The Word on Jhai
How much leverage does anyone really have to change the world? When charities ask you for money, the obligations of the rhetoric oblige them to imply your ten quid will build the world anew. Because, after all, who writes a cheque for a potentially doomed project?
And then, on the other side, we read news stories that tell us that it's all going to hell, and we feel hopeless, but we still click on those tales, because the stories that tell us its hopeless are the ones we read most closely. We read them because we think that's what shows us the way the world is changing. We like to think we're reading the signs
Last year, I did the first, upbeat, rhetorical trick on a project called the Jhai PC. It was a project to bring the Net to a part of Laos that was without electricity or telephony.
I didn't actually talk much about the project's chances of success; but there was an unspoken idea, I suppose, that such things change the world. I certainly encouraged people to send money.
The reaction was mostly enthusiastic. Net people like Net solutions, after all. Maybe a bit too enthusiastic, in that way that encourages others to point out flaws in the plan. What the hell where a bunch of villagers going to do with a Net connection, when they hadn't even got electric lighting?
It's a valid question, and it's valid no matter how many times it's answered. The answer the Jhai Foundation gave in this case was that it they were giving what the villagers had asked for. The Laos villagers wanted a way to talk to their ex-pat families in America; they wanted a way to make more money by finding out the local market prices directly instead of relying on middle-men, or risking the long trip down to the towns. They wanted communication, and information.
The Jhai people specced out a low-scale solution. Given the context,that was a ruggedised luggable, charged by a bicycle, talking down the mountain with a low-price WiFi link. Using free software, open standards, and commodity hardware made it cheap enough to consider; it also threw in the global Net as an added extra.
People at the time thought it might be a boondoggle; that the money would be wasted; that the project was futile, that it would be better to send books or build sewers. At the time, I said that all these things could be true, and I said that I would keep an eye on the project, and report as honestly as I could how it progressed.
So, eighteen months on, what's happening with the Jhai PC?
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Well, first up: the villagers don't have their Net connection. As I understand it, one of the relay points for the Wi-Fi connection attracted the attention of the Army, and the government got involved. Rolling out the network became a task of negotiating that bureaucracy instead of testing the equipment. "We could never get a yes or a no answer from them", says Lee Thorn, who runs the Jhai Foundation.
In the end, the government suggested another village as a test site, in a less contentious area. Besides, they said, the Jhai PC might be on its way to obsolescence in its original site. That particular valley was due to receive electricity soon.
Lee Thorn, who runs the Jhai project, has worked with the original villagers for over seven years. He says that they understand what it is like to work with the government, and understood the difficulties. Still, he seemed disappointed to me. He continues to work with them on the other long-term projects they have requested, and which he has provided: coffee selling, education, well-drillng. The Jhai PC will be tested elsewhere later this year; the poles and cables of electricity are springing up near the villagers, although Thorn says he can't say whether they'll get their power soon or not.
The Jhai PC, meanwhile, appears to have exposed an odd little niche. There appears to be quite a few places on the earth which are tantalizingly close to Net connections and telephony, but have no electricity, no cellphone coverage, and no landlines. Think of it as the developing world's equivalent of the last-mile problem.
Parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for instance, although unlikely to get electricity or telephony, are within ten miles of the IP network built out for the DRC's university system. Again, the villagers there want to stay in contact with the extensive ex-pat network that war-torn countries inevitably create, as well as improve their finances. A Jhai PC network seems like it may be the most affordable way to do this. There's a project, led by a Congolese graduate working out of South Carolina, using funding raised by from the Congolese themselves, to build this network.
This niche doesn't just exist in what's traditionally seen as the developing world. The Navajo Nation do not have complete telephone or electricity coverage in their sixteen million acres. They believe the Jhai PC may well fill in gaps by providing a quick and easy link to their existing computer networks to areas without power or phonelines. So the first real rollout of the equipment may well be in the continental United States.
Has the Jhai PC model changed the world? I don't know: perhaps the world will change faster than such an idea can catch on, and the economic niche it might occupy -- no power, no phone -- could vanish as grids are rolled out, solar panels or what-have-you dropped in, cellphone towers hiked up.
But it seemed to me a sign that the world had changed when the Jhai PC project was even considered - that villagers were asking for information retrieval and communication before they wanted electricity - and that the cost of computing and wireless commodity hardware had dropped so low that this was even conceivable as a low-level, privately funded project.
How can you determine whether what you do changes the world? You can't. But you can collect data. I don't think the emotion you feel when you send your ten bucks off to a charity is an accurate measurement of how the world changes, and I don't think the headlines in the news are either.
Something like the Jhai PC is so clearly on the edge of some envelope, some transitional state, that just watching it move and change shows you how the world is changing, like watching the line of breaking waves move slowly up the shore shows you the tide.
Danny O'Brien is co-editor of NTK.
