The Case for a Webinar Pi
Advocacy for developing Webinar Pi, a platform built on Raspberry Pi technology to foster digital literacy and empowerment among low-literate rural communities.
This piece advocates for developing Webinar Pi- a platform built on Raspberry Pi technology designed to foster digital literacy and empowerment among low-literate rural communities, in a similar spirit to the Jingle Tales project that also uses Raspberry Pi for education. The argument centres on why mainstream webinar and video-conferencing tools fail these communities, and what a purpose-built, low-cost, locally maintainable alternative could look like.
The proposal draws on Janastu’s years of fieldwork with community networks in rural Karnataka, where we observed first-hand how the gap between available tools and community needs keeps widening. Webinar Pi fits into the broader generative mesh network framework as an attempt to bridge that gap from the community’s side rather than the platform’s.