Friday, April 11, 2008

OLPC adds Mexican ex-official Castañeda to board

One Laptop per Child has appointed former Mexican secretary of foreign affairs Jorge G. Castañeda to the Cambridge-based nonprofit's board of directors.

According to OLPC chairman and founder Nicholas Negroponte, Castañeda's "extensive international expertise" will aid OLPC in fulfilling its mission to bring inexpensive laptops to poor children in developing countries.

Castañeda was foreign minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He received bachelor's degrees from both Princeton University and the Universite de Paris-I (Pantheon-Sorbonne), as well as a master's degree from the Ecole Pratique de Hautes Etudes. Castañeda collected his Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Paris-I. He has taught at Mexico's National Autonomous University, Princeton, the University of California Berkeley and at New York University.

Last month, OLPC's director of security architecture, Ivan Krstic, resigned from that role due to what he describes as a conflict related to the organization's goals and aims.

OLPC was launched in 2005 by Nicholas Negroponte, an MIT professor, with the mission of providing $100 laptops to those who couldn't otherwise afford them. While there has been much discussion about the fact the latest estimates now place the price closer to $200 when shipped, the nonprofit's executives have reported that large-scale production cost savings could help bring the price back down to $100 per laptop.