Next Thursday at the IADB is a huge event delving into the role of ICTs in the classroom, with heavy-hitters including Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC, Tabaré Vázquez, the Uruguayan President (no doubt discussing CEIBAL), and Mike Trucano of InfoDev, who has been spearheading a cool-headed data-driven look at ICTs -- See the full schedule and RSVP at http://events.iadb.org/calendar/eventDetail.aspx?lang=En&id=1444

CEIBAL (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea) is a laptop program for public schools in Uruguay, and one of the largest and most active OLPC deployments.

I'll be there asking annoying questions about total costs for ICTs versus teacher salaries, problems with software licensing costs, and the importance of enabling technology, and taking notes on my cute little OLPC XO laptop.

And no, I don't see that being incongruous.

Let's talk Total Costs of Ownership of One Laptop Per Child. Taking our set of different OLPC implementation cost calculators, as well as actual numbers that have bubbled up over the years, like IADB's Project HA-T1093 with 13,200 students plus 500 teachers (with a budget of USD $5.1M), we can try to settle on some generalities so we can compare apples to apples.

How much does this cost RITA?

Common Basic Assumptions

Let's start with how long the project will run, and what number of laptops we'll need to replace (due to age, damage, loss, hardware failure, and so on) during that time frame. That should be easy, right?

Five seems to be the magic number when talking TCOs, which is convenient when projected OLPC lifespans are also five years. Reality may disagree with that (and certainly GeSCI and Vital Wave wisely do).

So let's plan for five years, and drop re-purchasing of the whole batch within that period (see below for why this becomes relevant). We'll instead presume some per-year replacements (damage, theft, environmental problems, and "normal" wear-and-tear), but even this gets harrowing.

Different Lifespan Calculations

The OLPC Deployment Guide handily provides numbers for expected monthly repair frequencies, which they project at .083% risk of bricking per laptop per month - 1% failure over the course of a year.

Something is still missing in the world of mobiles and social networks.

I strongly believe in the power of social networks in development, be they online or offline. They create communities of practice from the local to the global level, which promotes better understanding of what a best practice is versus what is just a good theory that doesn't reliably work. You also have amazing, unprecedented access through mobile phones and SMS.

But there's nothing solidly connecting the two (unless I'm missing something?)

Update: Hello readers from Alanna's post on the OLPC at UNDispatch - You should check my original article on the OLPC TCO - written back in 2006 - over at OLPCNews.com.

If you poke around enough on the Laptop.org wiki, you find a few interesting corners. Linked from their work in creating a training and reference document for OLPCCorps, a link to an Excel spreadsheet to calculate OLPC-specific costs for a deployment, which has been created and maintained by OLPC's John Watlington

In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term community and economic development.

Finding, engaging an empowering local social networks is the first step. I believe connecting these networks to the global communities of interest and practice on the Internet can provide a multiplier effect.

In the recent Technology Salon on Malawian health ICT systems, it was discussed how hiring recent Malawian college grads and connecting them to the global community of open source coders gave them an immense resource to draw on as they began their work; and they were soon contributing as peers and mentors to other programmers around the world.

That's power, and that's the 21st century version of technology transfer.

World-wandering BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin writes about a video from the "What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation," NYU conference, where Leonard Wantchekoz presents on the importance of trust in development: