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Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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The Question Box
March 05, 2008 12:31 PM
If you live in parts of rural India, or sub-Saharan Africa, or too many other places on this planet, you'll know a kind of poverty that we in the comfort of America find hard to picture.
Internet access is out of the question, especially in villages where electricity, and literacy, are in short supply. Now there's an experiment to try to change that.
Call it the Question Box. In the Indian villages of Ethida and Poolpur, a few hours from New Delhi, a young American entrepreneur named Rose Shuman has installed a low-tech system for getting information online. It was no small matter, considering that the villages did not have phone service.
It consists of an intercom with a push-to-talk button. That's all. At the other end is a trained operator, in a larger town with enough bandwidth to access the net. Village residents can go to the Question Box, ask for some information, and in a minute or two the operator gets back to them with answers.
The Question Box project has a website HERE, on which Shuman and her fellow organizers write, "Question Boxes leap over illiteracy, computer illiteracy, lack of networks, and language barriers.
"They provide immediate, relevant information to people using their preferred mode of communication: speaking and listening."
What do people ask when they have access to information for the first time? Everything from farming advice to homework help to cricket scores, say the organizers -- plus many other things that would never have occurred to Shuman and her collaborators.
What are the villages like? Shuman has posted three pages of images on Flickr; take a look HERE.
A British technologist named Ken Banks has written about Question Box HERE. His interest has been in spreading cell phones around the developing world -- in rural places, frequently a better way of getting web access -- but he says he was impressed by Shuman's work. "Often when we plan and build mobile solutions for developing (or emerging) markets, we forget, neglect or are just plain unsure how to ask the users what it is that they want. The irony might be that, here at least, Question Box might end up being the answer we're looking for."
Boing Boing, the technology blog, picked up Banks' post the next day, linking to the Question Box site -- and sometimes crashing it.
March 5, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (6)
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A curious blend of high-tech and low-tech. A clever answer to a real-world problem. I'm always amazed at the ingenuity of people. I say "people" rather than "mankind", because of what people can do in spite of the predations of mankind, to better themselves. Ms. Shuman is to be commended for her work and that of her collaborators.
Posted by: Andy | Mar 5, 2008 1:03:16 PM
Interesting, and it makes sense in India where human labor is cheap enough to allow for such a "librarian" at the other end of the link. Also interesting is that nothing ever seems to be completely new. This type of "internet" access was forseen by Robert Heinlein in his first novel, "For Us, The Living" in 1939.
Posted by: Doc Savage | Mar 5, 2008 6:56:25 PM
Wonder if OnStar ever considered offering such a service?
Posted by: Shoemaker | Mar 5, 2008 10:09:45 PM
I think Rose is an indredible person.
Enrichening others that have absolutely no learning resources and giving them an edge is beautiful. Kudos to Rose and her associates.
Posted by: Deborah | Mar 5, 2008 11:10:24 PM
Speaking of science --- why is there no media coverage of the climate change conference in NYC. 500 scientists are disagreeing with the claims of Al Gore, and nobody is paying attention. There's no bias, is there??????
Posted by: Mark | Mar 5, 2008 11:22:18 PM
Quite an interesting and viable idea at village level to disseminate needful information. The idea is excellent and the process of implementation is extraordinary. It is appears that the Science is nextdoor in Indian villages
Posted by: Dr. G. Rajani Kanth | Jun 24, 2008 7:42:23 AM
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