First day with NRIDS in Nepal.

NRIDS Jos Groenewegen Daan Pijper

02-08-2009

First day of training from Inveneo

Training:

Topics:

Introduction Training

Hardware

Introduction:

The previous nigth Daan didn't sleep well. It was raining and water was getting in the room. Daan was just quick enough to get his laptop out if the water. Because the room only had a little window it didn't dry. Fortunately all the helpful members of NRDIS were able to find a different room with shelter from the rain, a bigger window and a better shower. It is hard to cope with the heat so and the luxury of good running water and a working fan make it a lot easier for us. Jos has less trouble with it because he has more experience staying in the outdoors with helps him with living in less luxury. I hope that once we get to a cooler location we can come by with a little less.

Introduction Training:

All supporting parties introduced themselves and said something about the importance of the project. Two representatives of the Nepali Post Office were present and they told how import ICT was for the development of Nepal and their organization and how glad they were to assist in organizing and supporting this training.

Sudip Aryal, representing NRDIS, was present and mentioned how important this training was and how important ICT and the telecenters are for the development of Nepal. He showed his gratitude to all involved parties for being present and helping making this training possible.

Several members of different companies and operators of telecenters attended the training.

Training by Inveneo given by Mark and Andres

Inveneo is a NGO based in the US who helps improve and introduce ICT in developing countries. They focus on capacity building. This is because it is to expensive and time consuming to keep sending experts to developing countries. Therefore they try to share there expertise with organizations in the developing countries so they can improve ICT in their country.

Hardware:

Not all hardware is suited for the conditions in most developing countries. Environmental conditions like heat, dust and humidity can damage equipment. Power, if available, is unreliable. There is little experienced personal to support and maintain hardware. And getting the equipment can also be a problem. Though these problems are smaller in the major cities, these problems can be a real challenge in the rural areas.

Inveneo test hardware for suitability. They test on resistance against heat, humidity and dust. And they also try to find and make hardware that is not only suited for the environment but also easy to maintain and low in power consumption.

Currently, Inveneo has the Inveneo hub server which is a low power server of compact size. Inveneo supplies these with its own server OS based on Linux. They explained how it worked and why they build it this way and gave us the opportunity to see a server.

The server has two Seagate laptop harddisks, and Intel Atom processor and an architecture allowing it to fit in a small case. It also has a low power power supply. They do not supply the sever with a monitor or keyboard. If they would, people in the telecenters might use those severs as computers. This shouldn't happen because it will affect the servers performance.

They also showed us a small low power computer setup and gave us an opportunity to assemble these. We will be using this during training and will be deploying these in actual telecenters during field training. It was nice to put something together that will also be used. Later during the training it appeared we were ahead of schedule. I believe this was because assembling the computers cost far less time then expected. Assembling these computers was easy because all it involved was attaching the small PC to the monitor and connecting the cables. Software was already installed. Inveneo supplies its hardware almost complete and considering how little time but how much to do all involved parties have this is a good thing.

Afther the presentation of hardware the trainers of Inveneo told us about electricity. We already knew about power circuits etc. so this was easy for us. One suggestion: If you encounter a practical problem were you need to calculate some variables it is always a good idea to first gather all the information you have and then think about what you need to calculate. First, write down all the units like volt and watt and fill those you can fill them in. Then find out what you are missing, write down the formulas and calculate the missing variables.

The trainers of Inveneo also told us about solar power and what you need to pay attention to. The basic maths are still the same but you need to know how much sun hours you can expect. I suppose we will hear more about how to look for a good place when the training will cover surveying.

Closing comments:

We both enjoyed the training and we are looking forward to the field work. The place were we have our training has great seats and air conditioning. And though there are some problems with power they seem less than in the rest of Dharan. We look forward to putting theory into practice in the beautiful hills and mountains of Nepal. We do hope that it is cooler up there.