About Page
Inspiration[edit | edit source]
With our proposal, having access to community knowledge without having to pay a fee, knowing any basics or having access to certain material, we hope to help people learn on their own how to make and use their own technology. With this free community knowledge readily available, challenges that people face in communities can be tackled together versus being tackled alone.
This idea was initially based on a group that exists on Facebook, known as the Buy Nothing Group. These groups are community run platforms that allow individuals to post resources that they no longer need. The resources could be from a small pot to a flat screen TV, to full couches. The individual would make a post to the group and on a first come first serve basis, give the resource to someone in the community who needed it. This model builds community while also allowing people who could not normally afford products the opportunity to be able to have them. With this, we hope to take the spirit of a group like the Buy Nothing groups on Facebook and allow people the opportunity to share knowledge with their community.
While considering our own idea on how we could possibly integrate tech into this solution, we found a few sites that are similar in this regard, both in implementation and in values.
Of these learning options, RepairWiki is by far the closest we’ve found that mirrors our own goals. While the other options are also great sources of knowledge to become educated about certain topics, there are some charges that are associated with each.
Company sites like Grow with Google and AWS Amazon are services of self learning that an individual user can complete in their own time. These courses are specifically for the company they are affiliated with and are useful if you are seeking to learn skills for that specific company. In these two cases, a User can complete their learning at their own pace and also pay to take a certificate test, which will show the User understands the topic well enough to work with the material now. Our project is similar in the aspect that we want to give people the opportunity to learn at their own pace and have a place that hosts knowledge the User can learn. Our project does differ in that we do not make the User pay for classes nor do we make them take tests to have certain certificates. Our goal is to make the information readily available and free for Users to use and refer to again and again.
The Repair Wiki is a site where people can post their own personal solutions to tech problems people could potentially face. On this website, people can post their own solutions and the Wiki also has a discord where people can discuss solutions while also asking questions on how to best approach a solution for their own problems. This site is very similar to our own goals, but it does lack the community building we wanted to see in our own application. There is also a large push on the site for the political agenda, the right to repair. This site is very similar to our own and we could use it as a potential foundation for what we hope to achieve at a later point in our own implementation.
Our Mission[edit | edit source]
With our own site, we hope to take a few details from all the sites we have shown above, but we do mostly want to focus on the community that this would be able to build for people all over the world. Knowledge is a powerful thing, both to share and to gain, and we want to support people that are seeking that knowledge. By providing a way to showcase unusual or even unheard of solutions from places all over the world, we give people from those places the opportunity to show that there are ways that technology can thrive and live in the most unfriendly of environments. With these examples, we did mostly focus on online learning and sharing platforms but there exists multiple examples of places of education existing outside of the internet and outside of where technology can currently reach.
Resources[edit | edit source]
[1] Bruce Etling, Robert Faris and John Palfrey. 2010. Political Change in the Digital Age: The Fragility and Promise of Online Organizing. Retrieved from https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4609956/SAIS%20online%20organizing%20paper%20final.pdf?sequence=1
[2] Catherine Howell and Darrell M. West. 2016. Internet as a Human Right. Retrieved from
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2016/11/07/the-internet-as-a-human-right/
[3] Karl Bode. 2019. The Case for Internet Access as a Human Right Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kxmm5/the-case-for-internet-access-as-a-human-right
[4] Western Washington University ISC. 2021. Rooted in the Community: The Equitable Internet Initiative with Janice Gates. Video. (April 14 2021). Retrieved November 11, 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELHod1Xgdr4
[5] Daniel Greene. 2021. The Promise of Access. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/promise-access
[6] Zeynep Tufekci. 2019. In Hong Kong, Which Side Is Technology On? Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/hong-kong-protests-digital-technology/
[7] Kaveh Waddell. 2016. Virtual Classrooms Can Be as Unequal as Real Ones. Retrieved from
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/inequaity-in-the-virtual-classroom/501311/
[8] Aahil Rajpari. 2020. Is Internet Access a Human Right? Retrieved from https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2020/10/12/is-internet-access-a-human-right/
[9] G. C. Townsend and K. Sloan. 2015. Julian scholars: Recruiting and graduating low-income, first-generation computer science majors. DOI: 10.1109/RESPECT.2015.7296504.
[10] Jack J. Barry. 2020. COVID-19 exposes why access to the internet is a human right. Retrieved from https://www.openglobalrights.org/why-access-to-internet-is-human-right/
[11] Nadine Bloch. 2019. How technology is shaping creative activism in the 21st century. Retrieved from https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/03/
[12] Amnesty. 2020. Tactics to secure your smartphone before joining a protest. Retrieved from
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2020/06/tactics-to-secure-phone-before-a-protest/
[13] Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie. 2018. The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/
[14] He W, Zhang ZJ, Li W. 2021. Information technology solutions, challenges, and suggestions for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. DOI :10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102287
[15] Optus Business. 2017. How is technology helping to solve global challenges? Retrieved from https://www.optus.com.au/enterprise/accelerate/technology/
