[gioazzi]

Brilliant concept! I recently met the fine folks at Beekee who make something rather similar: https://beekee.ch/beekeebox/

It's an apparently simple problem on the surface, but quite hard to get it right... I once worked on a wireless network deployment for a transit refugee camp, and at least that was built on the assumption that some sort of Internet connection would be available at all times, making remote management possible. And even then it was tough to manage considering all other constraints.

I can only imagine how hard it is to deliver this kind of service reliably when Internet is rarely if ever available.

[myself248]

Ooo, there's another one to look at. There seem to be a bunch of these with variously-overlapping goals. Two more I'm aware of:

https://bibliosansfrontieres.gitlab.io/olip/olip-documentati...

https://wrolpi.org/

And I feel like the PirateBox concept is sort of adjacent.

[nobodyknowin]

I saw a local agency demo their use of the pirate box for Wildland firefighting.

They had a GIS team working on mapping updates to fire lines, cut lines, dozer paths, crew assignments, etc. And as required they'd upload everything to the pirate box and the commanders / captains could download the maps to their tablets.

Amazing stuff all without internet.

[Bengalilol]

Did you meet Beekee in Geneva?

I bet those kind of boxes work very well when there are less than 30 connections at once. All in all, if it is about accessing useful information, I think this is somehow brilliant (as you wrote).

[gioazzi]

They are based in Switzerland as I am, but it so happened we met in Doha

IIRC they support 40 concurrent users, and in their model that would always be a school class, which I guess shouldn’t be larger anyway

[syncsynchalt]

The article is about devices that don't use internet access — they provide a shallow copy of wikipedia, learning sites, and the infrastructure for devices to connect and use these as if they were connected to the full network.