User:Ma

Remember the Social Context of your Technical Solutions

I think that the ideas here need to be seen in the context of how networking and distribution of data is going to be performed. In the poorest countries, the ideas may need to be modified due to limited scope for immediate netwoking. Also the role of charity will be very improtant; remember that most of the african countries have not yet been involved in the project, so charity support will be a major driving force in distributing the hardware.

I suggest a charity funded system of data distribution, but flexible enough that it could be a commercial venture for a citydewller with transport. Western charity could provide data transfer credits to individuals in remote villages, to be spent on delivery of data serveices to and from the village. A courier would have a laptop with large storage expansion, and travel to villages to deliver data designated for them, and to recieve data for delivery from them. They would expend their credits in the process of givig their data transmission, and recieve a secure reciept for their last communications sent from the data courier. When the courier returned to the city, they would access the internet via a larger access point if available, or just by telephone if not, and would load the appropriate dvd into a usb drive to retrieve the appropriate requested data from several repositories of information - e.g. encyclopedia (possibly wikipedia), educational syllabus for the next month or year as developed by national education system, etc. The delivery of the data would be accompanied by a cashing in of the data-transfer-credits collected on their journy around the villages, and converted to cedits for cashing at a bank, or directly at the internet access point if appropriate. Email based securely encoded credits designated for the individuals in villages as charity gifts would then be recieved from the internet and delivered by the courier to the village on their next visit. To prevent ransom of the delivery of the credits, the entire collection of data intended for the village would be bound in to a 'delivery package' only decodable and seperatable by the intended recipient and then distributed to the individuals by a simple username and password (the username selected from a village specific list, to avoid confusion).

For adults, with limited postal service or reliability, A major application of importance would be political communications, and the option of communications by pgp communications is essential, but should be very user friendly. There must be a pgp-like delivery certification to ensure that deliveries of emails is made without being intercepted or held ransom by delivery people is also very important. - a user or regular email would confirm reciept by clicking a url on the delivered email to confirm reciept to an international reciept confirmation server. reciept confirmation of the village resident would be sent by pgp based confirmation.

access to personal data must be able to protected, by user/password encoded access only, also for deleting data - there should be a firmware controlled partition or directory on the flash which can only be accessed by users' passwords, or deleted in its entirety (not per user) - also there should be a limit on the space used by each user. There should be a hardware switch for deactivating wifi if installed, to prevent hackers and viruses in potentially unstable political climate - likely used to prevent political dissent.

I think that the social model of data repositeries on dvd, and internet access, in cities or perhaps towns is a realistic and efficient solution. With funding of data distribution by digitally secure credits or tokens delivered securely to villagers, access to data by the holders of the laptop can be guaranteed.