oneVillage Foundation

OVF Looking at Replicating Dharamsala's Success in Afirca
OVF is now studying the project and considering work with Jim as well as others in replicating it to other regions such as Fantsuam www.fantsuam.com in Nigeria. This project would also build on the work Kafui has done in establishing the WILUG in Ghana.

Here are a few other "mesh" systems that come to mind in our research over the last year or two:
1) Jhai (Open Source)
2) BARWN (Open Source)
3) NextGen Wireless (Open Source)
4) First Mile Solutions (Proprietary)

Its About Communications
One thing I really liked about what Jim said in our recent email exchanges is this:

The whole reason for having the wireless mesh networks is communication. We are promoting communications among people who formerly were not connected to the world at all and the “rest” of the world that does have good electronic communication. We are trying to open up new sources of information to these people. We are making their communication more “immediate.” We are making it possible for someone in a remote part of India to ask a question and get an answer from the other side of the globe. These communications make “us” seem more human to “them.”

Community Knowledge Delivery System
In 2003 we worked with Jim to put together a proposal that would have funded the initial stages of an information system that would be accessed from telephones (read “mobile phones”) and hardened computers, in order to get, and to share, health information in broad communities within Africa to address urgent challenges in these communities. The CKDS (PDF) of course was based on OVF's oneVillage Initiative which we point out could be used anywhere, of course, not just Africa as way to connect people and resources to effective address a complext set of challenges in a highly integrated and proactive way.

There the emphasis was on:
1) providing an information store (database, if you will) that had reliable information;
2) providing the ability for local experience to be fed back into the information store;
3) providing various ways that the technologies could continue to exist under harsh environmental conditions.

First Steps
Jime notes that "People can easily get information, but processing it, judging it, determining its uses, is a difficult issue. So there enters your question about decision-making. Indeed one of the challenges is that we all this feeling that so much needs to be done. And so we often discuss many complex development issues in a way that can be overwhelming. However Jim feels that the "first step is in putting together some kind of technology-based system that will allow us to deploy information into the field, and to get good feedback and community involvement in building that store of information even further." While OVF feels that technology can be an enabler it is the innate technology within us that has to be better harnessed in order to enable the effective and empowering deployment of modern state of the art technology. Jim concludes by saying that "There needs to be not only information but good coaching on how to make decisions based on whatever information is available."

Developing a Realistic Open Source Development Model
Jim as a seasoned technologist says that from his experience "free operating systems require more skilled personnel to keep them functioning." He adds, "When an exploit is discovered for one of these systems, someone has to immediately update the software and recompile the system and install the fix. And that can be a real challenge in regions of the world where the digital divide limits access to train staff and adequate infrastructure.

Jim Further elaborates on some of his concerns about Open Source deployment in developing countries:

My approach in Dharamsala has been to provide “free” commercial software at first. We provide Mac OSX servers, which are easy to administer. We provide PGP for email security (free for these experiments). We provide Kerio mailserver software (initially free for these experimental communities) which is commercial and up-to-date and secure and unlikely to become compromised. This “seeds” the software into the community. The next step, which we still have to work out, is to provide an inexpensive migration path so people can afford to keep the software in operation. Yes, that can be a hurdle, but this is the best software around and it takes literally a few clicks to maintain (update) software, compared to lots of training and lots of technical expertise to keep a free-x system operational. Another approach to this would be for a central org to keep updates available and make them instantly available to NPOs and to actually help them with the upgrades when it’s needed. Perhaps someone has already seen this need and is doing it?

We see similar interest in India about this. They want to install free software and learn how to use it, but when someone learns it they go away to work somewhere else where they can earn “real” money and they do not stay with the community. And then the software is left there with nobody to maintain it. We have had better luck providing “utility” computing elsewhere and letting local people come up to a certain “maintainable” level of knowledge that corresponds to just what they need to know to operate these systems. In other words, we might not expect them to compile and install upgrades, but certainly to operate MySQL, and to write HTML, and to use PHP and Perl.

for more go to his blog post titled: Free software and the "support chain"

Stupa Project
In 2003, Joy had a meditation about building a stupa in Africa. Consequently she consulted with Lama Zopa Rinponche about this matter and was given a list of information, including data about stupa, people who have knowledge about building stupas and a letter of spiritual support from Lama Zopa Rinponche. The Stupa Project (download proposal here) would be in Ile-Ife, Nigeria as suggested in the document and would combine OVF's existing work in Nigeria and DLF's wireless mesh network in India. The impact would be a holistic one towards the PEACE building within each of us and for the world. The stupa project would be linked to the role that information technology could play in education for the promotion of ethics and peace. See also recent post on Little Stupa.