Bridging the Literacy Divide with Open Source
Can a $5 iPod-like device help change the world and substitute for the Internet where the Net does not exist? PORTLAND, Ore. -- Cliff Schmidt is a man on a mission -- a mission to help stamp out illiteracy. And his weapon of choice in this battle is a $5 iPod-like device that he says can substitute for the Internet in places that have little to no electricity, where the poorest of the poor live.
Schmidt is the president of Literacy Bridge, a nonprofit whose "mission is to empower children and adults with tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning, as an effective means towards advancing education, health, economic development, democracy and human rights," according to the mission statement on the organization's Web site.
The Literacy Bridge's core tool is called the Talking Book device and it looks like an elaborate remote control device of some sort. According to the organization, the Talking Book device "offers children and adults a versatile and interactive tool designed for use with locally recorded readings of existing and newly created reading books. As an information system, the Talking Book System offers inexpensive distribution to large numbers of people, enabling individuals to determine what information they want and when they want it."
Schmidt, who has been a consultant in the open-source community -- helping large companies adopt open-source strategies -- is attending OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Convention) here to talk about the use of open-source technology in education and to look into open-source software components for the Talking Book Device.
"The idea for this came up about a year ago and has evolved from there," Schmidt said. "I was working with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and I was looking at how we could use laptops to help improve literacy. And when I left to go to Ghana I took a few laptops, but I realized then that laptops weren't the solution because of their price point. They are a solution for a specific set of problems, and can be a strategic bet for a developing country over the long term. But for an individual to be able to buy a device that could help them improve the quality of their life ... I said, Could a $5 device be built to help instead of a $200 or $100 laptop?"
So Schmidt set out to see that device built, and the Upper West Region of Ghana will be the first location to get the devices when they are ready. Schmidt said the devices right now cost more like $10 the way they are built today, but he said by the time they become widely available he is certain they will be built more efficiently and could be sold for $5. The goal is to make the device as affordable as possible because in the areas targeted for its use, people live on less than $1 a day, Schmidt said.
Thus far, "We've locked in on the mechanical engineering and the electrical engineering for the device, but we haven't really done the software; that's why I'm at OSCON," Schmidt said.
He said the team has built a layer of software to prove out the features of the device, "but we have to build an operating system. We have a design and we think the open-source world is the right place for us."
Indeed, open-source software plays into one of the three legs of Literacy Bridge's "sustainability stool," Schmidt said. That stool's three legs are environmental sustainability, business sustainability and engineering sustainability, he said.
"We want our code base to live beyond us, so we're working with engineering schools in Ghana and will be working with engineering schools in other developing countries," so there will be engineers knowledgeable about the project and the device, he said.
Moreover, "we'd like to find some embedded C programmers who could build some software for the device," Schmidt added.
The business and engineering legs sort of speak for themselves, but on the environmental sustainability leg of the project, Schmidt said:
Although we will introduce the device as powered by locally available batteries, we are developing a rechargeable battery program for the