Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions

In collaboration with the Papa Legaba camp, TIER (@kheimerl and @shaddih and working with Tapan Parikh and Coye Cheshire) are going to be testing some of our ideas about community owned and operated networks (see our writeup on small-scale GSM networks for developing regions here) at Burning Man this late August.

 Though we at TIER are all resting (or writing disserations) over this summer period, our friends at Mobile Active (MA) have recently psoted a writeup of a trip TIER took to MA a month ago. We demonstrated OpenBTS and the Village Base Station, showed a number of potential GSM attacks on handsets, and made a call through a VSAT link. It was a great time. 
Here's their blog post: http://www.mobileactive.org/village-base-station-project

I've been thinking about crowdsourcing's application to development for a while now. Samasource is the most popular such system, but others exist (MobiWorks being the one I've interacted with the most). I've always had core issues with these systems, which have led to some epic debates (primarily with Prayag Narula of MobiWorks) in the iSchool's development seminar. My basic issues (that I can't take credit for) are simple:
 

 As some of you may know, the MetaMouse project has been ongoing at Berkeley for a number of years now. The short version is that it automatically converts any single-user Windows XP program into a multi-user, cooperative application. MetaMouse is primarily targeted at educational games in areas with limited computer hardware.

 As some of you may know, we've been working on a GSM Base Station (BTS) project here in TIER for a few months. This project is known as the Village Base Station (a.k.a. the "one GSM base station per approximately 500 people" project) and detailed in a white paper we published at NSDR a few months ago. 
 

 We're having the ICTD Social at B100 Blum Hall, UC Berkeley Campus at 5PM following the 4PM talk by David Green at the same location. 
If you're around, please come and say hi!

Interested in making this website a little better looking? Have some design skills you want to use to make TIER a better place? There's $233 dollars in it for you!
We've set up a 99designs Logo design contest here. Feel free to make designs, or just provide feedback on what you think would make a good TIER logo in the comments below. 

Why Hackers could, and should, be interested in ICTD. -kurtis

Computing in the developing world is a ramshackle affair. Various software packages are mixed together on ancient machines running unpatched versions of Windows 95 or XP. Power and network connectivity are erratic. Multiple users sharing one computer is the norm. User experience varies from expert to complete unfamiliarity, and the native language of many users is so obscure that even Google has no database for it.