History

OLPC Australia can trace its roots back to a collaboration in August 2006, between Rangan Srikhanta, Professor Barry Vercoe and Gregory Moo, with an ambition to bring OLPC XO laptops to remote Indigenous learners in the Northern Territory.

At this time, the minimum XO laptop order was set at one million laptops. The sheer size of this minimum order, and the subsequent cost, prevented OLPC Australia from working alone. As such, this informal group was required to 'think outside the box' and consider the implications of a more regional approach which would incorporate children living throughout the Pacific.

In October 2006, the group was collaborating with key members of OLPC Pacific; David Leeming, Ian Thomson, Sam Taufao and John Budden. It was decided that OLPC Australia and OLPC Pacific should join, and were tentatively known as OLPC Oceania.

Simultaneously, the global body of OLPC slowly reduced its minimum order limit from one million laptops to smaller, more achievable allotments.

A great majority of 2007 was spent trialling pre-production versions of the laptops in remote communities throughout the Oceania region. However, the group soon realised that although the implications of remoteness were uniform in both Pacific children and remote Australian children, the circumstances were different.

By the end of 2007, it became apparent that One Laptop per Child Oceania, had too vast a population to be managed under the one organisation. It required region-wide support, with no specific method for addressing our initial constituents; the Indigenous remote learners.

It became necessary that this informal group now needed to formalise. As such, at the beginning of 2008, Geoffrey Anson and Pia Waugh joined the group to form the body which would govern OLPC Australia.

At the end of 2008, OLPC Australia narrowed its focus to remote Australian children only. 2009 commenced with a donation from The Commonwealth Bank Enterprise Services Staff Community Fund of $150,000 to deploy 400 laptops to three remote communities under an Australia Council for Education Research (ACER) evaluation.

The lessons learned from these deployments were used to propel the organisation forward, building capacity to deploy thousands of laptops. As a result, funding streams have changed vastly to enable the focus on remote Australian learners.