Tectonic shift think tank/Positive vision

Nicky is 15 years old. He lives in Nala, Kenya, a small rural village of 7,000 people. He's on the way to the community media center (powered by recycleable solar panels) to work on a podcast about going fishing with his friends as a school assignment. (The podcast is under CC-BY in Ogg Theora and will be indexed by Wikimedia Commons.) He downloads several open access publications and Wikipedia articles for school.

While he is talking to his friends in the CMC, his buddy uses a word that he has never heard of. He looks pretty silly, but on his way home, he calls MobilED OmegaWiki server to look up the definition of "molecular biology". Suddenly he realizes that understanding biology might help him to find a cure for AIDS, which is father died from. As he comes home, his train of thought is interrupted: His mother is overjoyed and showers him with affection. The loan she applied for to start her own pharmacy has finally been approved through Kiva, a microfinancing network.

To celebrate, they visit a recently established Moroccan restaurant, where a local band is jamming with a Nigerian one using Songbird, an open source tool. The location of the bands are visualized through Mapopedia. Thankfully, the rerstaurant has a broadband connection through the CMC node.

The school in this rural village is connected to the CMC. Some villagers work there as guides. The students are autonomous and connect to remote teachers and mentors. The standard client is an open source, OpenHardware smartphone with multiple input/output channels, CM-5 (which has been led by CSIR). Most of the content is free, including liberated out of print textbooks. Mozilla, Wikimedia, and Ubuntu have teamed up to create the next generation open source collaboration toolchain, which is the standard even in commercial use. Nicky has contributed a patch to the codebase.

The school is following the Illich model of networked learning. Everyone in the village can read, write and count. Nicky is an ICT mentor and participates in a local timecash program. Nicky uses the timecash to build the local Wikipedia community.

Next week is going to be exciting, as a NZ nurse is visiting to advise and learn on HIV drug treatment. Thankfully, international patent law has been reformed to allow free manufacture of generic drugs.