Over the last few years we've seen an explosive growth in blogs, RSS, wikis and video sharing - for 2007 and beyond this will continue at an incredible pace, but the next challenge is making it "useful" for learning and manufacturing in developing countries. Projects like the OLPC (one laptop per child) are just one of many physical hardware solutions to information distribution, not *the* solution, just one of them. I also think we'll see open source hardware and open hardware projects provide a lot of opportunities to build physical things and share back the skills and iterations. It will be a little messy, and not coordinated at first, but things will happen.
One example - A doctor in India, Sathya Jeganathan made a baby warmer from standard light bulbs, these devices normally cost over $4,000 and they're expensive to maintain - her version for about $100 isn't the best, but it's better than what they had, nothing - the mortality rate at her hospital is down 50%.
While this wouldn't pass any medical certification in the USA and other countries, these plans, once distributed to developing areas, can save lives. Companies can't really help out here, it's a person to person effort with some just-in-time learning needed for a specific task or problem. It's not ideal, but it's what we can do for now.
With low cost hardware to access information (like the OLPC), how-tos, schematics and open and ways to share information, we'll see local know-how bubble up and modern skills distributed. Sites like Instructables might end up being internationally bookmarked for everything from water purification how-tos, to low cost heating.
Phillip Torrone is the Senior editor at MAKE magazine.
