[More in my series about cyber-nomads, entitled “I’m a Turtle”]
Wayne Hodgins runs a great blog Off Course-On Target – he is the e-learning guru at Autodesk, just north of here. And is involved in many important initiatives related to online learning. And Wayne travels. A lot.
In a recent post (11 May 2007), Online vs. Offline, he discusses the current trend toward web-based “applications” (such as Google Docs), but at the same time raises the question of whether these applications can thrive when individuals do not have “always-on” or even very good Internet connectivity.
Here’s what I wrote in response to Wayne’s article (with slight paraphrasing because you already have more background because you read my blog)…
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| The Internet/computer room – Chonor House – Dharamsala, India |
If you travel to even-farther-removed places [than the US and EU], the connectivity issue becomes really critical. When I’m in Northern India – Dharamsala H.P. – we used to always use Internet cafes. Up to about 12 months ago you had to use their computers – you couldn’t plug your computer into their router unless you could convince the proprietor that it was safe – or that it could even be done. Then they got wise and now we plug in directly – paying the same fee as if we were using their computers, but we’re wired right up. Back then they had 10 to 15 computers sharing one DSL line (128k bi-directional is pretty typical for 10 people to be sharing). Now bandwidth is a bit better, but still limited. I work alongside another org that has community mesh wi-fi available in the same town, with broadband uplinks to the Internet, and I can use that if I arrange it in advance and pay for the bytes I transfer, but I have to really do it at night when traffic is low, which entails a walk down a steep hill in the dark to another hotel where they have a wi-fi access point to the mesh, in the lobby, and then I sit in the lobby and get decent connectivity – generally about 512k bidirectional all to myself.
But there are other problems – the hotel that I stay in (up the hill from the wi-fi) locks its doors at 10pm, so I have to get back before I’m locked out. One night in March I stood in the cold for 15 minutes working to “pick” the latch, and I would have gotten in soon, but luckily the night watchman spotted me and let me in – otherwise I would have been sleeping on the street with the dogs and cows. And the cabs stop running at 9pm, so you gotta walk after that. Ah the dangers of using wi-fi!
Oh, sorry, Wayne’s question was “web-based applications?” No way could we depend on them for our working groups that span the globe.
That’s why I took to offline blogging. I settled on Ecto for that, after looking at several different packages. I write my blog posts, compose and format them, even insert photos, all offline and then when I have a connection I -click- the button once and upload everything. This is an absolute necessity, given the locations I’ve been frequenting.
And although we do use Google Docs now for working groups in the US and EU, we don’t try to use it when anyone’s in Africa or South Asia because their connectivity just isn’t broad enough for it to work. We even use “Postmanet” (drop it in the mail or send with a friend who’s going there) to send our multi-hundred-MB video files back and forth rather than try to transfer them electronically. Last time I was in Delhi, I had a 250GB USB drive onto which I transfused the contents of three video cameras (HDD cameras) and one person’s laptop drive…and brought everything home for processing. And I burned a bunch of data onto DVDs as well.
Universal connectivity is still a ways off.
-posted with ecto
There is one solution (actually, a representative of a class of solutions) that you should take a look at: Kerika (www.kerika.com) which operates as a hybrid P2P network. All your data are always stored locally on your computer, and the computers of your team mates, so you can work offline when you need to and synch up later with your buddies when you get a chance to go online.
Because Kerika uses a storage server that kicks in automatically when it detects that your team mates are offline, you don’t have to worry about being online at the same time as them. And if you yourself are offline, Kerika simply buffers up the updates you made locally until you get a chance to go online again.
More importantly, you can communicate your ideas in a visual form, by literally sketching out your project, process or strategy and then adding your content to these digital pages. This is particularly important when you need to make sure everyone is always “on the same page” with respect to strategy and process, and this is something that is really hard to do well with email, whether you are talking about traditional email clients like Outlook or Web 2.0 ones like Gmail.
Two other points I would make:
– When people are frequently offline, you need a distributed document management system, not a centralized checkout/checkin system like you get with hosted services. Kerika provides that in a seamless way.
– A system like Kerika gives you far greater privacy than you can ever hope to get from any hosted provider, Google or anyone else. You can set up your private network, at no extra cost and in just a couple of minutes, so that your project materials stay within a ring of trust consisting of your computer, your team mates’ computers, and your private server.
Take a look at this demo: http://www.kerika.com/demo_intro.html. It’s just a couple of minutes long, but I think you will be amazed by what’s possible!
We are offering Kerika free to the academic community, and I would be open to offering it free to selected non-profits like ours. (It is easy for us to offer it free to everyone in the academic community by just looking for a “.edu” email address, but since anyone can get a “.org” email address we want to deal with that on a case-by-case basis.)