I suggest OLPC was a high-risk startup attempt at a window of opportunity for a shoestring MVP bootstrap of an open-source open-education-resources chip-to-society-full-stack path to rapid global-scale transformative change against hostile opposition. And that it could have worked.
I don't know what I can usefully say here. Then, as now in OP and comments, there's much confusion. So start there.
It's ~2005. OLPC is using the available computer-supported community discourse tech - Wikimedia, mailing lists, and IRC. And it's not enough. Especially with shoestring human resources, and having to be semi-closed due to intense opposition. The press is its usual confused. But so are professional communities which needn't be. In an alternate universe, there's an extra developer-relations person, so Guido is a champion instead of clueless, and the python community doesn't fail to engage. Today, discourse tech still sucks. A postmortem on humanity may read "the software engineering community wasn't incentivized to create tools to permit sanity". It'd be nice to improve on that.
What else... Be careful over-simplifying your strategic story. "Jump to scale or fail" helped focus scarce resources on navigating the one chance of success. No need to worry about things that will "just happen by themselves" once scale occurs. Scale can be assumed, as either it exists, or you don't. And if the jump is clean and discrete, great. But in the mushy messy have-we-jumped-yet fingers-on-the-edge case, having organized for that regime can matter.
What else... It seemed the prospect of broad impact was pulling in science folk who otherwise wouldn't be creating open-education content. And a recent MIT cell-biology VR project, which for domain expertise pulled in researchers for interviews, mentioned one challenge was getting them to leave. So if some other new opportunity generates similar interest, it may be possible to attract more and better such resources than is obvious, or presently utilized. It's hard to overstate just how bad even the best of current science education content is. Perhaps AR will enable such opportunities.
Ah well. One challenge teaching history, is conveying its contingency. How easily the world could have been a very different place today.
A last thought, just for perspective: It's easy to forget the cost of delay. 350k people were born today. 2.5M last week. And this. They will most all be in school 6 years from now. Schools that are pervasively wretched. What can you do to help change that? You've 6 years. Tick tock. It's a pipeline, so if your transformation takes an extra year, you miss a cohort of 130 million kids. 4 years costs half a billion. Tick, tick, tick...
And it's not a "them" problem. Setting up an analogy, Mexico average high-school graduates can look like average US high-school dropouts. So if your transformative change makes them look like average US hs graduates, like awesome wow! But... average US high-school graduates? Pity the transformation wasn't just a little bit greater. And so if you tell me your transformative change will give every US high-school graduate the grasp of science of an average entering Harvard freshman, well, like awesome wow! Great for societal equity! But... Harvard freshman? Pity their science education is still failing them so very badly.
I don't know what I can usefully say here. Then, as now in OP and comments, there's much confusion. So start there.
It's ~2005. OLPC is using the available computer-supported community discourse tech - Wikimedia, mailing lists, and IRC. And it's not enough. Especially with shoestring human resources, and having to be semi-closed due to intense opposition. The press is its usual confused. But so are professional communities which needn't be. In an alternate universe, there's an extra developer-relations person, so Guido is a champion instead of clueless, and the python community doesn't fail to engage. Today, discourse tech still sucks. A postmortem on humanity may read "the software engineering community wasn't incentivized to create tools to permit sanity". It'd be nice to improve on that.
What else... Be careful over-simplifying your strategic story. "Jump to scale or fail" helped focus scarce resources on navigating the one chance of success. No need to worry about things that will "just happen by themselves" once scale occurs. Scale can be assumed, as either it exists, or you don't. And if the jump is clean and discrete, great. But in the mushy messy have-we-jumped-yet fingers-on-the-edge case, having organized for that regime can matter.
What else... It seemed the prospect of broad impact was pulling in science folk who otherwise wouldn't be creating open-education content. And a recent MIT cell-biology VR project, which for domain expertise pulled in researchers for interviews, mentioned one challenge was getting them to leave. So if some other new opportunity generates similar interest, it may be possible to attract more and better such resources than is obvious, or presently utilized. It's hard to overstate just how bad even the best of current science education content is. Perhaps AR will enable such opportunities.
Ah well. One challenge teaching history, is conveying its contingency. How easily the world could have been a very different place today.
A last thought, just for perspective: It's easy to forget the cost of delay. 350k people were born today. 2.5M last week. And this. They will most all be in school 6 years from now. Schools that are pervasively wretched. What can you do to help change that? You've 6 years. Tick tock. It's a pipeline, so if your transformation takes an extra year, you miss a cohort of 130 million kids. 4 years costs half a billion. Tick, tick, tick...
And it's not a "them" problem. Setting up an analogy, Mexico average high-school graduates can look like average US high-school dropouts. So if your transformative change makes them look like average US hs graduates, like awesome wow! But... average US high-school graduates? Pity the transformation wasn't just a little bit greater. And so if you tell me your transformative change will give every US high-school graduate the grasp of science of an average entering Harvard freshman, well, like awesome wow! Great for societal equity! But... Harvard freshman? Pity their science education is still failing them so very badly.