universal social access to data and calculation

Imagine a cheap, mobile device with a notebook-sized screen that could form an ad hoc network with other such devices nearby.  Imagine that the users of these devices had free spreadsheet software that would allow them to collaboratively share and analyze data across that network. With such hardware and software, persons could meet and set-up custom, multi-period financing transactions with all the details fully accessible, understandable, and analyzable for all parties to the transactions. With such hardware and software, a group could meet, share data concerning their progress toward a common goal, and collectively adjust priorities and resource allocations.  These sort of capabilities could contribute greatly to persons’ efforts to improve their lives.

Work to make such capabilities available to everyone around the world is now underway.  SEETA is adapting SocialCalc, a light-weight, open-source spreadsheet, for the Sugar platform.  The Sugar platform can operate on a  low-cost notebook computer that supports mesh networking, such as OLPC’s XO. Unlike a service that depends on the Internet cloud, SocialCalc on Sugar will work with a peer-to-peer network that can be established through geographic proximity and local wireless networking. Thus collaborative data sharing and analysis will be available to the many persons around the world who lack good, pre-existing data network infrastruture.

With a great spirit of community service and generosity, SEETA has also volunteered to work on making more publicly accessible the Lotus spreadsheets of publicly filed U.S. telephone company tariff data. Telephone company tariff data is quite complicated.  So too is telephone company regulation. Making a large archive of telephone company public tariff data more publicly accessible can help to increase knowledge about communications services and price-cap regulation.  Securing for everyone adequate communication services at reasonable rates is a challenge that could benefit from broad, informed public engagement.  SocialCalc on Sugar can help make broad, informed public engagement with communications data a reality.

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You can experiment with SocialCalc both through a browser and on the Sugar platform.  A browser version of SocialCalc (lacking load and save functions) is available here.   A simple, low-impact way to run  SocialCalc on Sugar is to run Sugar via the Sugar Live CD. Download a disk image (.iso) file of the XO-LiveCD here.  Burn that file as a disk image (ISO) file to a CD (not a DVD). Then download a SocialCalc.xo build to a USB drive.  After that, boot your computer from that XO-LiveCD that you made (shut down your computer, and then immediately on power-up press F-12 or some other key to get into the set-up menu, which should then give you an option to boot from a CD). Booting from the CD will put you in the Sugar environment.  From there, open the Sugar terminal activity and type the command:

sugar-install-bundle "/media/USB DISK/SocialCalc0-8-3g.xo"

(modify appropriately if your USB drive has a different name or you’re using a different build of SocialCalc). That should install SocialCalc as an activity. You may need to restart Sugar to see SocialCalc in the activity list. You can then run it as you would run any other activity under Sugar.

Update: if the SocialCalc install fails, try

sudo sugar-install-bundle "/media/USB DISK/SocialCalc0-8-3g.xo"

and then proceed as described above.