Hello everyone,
We might as well keep this list rolling - it’s been an eventful couple of months and
there’s plenty to tell.
Just as COVID-19 lockdowns started to roll out across much of the world, our good friends
at Orange (the French Telco) reached out asking for us to roll out Kiwix directly onto
their West African network. So yes, here’s the short story of us making offline available
online (!)
Background
In a nutshell, it’s easier/faster for a telco to carry data on its own, local network than
it is to carry that same amount of data internationally. It does make sense in hindsight,
particularly if you think of the internets as a series of tube.
Mission
They asked that we roll out Kiwix and a collection of ZIMs in Arabic, French and English
onto their Ivory Coast hub: Orange customers were to be directed to a specific page[1] and
would be offered the content at zero-rating or special low rate (markets could chose their
pricing model). 11 markets were selected for the operation (mostly sub-saharan Africa).
We rolled-out the whole thing in a few days using Kiwix-serve[2] - most of the time needed
was for them to secure a big-ass server and grant us root access. It’s been running
smoothly ever since - up to 100,000 users/month at peak, which was nice. Contents deployed
were Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Wiktionary, Vikidia and a couple of video channels we also
serve as ZIMs.
So what did we learn?
- Kiwix-serve is super easy to install, and can manage large loads robustly;
- Most demanded contents: Wikipedia and Khan Academy, then Wiktionary & Gutenberg
library;
- Information circulated around somehow: we’ve had users from 130 countries so far (about
20-30% of total traffic), definitely not bots. A gentleman from An-Najah university in
Palestine even reached out asking that we deploy the same thing on their local network.
- The URL that Orange set up was overly long, which probably impacted adoption. We lobbied
to get
https://kiwix.orange (they own the TLD) but to no avail :-/ There is also a huge
difference between markets that communicated on the initiative in a sustained manner (e.g.
Liberia) and those who did it as a one-off.
Cookie points
They made a simple but sweet video[3] - in French only but you’ll get the idea.
[1]
https://kiwix.campusafrica.gos.orange.com/
<https://kiwix.campusafrica.gos.orange.com/>
[2]
https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-tools <https://github.com/kiwix/kiwix-tools>
[3]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ug0XEFhByc
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ug0XEFhByc>