http://apiap.org
are cybercafes the technical institutes of tomarro ?
of today ?
apparently running a cybercafe in the developing world
isn't an especially lucrative business yet. in india the
average per hour rate for access is 15 rupees. ~ 27 cents.
education however is a big market. all the way down the
social stratosphere people are looking to gain technology
skills to help them rise out of poverty.
cybercafes have become very prevalent , even in very
impoverished areas.
if a concerted effort was made to produce video training materials
in the urban centers where there are a wealth of very educated and
technicaly trained people. this content could form the lecture base
to a very broad distributed educational system available wherever
cybercafes are.
to be maximally effective this should be developed into a program
in which a very large and explicit part of passing thru the system
was mentoring students younger in the program.
if structured correctly, this kind of thing could scale very largely
with minimal capital contribution, and would create tribes / clans
of people with experience working together.
this could also be tied to a system like mechanical turk , elance or
rentacoder which provides jobs that can be executed via the internet
such that an ecology is created in which the internet connection the
cafe operators bring in to a community are used both to deliver jobs
and the training necessary to perform them.
or more succinctly:
for those able to speak its language
the internet connection becomes a hose which spews money
think of it as capital irrigation
