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Geeking in the Third World
suzipaw writes "Geekcorps founder Ethan Zuckerman, late of Tripod, gets some well-deserved media attention for his good works via an interview on oreilly.com. What he and other volunteers are doing on behalf of developing nations is pretty darn cool. And humbling--makes this first-worlder grateful for a regular power supply."
It's Old World, New World, Third World, not First world, Second World, Third World.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
It can depend. For example, most of my distant relatives live in small villages in India. Having visited them, food isn't really a concern. There's plenty of that. Clean water? Maybe. However, their immune systems have adapted to the water, so only american born people like me needed to boil it first. Like it says in the article, power was key. At 9pm, every night, the power to the village would be shut off, so the city could have power. That, is the real technical hurdle.
Actually, with so much old computer kit being donated to the third world by companies etc (there must be a tax break or something - that and it saves paying to dispose of it) there's a lot to be said for sharing expertise, especially if those doing it are competent in working with Free software so that basic things like all the machines in a school running the same stuff can be taken care of. At the moment these machines run with what they came with and are nearly always next to useless. Well, unless you count the ones being used as doorstops and steps.
Of course there are other important things to do in these parts of the world, but the way I see it, sharing out expertise never did anyone any harm - it's a comodity both free and invaluable.
The Swedish Mac-guru Ulf "Omar" Henriksson have single handidly shipped over 1500 used and refurbished Macs to schools, libraries and hospitals in Kenya. Every Mac was donated by Swedish individuals and businesses for this charity purpose.
:)
In Kenya he have educated quite a lot users and admins in the ins and outs of Mac, the Mac OS and computers in general.
More info (in Swedish) at http://www.macs-to-africa.info/]Macs to Africa.info.
If you have any questions, feel free to mail "Omar" at guru.macsupport(at)telia.com.
And no.. PCs are not welome
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
Beyond power, other problem in dev. countries is harder or expensive to get parts when you are building something. I worked in a data acquisition project in south america and we used to request free samples from chipmakers. Now it's harder, some only ship to U.S.
>> I see a great benifit of raising the global I.Q. of a planet of roughly 6 billion people.
Why do so many posters insist on equating geek knowledge with higher IQ? IQ has nothing to do with how much you've stuffed in your head. Slogging through a dozen computer science courses won't raise your IQ anymore than a dozen English lit courses.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
IMR already had 2 computer support people working in Goroka -- one of them completely self trained -- so I thought that we could probably use Linux at least for the backend and save ourselves a lot of money. However I quickly found that although the techs were quite familiar with Windows, a year was not going to be anywhere near long enough to bring them to a point where they would be able to correct issues with Linux. There was just too much of a curve. I doubt that we would have been able to get to the point of patching and recompiling the kernel (or an application). For all the recent criticism of Windows Update, it usually works a whole lot more simply for users (and our techs here).
When I arrived, they had a basic Lantastic network that the techs would use for backing up data from individual PCs. There was just one computer with email and Internet access (and a single email address for the whole organisation) -- people would queue to use it. It had never been patched at all. We would open up computers just 3 weeks old and not be able to distinguish any features inside due to the dust.
We did some basic training for Linux, and the techs went through that with no problem, but they started to communicate to me their concern with administering it. They had a heavy workload and didn't feel confident that they would be able to get to the point they needed to with Linux before my time with them was up. In the end I went with an all-Microsoft solution. Windows, Exchange 2000, Terminal Server, etc. We are now at a point where client machines don't matter any more -- data is stored on the server -- it used to use up all their time just keeping the client machines running. Now, if a client machine goes down, they fix the hardware issue, press F12 and it rebuilds the machine automatically... And in the meantime the user can continue working on another machine.
There is some Linux expertise in the country, nearly all of it in the capital; I would expect some of the missionary organisations here also have Linux setups. However, there is no real support for Linux, whereas there are plenty of MCSE qualified people and companies that provide resources for Microsoft setups. If the whole thing went up in flames and the techs weren't confident of their ability to resurrect the system, I'm sure that they could hire someone from the capital to correct the problem. With Linux, they'd have to bring in someone from Australia...
Some of the more interesting issues we have to deal with include: we recently managed to organise a permanent connection - 64kbit (compressed to roughly 100kbit on average), shared with 4 other large organisations in town. It's actually cheaper than dialup. However, this permanent connection will be unavailable for roughly 40-50 hours per month as the telecommunications out of the city go down (batteries not charging at a repeater apparently). We still pay almost US$1 per megabyte over our monthly 1GB download quota... MS service packs take up much of that, but in my experience with Linux I have had to download a whole lot more... Remote administration is an interesting issue. I sometimes ssh to a server in Australia, but typing with a lag of roughly 2 seconds is not much fun. Going the other way requires dialup -- safer than opening ports on the firewall.
Interestingly, power has not been much of an issue. Although there are blackouts, we have both UPS and genset backups. Our old UPS (about 20 years old) died recently, and we have just had a new one installed... I have only seen a power cut at IMR once -- when the genset was being maintained at the time of a blackout. Power line filtering in front of