Appropedia:Can the poor access Appropedia?

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

1. Who has internet? Not as many as you might think. However, the digital divide is being crossed faster in developing countries than what happened in the past 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]
   5. The cost of computing continues to drop by about half every two years, an observation called Moore's law.^W A practical consequence of Moore's law is that software and content developers rarely need to think about the affordability of hardware. Developers can simply build their applications, knowing that sooner or later their target audience will be able to afford the computers to run their applications. Eventually the cost of computing could be lower than the cost of a subsistence diet, putting computers within the budget of anyone who has managed to stay alive.
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 lightweight, 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, such as:
   1. In a computer (e.g. Appropedia's offline content bundle & Appropedia:Offline browsing), CD-ROMs, DVDs, flash drives, hard drives
   2. Printouts as leaflets, booklets or books - e.g. use the "Create a book" link in the left-hand navbar. (This is one reason that it's so important to use an open license that allows commercial use, so small businesses in developing countries can be motivated to distribute this knowledge.)
   3. Community education programs based on content developed on the wiki. This is one reason the Appropedia community is developing content here that is useful to aid and development workers and local community development workers.
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. We need to keep developing the information, the resource, and continue to put more effort into dissemination.
8. Appropedia can benefit even the poor who never see it, by teaching the rich to live in ways that reduce their negative impact on the poor. For example, Appropedia can motivate the rich to cut their carbon footprints, thereby reducing their contribution to the climate destabilization which is possibly the greatest single threat confronting developing nations.

Feel free to help work on whichever channel feels the most effecting, or that you have the most experience in!

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