Intermittent networking - JohnTigue/idots GitHub Wiki

Internet and/or Internot

GoogleCrisisResponse (@GoogleCR) on twitter:

Hongyi Hu: Humanitarian design principles to live by: Usable, Inexpensive, Robust, Portable #iccmnyc

As the 2014 Ebola Outbreak in West Africa has demonstrated, tools need to work in contexts without pervasive Internet connectivity. Considering future outbreaks, West Africa is certainly not the only place where one cannot assume a network connection to global Web servers.

Further an imagined context does not need to be a pandemic outbreak. It could be a much more localize event. How do we enable a future lone John Snow? For up-country contexts, how does such a person get the job done where the network is nothing more than, say, some OPLC laptops connected via USB sticks moving over a sneakernet serving as the long haul network?

That can be done rather easily with nothing more exotic than modern Web browsers. Consider OpenEpi, which along with EbolaMapper-type mapping visualization tools could be pretty powerful yet not require a Web server.

The critical issue is that the low-connectivity design goal has to followed from the beginning. That is certainly not how most tools on the Web work. Yet if the working in low-connectivity is a design goal, then with a properly defined data APIs the same visualization tools can serve one machine alone in the jungle or millions of clients hitting a Web site.