Long time no see Jorge (-:

Others too are seeing a dramatic surge of interest in Internet-in-a-Box
this year, and especially in the past month.  A lot of the recent interest
is among people wanting a "complete" English Wikipedia for
offline/survivalist purposes, as you can see from the 900,000+ views here:
https://www.tiktok.com/tag/internetinabox

Another big trend is that microSD cards and various other kinds of SSD/HDD
drives have become *insanely cheap* (so even 1 TB Internet-in-a-Box's are
becoming much more common, which can hold more than 10 copies of English
Wikipedia, we're not in Kansas anymore!)  Based on clear community patterns
(full copies of Wikipedia is almost always what every community wants)
we're encouraging people to include the complete Wikipedia in several
languages now (Spanish and French are always popular, among others).

Hopefully Wikipedia's historical maps will be included in full detail
(right now ZIM files lose this high-resolution) in future too —
alongside OpenStreetMap,
and satellite photos that Internet-in-a-Box also includes, much like Google
Maps but with privacy built in !!

A common endeavor among all these grassroots communities is to build up
very rich Internet-in-a-Box "Learning Bouquets" for home schoolers,
missionaries, NGO's and others (some very new demographics we did not see
in prior years, in countries rich and poor!)  Certainly, English remains
very dominant for now.  But in short: the surge is not just among "prepper"
survivalists FYI, as the above TikTok vids might suggest.
Internet-in-a-Box software being completely free and increasingly very easy
to install (after years of refinement, gets better every year!) is
definitely part of this spike, that predated the above TikTok videos  ✅

If you're interested in keeping up with these latest twists + turns in
various countries — i.e. keeping an eye on Internet-in-a-Box grassroots
community action in all countries (peacetime, wartime, rich, poor) as it
grows — these will be posted here increasingly in coming months:
https://twitter.com/internet_in_box

Definitely we're entering a New Chapter.  Many hard-working people have
come together to get us this far, and to see where this leads.  Building
upon Emmanuel Engelhart's & many other *non-traditional* Wikipedia
volunteers' hard work bringing Wikipedia to completely new kinds of
communities~ đŸĒĢ🔋

Keep in Touch!
Adam


*PS if you want to install Internet-in-a-Box yourself, on almost any old
laptop (or Raspberry Pi if you prefer!) do that here:*

https://github.com/iiab/iiab/wiki/IIAB-8.0-Release-Notes


On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 10:36 AM Jorge Vargas <jvar...@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Hi James! So lovely to hear from you.
>
> Out of curiosity, can you share more about what latest build of the
> internet in a box at estoy shipping? Where are they going and how did they
> reached out? What content are you shipping them with and what memory
> capacity do you have?
>
> Super interesting stuff!! Are you planning to get any feedback from these
> users once they start testing and suing the devices? That would also be
> really cool learning.
>
> Hug,
> Jorge
>
> On Fri, Jul 29, 2022 at 11:51 PM James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We have seen a significant increase in interest in these devices this
>> month, having shipped 24 devices so far.
>>
>> As such we are increasing what we charge to distribute them to 50 USD
>> each so we are not losing money on each device. Also hopefully this will
>> make it easier for others to get into distribution.
>>
>>
>> --
>> James Heilman
>> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>> _______________________________________________
>> Offline-l mailing list -- offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> To unsubscribe send an email to offline-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
>>
> --
> *Jorge Vargas* (he/him)
> Director of Partnerships
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
> M: (+1) 415.404.9536
> I work from Miami, USA. My time zone is UTC/GMT -4/-5.
> _______________________________________________
> Offline-l mailing list -- offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe send an email to offline-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
>
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