Poverty and oppression thrive in situations where people can't communicate cheaply and widely with one another about corruption, injustice and violence.

The success of mobile phones in defraying these co-ordination costs shows just how profoundly technology can change the cycle of poverty. Whether it's electoral monitors armed with mobile phones who watch the ballots move from the polls to the counting houses in Kenya, the citizen reporters who exposed the brutality in Myanmar, or the fishermen and farmers in Africa and Asia who use networks to find the best market for their goods. A mobile phone network can multiply the food, education, health and democracy that is already there, and be used to bring new resources besides.

But mobile phones are necessarily an interim step. Adding software to most mobile phones is difficult or impossible without the permission of a central carrier, which makes life very hard for local technologists who have a very particular, local problem that needs resolving. Mobile phone use is always metered, limiting their use and exacting a toll on people who can least afford to pay it. Worst of all, the centralised nature of mobile networks means that in times of extremis, governments and natural disasters will wreak havoc on our systems, just as we need them most.

By contrast, an open laptop with mesh networking is designed to be locally customized  and to avoid centralised control and vulnerability to bad weather and bad governments. It is designed to be nearly free from operating costs, so that once the initial investment is made, all subsequent use is free, encouraging experimentation and play, from which all manner of innovations may spring.