Project Cauã

John "maddog" Hall preparing to speak at DebConf10

Around the middle of last year I wrote about Brazil as “somplace wired.”  Though a developing nation, it has a power grid and it is possible to get online there.  I mentioned in that post something Jon “maddog” Hall was reported to have said in a talk about open source tech in developing nations.  Essentially, he said there was nothing he could do for the child in the vast nothing of extremely rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa.  Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear him say this in person at DebConf 2010.  His idea for what can be done for people living in urban poverty, beginning in Brazil, may be just what I’ve been trying to find for part of my own future work in community development.

Project Cauã is an attempt at launching a fully sustainable, environmentally-sound means by which the urban poor of Brazil can support themselves as system administrators.  Rather than being job training for a corporate position (of which there are few and for which there is great competition already), this project captures the entrepreneurial spirit of the Brazilian people.  When I lived in Brazil I knew people who made candy at home to sell in the street and even saw a man fixing umbrellas in the street downtown.  Brazilians in general are quite creative about dealing with hardship and finding ways to make a living.

As I understand it, the basic idea of Project Cauã is as follows:

1. Train a person on how to administrate Linux systems and a Wifi network, to the point where he or she can be legally certified, licensed and bonded (this matters a great deal in bureaucracy-heavy Brazil, and I would argue is a vital step in breaking the underlying chain of corruption that exists on all levels in that country).
2. That person goes to the bank and gets a small business loan to by the hardware, including thin-clients computers that operate on GNU/Linux.  These computers, using already-available components, would consume less power by design and be far more environmentally friendly than the usual Windows desktop.
3. The newly-minted sysadmin takes leases out the hardware and admin services to local users.  For example, office buildings in São Paulo are often full of multiple, small companies.  A sysadmin could lease services and equipment to users in the building, working from a small office or even the basement.  In a residential area the sysadmin would be able to do the same for neighbors.

Figuring in Internet access, payments on the loan and other expenses, “maddog” figures system administrators could make as much as $1800 a month.  This might not sound like much to us in the United States, but in Brazil $1000 is about what an entry-level system administrator can expect to make in a company, perhaps as much as $2000 if he or she is really good.

There is more to this than what I’m describing, but that’s the bare-bones outline.  It may seem idealistic, but it’s entirely “doable” and makes a great deal of sense in the context of Brazilian economics and civil society.  It should also be obvious how this could serve as a key element in an overall community development strategy.  I’ve wondered for a long time how open source tech could be used effectively to break the cycle of poverty in a sustainable way in Brazil, and now I think I’ve come upon it in Project Cauã.  I’ll investigate further and, hopefully, find a way to go forward with this strategy.