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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."
isn't there still an issue with things like, well, food, medicine, clean water, stuff like that?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
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
child: papa, will we eat today?
father: no my son, but we will get to search the internet for information on food and food-like products.
Trolling is a art,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
THEY NEED FOOD AND SHELTER FIRST!!
I think you're joking, but just in case someone takes you seriously: they need the means to PRODUCE their OWN food and shelter. That means technology.
Give a man a fish, and all that...
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.
Something like this fits perfectly with Linux/OS philosophy. If technicically-minded people in developing nations can be shown how to run modern, full-featured computers/networks with the older hardware available to them, you remove the need for pricey (probably American) consultants, newer, expensive hardware, and newer, license-laden, expensive software.
Basically, I believe that developing nations deserve to get on their own two feet without tithing a percentage of their resources to American technology firms. Yes, I am an American. And yes, I will be volunteering in the future.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
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 -
I was discussing with a friend of mine last night about organizations such as the peace corps, and my lack of applicable skills to help an NGO (non-governmental-org, I believe). She pointed out that NGOs need people to do all the same things that we need people for here in the first world, citing that the hospital for which she had worked in Haiti required administrative staff and an IS department, despite being a hospital run by an NGO in Haiti.
I agree that there are definitely priorities, the food and shelter bit. Also, it's remarkably difficult to give people technology when there are so many prerequisites for it. It's a tough call to make, whether www access is that helpful to people in the third world, who may not even have the necessary reading skills (language skills, too) to utilize the information they find.
That said, if bringing technology to these people also brings literacy and knowledge, then it can be an important step in enabling these people to grow on their own.
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
and
So you go ahead and post it on Slashdot! Like no one's gonna see it there! Sheesh! Remind me never to ask you for help moving my money out of the country! It's not like they send those e-mails to just ANYBODY ya know!
My journal has hot
Ballmer's travel agent confessed, "With so many poor and helpless goats, Steve will be sure to visit and pump some badly needed funds into the local economy, in exchange for certain favors." Ballmer could not be reached for comment.
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 - $.98 tax) worth
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
I came to Guyana, South America in 1995, having worked in telecoms for 6 years. They had no internet access - not a single link. I used to dial Barbados and collect my email. Surfing was an expensive luxury. Still, managed to get the newspaper I was working for on the web (now Stabroek News).
The O'Reilly article is wonderful - clearly shows that the digital divide will not be bridged by IBM or Micro$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
Give man a fire and he'll be warm for the night, set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life :)
Of course the grandparent does bring up a good point, i don't think these computers are going to people who desperately need the three basic necessities. I for one would really like to some first-hand experience over there, but I don't have the time to do it yet. I have a friend who went with his family to Bangladesh for a year when he was in 8th grade.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Check out my new case modded rice cooker!!
Greater *desire* for food and shelter? Or greater ability to obtain food and shelter? Because I think there's nothing like famine and homelessness to increase desire for food and shelter.
Heisenberg might have been here.
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
this guy should be admonished for attempting to teach IT skills to a third world country. Next thing you know, greedy american companies will be outsourcing IT or programming work to people in Ghana for pennies and letting 3 well-paid American programmers go.
For the sarsacm inpaired, I think what this guy is doing is great. What I don't think is great is the guild/labor mentailty of some programmers and IT people who think there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
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.
Surely this is a contradiction because geeks are the very products of our very rich, western world.
eg: People with too much time and money.
How many Africans do you know that waste huge loads of time and resources on creating scale-models of popular star-ships?
eg: You damn Star Wars fans!
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.
It is nearly impossible to stop all hunger and disease - look at many 1st world nations that have not accomplished this.
If your philosophy is not to spend money on anything else until everyone is fed and healthy, then all you'll ever do is give out food and medicine. You'll never spend money on technology or infrastructure because there will always be at least one more hungry or sick person.
There was a program to distribute cellphones to remote villages in India. You might say they shouldn't do that because there is still unclean water, polio, and hunger. But the villages that received the phones prospered directly from them. Most importantly, they were able to call into the markets of the larger towns to find out how much their crops were selling for. In the past, the middle-men who would transport these crops to the market would pay only what they had to and would make lots of money. Now these middle-men make the money for transporting the goods, but the village most often gets a much better price. The village is now more self-sufficient and can make their own improvements in their living conditions.
By your philosophy, this would never have happened and they would be beholden the the middlemen who ripped them off, and the international aid agencies that would only give them food.
And again, there is little I can do to treat an HIV sufferer. But who knows. Mabye I could teach her to develop webpages and she can do something rewarding and even a bit profitable with her life. Would you have her simply waste away in a hospital? What kind of a life is that?
I can only do what I know how to do. I don't know how to teach better farming or even how to set up water purification, and nor could most geeks. These geeks go and do what they can. By improving one aspect, hopefully the whole system improves.
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.
>> ,,, cultural homogenization!
The 21st Century's version of White Man's Burden.
It takes a fair amount of Western arrogance and bigotry to decide what's best for someone else. Let people decide for themselves what they want.
And, I know that's difficult for people who think that non-Westerners aren't really up to the job and have to be protected by "enlightened" anti-corporate well-fed Westerners.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
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
And by geek volunteers, do you mean the young, idealist sort? Or the older, wiser, professional, and still idealist sort? The GeekCorps website stresses that it generally declines volunteers who do not have at least 3 to 4 years of work experience under their belt. Idealism does not build irrigation systems, nor does it build efficient information systems. Unfortunately, it takes alot of idealism to work so hard for so little physical reward....it is hard to keep that alive inside of you once you are skilled enough to really make a difference.
But in a more technical sense, much more can be accomplished by using stolid, unixy tools over guiy, themeable tools. Shells scripts and ncurses menus, written in the local tongue (if possible), with simple editors like nano, and browsers like lynx, will not be able to WYSIWYG or play flash, but it will transmit and store information, and probably never, ever, break.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.