Re: [GKD] RFI: How Can A "Grassroots" Project Obtain Financing From Private Donors In Rich Countries?
On Tuesday, 14 June 2005, Arrigo della Gherardesca wrote: > In relation to a specific project I am working on (but I will state the > matter in more general terms), I am interested in gaining whatever > knowledge I can on the following area: Oh, come on. Tell us about your real project. We may have ideas, and better yet, we may have appropriate contacts. > How can a small entity (say in rural India or Africa) - it could be a > women's cooperative, a small local NGO, or even an existing company or a > single entrepreneur (but the same could hold for a Local Government) - > if they have a viable project (both economically and socially), tap the > rich countries donor and grant opportunities (Foundations, Corporate > donors, etc.)? I don't have a complete answer, but I can make several suggestions. First, does your rural cooperative or whatever make anything that could be sold on eBay or Overstock.com? Would they like to? I am starting to help Nigerian artists sell on the Web, and have inquiries from other countries. I would be happy to talk to you about it further. Do you have a Web site? You can ask for donations or sell products there, and receive money through Paypal. See: <http://www.omidyar.net/>, Pierre Omidyar's discussion board. Omidyar is the founder of eBay. Any of the social networking services, such as Ryze, Friendly Favors, Upspace, LinkedIn, and so on. Also see: <http://www.globalgiving.org/> Post searchable requests for funding. I know very little about grant funding, and I intend to keep it that way, since I figured out that poverty can be ended at a profit. But there are plenty of Web sites about the grant process and about foundations and other grant-making bodies. Just Google for them, and start reading their Web sites. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD] Local Languages, ICT, and Indigenous Knowledge
On Friday, 10 June 2005, Donald Z. Osborn wrote: > There is not a huge demand for local language applications right now. The claim that there is no demand for a product is quite often wrong, especially when based on supposition rather than investigation. Every publisher that looked at The Wonderful Wizard of Oz turned it down on the grounds that there was no demand for American fairy tales. The only evidence they cited was that there were no American fairy tales in print--no surprise if every publisher refused to publish them. Frank Baum had to pay for the initial print run himself, even after he had several other successful titles. He eventually wrote 13 more books in the series, by popular demand, and it was continued after his death with more than 20 others. In every case involving language support in software that I have investigated, there is huge latent demand, but it is not expressed openly because everybody knows they can't get it yet. An example is Yiddish-language discussion groups, where the question of writing in Hebrew alphabet rather than Latin transliteration comes up every few years, and has still not been acted on due to lack of wide enough distribution of suitable software. (But we're close this time! Some of us have started a Free/Open Source project for Yiddish support in Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.) Your comment is also like saying that mathematicians wouldn't want to typeset their own work in the days before Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting software. It turns out that almost all mathematicians and physicists are willing or even eager to create their papers in TeX. In fact TeX has been an important option for many languages that were not well supported in Windows, Mac OS, and Unix until quite recently. Unfortunately, TeX is not suited to casual use. From <http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/bytopic.html> # Multilingual Support * Misc: The babel Package * Multilingual Bibliographies * Arabic * Armenian * Bangla and Asamese * Basque * Bengali * Burmese * Casyl * Cherokee * Chinese, Japanese, Korean * Coptic * Croatian * Czech and Slovene * Cyrillic * Devanagari * Dutch * English * Epi-Olmec * Ethiopian * French * German * Greek * Gurmukhi * Hebrew * Hungarian * Icelandic * Indian * Inuktitut * Italian * Japanese * Korean * Latin * Malayalam * Manju * Mongolian * Polish * Portuguese * Romanian * Russian * Sanskrit * Sinhala * Slovene * Somali * Spanish * Swedish * Tamil * Telugu * Tibetan * Turkish * Ukrainian * Vietnamese * Misc I went into all of this in detail in three market research studies, one on technical publishing software, one on non-Latin fonts, and one on the impact of Unicode. My computer, running Debian Linux, has keyboard layouts or IMEs for 26 of the 30 major modern writing systems, lacking Tibetan, Mongolian, Sinhala, and Thaana. All of these are in Unicode, and are supported in Free fonts. I know several people who can create a keyboard for any language, and I'm learning to do it myself, so that I can work on keyboards for Yiddish, Pali, Yoruba, and Klingon to begin with. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Local Governments Should Adopt a Business Model
On Wednesday, 25 May 2005, Janice Brodman wrote: > Regarding Ed Cherlin's suggestion about a Sears-type local government -- > I'm not sure I understand the suggestion, but I *think* he means that we > strengthen local enterprises, and then have local governments support an > infrastructure that facilitates e-commerce. Spot on. We install a national wireless network reaching to the villages, and one computer per village to get things moving. This allows local farmers to access world prices and increase their revenues, as in the ICT e-choupal project. Then, again as with ICT, we or somebody creates an e-commerce portal to sell to the villages. What the villagers need is essentially everything, in the same way that the first Sears catalog offered everything that a household needed to everybody in the US within buggy or cart range of a railroad station. We would include farming equipment and supplies, clothing, home furnishings, furniture, appliances, educational materials, health care equipment and supplies, and a good deal more. As much as possible should be locally produced, giving a further boost to the local economy. Would any existing organizations taking part in this discussion like to create a piece of this project? Since it can be done at a profit, it is not conventional aid, so you might have to rethink how you operate or even create new entities. On the other hand, since it is profitable, we don't have to wait for government funding or donations to get started. I am working on setting up e-commerce in Nigeria through an organization that provides computer training, health care, agricultural training and supplies, and much more, and have had queries from other countries in Africa already. We will also work with Partners in Health (Haiti) and Sarvodaya (Sri Lanka). > If so, it's an interesting application of the ideas in my previous > message. But to make that happen, local governments have to realize that > they must be part of the overall effort to make their communities > competitive and, eventually, more prosperous. It is not actually required that governments understand ahead of time. Staying out of the way and allowing someone else to do it is sufficient. However, if we can convince local government that it is in their interest to be civic boosters (another 19th century concept) and to grow the local economy, and thus get their cooperation, we can do many things better, faster, and cheaper. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Use of GIS to Support Local Administration of Municipalities
On Tuesday, 17 May 2005, Barbara Fillip wrote: > Earlier this year, USAID organized a workshop on Decentralization and > Local Governance in the Asia and Near East Region. > > The workshop took place in Cairo, Egypt. You can find out more on the > workshop's web site <http://www.localgovernance.org>. I was lucky enough > to be attending the workshop and to present in a panel on "IT and the > Media". One of my co-panelists made a presentation on a very interesting > project in Lebanon where ICT is being used to support local > administration at the level of municipalities. > > Link to the Presentation: > http://www.localgovernance.org/binderdocs/pres_freij.pdf > > One element of this project in Lebanon, which is also present in one of > our dot-ORG projects in Central America is the use of GIS (Geographic > Information System) to assist local planning and track all cadastral, > financial and administrative data related to the community. Would any of these people be interested in a handheld computer with built-in GPS and local language support in Free Software? The product has been announced, but without full details. Simputers with external GPS have been used in a rural land survey in Karnataka State, India, using software in English and in the local language Kannada. I'll let you know more ASAP. You can find out about the Simputer in general at: http://www.encoresimputer.com/ http://www.simputerland.com/ http://www.ncoretech.com/ The base unit cost is Rs1, (a little more than US$200). These devices could be used for planning roads, laying out wireless networks, planning health and education systems, organizing co-ops, and for many other purposes. With proper management, the ROI on such projects can pay for the equipment in short order. The systems can also be used for teaching and enabling proper management, since they are complete computers with a wide range of Free Software. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For past messages, see: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Local Governments Should Adopt a Business Model
On Friday, May 20 2005, Janice Brodman wrote: > I would like to propose what may be a somewhat radical approach to using > ICT to strengthen local governments (LGs): We should be thinking of LGs > -- and encouraging them to think of themselves -- as companies do. We have had some very bad experience of this concept in various levels of government. Too often, the company that government models itself on is Enron. :-( I have a different idea. Let us make our NGOs into companies, like the microcredit institutions, and like the organizations that help poor artists and craftspeople sell their wares on eBay and Overstock.com, and like ITC in India, which puts computers into villages so that farmers can see world crop prices at no charge. ITC also offers to buy at prices publicly pegged to the Chicago Board of Trade, thus increasing farm income and (they say) getting better quality product at lower cost than the alternatives. Suppose we put all of this together. Create computer software and training in local languages for applications that will increase village income, such as e-commerce, and get the microbanks to place them (along with wireless Internet equipment) and make the loans for buying them, as they do with cell phones. Then let us see what kinds of health, education, and other programs we can deliver over these computers to increase local income further and faster, and how villagers can talk to each other about wider cooperation, including producer and consumer co-ops. Let us also see what kind of development portal we can create to sell to the no-longer-poor farmers and artisans and to their families. Do you think we can get a government to think of itself as the Sears and Montgomery Wards of more than a century ago? -- Edward Cherlin, Simputer Evangelist Encore Technologies (S) Pte. Ltd. The Village Information Society http://cherlin.blogspot.com This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For past messages, see: http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer
27;s what you have against Linux. It seems to color all the rest of your opinions. You also don't seem to think that you have the time or commitment to understand the Free Software culture and economic system. I would have thought that professional pride would force you to learn a little bit about them. Anyway, your objection turns out not to be the case. Install Cygwin on your Windows machine, and you can try out Linux utilities at leisure. Install the Windows ports of OpenOffice, the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, roughly equivalent to PhotoShop), various programming languages, and much more. When you have a set of applications that meets your needs, and you are comfortable with them, then you can try running them on Linux. Mandrake Linux is the easiest complete distribution to install. Ubuntu Linux is made rather too easy, in my judgement. It leaves out all of KDE, for one thing. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."--attributed to Albert Einstein > What I distrust is the presentation of any particular technology as a > unique solution to any real world problem. We've been down that road far > too many times before It isn't the solution. It's the necessary infrastructure for solutions, of which many are needed. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer
On Tuesday, 1 March 2005, Joe Monahan wrote: > Are there any folks here who can talk about the specific OS these > computers are being built with? What are the trends that look likely to > emerge? I see Microsoft supporting the MIT effort, but what version of > Linux, etc. If the community doesn't settle on a platform there will be > lots of wasted energy. The only OS that actually makes sense for the poor is Linux. Free Software that can be adapted to any language and to any set of cultural and legal requirements without waiting for a vendor is essential. The Simputers use Linux. Microsoft has effectively taken over the Grameen Foundation USA's Village Computing Project. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer: A Polite Scam
On Thursday, 17 February 2005, Mr Sachin Joshi wrote: > The questions are certainly justified to be posed, but it is likely that > the major computer manufacturers would have looked at the market > feasibility, which demands huge resource investments. The major computer manufacturers are stuck with inappropriate market models. They have no idea of any viable approach to computers for poor people. Computers will be sold to the poor by microbanks, which have a viable financial model. > The Simputer in India costs $200 which many Indian families still cannot > afford. So the poor will certainly not buy them. You are quite right that the poor will not pay cash for Simputers, and will not buy them to surf the Web. But that does not mean that Simputers are beyond their means entirely. Poor people buy $700 cell phone packages with loans from the Grameen Bank and others like it, but only after they are trained in banking and in business, specifically including how to make money renting out the phone so that they can pay back the loan and have something left over to live on. Exactly the same process will apply to computers with wireless connections to the Internet, once there is suitable software and training for an application known to be a money-maker in the villages. The ITC e-choupal program has had very good success in placing computers in villages for farmers to use in looking up international commodity prices. The company offers to buy crops at the previous day's price on the Chicago Board of Trade, and does excellent business. The farmers receive more money, and can invest in improved equipment and supplies, or pay more for their children's health and education, or otherwise improve their situations. Investments in health and education have a spectacular Return on Investment, especially when putting invalids back to work or when enabling children to get better jobs than their parents had. > It has been used in villages as a community device customized for > specific jobs, such as e-trading for farmers. Such a specialized use > requires customization by the company that promotes it, and this > customization necessitates a working partnership with various > organizations and government agencies, active at the grassroots level. ITC has not needed government assistance, and we would prefer to avoid government programs wherever possible. They are almost always inefficient, and absolutely always a temptation to corruption. > A mass promotion would work when the Simputer is as trendy and classy as > handheld devices, if it has to be pitched with the existing PDAs from > the mobile/computer manufacturers. The market price of all these models > is the same. The Simputer is not a PDA, and there are no plans to market it as such. It was designed for villages without power and phones. There are other applications for a portable computer, and Simputers are being used in various other ways. > Simputer is a good but expensive option to bridge the digital divide. Expensive compared with what? -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer: A Polite Scam
On Tuesday, 15 February 2005, Pat Hall wrote: > This is an interesting posting, and worth unpicking. Sam Lanfranco has > just posted a wonderfully incisive analysis of these 'offers'. Even the > much vaunted Simputer becomes questionable under this analysis. I don't think so. I posted about this earlier. > I want to take Sam's analysis a little further. > > (1) If these computers are so great, why aren't they being sold this > side of the digital divide? Can't people in the North/West also benefit > from these cheap computers? The answer is that it is not in the > interests of the hardware and software suppliers to sell us these, when > we have been so willingly (reluctantly?) buying much more expensive > equipment, forced upon us in a cycle of planned obsolescence of > incompatible bloat-ware releases. So what do they do to prevent it? They > supply software that we would not find useful, reduced Windows systems, > limited software that will not communicate across the divide. And > meanwhile they attack the potential open-sources that do deliver useful > software. I yearn for those days when office software was sufficient for > my purpose and did not fail from over-weight functionality. That's not "They", that's only Microsoft. Hardware people love to sell Linux (Sun, HP, IBM) and BSD (Apple). The other PC vendors don't because Microsoft puts illegal pressure on them. Anyway, you can buy an Amida Simputer from their Web site, . There has been no mad rush to buy them, which is why no large corporation has picked them up. Sharp tried to sell its own Linux-based handheld, the Zaurus, at retail in the U.S. a few years ago, and gave up when nobody bought it. > (2) The objective of such enterprises is to give voice to the poor and > the marginalised, in precisely the same way that literacy programmes > can, and local community radio stations can. Sam points this out, but > lets emphasise this, enabling access to ICTs is not so much to enable > the South to access the 'truths' from the West, Not 'truths', information and access to markets. > it is to enable 'truths' to flow the other way. Truths, bah. Humbug!! Most people can't recognize truth when it knocks them over the head. Which it does, every day, and they wonder why it hurts. > And to do that means we must recognise linguistic diversity and support > and respect that, so that the ICTs so cavalierly being offered do work > in other languages and scripts, and that there are translation paths > between languages, and there is support for those many who are not > literate. As the Simputer does, in fact, for languages of India and Bhutan. Are you aware of the number of projects to localize Linux into African and Asian languages? I'm working with some of them. Would you like me to send you a copy of the Unicode HOWTO that I just wrote? Have you seen my Unicode Conference papers on these issues? "Obliterating the Digital Divide" 24th Unicode Conference Proceedings, 2003. http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc24/a345.html "Completing Unicode 3.2 Support in Free Software", 24th Unicode Conference Proceedings, 2003. http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc24/a304.html > This is a big enterprise, not a matter for $100 handouts from the West, > but an enterprise for us all on both sides of the digital divide to > combine our expertises and make it happen. Handouts? What handouts? The deal is to sell these computers, and to train people to use them effectively. > Pat Hall, > Global Initiative for Local Computing > Limerick University Ireland and Open University UK URL, please. Never mind. (Google is your friend.) http://www.localisation.ie/ > "Under the [Official Languages Act 2003], government information has to > be made available in both English and Ireland but currently there's no > software that runs in Irish. There's only a lightly localised version of > Windows," [Reinhard Schuler, director of the LRC] noted. Inexcusable. Why aren't they using Linux? Your people can localise it themselves. UNDP is writing a Linux localisation HOWTO, and dozens of countries in Africa and Asia are doing it. Your people obviously haven't talked to Michael Everson of Evertype.com in Dublin. He can give you everything you need for creating documents in Irish. He wrote the proposals for getting the necessary extra letters supported in Unicode/ISO 10646, including creating fonts with those letters in them. He maintains the Roadmap for future inclusion of writing systems in Unicode/10646, in addition to his paid work creating writing systems and fonts for minority languages around the world. You should hire him. Him and me, both. "Please check your facts before posting nonsense to Usenet. I always do."--Beable va
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer: A Polite Scam
requirement, then, is to get them on the Net where their voices can actually be heard. > There are places and contexts where an old machine will do, or a > state-of-the-art machine is right. There are almost no places where one > can air drop $100 machines to all and sundry and expect miracles. Strawman. Air drops are indeed ludicrous. What about the actual proposals? > If asked, most of those places would have other priorities, many of > which may be linked to effective and efficient organizational or > community use of a variety of ICTs. How do you propose to ask them? > So why does a bad idea live on? It lives on because on the one hand it > does not have to face the reality of the market. It does not sit on the > shelf side by side with the cell phone option, over there, on the other > side of the digital divide. It is pitched to those who could fund it and > supported by those (NGOs, INGOs, IGOs) who would benefit from the > logistics of delivering the devices (or benefit from fine wine at Davos) > even if not successfully achieving the aims of the programs. Rather than argue this notion, I will point to the ITC e-choupal program, which a Harvard Business School study shows has increased farm revenue by 2.5% in many thousands of villages. That may seem small to you, but you should remember that it is a much larger fraction of income, and that any increase which permits people to begin saving has an exponential impact. > It is time for three things to happen here. One is the honest assessment > of the evidence. The $100 computer is no more than a minor bit player in > bridging the digital divide. Only if you consider the hundreds of thousands of villages without power and phones a minor issue. > ICT is wider than that. One could benefit from reading the report of the > International ICT Literacy Panel "Digital Transformation: A Framework > for ICT Literacy" where, talking about ICT literacy, even they > understood this truth. > > See: http://www.ets.org/research/ictliteracy/index.html > > The second is for the intermediate players to be more forthcoming in > what they know, even if it means smaller implementation budgets for > NGOs, and allied groups. They have a lot more knowledge and wisdom that > they have been using, since to use it could mean securing less project, > program and core funding to sustain themselves. It is a sad state of > affairs when millions are spent on failed projects, only to celebrate > the occasional mini-successes, and then fail to translate lessons > leading into action. Rather than lament that they are not at Davos, let > the NGOs call the academic skim-scam artists to task for their > irresponsible behaviour. Works for me. Did you see my post responding to Hiawatha Bray's article on the MIT announcement? > Lastly, the one thing that ICTs have done, and mainly via wireless > communications, is to start giving a voice to the poor. This has > occurred initially in their own lives as they use cell phones for > personal benefit. Civil society groups, NGOs, and last but not least, > the donors, should respect that starting point and work out from there. Hear, hear. > In large measure we know what we should not be doing here. We probably > know as well what we should be doing, and that should be small scale > efforts that carry within them their own seeds for self-replication, > with elements that allow them to neural network outward, transfering > lessons to other groups and communities. Actually, my experience is that hardly anybody knows what we should be doing. Almost everybody I meet has a piece of the elephant, but doesn't know how that piece fits with any of the others. > So long as we let the academic skim-scam artists run with nicely turned > "sound bites" at the expense of an honest assessment of the evidence, we > are all guilty of supporting a fraud. So long as some of us accept the > task of delivering programs that are pre-ordained to fail we are all > guilty of fraud for self-interest. > > It is a sobering thought that the global beer making community (large > and small) has done a better job incorporating technology across the > boundries of the digital divide over the past quarter century than has > the ICT community. Maybe we should pay more attention to those who make > the beer than to those who drink the wine. For well over a century, actually. German beermakers in China, Korea, and Japan created the local brews, notably Tsingtao in China, OB and Crown in Korea, and Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo in Japan. Similarly, English brewers created India Pale Ale in the mid-1700s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_and_nationality -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer
On 2/10/05, Parker Rossman wrote: > I hope the major computer companies will in time consent for it to be > manufactured in the developing world. I suppose Negroponte knows about > developments in India, and hopes that mass production can make it > cheaper. It isn't a question of permission. Simputers are being made in India and Singapore, and oneVillage Foundation is planning for eventual assembly in Africa, including training the technicians. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
Re: [GKD] The $100 Computer
On Thursday, 17 February 2005, Kris Dev wrote: > To my mind, what is required is 5 to 10 community computers available in > every village at Indian Rs. 9,000 (USD 200) per computer that can be run > on solar power with Wireless Local Loop (WLL) internet connection 24x7 > at a very low cost. If this can be ensured, there can be lot of progress > from learning to applications. > > Can this be possible? Yes, as soon as the microbanks figure out what software they need in what languages, and how to train the users and support people. Grameen has two such projects, and there is another by the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka. Bhutan is already experimenting with Simputers to deliver e-mail to villages over their recently-built national wireless network. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
