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CD3WD - Helping the 3rd World to help itself

Future Directions for CD3WD


Content

We are missing the following at the moment.
  1. Cotton
  2. Tea
  3. Tobacco
  4. Tractor operation
  5. Tractor Maintenance
  6. Farm machinery, including field machinery
  7. Welding
  8. Plumbing
  9. Sheet Metalwork
  10. Machine Tool Operation and Programming
  11. Rope-making hand-operated machines
  12. Using water pumps as water turbines
  13. Engineering drawings for Cinva Ram compressed earth block making machine
  14. Dress-making, Garment Design and Production
  15. Bricklaying and other aspects of housebuilding
  16. Zero-Cost Housing (as opposed to so-called low-cost housing, which in fact is usually unreachable by the masses) - adapting modern techniques and materials to traditional rural and urban dwelling designs
  17. Bookkeeping and Accountancy, including computerised
  18. Mosquito traps and natural repellants
  19. Home-made Rat traps and control of rats and other pests
  20. Good-quality (!) Homeopathic information for health section
  21. MBA Coursework material
  22. Primary school coursework material - all subjects and not only the usual maths and computing
  23. Secondary school coursework material - all subjects and not only the usual maths and computing
  24. University coursework material, including the lecture notes of individual lecturers - so long as it is in htm, pdf, word .doc or similar format, we can use it...
  25. A medical expert system for use in the 3rd world
  26. Free but high-quality software which is relevant to the 3rd world - for Windows and/or FOSS/Linux platforms - these may be existing applications, reverse-engineered versions of existing applications, generic versions of applications which are normally bespoke, etc.. And note that these softwares can be source-code-withheld or source-code-supplied, as desired by the producer... One possible such application would be a system for the management of microfinance loans...; another a free basic book-keeping package for small and micro-business...
  27. Free Computer LAN-based applications, intranet applications and remote web-based applications and services for government and local government in the 3rd world (and maybe also in the West)
Please we need material on the above - either existing material or newly-created.... There is great opportunity for international tractor, farm machinery, electric motor, pump, welding, sewing machine, medical/health/pharmaceutical and software companies to commission/organise, finance and submit material - anyone reading this who works for or has contacts in such companies - please act...

We also need input on listing other material which you feel is missing from CD3WD...
Content

There is a great wealth of high quality paper information held by organisations like Practical Action/ITDG. We would like to persude them to digitalise and make publicly available their information for free; failing this, we would like to raise enough money to pay them to do so. Anyone reading this who is the author of any of that material, and has maintained copyright, and is willing to donate or sell that copyright to the CD3WD project and/or to make their material public domain, please contact us.

Languages

We plan to translate certain parts of CD3WD from Spanish and French back to English. Also then to translate the complete CD3WD from English to Spanish, French and Portuguese. Then to translate the complete CD3WD from English to Arabic and possibly Russian; we will particularly need assistance with these 2 languages Arabic and Russian - financial and/or technical. Attempts to contact the Kuwait Fund for assistance in translation to Arabic so far have been unsuccessful - anyone knowing how to do so please act... Maybe we also do Mandarin Chinese after these other ones.... All translations will be PC/Machine Translations only, with no manual editing or refinement.

Anyone who has contacts with PC/Machine Translation companies and/or Machine Translation Software Companies please act... Although we can do the Spanish, French and Portuguese work ourselves, it will take a lot of man-hours on our part, and we would prefer to have it done for us....

Extending CD3WD to Spanish will open it up to about 500 million people (mostly in Latin America and South America); to French will reach approximately 200 million (mostly in Africa); to Portuguese will reach 200 million (Brazil and Africa); Arabic will reach 500 million; Russian 300 million.
Area Specialists

We would like Technical Specialists to review quickly the material on their specialisation which exists in CD3WD and to comment on
  1. The suitability of the technology and competing technologies in general - an overview
  2. Gaps which could or should be filled by additional material
  3. In the event of contradictory advice within their subject area, what they feel is the better advice or outcome

These Area Specialist's reports will be added to the CD3WD content as quite short but highly-useful webpages... (and would be a good advertisement for the Area Specialist/Consultant who provides the material)

Volunteers please....
Snail-Mail distribution

It would be nice to have some organisation and/or individual volunteers who could airmail CD's of CD3WD free of charge to 3rd world end-users, on request. We are not talking big volumes, but we do get occasional requests and passing these requests to in-country NGO's seems to get nowhere... Maybe any and every email I get from a 3rd world source I put immediately on a Special Mailing Request webpage, and the first volunteer offer to reach me by email gets to do the job of burning the CD's and airmailing them... Incidentally, in case people think I am being mean by not doing this myself, it cost me recently about US$ 17 to mail 2 CD's containing CD3WD to Ndola Zambia from here in Harare Zimbabwe, by regular mail - such is the messed-up state of the Zimbabwean economy and some of its parastatals and semi-privatised organisations. It would probably cost US$ 2 or less to airmail the same 2 CD's from anywhere in the UK, and they would probably get there faster also...
Partners

It would be nice to have collaborative relations with those organisations who produce the material which we distribute, e.g. to be notified when new material is produced and is available... To be informed as to which Goldmines we have missed in our trawling..... To discuss and propose together what material should be researched, commissioned, produced and disseminated...
International NGO's and Donors

It would be nice for these organisations to acknowledge the existence and utility of the CD3WD Project and the CD3WD Product, and to assist in its promotion, dissemination, distribution and utilisation. e.g. UK Government's DFID has a quarterly magazine Developments which could be mailed out with CD3WD as a CD on its cover.... (it goes to 70,000+ Third-World addresses 4 times per year)
Time and Effort

It would be nice to get funding, so that I have a budget for CD3WD activities and can devote 11-12 months per year to it instead of fitting in activity between work contracts...
Information for the masses

We may put CD3WD on VCD, so that the complete contents can be viewed on DVD- or VCD-player and Television, instead of requiring a computer. Anyone with experience of doing this please contact me, otherwise I will work out how to do it - it looks pretty straightforward... Of course we will keep the (much more convenient and versatile) computer version.... The VCD images will be available as ISO image downloads, which can then be burnt direct to CD on the computer. Since the language translation sub-project is in my estimation more important, this VCD thing will not happen till late 2007.... - unless someone else would like to take that project over? and/or fund it for commercial conversion?... My proposed format is VCD still-photo slide shows, where the still photos will in fact be screen-shots of HTML and PDF pages...


After doing some research and trials with www.photodex.com software (ProShow Gold), it seems like the numbers pan out as follows:
  1. Go for the VCD option since this is a more coherent standard than the various DVD formats.
  2. Use PAL option for Europe Middle East and Africa, NTSC for USA and South America (I Guess?...), and unknown for South East Asia..
  3. Use a 0.01 second merge slide into next slide option, and a 1 second slide duration, since longer slide duration takes more space on disc; therefore the pause button on the remote will have to be used for every slide... And even with a 1-second slide duration only, then the publication "Where there is No Doctor", which is 516 pages and about 6 megabytes when stored in computer format of HTML pages and .GIF and .JPG graphics files, takes about a complete VCD of 700 megabytes using the Photodex composition system.
    4. Thus one has to conclude that there is a factor of about 100x in translating from computer format to VCD format; and moreover 2 CD's of cd3wd in computer format would expand to 200 CD's in VCD format; additionally, there are of course with the VCD-option VERY serious problems in indexes and finding material....

Thus maybe we should think about low cost PC's with no display but a TV driver built in.... and especially using the new HD TV format...

Alternatively, DVD player manufacturers and designers should think about incorporating the capability to browse HTML-with-GIF/JPG files?....... like the Philips Electronics CDi project, which seems to have faded away...

And yet another route is through games consoles with browsing capability.....

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