Cooperative unions seem really difficult to me. One of the reason I perceive them difficult has a lot to do with me not really being educated enough. Another reason has to do with sort of being in the loop of a couple of projects that hope to grow this way. One involves a plan to improve incomes of families caring for AIDS orphans by supplying inputs for maize growing, post harvesting handling, and marketing. The hope is to develop a critical number of the small working groups so that maize can be bulked and sold at top dollar. (That's the thumbnail). In practice the growing runs up against the people involved attending to the future benefits from the larger coop.

In reading the discussion in the <Ned> Uganda Group How to Start a Cooperative I was struck by some of the similar difficulties.

Opportunities Industrialization Centers International is not a cooperative model, but somehow my mind turned to it when thinking about your proposal. Also I'm impressed with how Rotary International Chapters are often quite successful with projects. Somewhere there's a sweet spot between local and community organizing and larger structures. OIC is an interesting case of local initiative growing into a larger entity, and surviving the process. What's interesting is how the International participation emerged quite early on. Here is the Nigeria page.

I suspect you're already aware of Greenstar. It's pretty darn slick with all the working parts of technology, business planning, and communications working together. It's a bit hard for me to tell which came when. Here's a page that tells the story of Greenstar's partnership with IConnect in Ghana.

Oscar Blayton has reproduced some of the text from a UNESCO series on developing sustainable telecenters. There's a link on the page for the full set of articles in PDF.

I was very interested in the mobile telecenter idea. The problem with me is not having much sticktoitiveness. A while back I saw an article about Anywhere Books. That was a mobile platform for a mobile facility to print books available off-copyright in villages. It doesn't seem their Website is up anymore--in fact Halliburton seems quite insistent in putting a TM anywhere where Anywhere Books comes up in search. Timbuktu Chronicles wrote about them in 2004. What seemed like a good idea didn't turn out so well, not the least of the problems was that librarians in Uganda hated the project.

The thing that struck me about the project was the cost. Even though the books could be produced for as little as $1.00, even that seemed too expensive. So as a thought experiment I tried to imagine the cheapest book of some value could be produced and marketed. What I came up with was Cracker Jack Books I still think there's a kernel of a good idea to it, but I haven't really tried to hammer out the details.

Part of the Cracker Jack Book idea was that since they could be sold for pennies and are small enough, I figured that even school kids might be able to sell them. The profit might be enough to pay for their school meals or something small like that. Since I started thinking about Cracker Jack Books, the popularity of iPods took off. I'm slow on technical things and don't have an iPod. It might seem really funny, but I was blown away when I saw friends use a tiny transmitter to "play" their files on the iPod onany radio. What a great way to share digital information in areas where electricity is scarce.

There's another piece of technology which is really great from the perspective of digital information in low electric situations and that's the AlphaSmart Neo As computers go, it's pretty primative, but gets at least 70 hours of use with three regular AA battery cells! I figured that as newer, more powerful devices promulgated that Neo's would be sold for a song. Unfortunately, that's not the case. They have a rather solid niche market. There's a lively discussion forum at Flickr.

Global Voices is an organization which aggregates blog content from around the world. They have an outreach called Rising Voices which is giving micro-grants for community media outreach projects. Some great ideas are swirling around and it's worthwhile checking Rising Voices out.

I'm sorry to ramble so, but here's my point: I envision that people can make a business of connecting others with digital information and providing a way to create digital information without owning a computer and having their own Internet access. So instead of one mobile bus, a fleet of independent operators on bikes.

What tools and services the operators have might vary. Some might have a selection of printed materials, including Cracker Jack Books, a camera, phone, Alpha Smart Neo, recording device, iPod and radio. The job of the news carrier would be to connect people to information and a means to produce it. The village connection to the Internet would be through the news carrier.

LOL, so many of my ideas are half-baked. The trouble is I often can't tell which ones are worth pursuing. But if this fleet of news carriers is any interest at all to you, it's something I'd love to talk more about.