Fellow OLPC Participants, Some of you may find this paper a very informative read: http://www.icasit.org/ruth/telecom_diffusion.pdf. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an attempt, by any of the organizations (including the U.N.) mentioned in this paper, to collect information about Wi-Fi/mesh usage (e.g., number of connections). The paper appears to be quite recent although it shows no date-of-publication (probably because it was published as part of a group of papers). It will be very interesting to see what happens to the level of Internet use in the OLPC recipient countries over the next five to ten years.
This paper's analysis concerns itself mostly with statistics/indices/weighted averages as applied to the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) group of countries. The paper reports that, according to Freedom House's Freedom Index classification scheme, only Israel was classified as "free" in this group. Jordan and Morocco were classified "partly free." The rest were classified as "not free." One of the graphs in the article shows interesting relationships between a country's Freedom Index and the more quantitative measures mostly reported and discussed in the paper regarding the rate of adoption of telecom infrastructure, in general, and the Internet in particular.. Very well-written for a paper of this type. A good lunch-time/train-time read. Cheers, Brad
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