DIYNGO

= Do It Yourself Non Governmental Organisation (or DIYNGO, pronounced Dingo), championing the use of renewable energy for Information Communication Technologies

URL = http://diyngo.org/

Description

"DIYNGO is a Non Governmental Organisation championing the use of renewable energy for Information Communication Technologies to enable education, healthcare and governance in Developing Countries."

Aims:

1. utilise inexpensive, readily available technologies which can hopefully be sourced locally

2. share knowledge concerning the construction of the technologies

3. operate as a charity-based NGO in 'the field' (i.e. impoverished communities in Developing or, indeed, Industrialised nations).

"Taking a very broad view of ICTs the project will demonstrate how it is possible to combine multiple modalities to particularly allow access to ICTs in Developing Countries. Example linkages to be established include sms, chat, video, audio, speech to text, email, podcasts, radio casts and print-based systems. Utilising client/server architectures content can then be authoured across modalities independently of transmission methods and platforms. Finally, a visualisation of the network is used as a front end to aid accessibility and ease-of-use."

In other words, collaborative means will be used to develop and exchange educational, governance and healthcare provision across borders through the utilisation of 'glocalised' appropriate technologies, be they on or off-grid.

Please note that currently the educational aspect of DIYNGO can be found at thirdspace.mobi

Status Update 2008

Tim Barker:

"The mission of DIYNGO is to take renewable energy powered information communications technologies to the people who really need them. This mostly includes people in Developing Countries but will also include any area of economic deprivation. Currently we have a prototype home made wind turbine and solar array which are used to power an Asus Eee PC. The Asus is a low powered Linux netbook ideally suited for work in the field. We are now focussing on more mobile devices which will ultimately prove to be more transportable. This kit is also about to be tested in the field. The intention with this technology is to provide access to healthcare, governance and education. As such a portal has been developed at www.thirdspace.mobi which offers online courses.

We are also currently experimenting with software for Personal Digital Assistants which will provide Expert Systems encapsulating knowledge in the above areas. The whole philosophy of DIYNGO is to transfer methods and NOT technological solutions in an open a manner as possible. To this end the Blog at www.diyngo.org has been well maintained. Further software and hardware solutions were proposed in our White Paper (please click on the "culture" tab at www.diynog.org) which could facilitate intra-human networking. This software development is currently hosted at www.kommunitee.org.

We are using the social networking software Webjam to loosely maintain the core DIYNGO team together with email and chat. The team is composed of members from a variety of backgrounds and includes the informal involvement of UN-GAID (www.un-gaid.org) which we hope to strengthen once this feasability stage is complete and DIYNGO is further concretised. A trip to Lake Naivasha will take place in April which, if successful, will be the catalyst for formally establishing DIYNGO. Overall, progress has been steady but with the help of untold parties has so far proven to be highly fruitful. The future therefore looks interesting and full of hope for the success of DIYNGO in terms of acheiving its mission."