Internet-in-a-Box is a tiny device that brings the best of the Internet to offline communities around the world — Wikipedia, Khan Academy, OpenStreetMap, YouTube science videos, thousands of eBooks, etc — no Internet required!  No longer just a school server, Internet-in-a-Box is now used in medical clinics in some of the most remote parts of the earth.

 

Profound thanks to the huge number of contributors who've made Internet-in-a-Box 6.5 our best yet.  It's a real breakthrough release already being used in schools around the world — broadly in Mexico, Peru, Haiti, among others — and in growing number of healthcare contexts, especially in India.

 

This release brings many new library fabrication tools to DIY curators (DIY librarians) who have only the most basic familiarity with GNU/Linux:

 

   http://download.iiab.io/6.5

 

Then you can install civilization's highest-quality open content, using easily-downloadable Content Packs, before you install Internet-in-a-Box in a more fully offline environment.  Choose from Kiwix (ZIM files), OER2GO/RACHEL, Project Gutenberg, WikiHow for teens, or choose a Cuban Encyclopedia if you prefer!  All this is made easy using Internet-in-a-Box's Admin Console (typically http://box/admin) whose more advanced capabilities are documented herein:

 

   http://FAQ.IIAB.IO

 

It was a long road over 8 months of software development, field testing and even more intensive QA!  But Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) 6.5 brings many revolutionary advances, e.g. teachers can now edit ebooks' details in Calibre 3.23, fixing description translations and assigning ratings most suitable to their own school.  Profound thanks to all building out the world's 21st Century Developing World Libraries AKA Sneakernet-of-Alexandria, as we take the next steps now together...

 

Time to Enlighten Democracy? Civilization’s greatest medical and education sites are next, for 8 billion hungry minds.  We invite humanitarian hackers, NGOs and publishers to our OFF.NETWORK hackathons — transforming mind-opening websites — into amazing offline learning packs.

 

Also let's finalize our new vector-based approach to OpenStreetMap in offline libraries, bringing a highly-compressed map of the entire world into almost everyone hands.  (None of which possible just a decade ago, when we began as One Laptop Per Child’s school server!)

 

Time to Democratize the Enlightenment? Local educators then use these learning packs to build up their region’s redistributable Internet-in-a-Box — unleashing grassroots “fieldback” for their very own Libraries of Alexandria — of the people, by the people, for the people…

 

Let's bring together as many of these grassroots/offline innovators as possible later in 2018, as we did in August 2017 with financial support from the Wikipedia Foundation and Learning Equality (KA Lite, Kolibri).  Please get in touch ASAP those who can make it to this important UX summit and content hackathon, likely to take place in the US or Canada, around October or November!

 

 

 

Some of us will be working with schools in Chiapas, Mexico next week doing exactly that.  We hope you too build a Little Library of Alexandria, customizing it for the needs and challenges of your very own neighborhood.

 

THANK YOU To All who believe in libraries for this entire planet, and are willing to stand up to make this happen.

 

Do join our regular community calls restarting in June — supporting each other bringing educators' and technologists' best ideas together — most every week Mondays and Thursdays @ http://MINUTES.IIAB.IO