Question Box

Question Box is a very interesting, very cool project which allows people in an Indian village access to the Internet's wealth of information via a intercom that links up to a human researcher.

The spread of such access reminds me of how the Internet has changed the way that I think of (& access) knowledge and information--when I was a kid I would often wonder about a certain topic, but would know that the information was basically out of my reach. My town (population 7,000) didn't have a particularly comprehensive library--and even if it did, I couldn't spend hours in it to research a momentarily, idle curiosity. Now, I am constantly looking up information simply for the joy of it (e.g., "I wonder about Vanilla beans... are there vanilla trees? Oh, they come from orchids!").

Here's what Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow wrote about the project:

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it's like those "executive assistant" telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).
...

But the net isn't binary (well, it is, but not in the way I mean): it isn't there or not-there. It can ooze in, over the period of years and decades.

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

[via Boing Boing]