Slashdot Mirror
Peace Corps to Wire Senegal
An anonymous submitter wrote: "Peace Corps Online is reporting on the White House's Digital Freedom Initiative that will place volunteers from the Peace Corps, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco in a pilot program in Senegal where they will leverage nearly 200 cybercafes and 10,000 telecenters to provide opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The idea isn't new - David Rothman proposed an Electronic Peace Corps in 1984, the Geek Corps has been doing this kind of work in Ghana for years, and the Peace Corps already has about 1,500 volunteers working in information technology."
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4657
From the Peace Corps website: "Currently, 6,678 Peace Corps volunteers are serving in 70 countries, working to bring clean water to communities, teach children, help start new small businesses, and stop the spread of AIDS. Since 1961, more than 168,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps, serving in 136 nations." These people most likely dont have the skills to combat cyber terrorism and are using the skills they do have to set up small networks and get people on the internet.
Worst. Sig. Ever.
In a similar vain people might be interested in NetAid which apart of the UN in helping out online less developed countries
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
It is all very simple actually....
You can find practicly anything on the internet, no need for expensive books, all you need is a little curiousity.
As for fighting big business and governments all you need is to set up a 'poor-villages-against-whatever' mailinglist and you can organize.
That is the power of the internet: spreading information at practicly no cost.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Are there any Internet cafes in the developed world that use long-range wireless technologies? We can't even make 3G cell phone networks a reality here in the US, so I don't see how we can expect that to happen in developing countries. And if you're referring to Wi-Fi, then that's also not feasible, since 802.11b only goes about 10 miles max, even with a line-of-sight high-gain directional antenna. You'd have to put repeaters all over the countryside.
When I served with the Peace Corps in Ghana, some of the "luxury" Internet cafes in the capital were using specially-licensed microwave links to a shared VSAT Internet link, but spreading that kind of access throughout the rest of the (mostly rural) land just isn't economically possible.
What I noticed in Ghana is that any town that had been wired for electricity, no matter how small, was also wired for phone service. Unfortunately, the government-owned phone company (Ghana Telecom) has a monopoly on the entire phone industry, and they aren't interested in competition because they don't want to lose their cash cow. The result is that dial-up Internet access from small towns is already availble but extremely expensive due to the per-minute long-distance charges.
The solution, I think, is not technical but rather economical. Instead of building some fancy wireless mesh network, developing countries should work to deregulate the phone industry and open it up to competition, thus lowering the cost of Internet access everywhere.
Bzzzzt! Wrong Answer!
"Leverage" is about using a small investment to achieve a large result. Those of us who actually study a subject before being snitty about it call this the Multiplier Effect.
In this context, the goal is to use a relatively small investment in telecommunications and electronics to provide a tool, a "lever", that will then cause larger, desired change.
Go away, little boy and leave criticism to those of us who actually *do* know the proper meanings of words.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.