Slashdot Mirror
Still More on Connecting Laos
Rackemup writes "A story on Wired has some updated information on the progess made by the Remote IT Village Project attempting to connect several isolated villages deep in the Laotian Jungle to the rest of the world using wireless networks, pedal-power and Laonux (customized Linux installs translated into the Laotian language). Power surges can be a hassle when the nearest computer store is hundreds of miles away, but they're shooting for a May 18th "go live" date."
No one posts the IP of these networks to slashdot....
How is the Laotian government reacting to this? Any support or opposition? While I don't know much about Laos firsthand, I do know it's one of the last five remaining communist countries on Earth.
Other countries such as China and Vietnam have taken measures to regulate and censor the flow of information via the net -- will this be any different?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
...these guys actually knew what they were doing.
I first heard about these guys on slashdot last year. I went and worked with them in Laos. And, what I thought was a bad situation went from bad to worse.
Sure, Laonux is cool -> anything to make technology accessible to more people. But the whole remote IT project was fundamentally flawed.
No planning to speak of. No actual understanding of the conditions. No testing. No risk analysis. And a manager with a head so into marketing he couldn't get his nose out of it for long enough to realize that he was biting off more than he could chew. All he saw was an opportunity to make money off of it for his foundation.
It was essentially conceived as a vehicle to do a couple of things:
Obtain fortune for the techies working on it. Obtain fame for the JHAI project in lao to get it more funding. Turn into a business opportunity for everyone when it was hugely successful.
The first launch was a complete sham (and a failure) -> there were invites sent out to everybody and their cousin months before the launch date. At that point, nobody'd even bothered to try out the software involved on the eventual hardware. It failed essentially because they hadn't bothered to test it out. And, because the "lauch date" was so all important, instead of finishing it, everybody went home!
This would have been a cool idea if:
It had been planned in an effective way by people who had a clue.
It had been made to benefit the Lao people instead of the people making it.
If it had been built as something to last, instead of the best that they could come up with.
Now, they're trying to do it again. But, they still haven't spent the adequate amount of time planning and testing, and yet they're setting a launch date and inviting all the relevant people. And it's going to fail.
My guess, is that they'll have the whole thing work, limpingly, on the launch date. Then, nobody will be around who can actually maintain it, and it'll all break down within 4 months. All that effort wasted, and everybody who's been a part can put it on their resume and say "look, I've been selfless." Because they've put no resources into training people, or into any kind of backup. They're just doing like the dot com's... waiting for the crash, but completely surprised when it happens. Either that, or it'll be so buggy that nobody will ever bother using it.
...another man's imperialist running dog propoganda.
First off, people in the third world are quite aware that the US is loaded. Its shoved down their throats to the point that the myths of America told 2 and 3 hundred years ago are still believed. The roads may not be paved with gold but everyone is as beautiful as Jennifer Aniston and has a bitchin' apartment.
But, what I'm saying, what I'd prefer, is that if we're going to help them in any way lets not help them to be us. Let's help them enough so that they can figure out who they are.
How sad would it be that all the world is America? How boring? I'm in no way saying that I want them to remain a quaint village we can all visit and take pictures of. It would just be nice if they could remain the people they are at the core but be able to reap those benefits of technology they deemed useful.
America is like crack. We use peer pressure to push ourselves on the unsuspecting masses. "See, America is great, cold icy drinks come out of a tap in the wall! you need to be just like us to enjoy the benefits of the almighty slurpee."
I'm not a self-hater. I love America. I think of myself as a patriot in the unperverted sense of the word. I think America is great for me. I just don't think America is great for the rest of the world. If you want to come here fine but, don't clone our world. Don't make a doppleganger of Britney. Do your own thing. If you need a hand ask, I'll gladly help out.
Don't destroy your world to be like ours. Part of being American is being able to enjoy other worlds. It would suck if all the worlds were the same wouldn't it?
didn't mean to get off on a rant there.
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