Travel notes

What is the place of OLPC in the future of Bangladesh?

I asked this question whenever I could during our trip to Bangladesh to visit Jess's friends Jan 15 - Feb 12, 2010.

Much of the time, I found myself explaining about computers, internet access, and how other countries had used deployments of laptops to primary students to springboard into the digital era. (for slides and captions related to OLPC see http://picasaweb.google.com/jess.ganas/BangladeshOLPCVisit2010#)

Highlights in Narrative

On the other hand, I was extremely fortunate to be able to hook up with some of the leaders, and digital vanguard, who are already contributing to the digital future of the country.

Jess's friend, A.K.M. Wahidi (Wahidi), let us use an apartment that we shared with a teenaged son of his brother, Kasim Wahidi (Kasim). The two brothers are part of a family of 7 or so raised in the village of Sitakundo, which is about 30 KM North of Chittagong.

Wahidi was good at school, and got an engineering degree. After a few years working as an engineer, he got wanderlust, and shipped out in the merchant marine. After 10 years or so, he landed in Brooklyn, where Jess was also living at the time.

Wahidi now lives more than half of his time in Boston, and the other part in Sitakundo. He is strongly committed to education, especially for girls. A few years ago, he built a High School, which the government took over. More recently he has been supporting a primary school, located on the front portion of his family's land. While we were there, he was actively supervising the construction of a new facility for this school.

Wahidi's brother, Kasim, stayed in Bangladesh, and is well connected in the village of Sitakundu. He has server as the president of the village council for the last three years. He arranged for me to meet with two primary school principals, two high school principals, two central government officials, and the technically oriented entrepreneur who had installed his own broadband microwave link and launched a now defunct internet cafe in the village.

As an outgrowth of these visits, I have a much clearer picture of what might be useful as a way forward towards a digital future in the village of Sitakundo -- which I will detail at the end of this blog.

Before I left the US, I emailed people from Bangladesh, and North East India, with the intention of finding out what was happening, and connectinng if possible. One of those contacts resulted in my meeting with Ishtiaque, who was a visiting professor at BUET University, in Dhaka. It turned out that Ishtiaque's friend from the Media Labs at MIT was visiting, and was able to meet with me also. This friend suggested that I give a talk another university (BRAC) to a computer club. My agenda, for giving this talk, was to try to hook up with technically oriented, idealistic, people who might take on a pilot project deployment.

As part of my preparation for giving this talk, I put out an introduction on the OLPC listserve for Bangladesh. Jamil Ahmed, responded, and I invited him to attend my presentation at BRAC University. It turned out that Jamil was the leader of an NGO, funded by someone in Spain, that has 20 or so full time computer people localizing open source tools for Bangladesh. His group is responsible for almost 100% localization into Bangla on the OLPC web site. (see http://translate.sugarlabs.org/)

One of the highlights of my trip was visiting Jamil's NGO, "Ankur ICT Development Foundation", hearing about their initiative to prepare learning materials in Bangla, and their plans to begin "Train the Trainer" 3 day workshops at "Bangladesh Telecentre Network" locations in villages outside of Dhaka.

Observations

Digital infrastructure

===Developing OLPC Deployment