WHO: Grey-box is a social innovation startup that is working on providing free wifi access to educational content in areas where internet and electricity access is problematic.

WHY: 50% of the world lives offline – they haven’t connected to the internet in the last 3 months. In Africa, the average cost for 1GB of data is 7% of the average monthly salary. Even in North America, 50% of rural Canada does not have access to the minimum speed for the Internet. We believe that this is a solvable problem.

HOW: Over the last 2 years and based on field research and work, we have developed an array of mostly open-source social innovation projects. Each of those projects has a dedicated page on Riipen, but this listing serves as a quick summary:

• UNI is a low-cost device (and soon an Android application) that allows Wi-Fi access to everyone, everywhere, even in areas without reliable or safe internet. With a simple click to upload, Slides, PDFs, videos, Moodle, databases, or even copies of entire websites can be made available offline for free.
• Project Codex uses AI to translate medical databases in several languages and regions to facilitate international operations. It can be accessed via a mobile site or a tool such as WhatsApp. The Medical Codex project aims to provide an easy-to-use tool that can help coordinate medical equipment between countries and to quickly translate medical terms across multiple languages while accounting for local variations such as brands and generics.
• Project Symmetry is an application using AI to accelerate Wikipedia's translation efforts in less-represented languages (less than 1 million articles) by building a semantic understanding of similar articles in various Wikipedia languages and providing relevant translations for missing information
• Project Scraper is a Google Chrome extension that enables offline access to a web page or an entire website with just a few clicks.
• Project Mesh is an application that enables Android devices to connect and send files and messages over long distances without requiring internet connectivity.
• Project Cybercafe is software that runs on an Android device, enabling smart hotspot functionality for the sharing of internet connectivity with other Wi-Fi devices. Recognizing costs and other restrictions that may exist in our targeted regions, several controls are in place to allow a high level of control over how a user’s hotspot device is used for internet access.

Due to the multifaceted nature of our projects, learners would be capable of working on an array of projects as needed. This may include any of the following;

• Android development (UNI, Mesh, Cybercafe)
• Chrome extension development (Scraper)
• Python development (Symmetry)
• Database architecture and maintenance (Codex)
• Networking (UNI, Mesh, Cybercafe)
• UX/UI design and integration (all projects)