Overview

THE GLOBAL DIGITAL VILLAGE PROTOCOL:

GDV’s Development and Infrastructure investments are predicated on the premise that the workflow programs take root and bear fruit.

Management Structure

There will be a GDV Project Leader in charge of each Host Country Village enterprise.

Each Host Country Village enterprise will be composed of

a) A QWERTY / typewriter learning system that will morph into a QWERTY computer learning system once QWERTY is mastered. The QWERTY coordinator will also organize and mentor all smartphone, computer, and tablet usage training.

b) A Work Services Contractor that will train / certify Working Teams, and engage with the government offices for which the Village is designated to provide information automation services to oversee the information automation workflow for each client office.

c) A micro-power-plant coordinator that will recruit and train mpp franchisees.

d) A Network Services coordinator that will recruit and train WiFi franchisees and supervise the installation, training, and maintenance of all network elements.

e) Working Skills Program Coordinator that will work with the village to determine the appropriate vocations to select for teaching, mentoring, startup, and servicing in the village and surrounding area.

f) A GDV auditor will track all transaction processing and fiscal reconciliation for the Host Country Village enterprise.

Roll-Out of the Village Enterprise

A survey and mapping of where people live in the village must be accomplished. This people map should show what the population does for work, in addition to distance to road, the school, the market, the center village area, etc.
A fiber backbone route is planned with the approval of the Village’s leadership. A fiber dig team is recruited and trained. Network Services coordinator makes a presentation to the whole village about what the fiber backbone is, what its usage value is to the village, and how it will work.
The fiber backbone will be a ring that connects all collections of housing, consisting of a single fiber pair in a coated wire that is run through a 1 inch industrial plastic pipe, buried 1 meter deep in a trench and covered over. The fiber ring will be accessed by a series of access boards that connect to the fiber and come up to a stand on the surface.
A computer room / lab must be allocated or built at the school. An IT teacher capable of teaching typing, computer usage, and smartphone usage will be recruited and engaged for the school as an employee of the Work Service Contractor. The typewriters, paper, typing lesson books, and computers will be delivered and installed in the computer room / lab. Lessons will commence.
All students will be taught touch typing via the QWERTY method on the typewriters. When a student successfully reaches 45 wpm without errors in both English and the local dialect, he or she will be rewarded with a smartphone.
Access point locations will be recruited from local village residences and installed. Solar-PV Micro-Power-Plants (“mpp”) platforms will be installed and enfranchised with local village residences. The franchisee will be trained in operations, maintenance, and commercial management of the power purchase agreement governing each mpp’s output.
Network Services commissions village network. VSAT is delivered and installed.
mpp platforms are installed and activated. Virtual Axis Wind Turbine backup facility is located and deployed for emergency power backup.

Monetizing Barter in the Village

The MPP Company will be responsible for monetizing barter in the village. One or more ‘Money Crops’ will be decided upon by the village, and this crop will be grown by all farmers in the village. The crop will be harvested and taken to market by the MPP Co. which will be responsible for selling this crop and bringing the proceeds back to the farmers who will distributed that portion that has been exchanged in the village for goods and services.

Network Overview

The village network offers other operators an entirely new domain that is subsidized by all communications it makes possible for the first time. Outside-the-village service providers will pay termination fees for each data / voice call into the village. This ‘for-the-first-time’incoming traffic will provide significant revenue for the network.

As agriculture provides the primary economy of the village, the service footprint may range from 30 to 50 sq. km.

Villagers focus on their daily survival. The network’s initial mission is voice / video / message / email services within the village. We must grow the network’s traffic with local communications. Once the work flow programs (Vocations and Information Automation) take hold, communications will expand outside the village.

The village network will run all communications services on TCP-IP. There will be no 2G, 3G, or 4G networking. VoIP, email, messaging, and data-centric web applications will connect via WiFi on smartphones and computers —without mobile network operator intervention.

The villagers will use a ‘white-label’VoIP program that supports voice and data calls to phones and computers running the client in the village. The village VoIP program enables local voice / data billing. The VoIP program will interconnect a VoIP call to a remote mobile or landline network. The village network will charge a bandwidth usage fee per MB for all village calls to outside the village, plus an termination charge from the terminating network.

A mobile or fixed line operator that sends a call for termination on the village network will pay a mobile termination rate approved by the Host Country telecom regulator.

Smartphones, computers,and tablets connect via WiFi to access points deployed at micro-power-plants situated in key sites (residential and business) in the village.

Deep-charge batteries will be recharged at the micro-power-plants and distributed to remote WiFi sites.

The fiber optic cable system, buried at one meter, will provide backhaul for all WiFi access points back to the village school where the computer lab and the network operations center are situated. The Network operations center will have a router that enables all in-village voice / data calls to be routed between local devices. A VSAT transmission system will be used to uplink voice / data calls outside the village, and downlink voice / data calls into the village.

As information automation workflows progress, the digitalized records will be transmitted out of the village. As knowledge worker flows progress, voice / data calls out of the village will be generated for business. As small businesses are initiated by the GDV programs, as e-Government and financial transaction processing progress, additional capacity for storing, processing, and reporting on local information bases will be added. As more revenues are generated by villagers in the village, more communications services will be utilized.

The village network traffic will ultimately require extension of the fiber optic backhaul to the national fiber backbone, moving on from the VSAT transmission facility.

Harmonizing with the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) and the African Union’s Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa, (PIDA), www.pidafrica.org

AFRICA is embarking on a road-building spree. Ahead of the pack are mining organisations, largely funded by China, which have flooded into the continent over the last decade and need ways to transport materials. But also afoot is a larger, pan-African effort to upgrade and expand the continent’s highway network, as well as building many more smaller connecting roads.

The result will be a vast continental transformation with the potential to improve access to education and healthcare – and connect Africans to each other, enabling commerce. The reforms to the interurban road network have affected rural roads much less. Even though agriculture is viewed as an engine of growth, only one-third of rural inhabitants live within 2 kilometers of an all-season road. Doubling this percentage would be very costly, absorbing more than 1 percent of GDP a year for a decade. The rural environment presents particular institutional challenges for road maintenance.

Africa’s national road density is substantially lower than that in other developing regions: only 204 kilometers of road per 1,000 square kilometers of land area, with only one-quarter paved, compared with a world average of 944 kilometers per 1,000 square kilometers, with more than half paved. That density is less than 30 percent of the next-lowest region, South Asia. However, Sub-Saharan African road density in relation to population is slightly higher than South Asia’s and only slightly lower than the Middle East’s and North Africa’s. [See http://www.au-pida.org/transport for current projects status]

PIDA’s long-term implementation is currently estimated at more than $360 billion. PIDA, funded mainly by African governments, plus international banks, governments and funding agencies, was launched in 2010 and is due for completion in 2040. Transport makes up 30 per cent of the current budget, and roads are a big part of this, projected at $25.4 billion through 2020.

The plan is to expand the existing, 10,000 kilometre-long network of major roads to between 60,000 and 100,000 km – either by upgrading existing poor roads or building new ones. The result would be nine arteries, some hugging Africa’s entire coastline, while others strategically criss-cross the continent. Some 250,000 km of smaller roads will be built or upgraded to connect smaller cities to the main arteries, plus another 70,000 km to plug in rural areas.

GDV money crops will be trucked to markets and will therefore provide a substantial revenue resource for roadways through the freight tariffs that commercial vehicles are charged. Developing long-term tariff commitments will guarantee cost-effective transport costs for the villages while providing accounts receivable backstops for PIDA’s planned transport financing bonds.