[Wikimediaindia-l] An Offline Wikipedia for the Aakaash Tablet?

[Aditya Sengupta]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 12:28, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <
parakara.ghoda at gmail.com> wrote:

> Aakash is basically an Android tablet. So if we create an offline version
> of Wikipedia for all Android devices, [India specific], I guess that should
> do? Right?


This version of Aakash uses Android- the one that Datawind is making for
the first pilot run (100,000 devices).

The next version of Aakash will *likely* use Android too. There is no
guarantee that Datawind will make that version- the price point will be
determined by a government bidding process and multiple manufacturers (all
those who pass the technical evaluation) will be invited to manufacture and
sell tablets at that price point- on a "rate card contract" system.

There are efforts underway to port Debian to the tablet, as some folks at
the IITs/MHRD aren't too happy with the reliance on Google. The current
version does not have the Android Market- despite talks with Google. This
shouldn't be a problem for Wikipedia-offline for the tablet though, since
that will be FOSS.

Jessie has spoken to the professor from IITB (Kannan Moudgalya) who is on
the standing committee of the National Mission on Education through ICT
(under which the Aakash project, among others, falls). She has also spoken
to the CEO of one of the other manufacturers- Datawind is only one of many
companies that are bidding for this project- they won the bid for the pilot
run. I have not been following this project for the past two weeks or so
(since the WikiConference)- the bidding for the second version of Aakash
was on at the time. I'm not aware of what the current status is. I'll be
visiting IITB during Scipy this weekend, so I'll know more then.

About offline-Wikipedia, work has already commenced on porting Kiwix to
Android (3 weeks ago by Emmanuel, IIRC).

tl;dr: The foundation is talking to folks behind the Aakash tablet.

@Hisham, Jessie: Any updates on getting the sample tablets from the
manufacturer?
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