Save the World with Offline First
Using technology to change lives, and maybe even save them.
At Offline Camp California we had a breakout session dedicated to identifying how Offline First applications can improve and even save people’s lives and livelihoods. To build a system to work everywhere, you must focus first on the most resource-constrained environment. In this case, people with little to no connectivity represent your most vulnerable user base. By thinking of your users as vulnerable, you are forced to think about what information your users need access to no matter what. If your users have variable connectivity, or they lose it completely, will they still be able to get the base minimum of the information they need?
There are many vital use cases for an Offline First approach to app development. People without reliable internet access are unable to participate in online communities and discourse. There are researchers and scientists who are making great discoveries but need better systems to be able to share these large data sets. When a disaster strikes, people need to use technology to find the help they desperately need. And lastly there are those hidden communities who must find a way to defend their rights to their land and their wellbeing to secure their own future. This is all where Offline First comes into play.
Social Media
Facebook is a great example of an online service that can unite communities and is working to do a better job at reaching users with limited connectivity. Jesse Beach is an engineer at Facebook who specializes in accessibility, and you can read about Jesse’s biggest takeaway from Offline Camp. (Hint: her biggest takeaway was inspired by our session on Design Patterns.) During the “Save the World” session at Offline Camp she said that there are 1.7 billion people on Facebook. Roughly, this leaves 6 billion people around the world who are left out.
Facebook is making strides in reaching their offline users, even going so far as to bringing the internet to them with their Aquila project, which is a solar-powered plane designed to reach potential users who live without data connectivity in remote parts of the world. Aircraft such as this could potentially be deployed to disaster affected areas to provide life-saving communication to the outside world.
Academia
Academic researchers must retain massive amounts of collected journal articles and data but run into big problems when they need to share this work with others. They have way too much data to be able to share it via applications like Google Drive or Dropbox, but the functionality of those applications is enticing to them. Not long ago a solution was built out of Stanford University Libraries for preserving academic journal articles, called LOCKSS, which stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.” The LOCKSS Program provides libraries and publishers with award-winning, low-cost, open source digital preservation tools to preserve and provide access to persistent and authoritative digital content. But it lacks the ease of use and quick sharing functionality of applications like Dropbox. Max Ogden had the idea to take an Offline First approach to digital preservation by building Dat Project. This tool allows researchers to easily share huge data sets and is optimized for speed, simplicity and ensuring data is securely stored. This application keeps vital research data safe and allows it to be shared across an Offline First network to other researchers.
Disaster Response
When the Ebola outbreak in Africa reached epidemic levels, NGOs employed developers to build applications that could get life-saving information to affected communities fast. Gregor Martynus met the people behind eHealth Africa by sheer chance. They happened to start working in the same coworking space in Berlin where he worked and after getting to know them Gregor began contributing to their project. A Net Magazine story outlines the design of eHealth Africa, a health resources application designed to be Offline First to battle zero data connectivity and spotty WiFi access. eHealth Africa brings “new approaches to the development of people centric and data driven technology solutions that connect and deliver better public health services for vulnerable communities.” The eHealth dev team chose CouchDB as the database because it is designed with distributed systems in mind, where a local database is contained in each device. It became the backend too, as CouchDB provides a system for synchronizing changes between multiple copies of the same database record. Pairing this with PouchDB provides a JavaScript database on the frontend that can store data locally while offline. This way, when cases of Ebola were reported, this vital information was not lost and could be synced back to eHealth Africa whenever the CouchDB backend got back online.
Activism
Hack the Rainforest was an event in the summer of 2016 which brought together indigenous activists, technologists, designers, and civil society partners to build solutions to defend conservation and indigenous sovereignty in Guyana, South America. Across Latin America and in rainforests around the globe, indigenous people face multiple threats, including water contamination, deforestation, and illegal land seizures. When a community stands up to defend their land, but can’t describe or prove exactly what is or isn’t theirs, they have a difficult if not impossible time navigating the political and legal channels that are supposed to serve them. Digital Democracy supports marginalized communities around the world in documenting and responding against illegal land grabs, deforestation, water pollution, etc. Offline First applications would lessen their dependency on vulnerable sources of photo storage, and allow them to get necessary information out so they will be able to defend their rights.
In Conclusion
My biggest takeaway from this session? To build applications that work anywhere you must build first for the most constrained environment. After attending this session I was amazed at all the use cases for Offline First that I hadn’t considered before. To be honest, I really didn’t want this conversation to end. There are so many ways that people are designing mobile/web/native apps to change people’s lives, and I’m inspired to keep learning about use cases for Offline First. I’m building a conference talk about this topic and hope you will reach out if you want me to feature your Offline First project in some way. Follow me here on Medium to stay tuned for more!
Editor’s Note: This article recaps discussions we had at Offline Camp, a unique tech retreat that brings together the Offline First community. Join us at our next event or sign up for updates and cast your vote on where we should host future editions of Offline Camp.
