(Guest post by Michel Legnered)

I’ve almost endlessly been walking around the inner core of Brussels from the point I got off the flight this morning, trying to find (a) a restaurant serving vegetarian dishes and (b) a café with free wifi acceess. Tired of walking I found myself buying a daypass to the metro, randomly jumping aboard carts and following people around. Good idea, one pie looking pizza slice and one Christmas market later I’ve found my “natural, fresh and ready” Cappuchino and wifi.

This year’s TEDxBrussels is all about, well, us developing into Borgs with open attitudestrying to get everyone and everything onboard.

I very much look forward listening to Nicholas Negroponte’s talk “Schools without schools”, the founder of One Laptop Per Child, and Walter Bender’s “Sugar on a stick” talking about the open and independent Sugar operating system for kids, which powers the OLPC XO-1.

OLPC Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning. When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.

While we focus on developing open information infrastructure for urban communities, the OLPC project is all about spreading information and education to remote and rural communities with the help of low cost and easy to use technology. What fascinates me the most about the OLPC is its ability to connect to other OLPC’s without the need for a central access point. Sitting in a classroom, the students can wirelessly connect to eachother and teacher to collaborate on classwork and share information. Being used in places where there exist no internet connectivity, this will engage users to physically meet for information exchange.

This combined with the user interface for Sugar OS, reminds me of the days when we weren’t being spoiled with online 24/7, no brainer user interfaces and shiny but shamelessly closed devices (hello iPad). Don’t get me wrong, I like my iPhone and Asus Netbook and free wifi, but knowing that you can tinker with the hardware and use computers for more than just passively consuming information tickles the imagination in a wholly different way. I like to think the OLPC can open up a new way, or maybe I should say: inspire us, here in the developed world, to think differently on how we can develop our own services and technology; towards more openness.

Well, technology… Then there’s the talks about conciousness and immortality, which proably will leave me with a good mindfsck as I fly home.

Knowledge is like love, the more you put in the more you get out.

– Marc Luyckx Ghisi