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As a startup non-profit charity with a small budget, Literacy Bridge does not have a single paid employee, but it has benefited from over 7000 hours of volunteer work. Without our volunteers, this project would still be just an idea.

Although Literacy Bridge has no payroll expenses, it must pay for prototype production, pilot program costs, and outsourced engineering work. These expenses are entirely funded by individual donors. As with volunteers, donors are recognized (http://literacybridge.org/about/donors.html) for their willingness to step forward and have their donations invested to make access to knowledge available to people with the greatest need.

Literacy Bridge’s 200+ volunteers and donors are not contributing for the public acknowledgment. They are contributing their time and money to be a part of something that they believe will change the world.

Applying Community and Technology to Change the World

This series of blogs has focused on two key areas: community and technology. The power of these two forces has been demonstrated throughout history. Literacy Bridge is applying the same concepts to fight global poverty and disease. Throwing technology at a problem has often failed to produce results, but when technology is used as a multiplier of existing community efforts, significant and sustainable change can be accomplished. In the case of the Talking Book Project, Literacy Bridge is using a community of individual donors, developers, and other volunteers to produce technology that multiplies the efforts of other communities throughout the world – communities of teachers, nurses, agriculture experts, and others. Together, these communities are applying technology to bring an end to global poverty and disease.

The Talking Book Project encourages each local implementation to experiment with what works for their communities, sharing feedback with other implementations. The low-cost and scalable nature of the project also makes it easier for implementations to spring up wherever the demand is greatest. This is particularly important with respect to Talking Book Kiosks.

The Talking Book Project includes networked kiosks to improve content distribution and discovery. These kiosks might be considered a cross between Wikipedia and the iTunes Music Store. They serve as community centers for uploading and downloading knowledge recorded in audio, and they also help users discover the content that is most likely to interest them. Kiosks may host complementary businesses, such as support businesses or solar-powered stations for renting rechargeable batteries.

If Literacy Bridge distributed kiosks across one entire country at a time, the bias to pick countries based on overall literacy and poverty statistics would cause pockets of severe need to be missed in otherwise less severe countries. By developing the kiosk system without a top-down, command and control structure, new implementations can be driven by a more granular assessment of need.

Decentralization also reduces the ability for any one central force to attempt to shut down or control the distribution of information, just as the inclusion of a microphone on every device decentralizes the power to produce content.

The Talking Book Project relies on audio content for success. While Literacy Bridge believes that audio content is best left to the experts and citizens who speak the local languages and understand the local problems, facilitating the creation and distribution of that content is just as critical as designing the platform on which it runs. This philosophy led to the following actions:

• Every device includes a microphone, so that every user can potentially become a content creator.
• Audio content includes a control track that uses the same format and has most of the same flexibility as the system interface described above. Audio content can include embedded hyperlinks from one segment of content to the next. Content-programmable buttons allow interactive and entertaining applications – a universally important driver of user adoption.
• For people who would like to develop interactive audio content but prefer to avoid declarative programming, Literacy Bridge is developing a Windows application with a graphical user interface for creating and editing control track files. Users of this application will include university students, employees of non-profit organizations, and district officers of the ministries of health, education, or agriculture.
• Content that can be useful to multiple regions of the world will be hosted on a web site to allow local governmental and non-governmental organizations to select and download the recordings that they believe will be useful for their regions and domains.

The Talking Book Project includes several software projects, one of which encompasses the functionality of the Talking Book Device. Built around a chip designed for audio processing, the core functionality is programmed in C and low-level assembly code. Testing or patching this level of software requires having a Talking Book Device at your computer. To broaden the potential software developer support, Literacy Bridge did the following:

• To expand developer support beyond a small subset of software developers, programming most device functionality has been simplified. Changing system menus, content navigation, and volume control are all possible by editing a text file. Just as the early stages of the Web attracted thousands of new HTML programmers, this similar markup language opens the door to a broader base of device programmers.
• To test and run features that control the device’s audio interface, a Flash application is being developed to simulate the hardware.  A text file can be run on the device or the Flash application with identical results. This expands development and testing beyond people who own the right piece of hardware.

One of the objectives of the Talking Book Project is to instill ownership in the project throughout various entities in the host country. Part of the reason is to promote the long-term engineering sustainability of the project. This open development model invites social workers, budding programmers, as well as embedded C programmers to participate in the engineering and maintenance of the device.

The Talking Book Device is designed to fit the context of its users at a cost that is within their power to purchase directly. Targeted at less than $10, the price of a Talking Book Device will compare with that of a radio, the most commonly owned electronic device in rural areas. Some governments and aid organizations may choose to subsidize the device for the very poorest families, but the device’s technology choices are aimed at individual ownership.

The Talking Book Device is powered by the most common and least expensive form of available energy: disposable, D-size batteries, typically used in flashlights and radios. Without access to electricity, rechargeable batteries would require new infrastructure. Literacy Bridge is actively researching various options for affordable and renewable energy. To spur adoption, priority was given to fitting into the existing context, then co-introducing the device with a new power solution.

Talking Book users are critical to its content distribution system. Although electronic networks are rarely accessible to the poorest rural areas, “people networks” can be leveraged for the same job. Therefore, each Talking Book Device includes an integrated USB plug and receptacle so that users can give audio content to their friends at no cost by simply connecting the two devices. This allows the user community to make the system more valuable.