The Includer

EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen announced that Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple, LG, Research in Motion and other phone makers have signed an agreement to make their data-enabled phones compatible with standard charging devices based on a standard micro-USB socket.  There are 400 million phones in Europe and 185 million new phones are sold each year.  In 2010, about half of these new phones will be data enabled phones.

The European Union pushed for this agreement so as to reduce waste.  This is also a wonderful step forward towards Ricardo’s vision (in Episode 4) of USB Host Capability for basic phones.  There will soon be millions of used phones with micro-USB sockets and we can experiment as Ricardo envisions.  If there is a need, then I think it should be straightforward for phone makers to offer and expand USB functions.

In October, Ricardo submitted his idea for the Google challenge Ten to the Hundredth.  They were supposed to announce the top 100 ideas on January  27, 2009.  They received more than 150,000 ideas and have yet to announce any of them.  It is a shame that they didn’t collect them openly and we could be working on them ourselves!  (See Episode 7, Vote for Losers) .

Meanwhile, the Knight News Challenge has declared its winners.  The Challenge gave out half the money it had intended to, because of the financial crisis.  I looked up my own idea, Help Room of Episode 6, and here’s what I find:

WEB PAGE NO LONGER EXISTS

The Includer has no resources for development except for those we share amongst ourselves.  I and Minciu Sodas are currently working for Leon Benjamin to engage UK online communities on behalf of Mornflake cereal and their online video contest.  We built a directory of UK online communities and engaged about 70 of them.  Now we’re working with the most responsive, offering our online assistants (Sasha Mrkailo in Serbia, Masimba Biriwasha in France/Zimbabwe, Thomas Chepaitis in Lithuania, Fred Kayiwa in Uganda) for small projects (typically 70 USD) that we might do for and with them, acknowledging Mornflake along the way.  I’m wondering how to leverage our participants on-the-ground in Africa.  Their Internet access is proving to unreliable for them to help much with online research.  But I’m exploring how we might swap their on-the-ground efforts for online assistance in the West.  Here are some pieces of the equation.

Vinay Gupta of Global Swadeshi encourages the creation in the developing world of an alternative technology center in the spirit of Factor E Farm.

Vinay, before June 16, 2009: I’ve been discussing local infrastructure with Samwel – local power for charging phones, and super bright cheap LED lights from somewhere like http://dealextreme.com – an interesting company in their own right, in that their business model relies on using a trusted third party (Paypal) to handle payments, and online review communities to credential their products. Maybe we could do something there?

Samwel Kongere (of Episode 0) in Rusinga Island, Kenya has both the land and the interest.   I suggest that we experiment further with Graham Knight’s DIY Solar (of Episode 11), small solar panels for recharging mobile phones.  Wendi Loshe Bernadette in Cameroon (of Episode 1) would like to participate, too.  I asked her for news about the $100 project she did for us.

Wendi, June 18, 2009: We organised a symposium in our city on the eve of the Independence day celebrations of May 20th that we celebrate yearly as our national day here. This was a torch light procession where all the participants needed to use light to walk around the towns and villages and as usual, we had electricity failure here for three days, so we took this opportunity to teach all the thousands and hundreds of people what the DIY SOLAR was and we were opportuned to show the samples as you will see our own technicians in the group handling the samples you gave on the photos pasted or attached here. As we created awearness all over our towns and villages about this solar battery, all inhabitants enter our office daily to see this sample and are also asking us to tell them where and how we can get more of these solar batteries to use here.

Graham, June 20, 2009: It seems that you have alerted hundreds of people to the possible benefits of DIY Solar without considering how this need will be satisfied!  How will you introduce it without a lot more funding? I sent you [photovoltaic] pv parts on a “long-term loan”. How will you repay me? As I always emphasise in my introduction to DIY Solar, this project is much more about starting small enterprises than about pv solar but you have not even mentioned the costs involved. Any project needs someone to make and sell pv devices and then use some of the proceeds to buy more pv parts, etc.

Wendi, June 22. 2009: We are very sorry that we did not mention the prizes we researched and came to. We saw that for the 3.35w module here050mA @7V – Here will cost 2.500FRS cfa  and the 1 8w module – 260mA@ 7v , costs 7000 frs cfa which is about three and half pound. People are interested in buying these small ones for their personal uses in our local Cameroon currency. about two and half pound. … Our people are really interested to buy.so let us kindly work out a good and moderate plan of this project here.

I believe that Graham’s DIY Solar is essential practice for us as entrepreneurs.  I would also like to see it move us to work together in the West, for example, Graham Knight and Vinay Gupta.  We can then build on our teamwork.  Franz Nahrada (of Episode 33) encourages Wendi to pursue a solution that Marcin Jakubowski is innovating at Factor E Farm.

Marcin Jakubowski's solution for generating electricity.

Franz, June 19, 2009: You know that Marcin Jakubowski from Factor E Farm is the worlds leading force when it comes to realistic empowerment of villages. We are currently trying to turn his venture, Open Source Ecology from a single place-based to a multi-location global cooperation. Photovoltaics still is a technology which requires large factories for the base materials and there is no hope yet that the production can be totally transferred to regions or villages. Its still useful, but we must also look into alternatives. In the opposite, passive solar concentrators – like Marcin envisions them – with self-adjusting flat mirrors that heat a tube with water that propels a turbine / steam engine seem to have the perspective to be entirely reproduced anywhere in the world, and the computer boards to do the tracking are not larger in scale than the photovoltaics that you have now. For example from Arduino. This technology is just developing, and we want to find some places which are set up and prepared to do research. … Please look at Rob Hopkins’s Transition Handbook. It might also be very relevant for Africa!

Marcin’s approach would allow a village to solve the electricity needs for an ICT center, as in our last episode.  His creative self-reliance is the spirit that I wish for the Includer.

Can we come together with a little support from Mornflake?  Thank you, Mornflake!

The Includer is a device for reading and writing emails offline.  At some point, you’ll want to upload and download them at an Internet access point.  But what if you don’t have one?  Or maybe you have access to the Internet through your mobile phone, but you don’t have enough electricity to power a laptop or computer?

Renewables West sells Solar Rover

This month Pamela McLean (of Episode 31) dedicated her First Thursday Chat to helping Folabi Sunday in rural Nigeria (of Episode 40) think through how to power a local ICT centre. Her invitation explained:

You may remember that Fola uses his phone to go online. He has been doing some successful experiments linking his phone to a PC. He is wondering about the possibility of helping the Information Centre at Ago-Are to use this approach in order to bring email facilities to Ago-Are.  I think various people in Minciu Sodas in East Africa have been exploring similar ideas, linking in with Ricardo’s sneakernet ideas.  I hope Pastor David, manager of the Info-Centre, will also manage to be with Fola when he joins us (Fola may be a bit late as he has is teaching earlier in the day, but he will make it as soon as he can).  Either they will have to run a generator (and the Info centre one is very old and unreliable now) or they will need to find some other solution.

A flavor of the chat:

Ricardo: Pam and Fola, have you both read through the 2nd version of the plan? I suggested using a laptop for internet access, as it’s battery powered, and not dependent on NEPA. I set out a range of options for power. :: Also, a GPRS/3G phone for internet access runs on battery power, or you can use a USB 3G Modem, powered from the laptop battery when NEPA goes off.   …  Fola, what do you think the best options are for power? In the 2nd version, i mentioned that a laptop battery could be charged a little from many different sources, to keep it 100% topped up.  …  Yes sasha, for the Ago-Are ICT centre, they could use an old laptop from ebay, plus a new battery. :: Sasha, I emailed a whole plan to fola and pam, but you haven’t seen it yet. …. The centre can charge a laptop battery a little from NEPA when it’s on, from a 12V DC car cigarette lighter, or buy a small solar charger, like solargorilla. … Hi Graham. In Nigeria, NEPA, the 240V mains power is terrible. It comes on, then straight off for 7 days, on for an hour etc. Solar would be very good, if the community can afford the capital cost of the solar charger. :: I’ve seen commercial laptop solar chargers like the solargorilla, but they are 137 GBP. Is it possible to make a solar charger system for laptops (aboout 18V DC at 3.5 AMPs i think). … Fola, the ago-are centre will presumably want to keep the cost of equipment down. We could start with experiments on internet-access, using your phone for the day and one of the existing PCs :: but the PC needs 240V power from somewhere. … We need to think about the short-term and long-term power for the centre. Although in the short-term, you could use a solar laptop charger, that would still leave the rest of the equipment (PCs, TV, Satellite receiver etc) without a good power supply. :: Fola, In a typical month, is NEPA on for enough hours to charge some car batteries, to use for the PCs etc when NEPA is off.

Folabi Sunday: I think using a laptop will solve NEPA problem for us in AA …  And replacing the old battery with new ones will be better than waitng for nepa … This is a good idea but how do we solve NEPA  … I took the small gen from my younger sister to use personally … There is an old lister gen that is usually developing faults and it use diesel which is costly than petrol :: I have done that in my own room and not in the centre … And it works perfectly except that my Megabite runs off faster than on mobile and I have to print out R tips on how to reduce spent date and digest them because they seem thecnical to me …

Graham Knight: I’m puzzled as no-one seems to ever mention solar-charging for mobiles. …

Kyoto Butterfly Solar Generator yields 800 W, hot air, hot water.

I did some research into electric generators.  I couldn’t find anything at Appropedia, surprisingly. (Later, I had the chance to give my feedback to Preston at Global Swadeshi).  I wonder what Edward Cherlin of Earth Treasury would recommend.  And then a few days later we got a letter from Mark Roest about his new venture:

Mark Roest: Last Sunday I spent several hours at the Maker Fair (see Make Magazine’s website) … Jon is the head of Kyoto, Free is the Sun. I would like to invite discussion with you all about setting up one or more distributorships (larger scale) and / or dealerships (local level) to retail his product line. The Kyoto Family product group is particularly appropriate for small social ventures created by and around both Independent Thinkers and mutual support groups. This will generate real revenues, and it will also pave the way to creating complex solar businesses — look at the Butterfly, which generates 800 watts per panel, plus 400 degree Celcius air and 70 degree C water from cooling the panels (it’s a concentrating collector, 12 feet long, and tracks the sun on two axes!). That business can create revenues that can be the capital for building the houses he designed, which will sell for $1000 per 100 square foot (9 square meters) module, which can be arranged 4 around a central space, which needs floor and roof to make a 5th module — 500 square feet of high-tech living space, with eco-utilities, for $5000.  Please let me know if you would like to participate in planning this social business venture. David Alan Foster, David’s employer, and I are also building a solar sales business, Renewables West, which can source and sell globally. That is probably the vehicle we will use to work with Jon.

Meredith Patterson: Sometime in the next month or two I will be going to Ghent to take a workshop from Casa Calida, which teaches people how to construct low-cost timber-and-strawbale homes. I suspect they will be quite interested in practical solutions for solar electricity and heat, and I’m interested in finding out more about the Butterfly for my own house project.

Mark Roest: Jon mentioned that the Butterfly only works well in full direct sun, not on cloudy days. One of the services Renewables West could provide is helping you choose what electricity-making products to buy or build (or sell) in a given climate.

That sounds like a good service!

One hurdle that E-book readers have overcome is power.  My Sony PRS-505 Reader (of Episode 12) uses an ultra-low power display by which I can click through thousands of pages before I have to recharge the battery.  This is because it draws power to change the page, but practically none to show the page.  Ricardo alerts us at Mendenyo that this technology may now become available in low priced displays.

I saw a news story that may be relevant to the Includer concept. It says the eInk ultra-low power display company has been sold to a Taiwanese company, Prime View International. That means, instead of being a small company with limited products, eInk displays should become ‘mass-market’ and be included in far more products, leading to lower priced displays.

I don’t know if they will sell just eInk panels, for anyone to use in their own products, or still limit it to product partners like Amazon for their Kindle eBook reader, etc. If they sell panels and they come down in price through mass-production, it could be useful to any Includer device. The ultra-low-power eInk display combined with an ultra-low-power microprocessor could let an includer run for weeks on one battery charge.

David Weinberger wonders why eInk would sell when it seemed about to take off.  Seth Finklestein suggests that their investors wanted to exit and recoup their investments.

Pamela McLean [of Episode 31] inspired us to start our own chat room which has been one of our Minciu Sodas laboratory’s most productive venues.  Africans with marginal Internet access make intense use of chat and may conduct several at a time as they catch up with others they find online and make the most of their slow connections.  Pamela has made a tradition of chatting on the first Thursday of every month and she keeps to that faithfully for those who make the effort to practice chatting with her and us.  Please join us!

Hi Everyone, The First Thursday of the month is almost here again. All being well I will be around for an hour as usual starting – 13.00 Nigerian time, 15,00 Kenyan time, 13.00 British Summer time, 12.00 GMT.

To enter the chat room go here.

I know that Fola Sunday [of Episode 40] is hoping to be in the chat room with Ricardo and me, and we hope others will join us. You may remember that Fola uses his phone to go online. He has been doing some successful experiments linking his phone to a PC. He is wondering about the possibility of helping the
Information Centre at Ago-Are to use this approach in order to bring email facilities to Ago-Are.

I think various people in Minciu Sodas in East Africa have been exploring similar ideas, linking in with Ricardo’s sneakernet ideas.

I hope Pastor David, manager of the Info-Centre, will also manage to be with Fola when he joins us (Fola may be a bit late as he has is teaching earlier in the day, but he will make it as soon as he can).

One of the big problems Fola and Pastor David face is NEPA – the highly erratic Nigerian power supply (given that NEPA officially stands for Nigerian Electrical Power Authority but unofficially stands for Never Expect Power At-all you can undersatnd that power is a serious problem for them).

Either they will have to run a generator (and the Info centre one is very old and unreliable now) or they will need to find some other solution.

At present I am not able to be active in Minciu Sodas at present, but I dostill appreciate deeply all it has given me (relationships and knowledge) I look forward to being more active again later, and I appreciate the regular chance to catch up with people in the chat room on the First Thursday.

I hope to meet some of you there on June 4th. Pam

Will the Includer come to life?

I submitted my third report for the Knight Foundation.  One more quarter to go!  It’s strange to see an idea – The Includer – gasping for air. You will finish the race, you must! Includer!

Dear Bodil Fox and Gary Kebbel,

Bodil, Thank you for reminding me to send in my third report for the Knight Foundation, which I include below, and share with our working group Learn How To Learn.

Gary, I’m not getting comments at my blog or links to my blog.  What should I do, if anything?  Whereas, we have quite a lot of activity at our email groups and wiki.  Does that activity satisfy the requirements of my contract?

Thank you for this award!

Anticipated Outcomes.  Progress will be measured by:

• the number of blog posts,
• the quality of my content and
• the number of reader comments

Tides’ grant agreement with the Knight Foundation asks to measure

• the frequency of new blog posts,
• the number of responses by others,
• the length of various conversations,
• and the number of different people contributing to the conversation will be used to measure the Blogger’s efforts.
• They also will be measured by the number of other blogs linked to them.
• The quality of the blogs – do they link out to others, do they supply their comments with hyperlink references.
• The number of unique visits to MediaShift blog will also be monitored.

1. Please list each required project activity and tell us if, and when, you achieved it.

I am blogging at http://www.includer.org as agreed earlier. I blogged 14 posts (Episode 28 through Episode 42) in March, April and May of 2009.  They total about 8,500 words, which is about 19 printed pages. I have included about 24 pictures. I wrote about some 40 people and their work, some as memorable characters. I have given some 110 links. My posts looked at the Includer from a variety of angles:

• User dynamics (Episode 29)
• Strategy (Episode 33)
• Proposals (Episode 30, 34)
• Sample content (Episode 31, 40, 42)
• Knight News Challenge: (Episode 28)
• System infrastructure (Episode 39)
• Technology development (Episode 32, 35, 36, 41)
• Key contacts (Episode 38)
• Organizational dynamics (none)
• Usage survey (Episode 37)

I am grateful to Minciu Sodas members for letters which I used for interesting posts.  Some discussed examples of issues relevant for potential Includer users with marginal Internet access, such organizing a business for wedding pictures, becoming an ICT technologist and building pit latrines.  Some discussed relevant advances in technology such as new Internet cables to East Africa, the use of MMC cards instead of USB flash drives, and opening up PayPal accounts from Africa.  Others discussed obstacles such as “the viral divide”.  I wrote about two proposals, including one that was accepted, which was to organize global teams to promote Mornflake cereal.  I also wrote up my overall strategy for our lab.

Almost every post makes clear that we have a lively discussion at our lab.  However, this discussion is taking place within the posts.  We’re also reaching out and being found.  “Vagrant netizen” Lorraine Lee wrote from Michigan that she, too, faces the digital divide and would like an Includer.  Hardware hacker Marko Makela responded to Ricardo’s idea of using MMC cards.  Pamela McLean and I wrote a post for Christian Crumlish’s new book.  We get about 20 posts a month at Kiyavilo Msekwa’s working group Learn How To Learn which is the base for our work.  We also get more than 100 posts per month from our other working groups with African leaders such as Samwel Kongere’s Mendenyo.  And we get queries at our WorkNets wiki.

I received maybe 1 comment at my blog.  I think we’re not getting comments at our blog for the following reasons:

• The center of our activity is elsewhere: our email groups, our wiki and our chat;
• Blogs work best as social media for bloggers and their regular readers, but people with marginal Internet access tend to be neither;
• Blogs receive hundreds of false comments from spammers, and nowadays, comments are often never posted, which means that overall many people use them less and less as they are not worth the trouble.
• I can’t and don’t encourage our participants to “respond” except in ways that are easiest for them, especially because many are poor or overworked.
• The Knight Foundation, which asked me to blog, has never left any comment at my blog or engaged me otherwise as a blogger.  We have no relationship. (Why?)

Please let me know if it’s indeed important for you, as you state in your anticipated outcomes, that people post comments at my blog.  I am reworking my Minciu Sodas laboratory’s websites and very likely I will redo my blog so that it works as a substream amongst a “stream” of activity at our lab.  It will become part of a light weight project management system where comments and replies will be central and encouraged.

4. Were there any positive surprises? If so, please explain.

We had a wonderful meeting in London which included Samwel Kongere and Rachel Wambui Kungu of Kenya.  I was very encouraged by Samwel as a person and by our strategy meeting with Pamela McLean and Franz Nahrada and our vision of global villages where we live.

I am also very grateful for work from Leon Benjamin for our global team to engage UK online communities and promote Mornflake cereal and their online video contest.   We’ve had trouble including our African participants in this work because of bad Internet connections.  Yet this is an example of the economic potential of the Includer.  Our work on this promotion has pushed us to think fresh about our values and so we’re now working much more closely with Marcin Jakubowski, Ben de Vries, Jeremy Mason and Marcin Jakubowski of Factor E Farm, Masimba Biriwasha (Give A Book) of Zimbabwe, and Thomas Chepaitis, Foreign Minister of Uzhupis Republic.  This has also allowed us to invest ourselves in our global team, in a network of online communities, and in websites that would support a responsive “help room”.

Technologically, we’re seeing the proliferation of netbooks, which are now available for $300 or so, and also e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.  This means that Includer, in some sense, is coming to life.  Our contribution is to apply such tools to include those with marginal Internet access.  Ricardo and Kennedy Owino are making giant steps with their Sneakernet project in Nairobi.

Will it take a new generation?

5. Please explain how you are meeting the overall goals stated in the anticipated outcomes.

I am blogging at my own website http://www.includer.org We are having organic activity, but it’s not taking place at the blog.  I suspect that the Knight Foundation doesn’t care about the bigger picture and may (or may not) insist that I get the requisite (but unspecified number!) of links, comments and conversations.  It’s not productive to do that at my blog.  Instead, I am redoing our websites so that through them we can as a team respond effectively to incoming comments and also note actions to take by which we might help each other.  I also want to aggregate our lab members’ blogs. When I pull this all together I expect to have a “blog” that will meet the Knight Foundation’s formal requirements. Yet please let me know if I shouldn’t worry about them.

6. How are you measuring your progress? Please attach copies of any evaluation reports, and list results of any measurements, such as Web traffic, downloads, registered users, monthly trends, etc.

I am measuring progress by considering how easy it is to cull material for my blog from our members’ letters and other content.  Almost all of my posts are based on such material and that means that we have organic activity and a real purpose.

7. If you were publicizing the single most important outcome of your work, what headline would you write for your news release?

Mornflake engages the UK by way of Africa

8. What did you do to market the project? Was it successful? What would you do differently next time?

I am focusing on how our African participants might directly benefit. More and more, I’m trying to understand how we might all benefit from their activity on-the-ground, given their difficulty in participating through the Internet.  This might include us blogging from our “global villages” and supporting local projects to try out new technologies, as Factor E Farm is doing in Missouri.

14. Please describe your plans in detail to sustain the project long term.

Business opportunities include open source math learning materials, worknets culture, a 24-hour help room, and Sneakernet services. I am awaiting results for a Nordplus proposal and the Sneakernet I have proposed for Ghor province, Afghanistan.

15. Did you collaborate with other organizations, particularly Knight Foundation grantees, during the course of this project? How?

Janet Feldman leads our Holistic Helping working group.  She’s writing a handbook on “blogging positively” for Rising Voices.

16. Please describe your interaction with Knight Foundation staff. What was most useful and what changes would you suggest?

Nobody contacted me.  I have not found anybody at the Knight Foundation who wants to help me.

17. Did you ever need Knight Foundation to help you facilitate contacts with experts in the field, professional peers and similar organizations? If so, was Knight Staff helpful?

Nobody contacted me.  Nobody responded to my previous reports.  I have not found anybody at the Knight Foundation who wants to help me. Please do contact me so that we might work well together!

Our Minciu Sodas member and Nafsi Afrika acrobat Kennedy Owino and his bride Angelina got married on Rusinga Island, the remote island in Lake Victoria where our story started in Episode 0.  David Mutua also got married over the course of these episodes.   Congratulations!

Tom Ochuka in Kisumu, Kenya (of Episode 31) is thinking through a business of providing a scenic site for wedding pictures.  He wrote us to ask for help with his idea.  It’s an example of the kind of idea that people with marginal Internet access might communicate with The Includer.  I share Tom’s letter and Ricardo’s reply.

The First Day of Creation: Ana Ilic and her digital camera

Tom, May 12: Dear Andrius and all ms online users,

As part of Developing the God given Earth to pursue the initiative have had these year, am interested in Developing a picture site for photography where individuals, actors, the wedding couples and the public can come and take pictures.

Am looking for individuals with very good experience there are different forms of camera and with good photographers but the back ground means a lot. I have identified a site for this activity, it will also be a place to train photographers, photography is also an activity that brings youths and adults, tribe and ethnics together.  We too can link different communities using this means exchanging of pictures.

Am trying to ask thse questions.

• Who is the best photographer?
• How can we make a good site?
• What do we need for BACKGROUND
• Do we need natural flowers or just Natural with appealing colours?

Many people try to look for parks and other Gardens, others water and seas. Please help me put this on the Ground. Thanks. Contact. TOM OCHUKA. BOX 3295. KISUMU KENYA.

The UMI artist colony in the Republic of Uzupis is a popular site for wedding photos.

Ricardo, May 15: Dear Andrius, Tom Ochuka and all

I had a chat with Tom about his idea for for a photo site. I found that what he has in mind for a ’site’ isn’t a website (like Flickr.com), but a physical place. It would be a secluded/private/fenced garden, like an outdoor photo-studio, where people can have their photos taken. For example, wedding-couples, graduation photos, etc.

In Europe/USA, there are plenty of nice places for photos, such as public parks, lakes, beaches, etc, but Tom says there is a lack of nice-looking private places to go in his area. He has a garden already and he wants to fence it for privacy and security, and add plants, flowers, etc. Then he wants to add some of the facilities that you would find at an indoor photographic studio, such as a changing-room for
different clothes, toilet, seats/benches outside, etc.

There are 2 main aims;

1. To teach people photography (Deaf Impact members, etc),
2. To earn a little income for Tom and Deaf Impact.

I said that it would require quite a bit of money, so it’s not something I can fund on my own. It really needs a group of donors/supporters to fund it.

If the garden-studio ever happens, I (and anyone else that’s interested) can discuss the design of the garden and what is needed. For example, thinking about what direction sunlight comes from during the day, so that plants are on the correct side of the garden to form a background. Also, choosing plants that are dark or light, plain or coloured, etc, to contrast nicely with people and their clothes.

Many articles recommend avoiding the harsh, flat light at mid-day and instead taking photos at a time near sunrise or sunset, to make use of the flattering yellow/orange light and deep shadows.

Until Tom can get this sort of ‘garden photo studio’ facility off the ground, I said that I can do a bit of ‘teaching photography at a distance’. There are plenty of ways to learn photography using other locations. I can send Tom some articles by email, ideally articles that are mostly pictures with just a little text or captions, since Tom’s first language isn’t English.

I’ve been preparing a course for new camera-users in Nigeria, starting with pictures of ‘getting the camera out of the box’, ‘what all the items are’, etc, so I can use a lot of that material with Tom and Deaf Impact in Kenya.

The Includer is like a canoe upon a tidal wave of change.  So much has unfolded since we proposed the Includer in 2007, but especially the netbook movement and Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers.  Thank you to Ricardo of Episode 0 for ever noting the changes in our technological reality.

I keep an eye on the laptop / netbook market, to see if any new devices might be suitable for use in Africa. A real problem that many people face is no access to electricity for re-charging laptop batteries, or difficult/expensive access. I saw this article today that says a firm called iUnika is going to start selling their Gyy netbook in June or July 2009 for $176 or $220 for a version with a built-in solar-panel.

It’s quite a low-spec, at 400 Mhz processor, with Linux, but that’s fine for word-processing and web-browsing.

Another good thing, is the body is environmentally-friendly, made from bio-plastics, for recycling at end of life.

Sometimes product-announcement like this never happen, buy I hope this goes ahead. It could start a trend for other companies to include solar-panels, perhaps in even cheaper laptops.

Folabi Sunday of Nigeria

Folabi Sunday (of Episode 37) in Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria is perhaps the most out-of-the-way of our participants. He’s growing closer and closer through his letters.

I had an accident. It was a bad Monday (11th of May 2009) for me as I had an accident on my way going to the village with my motorbike. I think Pam still remember the bike she rode with me to PD’s house the last time she came to AA it was with this same bike I had an accident and I have been treated in the hospital. Thank God that I am now married, she has been taking good care of me especially now that I am
sick (you singles go and get married). If not for my phone that had a camera problem I would have sent a snapped copy of my self and the damaged bike to you all. I am happy to inform you all that I am recuperating fast. Thanks

What is the secret of Folabi’s Internet access?

How to browse using ZAIN. Hi Ricardo, Pam, Sasha, John and others, With the help of Pamela McLean (of Episode 31) and Fantsuam Foundation I can now browse using my 3G phone P990i in my village and I have posted in my blog (How to Connect with ZAIN) for all to see how to get connected with the internet using mobile phone(incase we have others like me in any village or area covered by Zain network in Nigeria). Ricardo has been of help and Perry who asked from Ricardo how to check used data with zain browsing on phone this I have answered in the blog let Perry read it. Thanks to you all

Ricardo is helping Minciu Sodas participants in Africa set themselves up as traders of electronics parts.  He reports on a breakthrough: their first PayPal accounts. Thank you, Ricardo!

Ken Chelimo has succeeded in getting eBay and PayPal 100% working now. He is the 2nd person from our Trading group to do that, after Kims (Kiyavilo Msekwa) in Tanzania. Ken is the first person in Kenya from our trading group to get Paypal and eBay working in conjunction with his bank account.

It’s taken ages. Some African banks don’t work well with the PayPal online payment service, due to incompatible computer systems, lack of staff training, etc. The key to getting it working was for Ken to get a new bank account at National Bank of Kenya. He then got a Visa Electron debit card, linked it to his Paypal account and managed to complete the Paypal ‘Link and Confirm you card’ process, to lift/remove the $100 lifetime sending-money limit (for purchases).

For the ‘Link and Confirm your card’ process, Paypal takes a small $1.95 test payment from the bank account via the debit card, with a random 4-digit code appearing in the bank statement. Ken got this code from his bank, and entered it into the Paypal website to lift/remove the $100 limit. He can now buy things from eBay USA and pay by Paypal without restriction.

National Bank of Kenya seems quite good, with helpful staff, and they offer many ways to get information about your account, such as Mobile Phone Banking and Internet Banking.

As well as benefiting Ken himself, our experiment also shows it’s not impossible for other people in Kenya to do the same as Ken, and get paypal/ebay working. I’ll talk to the other people in our Trading email group soon about it (Ken Owino, Samwel, etc). The aims of the whole exercise were…

1. To prove it’s possible for people in Africa to use eBay/Paypal, and
2. To get the knowledge of exactly how to do it, after overcoming any problems.

Andrius: Does that mean that we can send money to Ken or Kiyavilo and they can take it out locally and forward it (in Kenya by mpesa)?

Kiyvailo: Hi Andrius! Yes it is great but that does not mean that we can receive money sent to us via paypal. It will take sometime for that to happen! For the time being we can only send money from hear to any where in the world with the related service from paypal!  We are just waiting for paypal to allow such service to take place with drawing money sent to Africa.

Ricardo: Hi Andrius and Kims, This Paypal Worldwide page has several lists, showing which countries can both Send & Receive money via Paypal, and those countries that can just Send, not Receive.

If a country is not listed at all (such as Nigeria), it means the people there can’t use Paypal at all at the moment. I hope that changes in future. Paypal don’t give any reasons, but it may be due to an underdeveloped electronic-banking system, a poor legal-system or scammers damaging the reputation of a whole country.

I see that the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) are slightly restricted, in that they can send money, but only withdraw money to a US Bank Account (perhaps in the US or just a US dollar account), not withdraw money to a local-currency account.

I’m hoping that the ability to buy a wide variety of new or old computer, phone or other items from eBay USA helps people in Africa earn income by buying and selling items from eBay to local people or that easier/cheaper access to computer/phone items makes more community ICT projects feasible.