Microfinance in Ayacucho

Posted by Chris Ball Sat, 27 Jun 2009 04:17:00 GMT

My awesome sister-in-law Suzy is in Ayacucho, Peru, volunteering for Kiva for around nine months. One of the difficulties with poverty relief charities is that people feel a disconnect between their donation and the result, and Kiva works around this problem by personalizing the process of making a loan to a specific entrepreneur. Kiva also empowers recipients by organizing loans that the recipients are expected to pay back.

Suzy's working with a local microfinance organization, interviewing potential borrowers and uploading their profiles to the main Kiva site for lenders to see. She's posted three times to the main Kiva Fellows blog now, and I hereby humbly present her posts. You should read them.

(Updated on 2009-07-22 to add the third link.)

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XO-1.5 bringup

Posted by Chris Ball Sat, 06 Jun 2009 14:12:00 GMT

Back from Taipei, and appropriately jetlagged, after a successful bringup of the XO-1.5. The bringup team did some interviews for olpc.tv while we were there, including a demo with Fedora 11 running on the new board. There are interviews with John Watlington (hardware), Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley (hardware/firmware), and me (software), which I've embedded below.

Thanks to Charbax for recording the interviews! Was also wonderful to see the new Pixel Qi screen — I'm looking forward to seeing it on mainstream laptops in the coming months.

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