance and regular updating. For instance some 2007-era badges and promotions need to be updated to link to the Amazon site.

* Blog updates — the relaunch of the campaign will not begin in earnest for a few weeks, but many people will want to know in advance.  There are already discussion threads about G1G1 in the blogosphere in a few countries.

* Art projects — projects on deviantart, Flickr, and more. OLPC thrives on expressions of its cause and mission that do not rely on words; art is a universal language that speaks in ways that advertising spots can not. The design gang is helping to make great designs for web badges, swag and the OLPC sites, many of which are being revamped. We may also need material in specific sizes/formats for non-standard donated media (see below).

* Donated media — OLPC does not have an advertising budget, but relies on donated media.  OLPC’s advertising partners can however provide materials for any media outlets. If you have a friend who works at a magazine, TV network, or subway tunnel wall-space agency, or just has  badge or ad-space on their blog, ask them if they will run a G1G1 ad.  You can post potential leads on the discussion page, or send serious ones to g1g1@rt.laptop.org .

* Media concepts — Nothing is impossible. Ideas that take longer to create can be used when we launch similar programs in other parts of the world in the near future.