Linux-Rechner in Laos: erste Projektbeschreibung
In Laos sollen zunächst fünf abgelegene Dörfer von der Jhai Foundation mit jeweils einem Computer ausgestattet werden. Da die Dörfer nicht über Elektrizität verfügen, läuft das Gerät mit einer 12-Volt-Autobatterie, die über einen mit Muskelkraft betriebenen Generator wieder aufgeladen werden kann. 96 MB RAM sorgen dafür, daß Linux mit KDE flüssig läuft. Linux wurde dafür ins Laotische übersetzt. Die einzelnen Rechner sind untereinander vernetzt, durch eine Vernetzung mit der Hauptstadt besteht Internetanschluß.
Dies ist der Start der Jhai Foundation, eine amerikanisch-laotische Stiftung, einen PC-kompatiblen Computer für die Landbevölkerung der dritten Welt zu produzieren. Der besonders robuste Computer soll eine Lebenszeit von 10 Jahren haben.
Die Jhai Foundation dokumentiert das projekt ausführlich, sodass es bei Erfolg auch in anderen Entwicklungsländern angewendet werden kann.
Info unter: www.techempower.net/0/Editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=Projects&action=page&obj_id=794#
oder auch auf prolinux: www.pro-linux.de/news/2002/4681.html
Link zur Jhai Foundation: www.jhai.org/
Die Jhai Foundation beschreibt das Projekt im Januar 2003 wie folgt:
JHAI FOUNDATION IS MAKING THE WEB WORLD-WIDE FOR THE RURAL POOR
What do you do when you want to do a little business, and you have no telephones, no electricity and an impassable road? Noy Chanthavong and her neighbors in Phon Kham village in rural Laos asked Jhai Foundation (www.jhai.org and www.jhaicoffee.com) to help them get connected to the world wide web. Noy and her neighbors want voice and written communications with overseas relatives at affordable rates. They want access to price information for rice, vegetables, and woven goods in market towns and to get education on computers and the internet for their kids. They also want the ability to send spreadsheets and written bids to clients for small construction jobs, the ability to call the doctor, and a free way to talk with friends in neighboring villages. As reported in The Economist and the New York Times Magazine (see both articles below), Jhai Foundation will launch its rugged, pedal-powered, wireless-connected Jhai computer and communications system in Phon Kham village, Hin Heup District, Vientiane Province, Lao PDR, on February 13, at noon. You are most welcome to come.
Why? In the remote areas of rural Laos villagers lack connectivity. There are no good roads, no electricity, no telephones, and certainly no email. People from one such village, Phon Kham, along with four of its neighbors, have told the Jhai Foundation www.jhai.org that this connectivity is what they need. They want it for a variety of reasons: to contact relatives oversees and in the capital, to better coordinate cooperative economics, to get up- to-date commodity price information, and to gather information to improve their business techniques. How? For the pilot project, the Jhai Foundation is building an 802.11b wireless computer network to link the five villages with each other and the internet, providing email, voice-over-IP telephony, and telephone access. The network will link five ultra-rugged Jhai computers and printers in each village whose power requirements in various configurations have been measured at less 20 watts - which allows the systems to be powered by a battery charged by stationary bicycle. The Jhai Foundation is also localizing the Linux-based KDE Graphical Desktop and productivity resources, allowing for communications, word processing, and simple spreadsheets, all in the Lao language. Stage one of the process is a single village launch, connecting Phon Kham Village to the network as a demonstrator for the other villages in the proposed network. We expect to launch the entire five-village network before the rainy season, which starts in May. What? The Remote IT Village pilot test will link five villages in the Hin Heup District, Vientiane Province, in a wireless Wide-Area Network (WAN). Villagers will use Voice-over-I.P. telephony and Lao-language business tools to improve their standard of living while preserving traditions. The network will immediately enhance business and trade opportunities for organic rice and produce in market towns and the capital, Vientiane, and the establishment of a local market for sales of a variety of products among villagers themselves. Villagers will also connect by voice and email with family members who now live overseas. Who? Noted hardware developer Lee Felsenstein and networking specialist Mark Summer, are working with a 10 person Jhai Foundation team. Vorasone Dengkayaphichith, one of Laos' leading IT experts, coordinates project implementation. Anousak Souphavanh of IBM heads the localization of the open source KDE desktop and other tools. Lee Thorn, chair of Jhai Foundation, manages. Jhai Foundation, an American 501(c)3 non-profit, reconciliation organization, was begun in 1997 by Mr. Thorn, a bomb-loader during the American war in Laos, and Bounthanh Phommasathit, a Lao refugee from the American bombing. Currently, Jhai Foundation works in 20 villages in Lao PDR. on technology, a weaving initiative, and an organic coffee initiative. Jhai's four Internet Learning Centers have implemented a financially sustainable model for educational and community-based computing. The Economist and The New York Times magazine feature our project. The Swedish representative has nominated this project as 'best practices' to the Secretariat of the UN. When? Noon, 13 February, Phon Kham Village, Hip Heup District, Vientiane Province, Lao PDR
Please also see FAQ and other information at www.jhai.org to answer questions you might have.
Contacts: Jesse Thorn 1 415 225 1665, splangy@splangy.com Earl Mardle 612 9787 4527, earl@techempower.net
ein weiterer Bericht der Jhai Foundation vom 29. Januar 2003: From Lee Thorn In Laos Hi - This is just to let you know - 1) We have tested the 802.llb wireless network from Phon Kham to the Internet. Vorasone Dengkayaphichith, Jhai's country coordinator, sent emails, pictures, and spoke to Canada, the US, Sweden and Laos using VoIP on 23 January 2003 at 1 PM local time. The signal was relayed from Phon Kham over a station in a tree on a hill (2.4 km) to a water tower in Phon Hong (9 km) and then to the Internet over a phone line. We used laptops for this test. The Jhai PCs and other gear are being assembled and loaded with localized software as I write and being tested machine by machine and program by program. We are essentially on schedule and still expect to launch on 13 February in Phon Kham village, Hin Heup district, Vientiane province, Lao PDR. Please contact the people listed above for further information as it becomes available. 2) We have revised our FAQ at www.jhai.org for those wishing to travel to the launch and for those who want more detailed information. 3) We were featured in the San Francisco Chronicle and we are including the article as text below. 4) Our team here in Laos, in the United States, Thailand, Canada, Australia and Sweden, are working hard to give Phon Kham villagers what they want: connection to the world for trade and for friendship. We need your good wishes, your financial support, and your efforts to keep others informed. Donations can be sent to www.jhai.org/donations.htm We'll keep you up to date. Thank you. Together we'll make a difference. We do this as a means of reconciliation ... which is,as we all know, the opposite of war. Jhai, among other things, means the energy of connection. We're on track thanks to the many volunteers who have made this happen and the funding from the Canadian International Development Research Center, the American Embassy in Laos and hundreds of individual donors; we are grateful Yours, in Peace, Lee Thorn Chair, Jhai Foundation Press Coverage to Date Lee Felsenstein installing circuit board stack into Jhai PC The response to our initial release has been excellent with coverage from SFGate (Kevin Fagan's article is included in full below. CNN, BBC World Service (radio), Associated Press, Spectrum magazine and ASIA FIRST E- COMMERCE MAGAZINE. TechTV (24 hour cable/satellite channel dedicated to technology) has filmed the Jhai PC assembly and will air their interview with Lee Thorn, Lee Felsenstein, and the assembly on Wednesday January 29 at 5 PM PT (www.techtv.com for listings) Images Online We have created an image resource page for the project courtesy of our friends at TEN. If you want to publish the photos most of them are free of charge and the credits are identified with each photo. The page will be added to as new images come in, to receive an update notification please send us an email. The full sized version of the photo to the right is available from the resource page. San Francisco Chronicle Story in Print and Online Pedal-powered e-mail in the jungle 2 Bay Area visionaries head to Laos with a tough little PC for villagers
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer Early next month, a villager in the mountainous jungles of northern Laos will climb onto a stationary bicycle hooked to a handmade, wireless computer and pedal his people into the digital age. It will be the first time a human-powered computer has ever linked a Third World village to the Internet by wireless remote. And the two Americans who will make this possible -- one a Navy veteran who became a leader in the Vietnam antiwar movement two generations ago, the other a founding pioneer of Silicon Valley -- plan to be at his side as he pedals. Long ago, when their hair was jet-black and the '60s were hot, these two graying Boomers -- Lee Thorn of San Francisco and Lee Felsenstein of Palo Alto -- were in the forefront of the raucous Berkeley left. Today, they still want to change the world. But this time, it will be in the middle of a jungle 7,500 miles from home in a tiny village called Phon Kham -- with a computer they specially created to help some of the neediest people on earth. So why are they doing this? "It will be like Alexander Graham Bell, in the jungle," Thorn said. "It's groundbreaking and new. "Right now, the villagers have no way of telling what the market is like in the big towns they sell their stuff to, telling what the weather report is for their crops, things like that. This will absolutely change that. Plus, they will be able to talk to relatives in America some of them haven't seen in decades." LOW-MAINTENANCE MACHINE Technological projects have been slowly hooking remote villages in places such as India and Africa to the computer age for several years. But not in this way. They either involve cell phones, which need high-tech transmitter towers, or computers hooked into electricity and cable phone lines -- not foot pedals and wireless antennas nailed to trees. This new computer also has another element not common to Third World tech projects: The input of villagers who wouldn't normally know a megabyte from a mosquito bite, but who are helping install it and who will be trained by Thorn's group. Word has already spread so far and wide that 40 countries, including South Africa and Peru, are interested in it. "This will change everyone's lives in Phon Kham," Vorasone Denkayaphichitch, who is coordinating the project in Laos and has relatives in the village area, said from Vientiane, the capital of Laos. "The important thing is for them to have communication, because every day they sell their ducks, rice, weaving and chickens, and every day they have to sell for less money than they should because they can't know what the real price is down in the towns." PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS All 200 residents of Phon Kham live in bamboo houses with thatch roofs. There is no electricity. No telephone. If you want to go to the next tiny village a few miles away, you walk a dirt road that will probably wash out when the monsoons come. It's about what you'd expect in the 10th-poorest nation on earth -- which during the Vietnam War had 2 million tons of bombs dropped on it by the United States, more than was dumped on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. On its face, it could sound crazy to try to hook Laos up to a microchip world that its villagers would seem incapable of understanding, let alone using. But nobody had counted on the 59-year-old Thorn. During the Vietnam War, he was a Navy bomb loader on an aircraft carrier that was among those that launched devastating air strikes against Laos and Cambodia in the then-secret U.S. "shadow war." Decades later, racked with a need for penance, Thorn created the Jhai Foundation, a nonprofit that works to rebuild rural Laos -- and which will launch this new computer. His partner in the computer venture has an equally dynamic background, albeit more pacific. Felsenstein, 57, invented the Osborne 1, the world's first portable computer, and in the 1970s he kick-started the home computer revolution with his fellow nerds in the Homebrew Computer Club, Apple creators Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. PEDAL POWER His latest invention, created specially for Thorn's group, is the bike- pedaled computer. The two have assembled a team of a dozen wireless-technology and personal computer hotshots from the Bay Area and around the world, and they will tromp into the land mine-, snake-infested Laotian jungles over the next few weeks. There, with the help of the Phon Kham villagers, they will install the computer Felsenstein created out of off-the-shelf odds and bits -- and on Feb. 12, they intend to fire the machine up and hook into the Internet. SOLUTION FOR VILLAGERS They call the invention the Jhai Computer, Jhai meaning "hearts and minds working together" in Laotian. It was built because the villagers asked Thorn for a way, any way, they could better tap into their country's economy and have contact with the outside world. The bike-pedaled generator will power a battery that in turn runs the computer, which sits in an 8-by-10-inch box and has the power of a pre- Pentium, 486-type computer. Felsenstein designed it to run on only 12 watts -- compared to a typical computer's 90 watts -- so the bike power would be up to the task. "It has no moving parts, the lid seals up tight, and you can dunk it in water and it will still run," Felsenstein said. "The idea is to be rugged, last at least 10 years and run in both the monsoon season and the dry season." ROOF-TO-TREE CONNECTIVITY The computer will hook up with a wireless card -- an 802.11b, the current industry standard -- to an antenna bolted on the roof of a bamboo house, and the signal will be beamed from there to an antenna nailed to a tree on top of a mountain. There the signal will be bounced to Phon Hong, which sits 25 miles from Phon Kham and is the nearest big village with phone lines. The phone lines then hook to an Internet service provider. Felsenstein crafted the Jhai to run on Linux software, a system which, unlike some other software, will not be obsolete in 18 months. Then he recruited a Laotian IBM engineer in New York to customize it to the Lao language. Mark Summer, a leader among San Francisco wireless aficionados, designed the connections and tested them last summer on the city's hills. Through the Internet connection, the Jhai Computer will be able to not only do e-mail, but also run a two-way telephone system through Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. If the first Jhai Computer works as planned, Thorn's group will hook up four nearby villages and start an institute to train the residents. Eventually, they may mass-produce it for other countries. "I've never heard of anything exactly like this being done, in this way," said Dennis Allison, the noted Stanford University electrical engineering lecturer and co-founder of the groundbreaking People's Computer Co. in the 1970s. After seeing a recent presentation by Felsenstein on the invention, he concluded: "From a social impact point of view, it's a big deal. A very big deal." HEALING MISSION What impelled Thorn to recruit Felsenstein and the rest of his team is the same thing that motivated him to create the Jhai Foundation in 1998. He wants to repair the damage wreaked by a war nobody acknowledged at the time-- officially, the United States never laid a hand, let alone a bomb. What impelled Thorn to recruit Felsenstein and the rest of his team is the same thing that motivated him to create the Jhai Foundation in 1998. He wants to repair the damage wreaked by a war nobody acknowledged at the time -- officially, the United States never laid a hand, let alone a bomb, on Laos-- and in doing so repair some of the pain he feels at having been part of that war. "This is all about Jhai, the hearts and minds together, about doing what is right," Thorn said. "This is what the Phon Kham people asked for, and this is the most reasonable response to their request. It's simple." It's the same straightforward style he used three decades ago when he co- founded the national Veterans for Peace at UC Berkeley. And five years ago as well, when he loaded up a backpack of surplus medical supplies and flew to Laos with the simple aim of doing some good, and wound up creating his foundation. "I go back again and again out of gratitude," Thorn said. "The last five years I've been able to heal myself in ways I never thought would be possible, and that's because of the relationships I've built in Laos." Operating on a shoestring budget of donations from contacts Thorn made as a peace activist, Jhai has built wells, installed computer learning labs for children, helped clear unexploded bombs and started importing coffee to America. The most powerful factor on Thorn's side these days is the genius he knew from the old radical times and whom he recruited to get the computer project going -- Felsenstein. For Felsenstein, the idea of making a computer "for the people" has driven him since the 1960s, when he wrote for the Berkeley Barb and was tech whiz for the Free Speech Movement. The zeal never faded as Felsenstein's career carried on through the years to his current job at a Mountain View medical instruments company. "The human situation fit very well to what could be done with the technology we had available," he said in his characteristic dead-pan, engineer's earnestness. "What's incredible is that we couldn't just go to the store and buy this already, that it had to be invented." Neither of the two Lees, both not as svelte as they used to be, is looking forward to schlepping the computer and its clunky antennas through the jungle. But neither is complaining. People scoffed at Thorn years ago when he wanted to band veterans together to make a peace movement, and they scoffed at Felsenstein when he said he could make a portable computer. And today, they are just as determined to beat the odds. Some whom they have consulted for advice on where to buy batteries and the like have, just at the mention of the project, laughed skeptically. That just makes the two Lees smile. "When someone says to me, 'I don't understand what you're doing, you must be crazy,' I know I'm on the right track," Felsenstein said.
For information on donations to the Jhai Foundation's work in Laos, go to www.jhai.org/donations.htm. / E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.
Projektbeschreibung vom 16. April: Phon Kham Villagers test the bicycle generator Since we got back we were given a development space, a T1 line, and access to a kitchen at CompuMentor in San Francisco. We, now, have made enough progress to project a new one-village launch date. First, a little history. We had hoped to fully launch the new Jhai PC and communications system in Laos in February. As you may very well know, we did not. The short version is that two and a half days out from the projected launch the data on the development PC"s hard drive (and its back up hard drive) became corrupted. We lost all the software work we had done in Laos. This was more than we could make up in two and a half days. The wonderful thing was that the villagers completely understood. They not only understood, but also found out we were feeling really bad. So they threw us an all-day party. During this party Lee F showed our crew, our visitors, and especially the village kids how the bicycle-generator worked. He also told them, in the most amazing lecture I have EVER heard, what had happened and how a computer works. The kids were totally "there". After this wondrous event, we all gathered at my co-founder, Bounthanh"s parents"house across from the school. There her dying father, Pone, told us that he wanted us to launch "before June 1", before the rainy season. (This is God"s Truth.) He said he wanted to talk with his daughter in Canada before he died. Now, I've known this guy for five years. When he was a younger man and headman, he had brought this village as a group from the Plain of Jars, where their ancestral village had been destroyed by American bombing, through refugee camps, to this spot which is now the village of Phon Kham, to homestead. This is a strong and very smart man. He is one of my heroes. He probably knows that this is how I feel about him. He looked straight at me and said, "Lee, please get this launched before June 1." I said I"d do my best and looked at Lee F, Steve, Karen and Bounthanh (who was there) and they indicated their determination. So we are doing it. A pretty good description of that day, by the way, was written by Kevin Fagan of the San Francisco Chronicle and can be found here. NEWS Executive Summary: We expect to launch 18 May. Hardware is done; software boot and kernel are essentially done for Jhai PCs. Applications are being installed, now, and all have been previously installed on Jhai PCs and/or tested on laptops. Applications tests start Monday, system tests start the next Monday, and we intend to ship between 28 April and 1 May. We will have two weeks of testing and training on site before this launch. We do not consider this the ultimate launch, but rather a development step. We have paid off $6294 worth of debt. The complete launch (all five villages) is scheduled for October and that step has tentatively committed funding. We have received our first roll-out request from a funding agency with real money attached. Since I last wrote (15 Mar) we have had several breakthroughs. The Bay Area technical team have good news: We are projecting a new launch on or around 18 May. Given the quality and commitment of our team both in Laos and here, I am confident about this date. · Lee Felsenstein, chief design engineer, and Bob Marsh, have completed the Jhai PC hardware for all three (server, relay, village) PCs. · We have changed from compact flash to IBM micro-drives (a proven kind of very small hard drive with one Gig of space) for all three computers for this phase of development. The team is committed to return to the compact flash kind of storage by the time of the five village launch. That launch is now projected for October. This change will be to come as close as possible to ensuring the 10 year life objective of our design vision. · Steve Okay and his software team, Elaine Sweeney, Mark Cohen, Grant Bowman, Andrea Longo, Mark Summers, Scott Yokim, Stan Osbourne, Jeslie Chermak, have essentially completed the boot and kernel for all three Jhai PCs. · The development PC has now run for a solid week without crashes, corrupted files, or other gating problems. They are now testing applications on the PCs. It is good to remember that the critical applications ran on laptops in January and some ran on the Jhai PC as early as July 2002. The software team is on time and optimistic. · Vorasone and Sak and their team expect to reinstall antennas, batteries, security devices and solar panels starting no later than 23 April. · This week is dedicated to unit tests in San Francisco. Next week is dedicated to system tests. The hardware here is projected to return to Laos about May 1. · From May 1 to May 18 (approximately) the hardware will be tested onsite and the villagers will be trained on their use. This launch will be public, but will only be described as a "step towards our launch". The full public launch will be after the five village launch is proved by actual use. Here"s our remaining schedule as a chart: Work to be Done Start Finish IN-COUNTRY INSTALL WORK Wed 4/23/03 Wed/4/30/03 APPLICATION COMPLETION (VOIP, ETC) Mon 4/7/03 Sun 4/13/03 UNIT TEST Mon 4/14/03 Sun 4/20/03 SYSTEM STAGING Mon 4/21/03 Sun 4/27/03 SHIP Mon 4/28/03 Thur 5/1/03 IN-COUNTRY INSTALL/TRAIN Mon 5/2/03 Sun 5/18/03 I was able to secure a preliminary commitment for the hardware to complete the final four villages of our remote villages IT project. That money is projected to come in September. The assumption is that the one village version will be up and running before that time. We have been asked by a major funding agency to prepare a proposal for a roll-out of this system to be used for e-government in Northern Laos. We will ask for a planning grant. I meet with some of the funding staff in Laos in May. As you know this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of interest, we have received inquiries from over 40 countries. This, I truly believe, is all good news. A REQUEST FOR HELP In order to keep the schedule I"m announcing here, we need to buy spares for the Jhai PCs and pay expenses for two software people and me to go to Laos. We originally intended to use the Jhai development PC as a source of spare parts, but two things have intervened: 1/we changed the PC-104 card in the server to another model (although the same RAM); and 2/we decided we needed to keep the development PC here for further experiments with hardware and software. This work is the first step towards a Jhai Institute which will allow us to continue upgrading and developing the system as part of an ongoing R&D program. Thus, we need: Requirement Amount Accounts payable (hardware) (most of this goes to Lee F, who used his credit card) $8700 Hardware spares (cards, cables, tax, shipping in US) $2210 Travel, per diem "three people (average: 10 days) (Star Alliance/United miles works for $3600 of this "in 60K or 90K chunks) $5100 Subtotal "immediate need: $7310 Total need $16100 Please do not be daunted by the size of this number. Every single donation "from $5 to $50,000 "helps. The average tax-deductible donation in the last campaign was about $40. You can make a difference. The easiest way to donate is to go to www.jhai.org/donations.htm . If you wish to send a check, just address it to Jhai Foundation, 921 France Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112 USA. One easy way to give is to buy Jhai Coffee. Visit our website at www.jhaicoffee.com It is easy to get this great coffee that benefits both Lao farmers and the Jhai Foundation. More than half a century ago, the French thought Laos was to coffee what France is to fine champagne. They believed Laotian coffee was the premiere coffee in the world. And they knew what growing the best coffee required. The right rainfall and altitude. Rich volcanic soil. Shade. And love, which the Laotian farmers seem to have in abundance. In a land where water buffalos still outnumber cars, the coffee farmers in Laos take the time to nurture their plants the way master vintners tend to their precious vines. We paid over Fair Trade, organic prices directly to the farmers and are helping them get organized and certified for both "organic"and "fair trade"designations this year. But what is most remarkable is the taste "extremely rare, extremely complex ... and the finish "my God, the finish lingers on the tongue with the smoothness of a great Cabernet. I believe this coffee is nothing less than the best. I, of course, am prejudiced. But in 2002 the most prestigious tasting lab in France agreed. It said Lao Arabica Typica coffee was among the 12 best coffees in the world Support Jhai Foundation, buy great Jhai Laotian Arabica Typica Coffee! If you are in the United States, this is tax day. This is the worst damn time in the year to ask for money, according to conventional wisdom. Well, in the spirit of being completely out of the box, we are asking, now, because we need your help now. We know you are with us on this, because you understand its impact. You also know that Jhai"s way of working "through relationships "is working. That our system started with the ideas of villagers "and this is nearly unique. You have been extremely kind to us so far and I feel a little embarrassed asking you again. I appreciate your kind attention to this request. Obviously we are on a very tight schedule. I did not want to get back to you before I felt fully confident our team could do this task. We can. Thanks in advance for your continuing support. Yours, in Peace, Lee Thorn
