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Comment by andrewchambers | Hacker News Reader

My problem with all the save Africa hardware/software projects, is they seem to be made by people who don't live in Africa. I'm not confident they even have a grip on what the customers actually want or need.

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To be honest, we don't. We really do want to work with the people who do know though. Obviously some of the stuff we included for v1 doesn't make sense for certain regions, and we want to address this before any major deployment.

There's a mediawiki project called Afripédia [0] whose goal is kind of similar: put the whole wikipedia on a drive and install it on a pogoplug in multiple places in french-speaking African countries where accessibility is close to nil.

On the technical side they "only" have a wikipedia dump for the moment, but on the project side they have had some success in deploying it, so maybe you can have a look at what they do (warning: Afripédia is made by and for french-speaking people, you may have to learn it :)

[0] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/06/28/afripedia-collaboratio...

Everybody in Africa has portable devices, they are just missing this useless $10 hotspot gimmick with pre-loaded Wikipedia to get their information on Ebola.

The project did work on palm os so I'm assuming it would work on almost any other device as well

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/04/tech/mobile/africa-mobile-opin...

Did you just link to an article about people in South Africa using mobile phones in 2012? You realize that SA has been rolling out good infrastructure for a while now? Right?

Do you think people in South Africa need this thing to read about Ebola in 2014? How ignorant are you really?

Signed up 3 hours ago. Surprise.

Of course not, as the project isn't geared for people with existing infrastructure that allow them to access the Internet without any problem. Rather it is for the community that may have a mobile device but cannot access the Internet as easily. Of course not all people in such developing countries would have a mobile device but if we take the scope a little big bigger and say, a village, then there is a higher chance of a mobile device within such a community. Through this, we hope that information may be much more accessible to such audiences. It was my bad about that link, wasn't the most appropriate one.

I appreciate your critique (seriously), but keep in mind this project was built in 36 hours by four college and high school students. We clearly haven't thought through all the details and would appreciate constructive feedback. There are several projects similar to this that seem to be useful so I don't think we're completely off base (http://www.raspberrypi.org/the-kingdom-of-bhutans-first-pi-a...).

But if you really think this project is a 'useless gimmick' then there's not much more to talk about.

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