Contents of this page Minutes of our phone call 18-Jul-2008    Comments    AboutThisPage

Minutes of our phone call 18-Jul-2008    

1. Personal goals

Andrius - Paid work to make a living, make loan payments and pay off debts. Meanwhile, advance a strategic endeavor (such as the Includer) that would benefit a whole range of endeavors (such as making good use of marginal Internet access) of strategic importance to our MinciuSodas laboratory and the independent thinkers we serve.

Ricardo - Philanthropic goals. I just want to help more people communicate electronically, to expand their social world, join virtual communities for work/hobbies/education/etc, raise their incomes, etc. On a personal level, it gives me something to do in my free time, so I don't get bored. However, I need to avoid stress and over-work. Also, I prefer engineering work to management work. For those reasons, I think we need to find someone else to act as Project Manager.

2. Who is the customer?

The intended user is people from developing countries, mainly, who currently have limited local contacts, are excluded from electronic communication such as email and yahoo groups, and want to connect with a wider circle of people in online communities.

The term Customer can refer to 2 roles; The User and The Purchaser. There may be different types of Includer. For some types of Includer, perhaps the cheaper ones, the user may buy it with their own money. They are a combined User/Purchaser. For more expensive Includers, perhaps someone else will buy it for them (NGOs, etc), so the roles of Purchaser and User are split.

3. Should we produce new hardware or use a collection of off-the-shelf devices?

Most computer/electronics people like an interesting technical challange, but I said to Andrius that we need to put the needs of the users first, not create new hardware just because it's interesting and state-of-the-art.

An important requirement for any device used as an Includer is to have USB Host (Master) capability, so it can use cheap USB Keyboards and Mouse and other peripherals. It needs a mainstream operating system, such as Linux, Palm or WinCE, so device-driver software is already written for each peripheral (and so apps, tutorials and support are available).

Giving some feedback from recent PDA tests, I agreed with what Andrius has said for ages; an Includer needs a display that's large enough to use comfortably (7 inch or 17.5cm). It also needs a full size QWERTY Keyboard, not a difficult-to-use on-screen keyboard.

4. The Includer is a class of devices that meets the requirements, not a single device. There can be different types.

5. There will be several types of Includer, serving different types of user.

These could be...

• A collection of off-the-shelf devices.
• A single off-the-shelf unit (such as a laptop in the same class as the Asus Eee).
• A new design of our own for a 'Processor Box with USB Host interface' (to use as an Includer, but general purpose for other projects too).
• A mass-produced device.

We discussed the fact that many early home computers, like the Apple II, went through a lot of 'value engineering', to be as cheap as possible, but were designed to be as expandable as possible, with a whole range of interfaces (RS232 serial i/f for a dial-up modem for bulleting boards, Centronics parallel printer, etc). This means the entry-cost was low, but the system can grow to be very powerful. The Includer could be like this too.

A mass-market Includer could be like an Alphasmart, but brought up to date - Long battery life (hundreds of hours), QWERTY Keyboard, graphics not character display, USB Host, open, not proprietory Operating System and interfaces.

Alternatively, a mass-market Includer could resemble a calculator or personal organizer/diary, with a solar-panel for power, large mono graphics display, built-in QWERTY keyboard, USB Host interface or flash-memory slot.

6. Price

Different types of Includer, for different types of user (village/urban/etc), could have different retail prices.

Andrius has mentioned over the last 6 months or so that "a high price would be justified because of the benefits it brings" and mentioned that even a $500 price would be justified.

I said to Andrius that, although people would get a lot of benefit, the user/purchaser of any type of Includer (new design, new collection of existing devices, old re-used devices, etc) needs to see that the price is justified on a cost-benefit basis. People can buy an Asus Eee laptop from the USA for $300, so any device that costs more than that would need some really compelling reason and extra benefits to be worth buying. For example, it might have a much longer battery-life (hundreds of hours) or be more rugged for African conditions than existing laptops.

Our survey/requirements-capture phase will tell us whether people want an Includer with minimum features/minimum price, medium-features/medium price, etc.

7. Each type of user will have different requirements. For example, for people living in an isolated village with no mains electricity, low power-consumption will probably be very important (laptop batteries last 1 to 3 hours, but the Alphasmart batteries last 400 hours). For people living in a big city, long battery life may be less important. They may have electricity at home or less far to travel for recharging.

8. To find out the exact requirements, we need to do 2 things :-

a) Conduct detailed surveys of what people in the developing countries of Africa need, what things they want to do with an Includer and what constraints they operate under; how would they recharge batteries, what transport do they have, is there internet access (cafe/mobile phone signal) and how far away, etc.

b) Put some hardware into the hands of typical users (for each class of user), so they can try out the Includer device and try a simple flash-drive Sneakernet, give us some feedback and we can capture the exact requirements for each class of Includer. This is like computer-company or software-company 'usability labs'.

9. Funding

We had a discussion and came up with the idea that, instead of getting straight into developing hardware, Andrius should find some clients for Minciu Sodas who are prepared to pay for us to do the Market Research/Requirements Capture phase (the survey and useabiliy test, to capture requirements, mentioned above).

We need to decide on the terms of that funding. The sponsor will get access to the results on a non-exclusive basis, but we also discussed making the report available for a fee to whoever wants it, again on a non-exclusive basis (companies mostly, but it could interest NGOs, etc).

[We need to discuss how this works a bit more, if one client pays all the costs but gets no more benefits than someone who didn't pay for the research. Perhaps, the funder could have some input to the survey, so it includes their specific questions, whereas other report-readers don't influence it.]

We (the project) shouldn't pre-judge the outcome of that requirements phase. We should wait and see the results of that phase (the requirements and constraints), then review them and decide what types of Includer devices are needed for each type of user.

10. Project team

I (Ricardo) told Andrius that I need to avoid over-work, so I can't volunteer to be Project Manager on the Includer project. I said that we need to find some more team members, including a Project Manager, when we have funding.

11. Current activities

While Andrius tries to find funders, I can carry on investigating potential hardware/software in conjunction with other MS Members in the learnhowtolearn Yahoo group and Worknets. This is R&D and/or the usual 'Read all the background material you can' stage of a project.

12. Design Approach

We said that the Includer project can use an 'evolutionary' and 'iterative' design approach, trying designs in the field, seeing how well it works under those conditions, and changing the course of the project, instead of commiting a lot of money to a single straight-line, single-pass development process. In other words, at the start of development for each type of target-user, you don't know what design of Includer will emerge at the end. You have to try out a design and adapt it as you go along, until it works well in African conditions.

13. Ecosystem

The 'ecosystem' in which the Includer devices are used is a very large and important part of the project, maybe the majority of the project-work. We need to test how well all the support systems work, for communication (internet/sneakernet/mail), battery-charging, maintenance, training, etc.

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• FlashDriveEditor=To establish the way forward for the Includer project, from July 2008 onward. It describes what we would like to do, to capture the exact requirements and constraints for Includer devices, and then develop them.
• FlashDriveEditorTask=To establish the way forward for the Includer project, from July 2008 onward. It describes what we would like to do, to capture the exact requirements and constraints for Includer devices, and then develop them.
• PageByRicardo=To establish the way forward for the Includer project, from July 2008 onward. It describes what we would like to do, to capture the exact requirements and constraints for Includer devices, and then develop them.

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