René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

This is the blog post I had hoped to avoid. For one, as I would have loved to proceed as planned and for second, starting a fight around good purposes is the last thing I ever wanted to get into. Still, in order to proceed with „Plan B“ of our Vatsalya-charity, I need to shed some light why I can’t keep to our initial intentions. These were, just for the record: providing 11 laptops from „One Laptop per Child“ (OLPC) to the Vatsalya Orphanage in Bangalore.

Preparation for the Charity with OLPC India
Sadly, when I thought what all could go wrong in the beginning, the least thing I thought of is what in fact did go wrong. All else went smooth so far: Getting the commitments, rolling the money in (it’s sitting in my bank account waiting to get spent), preparing the orphanage for the computers and so on. Yet, what I can’t deliver are the 11 OLPC computers, because OLPC India is unable to deliver them. By contrast, hereby also acknowledging its achievements, the organization has managed to secure a deal with the Indian government to roll out 250,000 laptops.

I will try not to bore you in a blame-game with details which e-mails were sent at what date and what phone calls were made on which hour, but I can assure you that Petra and I did our homework in getting the facts right BEFORE we started to communicate the project on this blog. At no point in time Mr. Satish Jha, the head of OLPC India, hinted us to any constraints in delivering less than a minimum lot of 100 computers. Through him, for instance, we received the information of the price (Rs. 16,499) including logistics to the desired destination.

OLPC India: Minimum 100 computers per order
However, when we enthusiastically posted our order to Mr. Jha, things started to go downhill as I alluded to in this blog-post four weeks ago. Now, after Mr. Jha unfortunately did not keep to his commitment to let us know how to include the 11 computers into a bigger lot of 100 units, I don’t shy away of sharing with you that I wasn’t particularly impressed by the phone conversation with him.

In the 40 minutes “conversation”, Mr. Jha spoke approximately 39.5 minutes, which to me came more as a lecture (albeit a genuinely friendly one) than the focussed attempt to solve a problem. Mr. Jha’s deep diving into intellectual nuances between the educational concepts of „Dr Negroponte“ vs. “Mr. Sugata Mitra” concluding in polished rhetoric with the well balanced synthesis that those of Dr. Negroponte were superior, was not really what I wanted to hear – lest to start from scratch convincing me of the unparalleled grandeur of the OLPC-computers. Hello? We were way beyond the sales-pitch. We wanted the laptops! Yesterday.

OLPC India: What goes wrong in the „Long Tail“
As a person, and I mean what I say, I find Mr. Jha really sympathetic, but from a managerial standpoint the 40 minutes conversation with such a „small fish“ like me for 11 computers was a waste of time – not for me, but for him. I don’t intend to pretend that I know everything, in particular better, but let me take the opportunity to share my thoughts from my entrepreneurial experience how to improve the obvious shortcomings at OLPC India for the „long tail“. By that I mean a high number of orders, which contain a small number of units that in turn seem economically unfeasible to process, manufacture and deploy one by one. In the phone call, Mr. Jha mentioned rather by the way, that he had “hundreds of other requests for small-scale orders”. I’d consider this an un-served opportunity.

1. Sustainable communication: Instead of answering the same and again the same questions from long-tail customers, like me why not Mr. Jha start a blog, admitting openly to the problem of delivering small lots, continuously building up an online knowledge-base and having someone in the organization basically sending the right URLs as answers via e-mail?
2. System support: Why not tie up with one of the IT-pros like Wipro, Infosys or TCS who would for sure allocate a few developers for free (in exchange for becoming an official „partner“) and build a simple, but smart online system. Like on Amazon, you place your order, the system aggregates them, considers geographical issues along a few to be established logistics hubs in India, and gives back a heuristic approximation how long the „waiting time“ will be till the magic threshold of 100 units is reached. Once, the number of 100 per logistic hub has been brought together, the „buyers“ are asked to make the payment and here we are. The rest is basic execution. (I feel one of the overarching problems is anyway that OLPC doesn’t perceive itself in any “business” where they are facing “demand”, “customers” who come with “expectations” which want be fulfilled and all that stuff. Which brings me to point number 3.
3. Upfront-Capital: If we really, really break the problem down, then it is in fact a one of pre-capitalization. What I mean by that: Having upfront capital to buy, build and put the laptops on stock from where they could be delivered in an instant through a logistics network. I believe there are plenty of „social venture capital funds“ or „social entrepreneurs“ around who would be willing to put capital up-front against some (reduced) return on capital.

Sure, it would mean that there is all of a sudden a profit-component in the equation for somebody. One which would make the difference between dogmatic purity of a non-profit-concept (as Mr. Negroponte explains vividly in one of this TED-talks), yet at the same time loaded with problems as we have them at our very hands VERSUS deliberately blurring the lines to profit and being able to just deliver. To conclude from the philosophical standpoint myself: I can’t avoid the impression that Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel laureate of the 70’s in economics, was so awfully right. That organizations which are not geared towards profit, tend to become be default inefficient or worse, ineffective.

At least starting with points 1 and 2 would truly start building an organization that is replicable and steadily builds up speed and scale. Point 3 could be part of a later stage in the roadmap. Or as Clay Shirky, author of the must-read “Here comes Everybody” put it last week during his keynote as the SES-Conference:

It’s better to build a working small system and scale it than set-up a big system and try to fix it.

Interestingly enough, I don’t seem to be alone with my impression: Harrie Vollard who runs an amazing charity Making Miles for Millennium as a side-project to his day-to-day job contacted me after finding out about our project through this blog. He pointed me to his blog post “Evaluation & Recommendations for OLPC Organization” which is a worthwhile read. Quote:

The XO is great, but the organization OLPC can be improved. The organization OLPC tries to switch from a pure research organization to a supplier of the XO when they first started to deploy the XO in 2007. However after 1 1/2 years it looks like OLPC still has no business processes in place. The people who work with OLPC have no experience with these business processes and do not know how to organize a nonprofit organization into a streamlined organization that can handle simple orders. After all it is only one product OLPC ’sells’.

Let me just make this final point which is important before I revert to solving my own problem: Mr. Jha rightly explained that himself and his team have given up lucrative jobs in order to work entirely for free as volunteers for the good cause. Point taken. You have my full respect for this and I’ll over-stretch any benefit of the doubt for you. Yet, given the unfortunate course of action we have faced, I do have issues if such an argument is used to occupy the high moral ground that is supposed make someone immune against general accountability.

OLPC for Vatsalya: Plan B

Back to square. Almost, but from now on just looking ahead. These lines are directed at my dear donors whose trust I have earned and towards whom I will put all of my energy to put a plan into action. Let’s forget about the OLPC laptops, take a step back and rephrase what we jointly want to achieve: Bring computer abilities to young girls from an underprivileged background as part both of their everyday’s life. Both within the framework of a curriculum as well as for free exploration.

Thanks to the very same OLPC-laptops, a new category of computers has emerged in the last, say, 12 months: the netbook. Reduced in processing power and storage, it assumes that a big part of data and applications would be accessed from „the cloud“ on the internet. Roaming around Bangalore looking for alternatives, I stumbled upon „Chroma“, the electronic superstore from TATA, and came across these decent notebooks: NB e-go atom from Wipro for Rs. 19,999.

Interestingly, the manufacturer is Wipro, one of the Top 3 Indian software-outsourcing giants who has ventured back into one of its previous territories: hardware. The notebooks come with Windows XP and are fully WiFi-internet-enabled. (Coincidentally, the two available colours red and yellow are super-suitable for girls. What a mess if we had to paint them blue for boys ;-) The sales assistants told me that it would be possible to obtain the required number via cash & carry.

Hence, my request to the donors: Unless there is no objection to this plan B, I would buy these Wipro-netbooks and proceed with everything else as had been put forward within our project. I suggest reducing the number to 10 as we will save on one computer, which had been foreseen for the teachers. (Here we seem to face an unintended advantage, as the teachers are all familiar with Microsoft Windows as opposed to the OS of the OLPC). I am happy to cover the difference in cost of cumulated Rs. 18,500 (EUR 270) so that we can move ahead swiftly.

As with many things, life is a quest of constant adoption. After weeks of passive agony, I now feel relieved that we pulled the plug. More importantly, we can get positive again, as we have reclaimed the course of action for the newly named project „Wipro Netbooks for Vatsalya“ into our own hands.