 So most of my presentation is going to be focused, obviously, on my particular bent, the library box piece of technology. But you can apply a lot of the theoretical stuff I'm going to talk about near the end to any of the pieces of software that I just mentioned and a lot that I didn't mention. So what is a library box? Why do we care? The general description that I use is portable private digital distribution. It's a small piece of hardware. I'm holding one here and there's a handful of other options for hardware here. A little tiny hockey puck shaped thing. This is all commodity hardware, very, very inexpensive, very cheap that you can use to provide access to digital objects in a very private controlled small space. So that's this thing that I'm holding here. And the general idea to kind of wrap your head around it is the internet is big. But what happens if you want to break a little piece of it off and take it with you somewhere? Maybe somewhere where there isn't any infrastructure. Maybe somewhere where the infrastructure that is in the area has been damaged in some way. So how do you deploy digital information? How do you take the web with you into places that don't have anything? Well, you can do it with these sorts of devices. Library box works with open source software, standard web technologies. It provides its own Wi-Fi signal that is obviously anything with Wi-Fi can attach to it and then anything with a web browser can interact with it. So again, standard web technologies, cell phones, laptops, desktops, tablets, e-readers, anything like that. If you get bored, there is one that is running here in the room. The SSID is library box. And if you just want to catch up on your Khan Academy studies or read some Wikipedia articles or watch Plan 9 from outer space, that's all being served to you right now by this little battery powered box that I can put in my pocket. So I'm going to go through very quickly the history of library box and kind of how it got where it is now before we go into the future of it. It started with Pirate Box. Pirate Box was originally developed by Dr. David Darts at NYU as a sort of art project. It wasn't really seen at the time as a technology project even. It was mostly about anti-copyright stance. He developed it as an anonymous way to share copyrighted material. That really was the kind of art project that he put together. It was big. The original instantiation of Pirate Box required some fairly big hardware, lead acid battery, sealed up in a lunch box with a little external antennas and, you know, it was a pretty hefty little suitcase size sort of thing. Shortly after he rolled out the kind of initial code base for Pirate Box, I saw it and got the idea that if we could manipulate it a little bit, it would be really interesting in a library context to be able to share information out in the world, right? To take, again, to break off a piece of the web, to take a piece of the library out into the world with you and be able to share it directly with people. So in the spring of 2012, I forked Pirate Box and then came up with Library Box version one. Very, very, very prototype. It relied on a lot of customization through the terminal. You had to go in and really kind of hack at Linux for a little while to make it work. So it was a great proof of concept, but nobody was going to use it. Nobody was actually going to build one of these things because it required a fair amount of hackery, especially in the library world. There's just not that many people that were going to go through the trouble. So in fall of 2012, I changed the installation process and basically automated it to make it a little bit easier for people to build. This is when the project really started getting some traction and started taking off. And I saw kind of what it could be, where it could go after it started getting some attention in a variety of places out in the world. So then with the 2.0 release, I decided I really wanted to go big or go home. I wanted to have something that was really a reasonable piece of interesting technology that people could take out into the world. And that included the ability to have statistics on it, the actual easy installation, something that didn't require you to be able to tell that into Linux and run terminal commands. It needed to be responsive because obviously responsiveness is an important thing for web design. It needed to have easily customizable web pages so that if a library or other group wanted to customize the experience, they could do that. And I wanted to expand the hardware choices. At the time we were really only playing with kind of one little corner of the hardware world and I wanted to make it as international as possible because not all hardware is available in every country. So to make it kind of worldwide, I wanted to expand the hardware choices. So I needed money and when you have an idea and you don't have money, one of the options is Kickstarter. So I went to Kickstarter in June of 2013 and I launched a Kickstarter campaign at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago in the summer of 2013. I thought at the time that I needed a few thousand dollars, right? I was aiming very low. It was going to be a small project. It wasn't going to be a big deal. I was going to need three or four thousand dollars to kind of, you know, slide a developer to let them do some custom coding for me. No big deal. So I launched it and it was funded in six hours. In two days I was over double my goal. And then on about day three, this guy came in the picture. And if you don't know, that's Corey Dockdrow, famous sci-fi author, EFF Evangelist and generally all around famous on the internet guy. And he was at the American Library Association Conference. I had a chance to meet him and I had a chance to show him library box which led to Boing Boing doing a story about it and eventually Corey himself backing it. And it turns out when the largest blog in the world backs your Kickstarter project, well, you know, things happen. So over the course of the 30 days I ended up at a thousand percent of my goal and it showed me that there really was a like desire for this sort of technology that allowed people to run private, the private sharing of digital information to a small group of people out in the world. It's kind of a proof of interest. So that was delivered, that information, that particular code base. We worked on it post-kickstarter. We got the 2.0 out in the spring of 2014. And then we went to the next one, right? We started the next round of development because it can always be better. And this time around I ended up with a Knight Foundation prototype grant for the project, which is fantastic. And in this particular round we added a lot of things that I think are incredibly important for the kind of future of the project. We added localization and internationalization for language so that we're using, we have a translation engine that's doing internationalization. We expanded the hardware reach of the code base. We added a mini-DLNA server so you can actually use it as a multimedia server for your smart TVs and things like that. We added more responsiveness in the HTML and directory listings and then we added an automatic updater so that on the next rounds of updates we get some automatic updating going on. These are the languages, we're at 11 languages now and I know there are a lot of people in here that speak more than one language. So one of the things that I will talk to you about later is hey, if you would like to help me internationalize it yet further, that is something that I would love to do. So how's the project being used? This is really the interesting bit, right? Is how are people using the project? What are they doing with the hardware? How are they dealing with it? And I will say like any good tool it's being used in ways that people didn't mean for it to be used, right? So I developed it initially with the thought really for kind of libraries and education. It turns out there's a lot of other uses. The typical uses do tend to be in the education and library space. A lot of libraries are using it for outreach. They'll preload it with electronic books and movies, things like that and then go out into their community on their bookmobiles or other kind of mobile sharing sites and use library box to share things that way. It's being used internationally. This is the State Library of Queensland tweeting about their use. They're actually making library boxes and going out into incredibly rural areas of Australia. If you know anything about that part of Australia, it is rural beyond belief. And they are going out and delivering electronic things out into the world using library boxes. It's being used when libraries do author talks to deliver when an author agrees, obviously, to license their books for free distribution as Cory Doctorow does. When he goes to libraries, often libraries freely share his books, right, using a library box. It's being used in pop-up libraries. This is actually a small town in northern France where they built a little pop-up library next to a bus station and included a library box as a way to deliver information at point of need to people who are just standing around waiting on buses. It's being used by the Monterey Bay Aquarium to deliver scholarly papers out to remote Pacific islands, which I thought was really kind of a fascinating use of it, as a series of researchers that are going out into very, very, very tiny remote islands on the Pacific, but they need to be able to share scholarly research that they found with the people, with the researchers that are already there. They're using library boxes as a way to move that information back and forth. It's being used at Fort Knox, Kentucky, at the Army base, both as a tool to promote the library and as a tool to share library resources with people that are just coming in. There have been robots built with library box on them. This was a robot that was built by Steve Teary at the Detroit Public Library for a maker day that they had there at the library, and it just basically wandered the floor sharing books, which I thought was pretty fantastic. There is a librarian named Patrick Sweeney who has the book boat that sails the Pacific coast of California delivering books to small coastal communities who has a library box on the book boat to share information as he docks and can share things that way. It's being used by corporations. These are two of my favorite examples, Sparkfun Electronics and Open Hardware Electronics. Manufacturer in Boulder, just outside of Boulder, Colorado, does a lot of educational work, and they're preloading all their code samples and code bases onto library boxes and then taking them with them out into when they do middle school and high school educational events and then using that as the point of need sharing. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a middle school or high school Wi-Fi network understands why they have to have something to share the information with rather than relying on the internet inside a school because boy, howdy, that's terrible. This was one of the most surprising uses. IBM was using a library box at a conference to deliver sales materials to people, and I was trying to understand why IBM didn't have a better tool for this, but I'll take it. I'll allow it. The largest single user probably in the nonprofit space at this point for a library box is the American International Health Alliance nonprofit that does health education, mostly in Africa. They have distributed almost 50 library boxes in, let's see, Zambia, Ethiopia, and South America as part of their AIDS education in the area. So they preload library boxes with educational information about the prevention of AIDS, and then they take them out along with some nursing materials and things and then take them out into very remote communities in Africa to be able to share the information. People have mobile phones but may not have connectivity. This is an easy way to get them the information they need. My very favorite example of a library box use before we talk a little bit about the future of the box is an English teacher who contacted me from Shenzhen, China who wrote me an email that said, you know, I'm teaching English in this area where I have students from all sorts of, from a wide range of economic classes, and the students from households with, you know, not as much money can't afford a VPN to get through the Great Firewall to get the information that I am suggesting that they read. And it's blocked. The higher economic households have VPNs at home and they can just tunnel through the Great Firewall and it's no big deal. They just get whatever they want. And this disparity in the ability, literally just across economic lines to get information is, I think, at the heart of what I want library box to be doing. He would then obviously preload the stuff that he wants and take it into the class and everybody could get to it regardless of what their home internet situation was like. It's grown. The project keeps growing and I hope to continue this sort of growth. Since 2012, we've expanded fairly regularly throughout the world. This is last month's data that I have. Because it's an offline sharing device, it doesn't connect to anything. It's an island. I don't actually have a way to track because I can't poke it, right? It doesn't connect to anything. So I kind of rely on the community to tell me where library boxes, library boxes have been, you know, installed. So this is the community's report to me of where library boxes have been placed. We're up to about 33 states, 37 countries and six continents. And I have said this every time I've talked about library box. But if anyone knows anyone that goes to Antarctica regularly, I really want to get a library box on that seventh continent. So I will happily send them one for free if anybody knows someone who regularly goes back and forth to Antarctica. So I will happily, happily make that happen. And if any community knows somebody that regularly goes to Antarctica, it's probably this one. So tell me. What? Excellent. Fantastic. That's great. I really want to get one on that seventh continent. Okay. So I'm here as a Berkman fellow this year to work on this project, to push it forward, to make it more interesting, to make it do more, to make more people aware of it, all of these sorts of things, right? So what sorts of things am I looking to do over the next year? Put another way. What are the sorts of things that I would love this community to help me do over the next year? And there are a number of them, some of them technical and some of them not. The technical ones are things like I would love to find a reliable way for the devices to mesh network together. We have some very rough mesh code in the release right now where it does some automatic syncing, but it's not true kind of networked mesh. And that would be interesting to do small local networks with these devices. Encryption and security is another one. Because these devices are offline, they don't obviously connect to the internet. They're little islands. They can't use the traditional mechanisms that websites use to secure themselves. SSL is right out because you can't have trusted security certificates not talking to the rest of the world. So figuring out exactly how to make that happen is something that I would really like to do. I would love to have more secure connectivity on library boxes. Content packs on the non-technical side, I would really like to work with people who are interested in education and curricula and develop open access curricula for deployment on boxes so that we could put together a school in a box and give it out to people. It would be really fantastic. Custom hardware is something that I'm interested in. I'm very, very interested in open hardware and pushing kind of what open hardware can do. So I'm interested in kind of working on what the hardware choices are for our code base. And then of course, funding. Everybody needs funding all the time for all their projects. So that's something that I'm hoping to work on. The thing that really at the bottom, like all of the open access to information, easy sharing of information, all of this stuff is deeply held as a core thing for this project. The thing that interests me about the project, though, goes deeper than just that level. The thing that really interests me is the stuff that's kind of four years from now, five years from now. Everyone knows Gordon Moore's law about chips getting faster and cheaper over time. Kumi's law is one that's less known but has to do with the same timeframe. Every 18 months, a computer chip does the same amount of processing for half as much power. So the power curve goes down over the course of time. And when you combine the two, all of our electronic stuff gets better, faster, cheaper, and uses less power. So these boxes run on about 3.5 to 5 volts. They're incredibly power-efficient little things. They'll run on solar panels. But what happens when you're able to have these, right, even smaller, even cheaper, even more energy efficient, even more memory? As these sorts of things become smaller and easier for people to implement, I think that the concept of individuals having their library, if you'd like to co-op the word for it, that they bring into the world and share with you is an interesting one, because that's going to get easier and easier and easier and easier and easier for people to do. And it is going to increasingly confound copyright law, right? That gets easier and easier and easier for people to do and harder and harder and harder to track, because these are not connected to the net. And you can't just know that someone is sharing, right? You can't audio fingerprint the YouTube video and send a DMCA takedown because it's not online. Those things are very, very interesting. As we move into the so-called Internet of Things, just a phrase that drives me crazy, but as we move in that direction, everything in the world having an IP address, I'm really interested in people controlling that and having the devices on open hardware and open source software that control and allow those things to happen rather than relying on the corporate overlords to provide it to us. So the long game is making things that make it easier for people to control their own information as a result of being easier to use and cheaper. That's the long game for this project. So that's it. That's Library Box. We'll have a lot of time for questions. And I'm looking forward to it. That's Library Box. And that's me if you want to contact me afterwards if you have to run for something. We'll have a lot of time for the questions. So thanks, guys. Let's have a discussion. Oh, I think that first hand was over there, and then Nathan. On the grounds, you shouldn't be able to see me. My name is Mary Gray, my fellow this year. This looks so fascinating. And I think the thing that caught me was, at the end, when you're imagining, you know, the incredible shrinkage, is that necessary to the vision? And I think about some of the critiques of kind of positioning that as a law with a big L. What have you thought through what you get out of keeping it at this really fantastic portability and where you would go with that? Yeah, that's a great question. I do think that shrinkage, I do think that Moore and Kumi are fairly inevitable. I mean, I know that there are physical limits, electrons only want to be so close together, and I know all that stuff. But I don't think that the march of those two laws is going to slow anytime in five, ten years even, probably. These are great. Like you said, these are, I mean, you know, these are fantastic little devices. They easily fit in a pocket. I think one of the more interesting things that might come from the march of, at least Kumi's law is, so you've got these two separate pieces of hardware. This larger one is heavier and has a 10,000 mAh battery in it. This one is much smaller, just a little over the size of a credit card and has, I think, a 2200 mAh battery in it. This runs for about five or six hours. This runs for about three days. And if they got more and more energy efficient, I think that's better for remote uses, right? So the more energy efficient we can make them, I think that's a win for everyone. I would love to be able to have something that was, you know, half this size that ran on, you know, a solar panel that big. Like that would be fantastic if we could get that level of power going. So, I think Nathan was next. I know one of the ways you contrast library box with pirate boxes, that library boxes read only. Yeah. And pirate box, you know, you can upload and share. Sure. At the same time, it seems like libraries are becoming more of a commons for sharing and creating and remixing. So, I know why you've done it in sort of V1, V2. Is there a rewrite future for library box? Yeah, I definitely think that there is. I mean, I think that you're completely right that the future of libraries is the collection of information from their communities. I mean, the history of libraries is the collection of information from their communities as well. We've kind of lost that in the midst of the, well, commercial copyright world. So, long-term, I definitely think so. Using one of these as a story box where you go out into the world and you collect your patrons' stories, photographs, those sorts of things, I think is a really powerful use for this sort of tech. The reason initially that I went with the no uploading as an interface choice was purely to make libraries comfortable with it. It's way easier to sell it, not sell it, but to make it available for their use if they are not worried about it. So, it was marketing more than, more than obviously tech. There are a few other differences at this point. We've, we support each other. Pirate Box and library box support each other. We've run our code bases back and forth a couple of times at this point where the installation process that we did for the V2 went into the Pirate Box core code. So, we've, we work together well. I can see us working together more. Yeah, up here. Sure. What sort of capacities do you have now in terms of memory storage and so forth? Yeah. Second is, well, actually I'll just do two. Make it shorter. Second is, is there anything about this that couldn't possibly be fundamentally implemented as a cell phone app on a WAP, you know, access point enabled cell phone? Yeah, great, great questions. So, for my bent on the technology, right, the limitation for drive storage is the USB that you throw at it? So, yeah. So, you can, you can do a number. I mean, to actually get into it, you can do a number of things. If you're doing things kind of deeper into the, the Linux part of it, which is OpenWRT and the Linux underbelly that we use, you can telnet or SSHN and, you know, just go to town. If you want to customize the look or the feel of the UI, that's all on the USB key, as well as all of the shared files. So, if you just want to put a new book on it, all you have to do is turn it off, pull the USB, throw it in your computer, load stuff, put it back in, turn it on. Same with customizing the website that it delivers you, anything like that. All of that is on the USB. What was the second, again? Second question? Oh, smart phones, smart phone use. Yes, as a matter of fact, PirateBox has an Android app that does, that does act as effectively as a PirateBox. It is entirely possible that we would eventually go that way. There are two reasons that we haven't. One is cost. So, let me see. I think this is the cheapest one I've got up here. So, this box is about $22. Right? Like, it's hard to beat for an access point that you can put in your pocket and you can carry around with you. Even with smart phone prices going through the floor, I think it's going to be a little while before we hit $22 for the ability to do this sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think that's, a lot of the communities that libraries serve and a lot of the places where the education market is may not have the sort of smart phone that can run apps. Right? And that's a worry. Eventually, totally. I mean, we're going that direction, right? Everybody's going to have a smart phone at some point. Yeah, sir. Adrian Grapper. Many months ago, we had a talk here like this, like yours from a person talking about the importance of owning your router. Yeah, sure. You talk in, you mentioned the ability to have automatic upgrades, as well as was brought up, the right capability. Yeah. At what point does the library box have to merge with your router for any of these reasons? In other words, will these be separate things or are they invariable going to have to merge in terms of owned hardware, sovereign hardware? I see the kind of the roles of the kind of traditional Wi-Fi router and the roles of the library box different. Obviously, this is a router. That's what it does. That's what the hardware is built to do. But I think it is, from my perspective, philosophically important that this never be on the Internet. Like the part of the strength of the project is that this, none of these boxes connect to the broader web. And that, in some ways, is a problem because we can't tell where they're being used, right? And I can't push an update to them. But I can give, when I said automatic updates, what I meant was you put a file on the thing, you put it in and you turn it on and it works. It updates itself. Keeping it air-gapped from the real Internet, I think is part of the strength of the tech. And if you build it into the router, obviously, that's all bets are off. So I think that having it as a separate thing philosophically is an important piece. So you say it's air-gapped, but it's connecting to the machines that will connect to the Internet. It could. Totally true. I think that from the use cases you're describing, in some cases it's going to be operating in a hostile environment where this device might be gathering the details of what media people are accessing and then that's a very attractive target. Yes. You're talking about encryption. How much have you engineered for that use case? That is one of the things I want to do this year, is over-engineer the safety of the network traffic that's passing through it as devices connect. As I mentioned very briefly, the traditional way of doing it on the web just doesn't work, right? You can't have an SSL cert. And another one there might be the state on the box. What kind of logging is it doing or not doing? Yes, that's a fine point. Because this was built with the initial code base and the initial concept was all built with libraries in mind, it's not doing any logging, no MAC tracking, none of that. It keeps statistics of links clicked, but there's no IP and no MACs related to any of that that's ever on the box. So yeah, privacy is key. When I showed the map, it would seem that most of the users are in the US or Europe. So I'm wondering whether this is because the libraries can afford it more there, or is it the reports are more abandoned from this very year, or is it like a personal network that is affecting this? I think it's a combination of a number of things. Obviously, it's easier for me to evangelize in the US. It's easier for me to go to national conferences and I talk about this. So the fact that the user base is larger in the US I think has a lot to do with the fact that more people have heard of it. It's just simple marketing. Europe was interesting for reasons that I am not entirely clear on. One of the largest initial groups to latch onto the project was in France. And from there, it spread fairly quickly. One of the lead developers for the project is in Germany as well, and that helps in kind of getting information in Europe. So that may explain it, but that's a fine thing. I would love to know more. I mean, that obviously is something else I could probably do while I'm here is work on kind of how it's been distributed and why the kind of social net that has done it is something that's really interesting to me. Yes, sir. A couple questions about content. Sure. How much can you put on the box? Yeah. And I would think that reading from a mobile application would be really ideal for this. So do you have a way of optimizing the content for reading on mobile devices as opposed to browsers and other things? Sure. So the only limit for storage is the USB that you connect to it. So if you may not be able to see very clearly, but you can come up and take a look at the devices afterwards. There's a little USB, a little thumb drive. And the thumb drive is your hard drive. So if you connect a 16 gig thumb drive, you've got 16 gigs of storage. If you connect a 128, you've got 128 gigs. If you connect an external hard drive and you plug it in and you've got a four terabyte raid, you've got four terabytes of storage. It's entirely dependent upon the external storage for that. We have, again, kind of philosophically intentionally not optimized for any particular kind of content. That is intentional. It is up to the client that connects to be able to read the content in question. So if you throw an MP4 at a phone that doesn't have an MP4 decryption program, if it can't read the codec, then it can't read the file. But that also means that we can serve anything. So you want to serve huge data sets to people? Fine, throw them on here and give them something that can read huge data sets and they can pull it off. Totally agnostic as to the digital thing that you want to share. It also means that we can stay within web standards for the sharing, which means that any browser can access it. So we've had discussions with people about optimizing with an app, having an iOS or an Android app that connected directly to the box and was the interface for getting content off. But again, that walls you, it doesn't free you. So we want to make it as accessible as possible. That just makes me wonder. There's some new stuff that's coming out with Wi-Fi authentication that might be interesting to do that sort of automated login. There's a handful of newer Wi-Fi things that I would love to look into. There's a corporate Wi-Fi thing that I looked at very briefly that does end-to-end encryption without using SSL. That one didn't go very far, but I hope to find something that does because it would be ideal. That's what I want for it to be end-to-end encrypted on every device. Yeah, in the back. I've been working on one laptop for child school server for many years. It's kind of a larger version of this. Yeah. First the good news. When I worked in Madagascar in Ghana, people prefer this to the Internet. Yeah. And the so-called whites can't because they're addicted to Google and they're addicted to their smartphones. So there's a limited window because it's faster. The content is closer. And it's a cultural divide. We cannot resist grabbing Google in our pocket. We just can't. We're addicted to it. So there's a kind of a limited time to deploy these things, whether it's 10 years or whatever. And my perspective, so this is pessimist, so you're supposed to be the optimist, is that it's not going to work unless we have an incredibly powerful brand name like Wikipedia or United Nations or Pick Your Favorite Private Public, whatever. Because the costs to deploy are much larger than the cost of the hardware. We all have $10 units, $100 units. I consider that completely irrelevant. The deployment costs are the real cost. And so unless we find a way to become Henry Ford, this will remain a Tinkerer's game. An interesting Tinkerer's game. Yeah. I don't disagree. I would love to become Henry Ford. Well, okay. Part of Henry Ford. Hi, I'm Ellery. Just going off of that, can you talk about how, how do I get it if I live in Zambia and I don't know you or me or any of us? I mean, I think just a lot of these tools, they're really cool and can be useful in context with low connectivity, how do you get it if you don't have a credit card, if ordering something online is not an option and you're not connected to these kind of networks. And then how do you know how to use it? The last mile problem is a real one and especially for physical goods. Part of the goal of the project has been to make it as easy as possible to install, to build. So we have intentionally tried to support international versions of all of the hardware. So you can go to a local electronics store in much of the world. I won't say all of the world because I don't know all of the world. But much of the world, you can go into a local electronics store and buy whatever the local version of this hardware is. Because TP-Link, these are all TP-Link routers, well, okay, three of them are TP-Link routers, they're a global company. You can buy some version of this that we support almost everywhere. Now, if you're in a remote area that doesn't have an electronics store, obviously that's a problem. As far as building it, you do need initial access to be able to build it. So the implementation can't take place in a vacuum. And honestly, I don't have a solution for how do you build it in the middle of nowhere. We can slowly start answering that question maybe through better methodologies for installing it from offline. But we're not there yet. But we have tried to make sure that we support some version of hardware that is available, again on every continent in most countries. Certainly anywhere that anyone has contacted me and said, I haven't been able to find the MR-3020. Our local version is the WR-173. Okay, well, we'll now build it for the WR-173. So we've tried to hit when people ask. But, yeah, it's a problem. Yeah. Have you talked to FabLab communities at all to kind of following off of that? Could you make a library box that makes other library boxes, essentially? The plans on it, the information you need. Maybe two USB ports so that you can copy over the code. You can build a box from a box, yes. That's totally doable and legit and works and is fairly easily done. So, yes, once you have one, you can have many. The FabLab communities are one of my favorite communities in the whole world. I absolutely love, love, love all things maker, makerspace, fabbing. Working with SparkFun on a couple of projects has produced me two wide swads of that community. And, yes, I would adore working with them more, especially on the open hardware front to try to free, I mean, these are, you know, open source code, but the hardware on this particular box is not open, which bothers me and I would like to continue to work with communities to make it more so. To riff off of the, I'm Willow, hello everyone. To riff off of the idea of FabLabs and data that you brought up earlier in openness, I do a fair amount of hackathons in places with low connectivity and being able to walk in with the libraries and the data would be dreamy because the power is never reliable and the connectivity is never reliable and taking enough with me to be able to leave them would be great. Well, that is exactly the sort of use case that I think this particular project shines with. That is almost exactly SparkFun's use case. They have pre-built all their libraries and everything into a box and they just take it with them and the box costs $40. They just leave it with the school. Yeah. To follow up on that question, wouldn't it make sense for all of us to have this software on our laptops? Well, your laptop can't run off a solar panel typically and probably isn't going to be quite that size. Oh, sure, sure, sure. There are really cheap laptops so if you have a $50 laptop, sure you can leave it behind. The goal of this is to try to push the price down to the point. One of the goals is to try to make it absolutely I want these things in cereal box hardware. I want it to be as cheap as humanly possible to roll out. To give you so I did I've talked a couple of times about solar panels I brought one just to these boxes will run if you're in full sun on a solar panel this size so it doesn't take a lot of space if you're running it in a remote area. So I think with a lot of these questions you're hearing about can it be an app can it be on my laptop. I've rolled my own version of this 20 times in the last 10 years and I think everyone should maybe in some ways I think you're stuck on the thing of the box versus the thing of the light box and that like maybe it's better if people say oh I've set up a web server on my land and you can it's like oh I put up a library box and maybe it has nothing to do with your software or hardware it's just it's a now a verb I library boxed it I would love to be a verb that'd be awesome. Henry Ford and a verb. It's a concept that the idea that you don't need the internet you have the right to share freely licensed content and that this is something you should do as a community act or a resistant act or something like that's a bigger gift to the state of the world than like selling your box. Yes, totally. Yeah, no, that's well said. Thank you. I was sort of impressed by the picture you put on your presentation showing a sort of bookshelf that was half empty with just a little library box. I was reminded of the own efforts we've been having in my department at University of Geneva of downsizing some of our libraries because they were saying you have everything online you have everything digitized anyway so I was wondering do you have any policy standpoints regarding the issue of the digital dark age the idea that every data is now digital and we'll have big we're going to have trouble getting back to our own history and getting back to our data like 50 years from now. I definitely, I mean obviously there are lots of libraries that have thought about that there's probably librarians in the room that are more qualified to talk about that than me honestly. I do think that one of the things again kind of philosophically that makes me continue to be interested in this project and projects like it is the idea that it is possible for people to easily and cheaply be their own archive that their information can easily be kept and shared by themselves and I think that again concept is fairly powerful once you start seeing it in the world. Got through all the questions? One more? Sure. Sort of a semi-comment the image that just came to me I recall I think it started around 10 years ago where you'd see people especially kind of geeky people at geeky events who would have their USB thumb drive hanging around their neck with all of their vital stuff. This sort of strikes me as like a USB thumb drive that broadcasts. Yeah. But I think that the question raised here is really when you look ahead I mean with the technology changing as rapidly as it is the notion that you can rely on archiving in these forms starts to get a little daisy doesn't it down the road? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean if no data format is immutable or you know immune from bit rot or any number of other you know problems digital information storage over time both in codec and in just again physical storage I mean physically storing digital things is hard if what you want is absolute bit for bit copies. Yeah I do not think this is a magic archive box. That is just not what this is and this really is more about sharing than archival but as a potential point as I said to Nathan's question a little earlier the potential point for using it as a collection device and then moving it into the archival sort of a more stable archival form I think is a fairly interesting one this could be the shuttle craft for the mothership right so thanks Gary. Just a tiny push back on the laptop question one of the things that we're playing with in our kind of one laptop per child the server world is well not officially kind of an underground hack of the old old PC laptops to turn them into something like this because there's about three million of these littered around the world so the cost is zero literally zero because they're being pushed out of schools and they're easy to find so why pay anything when it's completely free so you have a screen as well and maybe the laptop is actually a better form factor because if you're looking at cultural adoption you're not demanding someone have any fancy smartphone low-end smartphone anything and as one of the gentlemen over here I forget said you have an AP you're spreading the knowledge through the little village and do you consider that form factor possible as well? Yeah, yeah no I mean the OLPC project in general is a great one the particular reuse of it I mean I it is a fantastic idea to reuse old hardware in this way that is really yes I mean both environmentally friendly and it's just an awesome use of old hardware I mean we again like my particular project hasn't gone that route because we don't have access to three million free laptops you got it I will happily talk to you about using them but yeah no I the form factor again kind of philosophically form factor doesn't matter at all it's more about the kind of re-conceptualizing the way that we share things being able to do it very very very cheaply in areas with no infrastructure honestly I think that's an important re-conceptualization of the way we share digital things. So I think we have time for one more question if anyone with one more? I didn't even look at what time it was so alright so last one I didn't want to take the mic if somebody else had something to say well I was I was going to say and I don't know this is probably obvious to most people in the room but this is like such a lovely example of values and design so you really embedded of philosophical several philosophical positions in your in your build and I missed the very beginning of your talk so I'm not sure if you laid out how the philosophical principles that are there and I did want to introduce at one point you used the word we're kind of agnostic to what the data is those places where there is very much a philosophical position that means you can't necessarily make claims to agnosticism and if you if you maybe agree or disagree with that statement but it just does seem like such an interesting example for people like me who would say oh actually your values are absolutely baked into what you're doing this is like par excellence so what we're talking about when we say that. Yeah I absolutely agree I mean the I am by training a librarian I have spent time as a librarian over the last decade it is fairly clear to anyone that knows librarians and libraries that there is a the philosophical basis of it is pretty firmly rooted in the library world open and free access to information everywhere all the time agnosticism about what people are reading is a core library value right we don't care what you read as long as you're reading we don't even want to know what you read we just want you to read we don't care so all of those sorts of library values I think are are part of the are part of the underbelly of this project at least I hope they are I want them to be and it makes me really happy that you think they are because that is I think a piece of what I want to put out with the project is those positions it is one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves from all of the other potential projects right there are other ways to do this as again I keep relating back to Nathan he said people have rolled their own on this sort of thing a lot there are other ways you can do this but we have a particular bent and we want a particular thing out of the project and I'm willing to I'm willing to make the decisions that make it go the way we want so thank you alright thank you guys I'll put mine there's me again if you want to get in touch I would love to hear from anyone and everyone so thank you so much and if you want to come up and look at stuff whatever come on up