A test in topology [2015-09-19]
Just 10 days ago, we were in Oregon picking up monitors, desktops, keyboards, and mice at Free Geek (www.freegeek.org). It was really exciting yesterday to already fire out five boxes with 26 monitors, 5 desktops, 15 keyboards, and 15 mice! Packing the monitors was definitely a mind-bending 3D puzzle though! When I was a kid I loved playing with the Soma cube, and trying to find a way to make the many variants of monitor stands fit together efficiently into a nice rectangular parallelepiped volume reminded me of the hours spent moving and turning the Soma cube pieces. It was a combination of fun and headache!
The Free Geek grant is just a marvelous thing, giving Reneal some extra margin to address the long-standing problem of CRT monitor attrition in the Philippines. Most of the schools that we work with there are using hardware donated 10-15 years ago, and they have little hope of replacing items when they fail. It’s very hard for someone familiar with American schools to imagine the lack of resources in schools in the Philippines and Tanzania. The on-going technology budget for schools in the Philippines is usually barely enough to keep the printers printing. The basic things that we take for granted in American schools – a desk for every student, text books, a janitor, climate control in the classroom, a class size limit, and so forth – are either deficient or totally missing in the schools where we work. Many kids arrive without having had breakfast, and their uniforms (required to attend school) are threadbare. Thus watching the CRTs slowly fail over time, losing an IT lab seat for a student each time it happens, is a painful process.
This issue of replacing failed hardware is a big deal for Reneal IEO. We do not want to be an organization that helicopters in, installs a bunch of stuff, and then leaves. We’ve heard of (and seen) too many IT labs with nothing but showcase relics left, unusable by students and teachers. Sustainability is a key part of our work and how the Reneal system is designed. The Reneal system can run using 10-year old hardware as clients, and a hard disk drive (a typical point of failure) isn’t needed for the client to serve the student. Those CRT monitors have been an Achilles Heel though, and through these monitors, we at Reneal can help the schools keep their IT labs alive and running.
Guess I better get back to my packing!