 coming. Yeah, so you know, let's begin here. We have a short time together. This is going to be a brief overview of the work we've done on internet in a box. So myself, Suyash, Tim Moody unfortunately couldn't make it here with us today. So to start with, I'm just going to show a quick video here of let's see if the sound works. It might not be lucky enough. Do we have a, oh, I think I know. Is that going to be the, I guess I should have tested this beforehand. Do you have, do you have a sound cable? Okay, let's try that again. But the unmute is under the slides. A learning hotspot. It could be used on the beaches of Haiti, to the remote woods of Northern Canada, to the Saharan desert in the central of Africa. It could also be used on a rocket ship headed to Saturn. This tiny affordable server brings the internet's crown jewels of open source free education and knowledge, including Wikipedia, thousands of Khan Academy videos, zoomable open street maps, electronic books, WordPress journaling, toys from trash electronics projects, and a whole lot more internet in a box is being used around the world. You could build this offline digital library for your school, your medical clinic, your prison, your region, or your very own family accessible with any nearby smartphone, tablet, or laptop. We are very proud to be working side by side with schools, clinics, and the libraries around the world. This free and powerful software can be easily installed on all types of hardware, from desktop computers to laptops, even a $35 Raspberry Pi. You don't need big expensive equipment to run this lightweight software. Internet in a box is a community driven open source project that greatly welcomes contributions from educators, librarians, IT workers, developers, and anyone else that wants to contribute to the project. To get answers to many questions, please go to faq.iiab.io. Also, check us out on GitHub at github.com forward slash iab. First question is what is internet in a box? It's a very simple device. It's basically what we're shipping as Wiki Project Med Foundation is we're shipping what you see in the picture there. I have one up here up front for those who wants to see internet in a box. And what we're shipping is we're basically shipping a Raspberry Pi 0W. It comes in a 3D printed plastic box held together by four screws. These boxes were donated by one of our volunteers within our movement. We put a 128 gigabyte SD card in this device, which is enough to hold all of English Wikipedia. So what you basically end up with, and as mentioned in that video, there's lots of content options from Khan Academy to other educational resources, including Wikipedia, including MDWiki. This is what we're shipping around the world. We manufacture these devices in Canada. They weigh about 35 grams. We've shipped them to a whole bunch of countries. So currently, we ship the devices at the cost of manufacturing. So we're shipping them for 50 US dollars to high income countries. And then we ship them for about 40 US dollars. We ship them for 40 US dollars for low and middle income countries. And that includes the cost of shipping. So when we ship to high income countries, we make about five dollars on the cost. When we ship to low income countries and middle income countries, we lose about five dollars per cost. And we charge the high income countries a little bit more to make it less expensive for the low and middle income countries. With respect to the number shipped, we began manufacturing and shipping these from Wikiproject Med Foundation. We began in 2017. So we've been doing this now for the last five years. Here's sort of the number of devices we've been shipping over the years. From 60 up to 80 dropped down a little bit during 2020-2021. And now we have seen a recent increase in 2022 to about 50 devices. With respect to where we have shipped them, we've shipped them around the world, you know, including Pakistan, Israel, Palestine, many places in the South Pacific, a number of countries in Africa, including the DRC, Botswana, Mali. The only places we have had trouble with devices arriving is Mexico. For some reason, the Mexico Postal Service, this eats up the internet in a box and they never arrive at the final destination. But, you know, we've had, we've shipped devices to Kinshasa and they've reached that destination. Sometimes it takes, you know, shipping doesn't take one, two weeks like with Amazon. We're looking at shipping times closer to, you know, one to three months. With respect to the breakdown of costs of this device, you know, the 128 gigabyte USD card costs about 20 USD. One of the issues with these devices, if you're going to make your own, is that there's lots of fake US, USD cards out there and you need to make sure that you find a natural real USB card when you're making your device. The Raspberry Pi's themselves, the zero W's are about 15 USD. If you buy them one at a time, they're less expensive than if you buy them in quantities. So, you know, usually Raspberry Pi will only sell one of these cards to a person at a time and they're like 10 to 12 USD. If you want to buy more than one, they increase the price to 15 USD each. So we're paying that sort of 15 USD per Raspberry Pi. And then shipping costs average out to about 10 USD to ship a package by airmail around the world. There's no tracking involved. It's just not worth paying that extra amount for tracking. You know, one of the things we'd love to support is we'd love to support other people within our movement, making these devices or assembling these devices and then distributing them locally in your own country or in your own region. And that could potentially cut down with, you know, on some of the shipping costs and, you know, sort of distribute the labor of assembling and manufacturing these devices. Now, we have, as I mentioned, we have an internet box here. If you guys pull out your phones and if you turn off your cellular data, you will see something called, you'll see Wi-Fi called Internet in a Box. And if you click on Internet in a Box, you will be able to log on to this miniature computer in my hand and you will be see, you know, the two slices of information there. One is MD Wiki, which is sort of a medical version of Wikipedia and the other one is the whole English language Wikipedia. So once you, with some people's phones, Active Portal will pop up and that will bring you to the home page of Internet in a Box. On other phones, you need to open your browser and you need to type in HTTP colon front slash, front slash box.lan. And we've written that on all the boxes that we distribute just to help people get to that starting point. Make sure there's no S. The S stands for security. That requires online access to get an HTTPS site working. So all we've managed to do to get around that, we were just using HTTP. It's also possible to look at what the site looks like online. So you can, you know, sort of view a version of what's on the box or one version of the box by going to HTTPS, the lower link there, colon, front slash, front slash, IAB.me, front slash home. And you can see an example of what we're shipping. We will often customize these versions for different folks and add specific languages if people aren't interested in having boxes with specific languages. Anybody managed to log on? A few folks. Yeah, it's a little slow. You know, this is a Raspberry Pi 0W. One of the reasons why you went with this very lightweight server is one is, you know, the cost is low. Two is that they're super small and they're easy to ship and, you know, they come in just a normal envelope. So, you know, the people at customs won't realize it's something expensive and thus won't go exploring people's mail most of the time, except for Mexico. Okay, so that's sort of my overview of how Inner A Box has done this last year. I want to invite my colleague, Suyash, to come speak about some of the modifications he's making. Thank you, James. Thank you everyone for coming here. So yeah, like James introduced that device very well and while exploring this device and using in real things, I realized, we realized that something it is good that the size is very small and sometime it is challenging because if you want to place it in public places, then a size may be a challenge. So let me introduce myself. My name is Suyash Devedi and basically I'm from India and yeah, I'm currently having twice here as a comments photographer user group and I also serve at FCOM. So I think this slide is already covered that what is Internet in a box. So I am skipping and first image you can see that is already there and second one is a little bigger size with the enclosure where we can put it into the public places and the third slide is how it looks like to your mobile screen. The good thing of this device is that you can build your own. It doesn't require much engineering if you are if you have a colleague of some techie colleague so he can guide you how to build this and all the resources related how to build it is available. So basically during using this particular devices I found three problems. Not problems but enhancement which can improve the performance of device. First thing is that like the each and every other computers it should have some hardware based shutdown because you cannot you know directly plug out and shut it down. So first problem was that that we need to you know put some hardware based shutdown system. Another one was the enclosure because if you want to place it in like I earlier said in the public places like it is really very useful for the places like hospital where people are waiting with their patients and they can they want to explore more about the disease or anything extra so they can utilize that waiting time. And third thing like because you know since it has been primarily focused to those places where internet is a limit so same places sometime powers is also challenge. So these are these were the three challenges. So this is solution number one. There is a very tiny it's a hardly 20 cent add-on device where you can you know put a switch and wait for five second. If you keep pressing for five second it will hardware will get properly shut down and this is a quick click how this hardware means this Raspberry Pi the left one is the Raspberry Pi 0 which currently we are using this device and the middle one is Raspberry Pi 4 version which has more memory and it can covers and speed can get you can get the more speed. So yeah this is the quick solution all you need to put one momentary switch one LED indicator this is optional it will indicate that whether your machine is running and whenever you press this little button it will flash for few seconds it will be giving a indication that it is going to be shut down and that's it. So a little Python script is written for this and it is also available on github Okay I'll make sure that this slide will be available on common so you can go through that link also. So coming to the next solution that is enclosure. So enclosure was you know as I earlier said that sometimes the little size is challenging and we are very thankful to our colleague who is donating this 3d printed enclosure but here is a very quick acrylic based enclosure which you can this design is already available on commons so you can simply go to the acrylic 3d cutter center and get these enclosures. To like I earlier said that I have shared the all the links and codes related to that printed circuit board which helps you to make this device hardware shut down things and along with this design of the acrylic sheets. Third thing was like solar based power supply system. So we are just thinking and we are into the process where we are trying to make these devices powered by the solar energy so that it can run along and even you can put these devices to the your local village pump is not the Wikipedia village pump but the real one where you can utilize these devices not only for the education purpose but you can also these devices can also serve to the farmers to know the what type of crops are there and what type of diseases are coming and that it's remedy and so on so. So even it will be very helpful to as a you know information tool that these types of grants are available for the farmers or these types of you know applications or the farms are available they can simply download and then they then they can use it and that's it. So this third one that challenges under process. Any questions? Yeah please. Thank you both of you for this wonderful presentation. So the question is that these devices are for those people who don't have internet availability. So what if when we talk about villages where there is no internet but if there is no internet there there the smartphones are also challenged there. So how we are going to tackle these problems. If any village don't have problem sorry don't have internet there must be no good smartphone and this work with smartphone. So how you are going to tackle these problem. You know one use case of this was in Central America where you know the medical students would train in the large cities where they had access to lots of resources and then once these students graduated from medical school they were sent out to regions of Central America where there was no internet access. So all of a sudden you have all these newly graduated physicians who have no access to the resources that they're used to having and you know they're starting out in their career and they know barely anything and so you know that was a perfect use case as you know these students already had these newly minted doctors already had excellent cell phones but they just all of a sudden were in a region where there was no access and you know we're starting to see people in many regions where there's not great internet access and yet they still have smartphones. You know getting smartphones to everyone you know that's not going to be a solution that's going to come from us but there are you know lots of efforts specifically in India and other locations where large companies are working to make inexpensive cell phones that can be distributed to as many as possible. Yeah thank you very much my name is Ruby from Ghana. I'm very much intrigued about the work that you were doing regarding internet because I understand from my background how this is a very big problem. What I want to understand with the device that you use and I wanted to I want to know how many people can use it at the same time and secondly do you program the content on it before you ship it and what happens if the content needs to be updated do they ship it back for an update? Yeah so that's just what I wanted to know. Perfect yeah I'll take the first part of the question so if you open up this device so at the time 32 people can join and if we if you use some kind of extender like Y5 extender then you can means more people can log in at the same time and yeah second part yes yeah so you know with respect to the updating of content so you know we we compile these and fill up the sd card before we ship them so it's shipped with English Wikipedia and generally other resources already installed and and then with respect to updating you know it's difficult to get updates you know in the olden days when we used encyclopedias you know we had less expectations around the encyclopedia being updated in the prior months or weeks you know we would use the same set of encyclopedias for months years you know even a decade at a time and you know that was seen as being reasonably up-to-date. You know with respect to providing updates you know I know in Papua New Guinea there's a gentleman who's bought a whole bunch of these devices to distribute around the country and one of the things he struggles with is the internet in his location simply isn't good enough to download the entire Wikipedia for offline use so when he wants an update he just simply emails me he sends me another sd card or you know I grab one of my sd cards I put new content on it I mail him a new sd card and then he just pulls up the oldie sd card and he plugs in the new sd card and he continues on with the updated version but how often do you need to update it you know probably every couple of years is more than sufficient Hi I'm Davul, I'm one of the Gujarat in the equine quivered in a couple of questions here one is the stats the boxes that Suyash said which he's assembling or his team assembling are they the same boxes or numbers are the same within what your graph was showing or they're out of that number because I see your list of countries included in India as well so that's one thing the other is the stats of usage have you ever tried to conduct that kind of survey that how many people logged in different IPs recorded etc just as an interesting piece of session yep so so you know we did have a manufacturer slash assembler of these devices in India it was called Thingbits and they they made a bunch and they distributed a bunch from India to India but they have we're not quite sure why they're no longer doing so so we're looking for someone else in India interested in taking on that work these stats do not include the numbers distributed by someone other than us at Wiki Project Med Foundation so that's the first part of the question what was the second part again how how widely they are used like once you're distributed that data yep so you know ourselves and and Jorge did a study in Nigeria with respect to usage of these devices they were our previous versions so we were we were they only had like a 32 gigabyte SD card they didn't contain the full Wikipedia and we gathered some data around usage from they were put in health clinics in Nigeria and you know there was decent usage but the only way to actually calculate usage is you need to get the you need to get the device back yeah before you can pull the numbers off right and most of the time we're not doing that we did that for that small trial in Nigeria but that's the only yeah and sorry just one last quick question do they do the Raspberry Pi that we use does it support the other languages other scripts etc when I say script the the scripts in which we write uh other than English or Latin script yeah yeah so so you know there there is a massive quantity of content you can pick from to put on the device you can pick any language of Wikipedia that you want and you can put it on the device thank you hi James hi it's a great project like it is it sounds very interesting so this is it is only being used to consume the knowledge by using this particular data in mobile devices is there also plans to also give back the knowledge using this device using editing and stuff yeah so if you log on to the if you log on to the internet in a box that that we have sitting up here you can actually there's one there's three different modules on there there's md wiki there's wikipedia and there's a blank media wiki install and you can actually open that blank media wiki install and you can start writing on there yourself um and you will when you hit save you'll be saving and changing that version of media wiki that exists upon that individual box we don't have a method yet for that material to flow back into wikipedia but you know if you were to you know take a class have a class work on that one version of an article on that internet box then you could theoretically take it to some place where internet exists and you could re-put that you know into wikipedia okay thank you but complicated and requires some legwork perfect any other questions um i saw that was like what $50 or $40 right but do you have like a paid forward sort of thing or a donation account where you know if i don't need it but i think maybe someone's needed i could sort of put something in yeah certainly so you know this this um the distribution of the device is supported by a 503 um new york-based ngo called wiki project med foundation if you look at wiki project med foundation if you go to like md wiki.org um there's a donate button and you can donate to the charity that's you know we'll support the distribution of these devices but we've also seen many people you know like some devices have ended up in cuba um and you know people in ireland bought internet's in a box i ship them to ireland and then they put them in their suitcase and they carried them to cuba and then you know they fired them up in cuba so some region of the world people are you know they need to carry them across borders i imagine the same would be required for like north korea as you know the post is probably well checked there whether or not someone would you know bring in a device and sort of second set it up somewhere that would be a possibility so and yeah you know with with respect to sueyash's idea you know of you know we're we're looking at steps to make standalone devices where you know you have the battery included you have a solar panel included you have a bigger box um you know that can protect the device and sort of having something that's just ready to go out in a place where there is no electricity or there is no internet access and sort of you know you could put this in the center of a village um and you know this could be sort of your your your town pump where people could access um a library so thank you everyone for coming thank you and ruby are you up next excellent so we have another we have another qx flash internet in a box sort of related talk