Mokurai

Epictetus - "Only the educated are free."

Founder, Earth Treasury, an NGO to link schools around the world for education and business. Mokurai volunteers at OLPC as a volunteer coordinator, localization administrator (Khmer and Kreyòl), and general knoker (an especially Yiddish know-all, the kind who did math homework in pen), based on his training as a mathematician, classroom teacher, amateur musician and linguist, philosopher, and Buddhist priest plus his lifetime of encyclopedic reading, many years in high-tech market research and technical writing, and work in Unicode and Free Software. Video of me at Linux World talking about my take on OLPC and its potential to end poverty. Along with a few other requisites that we can work on.

Mokurai's Vision

End Poverty at a Profit all around. The mission is whatever planning, funding, research, development, and deployment is needed to make that happen, with a focus on Management by Exception in order to keep on top of what is needed in changing circumstances and make sure that nothing gets missed that we must have.

Sugar Labs has the Sugar software as its main focus, but needs to work with others on the rest of the mission. We should raise substantial funding to support these substantive projects, up to the point at which they can become self-sustaining, in the manner of the Grameen Group of companies.

These are the principal elements of the mission today. More will appear.

• Extend the OLPC and Sugar Labs work with evidence-based education research, curriculum development, and the redesign of textbooks, taking maximum advantage of software on the XO, and of the best research that we can find or carry out on how children learn, and what is of greatest value for them to learn.

• Engineer appropriate solutions for electricity and Internet connections in even the poorest and most remote villages in every target environment, in collaboration with university Schools of Engineering, Engineers Without Borders, and others, in order to maximize the usefulness of XOs to children everywhere.

• Work with microfinance organizations to place these electricity and Internet solutions along with XOs. The intention is to jump-start local economies by selling modest amounts of surplus power and bandwidth, and thereby raise the money to pay off the original loans and make further investments.

• Create an R&D consortium to further all of these goals and whatever else turns out to be necessary. We know that issues of economics, governance, social attitudes, and sustainability are important. What do we need to know, and how can we come to know it? What can we learn from the children themselves, and from teachers, parents, and others?

• Tap into Barack Obama's plans to increase global development aid by $25 billion annually, including a $2 billion Global Education Fund; into the UN Millennium Development Goals program; Make Poverty History; and all of the other initiatives that share our vision, even if they don't know it yet.

• Save as many languages and cultures as possible from extinction by teaching the children how to record them.

• Link children, schools, and communities together around the world in a safe manner for collaborative development.

• Teach children how to create sustainable international businesses together using their new knowledge and skills.

Mokurai has extensive experience in every aspect of computers, as a tech writer, global market analyst, and software developer. Previous work includes math software and textbooks, Computer Science papers, Free Software for voting, Unicode support on the XO, fighting spam around the world, and earlier anti-poverty projects. He can sometimes get people to stop talking past each other and answer the real questions (though not necessarily with Nicholas %-[ ). See, for example, the IETF discussions on multilingual URIs (link below).

AKA

• Edward Mokurai Cherlin/Czerwin
• גרשון בן יסעף
• Эдуард Георгеевич Черлын
• 장영구/張永久
• 法雲默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज

Contact

• My e-mail
• At SCALE x6 Sixth SoCal Linux Expo

AIM chat: mokurai

408 219 4178

• My LinkedIn profile
• Friendly Favors I'm FF10136 - Edward Cherlin
• My Digital Earth wiki page

Background

When I wrote a guide for new Internet users at Newbie.Net, there were three questions I couldn't answer:

• How to stop spam. So I founded the Coalition Against UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail)
• How to view all languages correctly in browsers and other software. So I joined Unicode.org and a number of Free Software projects dealing with browsers, fonts, keyboard layouts, locales, and rendering software for screen display and printing, and the IETF standards process for multilingual URLs and URIs.
• How to get everybody on the Net. So here I am. I have previously worked on wireless networking, satellite internet, and the Simputer.

I'm contributing information on countries and languages on the OLPC Wiki, including writing systems, fonts, keyboard layouts, sources of literature, and other items of interest, and administering Localization localization projects. I will be adding material on education and on the other impacts of the Laptop. It will have major effects in social development, health, economic opportunity, politics, and other important areas.

Contributions

I started to work on OLPC documentation, but then I discovered that even more pressing needs were being ignored. So now I have appointed myself Shadow Chairman & CEO of OLPC. Don't tell Nicholas.

Generalist

Buddhist priest, software developer, market researcher, technical writer, Peace Corps volunteer, cook, goatherd, music teacher...

I edited the Geode processor manuals for National Semiconductor, before they sold the product line to AMD. (The Laptop contains an AMD Geode processor.)

Languages: Hebrew, German, Latin, Russian, French, Swahili, Korean, Japanese Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, Classical Greek, Lojban, Klingon

Programming languages: APL, LISP/Scheme, FORTH, SNOBOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, Java, C, C++, Pascal, Smalltalk, Python, scripting languages. And I'm learning Squeak.

Unicode

Free/Open Source Software: I-APL, Open Voting Consortium, others

Math

Science Check out Astronomy Picture of the Day and the world's biggest telescopes, for neutrinos and gravity waves.

Co-founder of global anti-spam organization, The Coalition Against UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail)

Music: Yale Concert Band and Marching Band, clarinet; First Prize, Classical, in first-ever Foreigner's Korean Music contest of the Korea Herald on gayageum; Slavyanka Russian Chorus; Music Around the World pre-school multilingual music program; banjo, recorders, spoons, piano, harpsichord, dumbek

Simputer: Simple, inexpensive, multilingual computer for poor people

Village telemedicine over wireless

Science Fiction: John Brunner would have loved the OLPC project if he had lived to see it. Check out Stand on Zanzibar (includes national development projects in fictional countries), The Shockwave Rider (integrated disaster recovery and sustainable communities), The Sheep Look Up (environmental catastrophe), and The Stone that Never Come Down (What if people couldn't ignore information they have?).

Geek code GAT d-- s+:+ a+++ C++ UL++ P+ L+++ E- W++ N+++@ o+ K++ M+ b+++ e+++ h---- r+++ w--- APL++++ House, MD+++

Basic level in Korean, Chinese, Swahili, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German
Intermediate level in Russian, French