Appropedia:Can the poor access Appropedia?

What use is a wiki such as Appropedia, for the poor who have no internet?

1. Who has no internet? Not as many as you might think - the digital divide is being crossed faster in developing countries than happened in the developed world.
   1. 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.
   2. Leapfrogging: Users are skipping laptops, and cell phones are getting smart quickly.
   3. 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.
   4. Smart phones outsell dumb phones in Africa already.
2. In any month, Appropedia has visitors from every country except around 4 or 5 (usually including North Korea and Greenland).
3. We try to keep the site light weight, and users can customize the size of images that they see. If you can help us improve our "low bandwidth" performance further, we'd be very happy.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. That other way - the one none of us have thought of yet.
7. 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.

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