New member first post

[SJ Klein]

Hello Jim,

Welcome to the list. You've come to the right place for these discussions. 
How to make material findable and useful, on the laptops and on the mesh, 
is an important subject; and I think a number of people on the list might 
be vying with you for the first AI.

The laptops have been designed with an eye towards making communication 
reliable and easy; the hardware developers are certainly aware of this. 
We are working on the ways laptop users will track and share their 
communications and collaborations over time.

Providing access to available library collections is important; as is 
providing access to new books and media and other materials that laptop 
owners begin to share with one another.  Much of this already takes place 
via the Internet at large; though as you mention it often takes a back 
seat to communication and news.

> I think most future users of this laptop will primarily want to do what 
> most other humans using the Internet have done, namely, communicate.

Hopefully they will want to collaborate in other ways as well.  Over the 
past ten years, the barriers to exchanging rich media, or collaborating in 
real time through games, and on stories, drawings, or audio and video 
programs, have diminished rapidly.


> 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.

In every bookbag, perhaps.  To start with, we can at least provide an 
index into the public library, and a way to request books and materials 
that aren't yet available.


A question for the list: if you could only choose ten books or collections 
to share with a significant portion of the world's population, what would 
they be?

SJ

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SJ Klein                     sj at laptop.org               +1 617 529.4266