GraaspBox: Enabling Mobile Knowledge Delivery into Underconnected Environments

Interacting with knowledge in a timely fashion is critical for the success of humanitarian missions. At the same time, the places where humanitarian action is needed are often those where Internet connection is poor or not available at all, making digital knowledge access difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge delivery model that relies on a peer-to-peer middleware and uses low-cost computers for local knowledge replication. We have developed a system implementing the model and evaluated it during eight deployments in Médecins Sans Frontières missions. The evaluation demonstrated knowledge delivery abilities of the system and its usefulness for the field staff.