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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."
makes this first-worlder grateful
for a regular power supply."
Our computers are horrible power hogs for what they do. if you had to conserve your electrical power like they do in a 3rd world or even a 2nd world you would realize this.
Try living off the grid, it is possible and many 1st world people do it.
What you are grateful for is the fact that you are spoiled by the luxuries we have in the modern countries.
many of the advances in personal powering and conservation is created by these people that are trying to get the 3rd world countries closer to where we were in the 60's.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Bram Moolenaar, the author/maintainer of the amazing vim visited a school/community center/development center in Uganda a few years back, and when he returned to Europe, he, along with others, setup a charity in the Netherlands to support the center. Those who use and enjoy vim (and those who don't!) "are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Go to the International Child Care Fund and make a donation, or at least click through their Amazon affiliation links next time you buy something from there. That way, it doesn't even cost you anything...
Wouldn't it be nice to Slashdot a charity with donations? :-)
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
If they are able to get internet, power, "e-commerce" etc... up and running then these "3rd world" nations will be able to start making money which will in turn open up jobs where people will have money to spend to buy and produce things like food and shelter or better tools to produce these things.
That's just my ($1.00 - $.98 tax) worth
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
father: no my son, but we will get to search the internet for information on food and food-like products.
I know you were just being glib, but let me amend that for you:
"but we will get to search the internet for ways to stop our crops from dying off, so we can eat tomorrow."
Of course, you could put in other lifestyle improving search terms, like say, how to build a sewage treatment plant so your village doesn't dump raw turds in the river that you drink from, or using all that pig/chicken/cow shit around the place to make enough methane for a small generating plant. Or even how to construct a nice cheap house that'll hold up to cyclonic winds and monsoon rain.
Living in a modern country, and going to a even a second-world country (never mind a third world one) is a real eye-opener - things that I've said:
(This is when I was staying in a town of about 300,000. Picture a small idyllic fishing village, then cram 25,000 people and cars into it)
"What're all those tanks on the roof for?"
"Oh, the tap water's just bore water - it's not really fit to drink. We get the drinking water trucked in."
"Damn! What's that stink?"
"Dead cow in the open drain outside the window there, see?"
"How long will the power be off for?"
"Oh , two or three hours... it normally comes back on around 10."
"Howdy'a get a line out here? I need to ring home"
"I'll book you a call, the guys at the exchange will ring us back when it's hooked up. There's only 15 lines out of town."
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I have relatives in rural Tanzania and it's pretty much the same situation. Food, water are not really a problem since the food is grown locally and the people are adapted to the water.
But only recently has electricity been introduced, and it is not that reliable.
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
I came to Guyana, South America in 1995, having worked in telecoms for 6 years. They had no internet access - not a single link. I used to dial Barbados and collect my email. Surfing was an expensive luxury. Still, managed to get the newspaper I was working for on the web (now Stabroek News).
The O'Reilly article is wonderful - clearly shows that the digital divide will not be bridged by IBM or Micro$oft and that hardware is not the answer - skill transfer is. Also shows how reliable power is not a given in developing countries (and, of course post-Enron California...
Now we have ADSL, satellite, fibre (Americas II). Still regular blackouts though.
Check out the Guyana SDNP, the UNDP Digital initiative.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Having just returned from three months connecting rural schools in Uganda, let me just offer one (small-sample-size) perspective:
It's a lot tougher than you think. I visited 16 schools several months after they had received an in-depth, two-week Linux training course. By the time I arrived their Linux computers lay broken, not having been touched for weeks.
We (geeks and nerds of the developed world) have been suckling at the teet of technology all our lives: drivers, file systems, and the like are now second-nature. However, to someone from another, non-technically-innundated culture, it's extremely difficult to use Linux.
Proof? In 16 schools, only one Linux machine was still running when I arrived. But every Windows machine was still being used, and loved.
For the time being, at least, let's give developing nations what they CAN use (Microsoft) not what we WANT them to use (Linux).
I would love to hear other people's experiences with MSFT vs OS in developing nations.
Well, if you RTFA you will find that they help local companies and such which are trying to set up their own IT but are lacking in expertise, such as the Ghanda ISP mentioned in the article. They are not walking into a third world village and saying "Hey starving villagers, how about a computer?"
On another note, people should contribute acording to their particular skill set. If I am an expert in Linux and networking, should I go teach a poor African modern agricultural farming techniques? No, I should teach based on my area of expertise, regardless of whether you believe there are more pressing concerns.
Maybe these guys deserve attention, but not nearly as much as Engineers Without Borders. It may be considered trolling on Slashdot, but to most people it is obvious that there are more urgent problems for many of these countries/cities/villages than lack of Internet access.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
The guys I work with have pictures from some 3rd world country they visited 5-6 years ago with high voltage power lines just running along the ground. I can't remember where for sure. Any curious kid is not safe around there. They also don't protect their equipment in any way like circuit breakers. Just wait till it cooks something, and replace it if they can afford it.
Fix Your Own TV - RiddledTV.com Avoid the Landfill
You can use the Internet to find information about things besides the latest NVIDIA chip or whether or not JFK had an affair with an itern. From what I understand, the reasons why developing countries are "developing" instead of "developed" aren't simply that it's physically impossible for them to produce enough food or shelter. It seems to me that Internet access could be more useful than a shipment of grain and medical supplies. As we all know, there's a lot of useful information available on the Internet, not to mention the ability to organize political and social organizations quickly and cheaply. From what I hear a lot of donations of food or medical supplies end up getting stolen or wasted anyway.
One of the issues is that Windows computers degrade, if not gracefully, at least in a somewhat nice manner. Sure towards the end of the "install, use, reinstall" cycle they may crash every half an hour (or more often!), at least they boot into a GUI and you can load up (most of? some of?) your programs.
:-D
:)
A *nix machine can have X die hard and not boot into a GUI at all. Sure it may be easy for somebody who KNOWS what they are doing to fix, but, err, this is a school, students are there to learn basic life skills first and foremost, not fart around with config files. (or, if they are farting around with config files, that is an elective, heh)
Also, it is far harder to FUBAR a Windows box just from regular day to day use. Windows may eat itself up, but at least little of that it due to user intervention.
By comparison, I have managed to get X to fail to start up in under 10 minutes of a new install without ever touching a single config file (with a text editor at least, obviously something was changed!!)
A properly setup *nix box MAY last forever, but this is a school environment, remember, kids are kids, and they will find endless pleasure in typing in random crap until the system goes tits up.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The Third World needs a lot of things. But, what it really does not need is naive Westerners deciding what's good for it.
In a more specific note, consider the role that IT plays in delivering food, medicine and clean water. Yes, some people get their water by walking to a village with a pipe sticking out of the ground. And other people don't have safe water because the equipment that runs the municipal filtration system broke last year and no one in country knows how to repair it. Or that doctors can make mistakes prescibing drugs because they lack access to online pharmaceutical docmentation.
The Third World is a big and varied place.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I worked for an ISP in Dar es Salaam for a little over a year. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys having responsibility, freedom to innovate and a steep learning curve. This whole 'does a lot of work for charity' thing gives me the creeps though. Businesses are businesses, even in Africa. Sure, there is a huge skills gap - so if you want to plug it flash your CV around every ISP you can find and you're bound to get lucky. NGOs are just a source of free money/skills and they don't make business sense. As an IT professional you're a valuable commodity - so I don't see why anyone from the States or elsewhere should be paid less than the going local rate for their work - let alone why the business you're working for shouldn't pay you. In the long term, providing cut-rate western expertise to businessmen in the developing world just makes the rich richer.
And lastly, as we all know, you can't be taught the skills you need to be a sysadmin - you have to learn them by yourself. All the guys i met in tanzania had taught themselves from scratch because they realised they were onto a winner.
Yo. I am a geekcorps volunteer here in ghana. I'm not certain that your comment qualifies as "insightful". It is the obvious thing that everybody says.
Clearly, there are huge problems here associated with poverty. The way to combat them is to try to boost the economy. Computers here are relatively cheap. There is an opportunity here, particularly if the infrasrtucture is improved (and alot is being done in that direction) to create at the very least a viable industry in offshore consulting and so on, much as there is in Bangalore. We hope there will be knock on effects in the rest of the economy as more money comes in. It has worked extremely wel in, for example, Taiwan or India - also places where very large numbers of people are subsistence farmers and need more basic things.
The argument that the money automatically needs to be spent in areas other than technology seems to me only to have force if you accept its corollory - which is to say that until we have sorted out poverty, gang violence illiteracy and so on in US and EU cities, we should spend money only in those areas.
Colin Reveley, Geekcorps Ghana
If you've never been to a third-world country and you have a chance to go, please go.
I recently (fall 2002) went to Nicaragua to do research for a website for a Nicaraguan mission group. In reality I somewhat disagree with what they're doing, my friend and I joked that it was the Inquisition all over again. Anyway...
The first thing you notice upon landing in Managua is how unbelievably poor everybody is. Sure there were a few people in suits but most people were wearing T-shirts that had obviously come from the U.S. (high school reunion shirts, prom night shirts from high schools in Virginia).
We stayed in Leon and the people there had no concept of a computer, they damn sure knew what a camera was though! It's completely unbelievable to someone from the States to see how they live. But they don't know any different, so they're happy, or at least content.
Some of the kids had never seen television so when we taped them on DV and played it back for them on the spot they went apeshit. Most of the people in the outskirts of Leon just steal electricity by throwing wires across the main lines. We saw a dog that had been in the way of one of these wires and it was burned clean in half. The poles that hold the wires up are usually just sticks or the wires are stapled into a tree. Unbelievable.
A country like Nicaragua needs more infrastructure before a truckload of computers would do them any good. Good luck getting that truckload of computers through customs anyway. The mission group we're doing the website for had the damndest time getting a container of clothes and miscellaneous goods through customs.
The best part of the trip was riding around the streets of Managua with our driver California... that kid could outdrive Colin McRae, I shit you not. We'd be doing 120KM/hr through the busiest street I've ever seen anywhere and he's hanging out the window singing Nelly (andale andale uh-oh... you know the song) Christ that was funny.
I should probably tell my side of the trip on my own site but I guess the mission site will have to do, due to my laziness.
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
It is interesting that in the third world there is no such thing as the nerd. Before coming to America, people who were socially inept and shy were just that, socially inept and shy... and studious. There is no derogatory term for them like nerds and geeks here in the us.
This brings up another point: why make a term for something that should be good for our society since it brings social change locally (a community grows more advanced and probably more educated) and globally at the scale of the country, when we can go into technical jobs that pull the economy forward?
Actually, if my parents knew of the connotations of the word geek or nerd when I was growing up, they would probably have rubbed it in and warned against it. But they just wonder why I spend so much time working on CPUs and reading and find it strange, not knowing how many equally conditioned people we have out there. Good that they could not call me a "geek" in spanish, even in good will because the lack of the CONCEPT helped me to not feel singled out in society.
"Wireless : LAN
about 15 Years--once a true global network is in place, and you have a device with the equivalent of a T1 connected to the network. It's the size of a palm pilot with hi-res screen and can run for a month on a single battery. It has full video/audio capture/receive and runs equivalent to our current 5GHz processors.
At current rates of progress, this will be available between 15 and 20 years from now, for equivalent to about $40.
I'm sorry, but technology is going to yank every third world nation (and basically all of us) onto the same "platform". Introducing people to these technologies now, however premature they might seem, is a good idea.
Sometimes it's edifying to open yourself up to other fantastic possibilities for our planet... maybe we can make this world into a better place. The pessimism will only slow us down.