What use is a wiki, for the poor who have no internet?
- The digital divide is much less of an issue than westerners often think. Travel in a less developed country and you'll typically see internet cafes, and find widespread use of mobile phones. This doesn't reach everyone, but it just takes a few people for ideas to spread, and the number of people with access is increasing.
- Phones. A story was told at BarCampAfrica[1] of a conversation in Africa. "Have you heard of Google?" "Yes, of course." "Have you searched Google from a mobile phone?" "Of course - how else can you search with Google?" You only need one phone in the village with this capability to massively increase people's ability to find information.
- There are all kinds of ways of distributing offline content - in a computer (e.g. Appropedia's offline content bundle & Appropedia:Offline browsing), CD-ROMs, DVDs, flash drives, hard drives, printouts (leaflets, booklets or books[2]), community education programs based on content developed on the wiki... more could be listed.
- Villagers who have moved to the city to work, that maintain a connection to the village - if they have internet access, they can become informed, and send or take the information back to the village.
- That other way - the one none of us have thought of yet.
- First we need to develop the information, the resource. Over time the Appropedia community will put more and more effort into dissemination, if and as necessary.
There's no need to put weighting on the different channels. You might think #4 won't be effective, for example. You may be right. For now, the important part is to create the resource.