New Readers/Offline/Grants
This page is a place to collate and analyze the results and feedback from different grants related to Offline over the year. It's intended to be an evolving document to look at the grants together. It will not replace anything in the grants portal in terms of how grantees should engage with the Community Resources team.
The columns here come from the ecosystem at Offline Projects/About Offline.
| Methods | Lessons | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grant | Year | Location(s) | Content | Storage | Reader | Distribution | Content | Storage | Reader | Distribution |
| Distribute WikiReaders to Schools | 2013 | Mexico, South Africa, India | All of es.wiki or en.wiki | WikiReader | Lots of technical issues with maintaining charge.
Device has been deprecated. |
Students loved the devices and learned a lot.
Customs fees were very expensive, could pursue a partnership to waivee those fees. | ||||
| Kiwix and mobile wifi hotspot in South Africa | 2014 | South Africa | Full en.wiki, TED talks, Project Gutenberg | ZIM | Kiwix Raspberry Pi (?) | UNKNOWN | School has steel walls, so wifi device was not effective at getting signal through. School administrators were concerned about a secure location. | |||
| Offline Wiktionary Roll-out Pilot in Ghana | 2015 | Ghana | Wiktionary (en). Intent to use Wikipedia but ZIM files were too large. | ZIM | Kiwix on laptop computers in school lab | Teaching teachers. | Wiktionary is useful, but less so than a full encyclopedia. | Storage space for all of Wikipedia was not possible as files were too big. | Need a training "toolkit" for teachers. | |
| Empowering African Schools with Kiwix | 2016 | Senegal (rural) | UNKNOWN | ZIM | Kiwix on flash drives, installed to school computers.
Kiwix on Raspberry Pi |
Workshops and demonstrations, allowing people to copy Kiwix to their computers. | Raspberry pi requires that students have personal devices and use them regularly.
Flash drives or hard drives work better for installing to lab computers, but many computers do not have sufficient space to copy. Once people see the value, they might make space on their computer, but it is hard for them to delete things when they don't have much internet access/ease to get them back. |
Teaching and communication must be done in local languages. Workshops and demonstrations were successful and viral. | ||
| Offline Wikipedia outreach in Mongolia | 2017 | Mongolia (IN PROGRESS) | en.wiki and mongolian.wiki | Wikipedia DVDs, installed on home computers. Include some additional content. | Training Managers teach educators to guide students through usage, application, and creation of content. | Students are initially excited, but interest wanes. | ||||
| Dominican Republic | 2017 | Dominican Republic | Wikimed in English, Spanish, French, and Haitian Creole | ZIM | Internet in a Box (using Kiwix with different UI) | Mostly through "pasantes" - doctors who have recently finished medical school and are completing rural rotations. | Would like updates at least annually. Would like more locally specific and practical content. Creole and Spanish content would also be good. Suggest adding other non-Wikipedia sources.
Translations on the fly (or possibly moving btw languages) could be good. Suggestion to include a feedback mechanism. |
UI is crowded, especially on older devices. Search and disconnect functions are difficult to use. Interface should be mobile-optimized. A shared search and browse for all content (rather than separated by project).
Reliance on power is problematic. Suggest solar or battery options. Name should be changed to work in other languages. |
Recommend working with Ministry of Health or Universities. MOH already visits and performs tasks, and could undertake updating content. | |