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I would love to see 826CHI(http://www.826chi.org/) added to the runnings!

Anonymous from The City By The Lake
Thursday, November 22, 2007 at 10:10:29 AM

Just wanted to update people on the polls. We've been trying different ways to make sure that all the charities on our list get on the polls in a fair manner. For a while we took winners off the list for a year, but then it was suggested that we should only take the winners off for 6 months. In order to make this easier, I made it so that winning charities were off the polls for 2 rounds. This should be approximately 6 months since we have enough charities on our current list to fill up about 3 months worth of polls. In the past no one really seemed to have strong feelings one way or the other about when winning charities came back as long as they were off for a while. One of these days things will be completely figured out but for now just think of this site as a work in progress. You elicit the progress, so continue to give your input. Let us know if you have a strong opinion on removing the charities for 6 months versus 1 year, or perhaps this could be a topic for a future status poll.

Thanks for your continued support and involvement,
Sofia

--Thanks Sofia. --Syed

Sofia
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 3:03:00 PM

How about the charity Ethiopia Reads. I recently learned of their work. http://www.ethiopiareads.org/
Every donation stretches far

Vina from Austin,TX
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 12:12:29 PM

There are plenty of charities out there.....I think a win only once every year is very fair. I think it is too soon for Invisible Children.

G
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 12:12:08 PM

I guess it's still early days, for the search kindly website, and once more people get to know of the website then more charities will get suggested, and so there will be more variety in the polls. this should then mean that Invisible children will come up less often, and say if a good cause was to receive a donation from this website once every 6 to eight months, what would be the harm, as long as the people using the website, have had the chance to have their say! Why shouldn't Invisible Children still be around in a years time, with hopefully more money being raised and therefore they would get a bigger collection.

Well done to Syed and everyone that organises search kindly, you do a great job, which means we can raise money, without doing anything extra!

Louise from Uk
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 11:11:37 AM

Hi There
Just noticed... Invisible Children has been given money THREE TIMES, and they are still on the ballot again ?? I know its a good idea to rotate things and have names up on the ballot again, but there shouldnt there be some reasonable limit

--You have a good point there. The only problem is that we still haven't gotten around to coming up with a concrete policy on how to handle multiple-winners, so we went ahead and treated them just as we would other prior-winners. I know we've had a bit of back and forth about this in the past, but it would be a huge favor to us if all of you out there could comment about this subject one more time. Thanks. --Syed

KT from US
Monday, November 19, 2007 at 5:05:07 PM

This is a great idea! Thank you so much!

Also, in case there are any Mac users out there who want to use Search Kindly with Safari's Google searchbar, here's how:

1) Download and install Inquisitor from Inquisitorx.com. This is a really useful Google searchbar addon for Safari. It's basically Spotlight for Safari.
2) Under Safari>Preferences, go to the Search tab. There, enable "Display links to additional search engines." Then click "Edit Sites..."
3) Add an entry for Search Kindly with URL http://www.searchkindly.org/?q=%@.
4) Change the entry's Shortcut to return.
5) By default, Google's Shortcut is return, so change that to some other combination of keys.

You're done! Enjoy the satisfaction that comes from donating by searching!

--Thanks for the tip! I am posting this over to How to Set Search Kindly as Your Homepage. --Syed

Sudeep from Pittsburgh
Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 11:11:59 AM

Item 3 of the G1G1 terms and conditions:

3. XO laptops are available only for private home and educational uses. No XO laptops will be supplied for resale.

This leads me to believe that they would not appreciate you reselling the laptops on eBay.

WRT whether people would actually buy them on eBay for >$400, I'm not so sure. You'd have to be a real gadget junkie to want one. They are truly marvelous feats of engineering, but the vast majority of computer users would find them far less desirable than the latest $400 budget laptops available at Circuit City. I would suspect that the small group of people who would actually want one already know about the project and are in the process of making their donation to G1G1 right now.

Also, a point of clarification: while the G1G1 website does say that quantities are limited, this is only within the context of whether you can expect your order to arrive before the holidays. As far as I can tell, they make no mention of limiting the number of orders they'll accept within the allotted time frame of Nov 12-26. If my thoughts about who wants these are correct, then I don't think they care whether they get them before the holidays.

Just my 2 cents.

--The more and more I think about it, the more and more I'm thinking that you (all of you) are right. Thanks for the change ;) --Syed

Dylan from LA
Tuesday, November 13, 2007 at 1:01:20 AM

Another question to ask (and one to which I don't know the answer) is whether the kind of person who buys things on eBay is the kind of person who needs or wants such a basic computer. I can understand buying a new computer to replace an older one on eBay, but it seems that the "first world" would have very little need for such primitive computers. You don't get a lot of impoverished people shopping on eBay.

I hope that rather convoluted paragraph made sense.

--Good point. --Syed

Emmy_roo from Maine
Monday, November 12, 2007 at 10:10:58 PM

"What I don't care for--at all--is some of the the policies and actions that they have taken to get the project in motion"
Can you elaborate?

Also, what will you be reselling your laptops for? I'm not sure I would consider it unethical, considering it allows you to donate more than you would otherwise (I am assuming this is the intention... b/c essentially you would be donating the laptops for less than the $200 each it would take to donate w/o getting one yourself).

Of course, that still leaves 2 questions to be answered: 1) would OLPC be okay with you doing this, e.g. would doing this have any adverse affect on what they are trying to do, and 2) would you be able to find 100 people willing to buy this laptop for >$225, e.g is it practical?

Now all this is assuming you aren't trying to make an actual net profit on the whole deal, selling them for greater than $425 each- Because I'm not sure people would buy these laptops for that price. If that is your intention, however, please clarify, because it would be a separate issue (and not a good idea, IMHO)

--I've been following this project for a good while now. There are a bunch of minor annoyances--like taking two years to bring something to market, but that's not what really bothers me. What I thought was ridiculous was the fact that the organization would (initially) only talk with heads of state and only entertain orders at 1-million units or more. That's crazy. There are plenty of niche electronics manufacturers who do quite well at small fractions of that kind of volume. And what's wrong with opening the product up to everyone at the retail level? They've been saying that the reason for the price hikes has to do with the fact that they don't have enough orders for mass production. Well, why not let people just buy one outright and build up credibility and respect for the product like that? But like I said, when you have such large-scale ambitions, not everything is going to go as planned. As far as what I'd be selling them for--I'd let the market determine that (to a certain degree, of course). I guess the price that they will fetch on eBay is contingent upon when they are shipped and how many are actually shipped out. Oh yeah, back to your original question (again), the laptop was supposed to be the $100 laptop. I realize that the cost is out of their control to certain degree, but it was the price that was initially grabbing headlines. And now it's up to $200 a pop. Still, it's a great idea. I just wish they were cheaper. --Syed

Stoney229 from MO
Monday, November 12, 2007 at 10:10:59 PM

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