Looking for Lao software solutions

Posted by Daniel Hirschler on July 8, 2009 under ICT, View all | Be the First to Comment

One of the biggest obstacles for media development projects in this country is the lack of localised computer software. Computers are a necessary ingredient in the process of media production: They are cheaper, more versatile, more powerful then analogue equipment like tape-recorders. And they are available, which is increasingly no longer the case for analogue equipment.

Digital divide caused by language
Yet, their interface is a challenge to many people, if it doesn’t come in a language they understand. Learning a software then becomes not only an exercise of understanding how to use the tool, but also of guessing and memorising, which word on a menu to press. Try switching your browser to a language you don’t know (like maybe Thai, Arabic or Japanese) and then save or print out this page. Good luck!

Saving files with names that make sense is another obstacle: The application might allow you to write using Lao alphabet, but the operation system of your computer is in English. Your stuck with typing just some letters of this strange Latin alphabet. How do find the file later?

Instead of working towards creating good radio programs with reports on relevant topics, you end up tackling the challenges of un-localised software programs.

Help wanted!
This is why we are very interested to learn about available software for Lao media production. So far we have found (thx mainly to Anousak Souphavanh) but weren’t yet able to test:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/laofoss/

The pages lists all kind of offerings like a

• UNICODE keyboard layout
• E-Mail Client

There is the very interesting international NGO “Jhai Foundation”, which has made remarkable progress developing a low-energy PC (“JhaiPC”) coming with a localized linux KDE.

Then there is OpenOffice in Lao

http://lo.openoffice.org/

We would like to hear from people about their experience with this software and also if there are similar projects, etc.

Due to codex.wordpress.org, there is a WordPress localization team currently forming, but service seems to be unavailable at the moment.

Also we would be very interested in a Lao localized version of Audacity. Anyone done this? Or planning to do it? Or willing to do it (and waiting for more motivation…?) Or able to tell us, how we can do it?

Comments more than welcome, you can also ping us on twitter.com/dwa_laos or send a mail to daniel.hirschler [at] dw-world.de or teamlaos [at] ymail.com

Mobile Edition Launched

Posted by Simon Didszuweit on July 7, 2009 under ICT, View all | 3 Comments to Read

Background: ICT in Laos
Due to UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme’s ICT profile, Laos’ overall teledensity is only 1.31%: the nationwide mobile coverage is 2.02% (GSM network is available in 9 out of 18 provinces with coverage usually available only in the largest towns and est. less than 10% of the population being covered by the signals); less than half of Lao districts (58 out of 142) have fixed-line telephone service; and probably less than 1% of Laotian households currently own a telephone (48,557 lines in the country). There is no internet-backbone in Laos, the (hypothetical) bandwidth of 2 Mbps for uplink and 4 Mbps for downlink (combined total for the coutry’s six ISPs) is seldom reached in reality.

There exists a National ICT Policy and e-Strategy Task Force with five Working Groups consisting of government, agencies and private sector but there is also a 5% tariff on all imported hardware and a 10% turnover tax applied to all computer retailers. As these taxes are passed on directly to customers, along with an additional 20-50% markup as operating profit, there are 0.371 internetcafés per 10,000 inhabitants and only 0.18 out of 100 Laotians own a computer. The overall size of the IT-market is considerably small.

Supporting Media Development now features a mobile edition.
Facing these few facts, it is easy to understand the importance for such projects as this WP-blog to think about ‘inbound’-compatibiliy, that is to try to make platform-based communication as easy as possible. Not only in Laos, but in many developing countries it is important to offer (or at least consider) low-bandwidth-solutions.

Thanks to alexking.org WP-Plugin for mobile devices (simply called “WP mobile edition” together with “Carrington Mobile Theme”) we are now able to alternatively present this blog ‘mobile friendly’. This means, the plug-in recognizes mobile clients and automatically shows an interface designed for a mobile browser. On tested devices (3G) it was possible to reduce traffic from something around 380kb to around 160kb (which is a good start, though we desire to further reduce this).

As the plug-in is both helpful and easy to use, we would like to recommend it to our readers (please follow the installation instructions on alexking.org). If you have another idea or even a different solution on ‘bandwidth’ and ‘ICT4D’, feel free to contact us anytime.