Hi, Over the last one and half years, I have been experimenting with the idea of Localized Low Cost Computing and interacting with end-users to see if and how The Digital Divide can be crossed. During this time I have often been pleasantly surprised by the adaptive capability of our people living on the wrong side of the Divide.
Day before yesterday was something special that I will remember for very long time. Here's that story [1] from my blog. <BLOGPOST> Today I reached WBUT at 12 O'Clock. Palashendu and the rest of the Redhat Team was supposed to come down for a meeting with "The Boss". On my way over, I was worried that without Sayamindu, Soumyadip or me being around to switch on the LTSP server, our Santhali L10N colleagues may be sitting in the lab without being able to get any work done. Boy! was I surprised when I reached there... they were busy, with fingers flying at their designated terminal! Intrigued as to who may have set them up, I asked them only to find that the younger one among our volunteers - Ajay Hembrom had done it! Seems that by watching us go over our daily business at the lab, they had quietly picked have out what all they needed to switch on and in which order. Quite a few things actually - the main switch board -> the power up LTSP server -> switch on another switch board -> switch on the power strip supplying the 100MB/s switch connecting our LTSP terminals -> switch on their terminal and bootup into their localized desktop. Some may wonder what is really so extraordinary... well for one, they are using computers for the first time in this lab. It took me a lot of patience and nearly 10 days to get them to understand that they really needed to press the <enter> key after entering their login ID and then again after entering their password. From their perspective it was the computer which was being stupid... asking them for their login and password, which they were entering and still the darned beast would foolishly sit idling waiting for who knows what! Make no mistakes, they are intelligent people, only that being on the other side of the Digital Divide, computers and IT happened to have largely passed them by. This last one month has been their first up-close and personal interaction with computers. Once more, I found myself wondering over the innate intelligence and adaptive vitality of our people. I wish some of the armchair-preachers of "technology to the masses" who banter endlessly about the user-friendliness of technological interfaces, had been with me at that moment. </BLOGPOST> cheers, --indra. References: [1] http://blogs.randomink.org/node/view/106 ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Bengalinux-core mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bengalinux-core
