A Community Effort Is Needed to Eliminate the Digital Divide

Computerworld - For about 700 million of us, the past 10 years have been a rush. The Internet, broadband and cheap computing devices have changed the way we work, live and play. The other 5.6 billion people on the planet have missed the party. On their side of the digital divide, Google is not a verb, and Spam still comes in a can.
This issue was reinforced in a February 2005 draft report published by the World Bank. The report looked at the current state of the digital divide, particularly as it relates to communication tools, and found that while some progress has been made, much work remains. It determined that in developing countries, the number of Internet users was just 40% of the worldwide average, the number of PCs per capita less than one-third, and the number of Internet hosts less than one-tenth. It concluded that the developing world's need for additional infrastructure investment exceeds $100 billion in the next five years alone.
But as The Economist recently noted, closing the digital divide doesn't start by handing everyone a computer or a PDA. It starts by addressing and resolving the digital divide's fundamental triggers, the biggest of which, I believe, is education. Dealing with the problems developing nations face in providing quality education to their people is a monumental task. But if a community of people helps by virtue of their jobs, wealth, passion or expertise, it can be accomplished. Think of it as "open-sourcing" the problem of education.
We know this can be done in education because it is being done -- witness Java Community Process, Unix, Linux and the Web.
It's being done by Nicholas Negroponte, who has made the $100 laptop his personal mission and has persuaded some giant tech firms, such as AMD, to come along.
It's being done by Jimmy Wales and his volunteer authors and editors who are making Wikipedia one of the best one-stop reference sources on the Internet.
And it's being done at Sun, where over a year ago we founded the Global Education and Learning Community with the goal of bringing academics, politicians and businesspeople together to share best practices and content in learning. This is one way we hope to create a freely accessible body of basic education content. This is a grass-roots effort that has garnered support from countries around the world, whose 1,600-plus members are currently engaged in over 200 projects to improve the state of education in developing nations.
Clearly, then, the problem isn't that it can't be done. The problem is that we need to get the right people involved.
The formula for success has three components: access, technology and tools. Here are 10 areas within those three components where we can start an open-source education project:
Access