Association for the Advancement of Innovative Information and Communication Technologies for Rural Development

Village Scribe Association

 

The ECSPIRT Project

Project Description    Our Assignment    awareNet

A new interactive education and communication software awareNet

Background

While Internet capacity is growing in Africa, the amount of investment needed to truly bring Africa online cannot be afforded by many governments, apart from the fact that vested interests make the Internet business lucrative for those in control. For these and other reasons, mesh networks may provide an interim solution in the next 5-10 years. Such networks provide local broadband and poor Internet connectivity.

New developments in South Africa, where ISPs and cellular companies offer free data during out of business hours, also point to a new way of allowing Africans affordable Internet. Both the mesh scenario and the "out of hours Internet" scenario can be addressed by batch technologies. Email, website mirroring, etc. can all be provided at a much lower cost using batch technologies. That is, to view a YouTube video inexpensively, you would say which video you wanted to see, and that video would be downloaded at night ready for your viewing the next day, by a local service (be it on your phone, a lab server, etc.).

A unique Feature of awareNet

The unique feature of awareNet is that it allows the creation of a single social network, that brings the network to its users, instead of expecting them to come to the full Internet, which is too expensive. awareNet can be hosted locally within a mesh, allowing a large number of servers worldwide, all of which may only have intermittent access to each other. This allows participants to use rich technologies (multimedia) in collaborative projects with other learners anywhere in the Internet. Responses may be delayed, but they are at least enabled.

Learners on a mesh network or a LAN can make use of the broadband Internet to produce strong local content (including videos, their own music, and picture galleries) and share it overnight with learners in the rest of the world. awareNet is a single social network, which has the potential to bring learners all over the world together in a collaborative learning experience that can grow flexibly as more learners join.

awareNet Functions

  1. Bullet friends network with profiles, status updates, notifications,  etc

  2. Bullet discussion forums

  3. Bullet personal and syndicated picture galleries

  4. Bullet blogs and blog aggregation

  5. Bullet instant messaging (chat)

  6. Bullet user messaging (mail)

  7. Bullet image and file management

  8. Bullet shared calendar

  9. Bullet collaborative projects to encourage teamwork.

It is now being developed further in close cooperation with the learners to adapt it precisely to their needs while they learn the basic skills of how to use the computers. This method particularly motivates the learners to cooperate in a focused manner, because changes are visible immediately. Especially interesting is the fact that awareNet’s functionality will, for a large part, be determined by young inexperienced users. New insights of the perception of young African users may make awareNet a highly popular tool, helping bring Africa onto the Internet in an unprecedented manner and making generations of young Africans more aware of our global community. awareNet is free/libre open source software (FLOSS).



Read more about the Village Scribe Association’s Assignment and the international communication and education network >>


awareNet on Google Code



Screenshot of a profile page on awareNet

Screenshot of the main project page

on awareNet

Screenshot of the main blog page

on awareNet

Screenshot of the video and music page

on awareNet