AndriusKulikauskas, ms@ms.lt, Minciu Sodas June 12, 2008 2:47 CET I appreciate your comments!
Here is my Includer proposal for the Google.Org Inform and Empower initiative.
We have participants in Africa who walk to the Internet cafe and pay $1 an hour there. We have helped some of them to get their own computers at home. We want to perfect a system where they can:
- do most of their work offline (reading and writing emails)
- make the best use of their time at the Internet cafe (sending and receiving emails).
I propose that Google.org provide my laboratory Minciu Sodas with $100,000
so that we:
- Create a web service where such participants accomplish more in the limited time they are online, such as download all of our lab's online activity (email, wiki, chat) and send out all the emails and pages they have written at home, offline.
- Create a simple interface for their offline computers so they can read and write their emails and texts which they will bring to the Internet Cafe on their USB flash drives.
- Show how this interface can work on or with other devices (such as digital picture frames).
- Engage manufacturers to make or adapt Includers, devices that would run the interface software.
- Engage Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, Socialtext and other companies that they pay us to make their online APIs work effectively offline using this interface on offline computers and Includers.
This will allow independent thinkers in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda work more
effectively with independent thinkers in government, education, health
care, business and academia, locally and globally. It is like a Cluetrain
Manifesto ("markets are conversations") for the developing world.
