Kids on Computers (KOC) partnered with Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) to host the 2019 IIAB Summit from November 6th-10th, 2019 northwest of Boston in Stow, MA. Attendees included representatives from six different organizations including the Free E-Book Foundation, IIAB, Kiwix, KOC, the UN, and UVA. The summit coincided with the 2019 WikiConference North America happening at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, MA, making the gathering an opportune time for fourteen of us to connect on our various offline and technical initiatives and define plans for 2020.
Background on IIAB: Internet-in-a-Box brings the very best of the World’s Free Knowledge (Wikipedia, Khan Academy, OpenStreetMap, E-Books and many others) to those who are offline and/or unable to access the internet easily. Internet-in-a-Box is in use in more than 20 countries, You can install an Internet-in-a-Box “learning hotspot” anywhere in the world — even under solar power, using very diverse hardware. Kids on Computers uses IIAB on Raspberry Pi devices in our labs to provide access to rich content in areas where internet is not available.
Lane Rasberry took excellent notes as we sat around a dining room table covering topics such as documentation, organization structure and governance, community, and funding. We discussed obtaining and retaining new contributors and barriers to entry. Unit and integration testing are key for enabling new developers to make changes to code more easily. We also discussed community maintainability and how to sustain the efforts and grow the progress seen to date given the small number of contributors. Some tactical topics discussed include migrating IIAB to nginx and Python 3 and migrating the http://wiki.laptop.org Wiki where IIAB’s documentation resides to http://meta.wikimedia.org. Vic Chan Timmons brought his work-in-progress client machine for the upcoming KOC Mexico trip. Larry and I enjoyed playing TuxMath, making me anticipate the Mexico trip even more!
We had many delicious meals and roundtable discussions throughout the four days together. It was a productive and necessary summit to drive IIAB into 2020 and beyond. Many thanks go to all the summit attendees and also to longtime KOC supporter, Peter Fein, for helping host and buying groceries and beverages for the group!
Summit Attendees
- Nick Doiron
- Emmanuel Engelhart
- Avni Fein
- Eric Hellman
- Adam Holt
- George Hunt
- Chris Li
- Reno McKenzie
- Daniel Mietchen (and Larry)
- Lane Rasberry
- Abhishek Suryawanshi
- Victor Chan Timmons
- Martin Walker
At WikiConference North America
Virtual Attendees
- Shanti Bhardwa
- Evelyn Fitzgerald
- Tim Moody
- Eric Nitschke
- Jerry Vonau
- Computer Science students from the Stevens Institute of Technology (students of Eric Hellman)