My name is Lloyd Bedik. I am a first year US Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Morocco. Peace Corps’ Morocco is focused on Youth Development. Specifically, we work at a local youth centers funded by the Moroccan Ministry of Youth and Sport as teachers in a wide range of subjects, mentors, camp facilitators plus whole range of youth focused activities such as teaching employment skills, gender rolls and volunteerism to name a few. The unique aspect of our work is there are no job assignments, rather each volunteer is assigned to a youth center and it is there responsibility to work with the youth at the center to identify their needs in order to develop activities/projects to address those needs.
When I arrived at my youth center I found a room with ten brand unused new computers without any internet connection, programs or applications that would have made them useful to the potential users. Further, there was no budget for addressing this problem. Talking to other volunteers I further learned this problem was not uncommon at other Youth Centers in Morocco. To those of us interested in using technology to assist young people gain certain skills that might assist them to succeed in school and life this appeared to be a real problem that needed to be addressed.
While perhaps the best solution to our situation was to provide an opportunity for young people to access information on the web via an internet connection we quickly learned this was not a practical solution. There just was no budgets or funds for purchasing software, managing the computers or maintaining an internet connection at many of the Youth Centers. Also many of the computers are older requiring additional investment to set up a hard wire or wireless network. In many youth centers there is no expertise, professional or hobby to facilitate the creation of a functioning useful system.
Wanting to address these problems I and now working with some other volunteers started to think of a more practical alternative perhaps focusing on the installation of educational and productivity software that could be used without a local network or internet connection.
In response to this idea we have developed a project which we modestly call the Moroccan Applied Technology Initiative (MATI) with the goal off adding free or open source software to these offline computers. The software would allow the users to do research, access information, develop computer skills and even enjoy some entertainment normally available with an internet connection.
We have looked at other efforts in this area. The Rachel Project at http://worldpossible.org/rachel/ and the Ubermix program available from kidsoncomputers.org and concluded that we needed a more comprehensive approach. One that that would not only offer a broad range of software but would include programs in Arabic and French, the two primary languages in Morocco,
Our initial idea was to assemble the software package in such a way that it could loaded on to a portable hard drive or similar device in a format that would allow anyone, regardless of their level of computer skills, interested in installing the software on the computers at their location. Plug and Play so to speak.
However, as the project developed it became obvious the size of the installation file, over 300 GB necessitated a more creative and professional approach in order to achieve our ultimate, “plug and play installation” goal. Not being a computer person, in fact my work on this project has been more of trial and error rather than professional, I have no idea what to do to reach our ultimate goal of reducing the program package to a size that could be installed in a reasonable amount of time (currently it take about 3 to 4 hours to upload all the programs) while at the same time programming our package of software in a format that would allow anyone to insert a USB device into the computer and by “pressing one button” install the entire package.
In reviewing your program, it appears that you offer a solution to our problem if it were possible to take one of your portable app USB’s and upload the entire package to a computer. And then have the programs or most of the programs work without an internet connection.
I would welcome an opportunity to open a dialogue with someone about our Peace Corps project. Can I get an email address to send our documentation detailing our problem and current solution?
Any consideration or comments on our needs or our initiative in general would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Lloyd (Ali) Bedik
Lloyd@Bedik.com
Tel: 0648035903
Peace Corps Volunteer
Morocco
2015-2017
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Your idea of keeping all applications (programs) on a USB memory stick will work.Without being either expert or geek, and happy to have my suggestion demolished, I would try for Windows 7 versions of everything. It is widespread, most Windows 7 versions of software work happily on Windows 8, 8.1 and 10.
You talk of uploading the apps to a computer -- "Pressing one button to install the entire package. . You might do that. You can certainly copy the whole of the memory stick to the hard drive and everything works off the hard drive.
Remember, however, that you can also run applications directly off the memory stick. If you keep the programs on the memory stick you can take advantage of any internet cafés you come across. The programs on the memory stick will auto-update automatically over the internet (it's an option you can disable) and you can take the memory stick back to base with the latest versions. If you keep the programs *and* data on the memory stick you can do your own work on the computers back at base, on any laptop of PC you can borrow.
I have Libre Office on my memory stick and I love it because it is free, it reads and saves in the same format as Microsoft Office, it has a word processor, spread sheet, presentation designer/presenter, database, charts and diagrams, maths formulae and everything a student of any level might need and it is advertisement free and in the public domain. It's feature list may not overlap MS Office 100%, (Actually, I have never found any gaps, personally, but I don't promise) but it is at least as wide as Microsoft's.
Good luck.
John van Someren