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How to make contents of element14 avaiable for African communities?

frehun

Imagine these two categories of communities in Africa:

1. Those who don't speak the English language

2. Those who don't have access to the internet

what are we doing to mitigate these two issues at CLIC Africa? (https://www.clicafrica.net/en/home)

We have so far 2 locations in Africa (DRC and Ethiopia) and 7 more locations coming soon (Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, ...). In these locations, we have three types of labs for makers & developers; digital lab, fabrication lab, and field lab. We provide training for the youth in these countries focussing on what we call the STEAM-E initiative an interdisciplinary training combining Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics for future Entrepreneurs in many sectors including Agri & Food Tech, Health Tech, Construction, Manufacturing, and more.

I am training professional translators, those who can translate English content (blogs and vlogs), to 3 major local languages in Ethiopia. This is to help young Ethiopians join the global maker communities, and bring tech products and services to their local communities.

Some other trainees of mine, future makers and developers, are also working on making content available for remote parts of the country where internet infrastructure doesn't exist or for those who can't afford expensive internet access. We are working with products like WIKIX and Internet-in-a-box using old pcs, RaspberryPi and other cheap mini PCs.

My question for this wonderful community is very simple?

1. Is it possible (legally, technically, ..) to make element14 contents available for the aforementioned two groups of African youth? What I mean is, to make the content of element14 (blogs and videos) available for offline content consumers.

2. Do you have any suggestions for me? Alternative solutions or anything at all.

I am new to this community, if my content is not to your taste I apologize in advance and I will improve it as soon as I can based on your recommendations.

I am really grateful to this community as I learned quite a lot from you as I was preparing STEAM-E curriculum, as complex and expensive as it was, I couldn't have done it if I did not watch hundreds of hours of your content. So keep up the good work and I am sure all of my students would benefit greatly from your work.

Thank you for your time and comment.

Frehun

  • There was a start of a project by someone here on the forum, at least 5 years ago, to serve subsets of the internet off-line. For a similar purpose. I can't find it back, but it didn't lift off.

    There will be ways to scrap the content and download videos, attachments, photos, code. Then serve them as static content.  If you can set a fence - how far do you fan out? Do you download reference material from other sites? Referenced github repositories? Datasheets from vendors? How do you see that this can be updated on a regular basis? Could you allow the students to interact with the community, or is it consumption?

    frehun said:
    2. Do you have any suggestions for me? Alternative solutions or anything at all.

    I think that translating good books is more feasible. That is a way of working that has been mastered. It has proven its value.
    For education I believe that a book on the subject is better than this forum. The value of this forum is that it is interactive. And you can't replicate that offline.

  • Hello Jan,

    thank you for your feedback and suggestions.

    Let me answer your question.

    1. Web scraping - we are already doing this for websites that legally allow this. We are doing the same with Github codes and electronics board designs, and more.

    2. Downloadable videos and pdf documents are being downloaded by my team and translated/dubbed into three languages in Ethiopia.

    3. Regular updates of content will be done in our digital labs where we create content. To do this our representatives ship the hardware (PCs/RaspberryPis) to our nearest digital lab and they will get updated content back. In some cases, we only ship storage devices like memory cards or external HDDs with new updates to our rural hotspot location.

    4. We 100% allow our students to interact with the community, we don't put any restrictions. But for those students who don't have internet is an issue for now.

    Frehun

  • What other language(s) might be appropriate to serve your community?

    I ask the question as a E14 Community member and not an organizer. I'm wondering if there are webtools that could be deployed to provide translation to an alternate language that is more friendly to your community.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps said:
    There was a start of a project by someone here on the forum, at least 5 years ago, to serve subsets of the internet off-line. For a similar purpose. I can't find it back, but it didn't lift off.

    Were you perhaps thinking of the Kiwix project ?

    https://www.kiwix.org/en/about/

    Kaleb used it as part of his off-grid Wikipedia project:

    /challenges-projects/element14-presents/project-videos/w/documents/4913/episode-451-build-an-off-grid-wikipedia-with-raspberry-pi

  • Hello  ,

    frehun said:
    1. Is it possible (legally, technically, ..) to make element14 contents available for the aforementioned two groups of African youth? What I mean is, to make the content of element14 (blogs and videos) available for offline content consumers.

    We do not currently offer this, and we do not permit website scraping to do this or general access to APIs to do this. There're currently no mechanisms or plans to make the website and its contents available offline.

    frehun said:
    2. Do you have any suggestions for me? Alternative solutions or anything at all.

    I'm pretty sure that not all of the Community content is useful to you. It would be better to narrow your scope of what content you require and then alternatives can be offered.

    For example, I'm pretty sure that the forums of the EAGLE group will not be useful to you, or the contents of Feedback and Support.

    As for translation support on the site, it mainly uses google for this functionality as per the 'translate' button from the mega menu at the top of the page.

  • in reply to Jan Cumps

    I think the Up Vote button on Jan's post is broken.  I clicked on it and it went from +1 to Zero.  Now I click on it and the up gives -1.  The down goes from Zero to -2.  Fortunately, clicking it again brings it back to Zero down.  Very strange.

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    It had been downvoted by the OP, so was at -1 to start with.

    So by you upvoting it, it went from -1 to 0. By you unvoting it again, it went back to -1

    When you then downvoted it, it went from -1 to -2

    When you upvoted it again, it went from -2 to 0 as you cancelled your downvote (-2 to -1) then applied an upvote (-1 to 0)

  • in reply to beacon_dave

     Wow.  Thanks for the explanation.  I wouldn't have connected those dots.

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    yes :)  votes you down if the answer isn't in line with expectations.