New Member first post: some questions about the focus of this list

[Jim Pace]

Hello everyone;

I am the owner of a wireless Internet service company in rural Idaho, USA,
and also a former professional librarian with a long-term interest in
information literacy.  Years ago I thought E-books would take off and
revolutionize the dissemination of information, especially with the
development of E-paper at Zerox PARC.  But I was wrong.  Perhaps this laptop
project will do what E-Books did not:  Bring the world's collected knowledge
to a significant portion of the world's population.  A public library in
every citizen's pocket.  The "AI's" in the pockets of the characters in the
Red Mars-Green Mars-Blue Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson would be a good
hypothetical example to emulate.

My other major mistake was in predicting the development of the Internet. It
came from my bias as a reference librarian.  I assumed that the Internet was
primarily an information access tool.  A way to publish and disseminate
useful information content, without the expense and time delays associated
with paper publishing.  The Internet does serve that function of course.
But I realize now that the primary driver of the growth of the Internet is
as a communication tool.  First Email, then chat, then VOIP and Skype, then
who knows what.  The mesh networking tools built into this new laptop
facilitate both the information gathering and the communication aspects of
the Internet, but I think most future users of this laptop will primarily
want to do what most other humans using the Internet have done, namely,
communicate.  Are the hardware developers aware of this?

With my professional background in computer networking, information and
library science, and end-user computer support, I'm skeptical about how this
project will succeed with content provision.  I know just enough about this
to know what I don't know.  And what I don't know is how content on these
new laptops will be organized in such a way as to be useful to the intended
end users, and not usurped by authoritarian government bureaucrats into
something quite different from the good intentions of laptop designers.  We
now have the advantage of a good 20 years' practice in developing
information retrieval portals, A body of knowledge worth mining.  Is anyone
involved in this project focused on the content questions?  Is this the
proper forum for those questions? We are a long way from Robinson's "AI",
though I'd be first in line to buy one.

Seymour Papert and Alan Kay have my utmost respect as pioneers in
Information Science.  Seeing their names on the list of advisors for this
project gives me hope.

Jim Pace