Oaxaca, Endless OS, and indigenous languages

A rural Mexican state was the setting for an initiative to use the GNOME-based Endless OS to improve education in indigenous communities. Over the last several years, the Endless OS Foundation has teamed up with the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca (FAHHO) to deliver offline-first computers to those communities, but also to assist these communities in preserving their native languages. In a talk at GUADEC 2022, Rob McQueen provided a look at the project and what it has accomplished.

McQueen was not slated to give the talk—he already gave an earlier presentation at the conference—but Sergio Solis, who is from Guadalajara where the conference was held, was unfortunately unable to attend due to his family coming down with COVID. McQueen apologized for flying into Mexico from England to give a talk about Mexico when he had never been to the country before. But, as the CEO of the Endless OS Foundation, McQueen is obviously knowledgeable about the project and was able to step in and pinch-hit for Solis.

Project landscape

FAHHO is a Mexican organization that Endless has been working with, both before and after it became a non-profit, on a multi-disciplinary project to bring educational resources and technology to communities in the state of Oaxaca. The terrain in Oaxaca, which is located in southern Mexico roughly 1000km southeast of the conference, is rugged and mountainous; just getting to the communities the project is working with is a rather arduous process. For Endless, the focus is on bringing additional educational opportunities to people who are not connected to the internet, while the project as a whole has a larger scope, including elements of cultural preservation.

Oaxaca has the fifth largest area of any state in Mexico and it has a higher linguistic diversity than any other state; there are six native languages and ten variants, he said. Since the educational system in the country is centralized, it effectively discriminates against this language diversity by providing all educational material in Spanish. But some of the indigenous languages in Oaxaca are spoken-only; they need to be used and handed down so that the cultural heritage, stories, histories, and so on to continue to exist.

The last few years have been particularly challenging for education in many areas due to the pandemic, but educating children has been even more difficult in the communities where the project is active. Some of the communities blocked their roads to keep outsiders (and the virus) away, which sometimes kept the teachers out as well. Schools were closed and some remain that way even today.

While the government provides some educational materials via TV—which has both pros and cons, of course—many of these communities cannot receive TV signals. There is no broadband or cell service either, so when the schools are closed, access to additional educational resources is limited—or nonexistent. The pandemic has served to underline the need for other solutions for bringing educational materials to these isolated locales.

As McQueen described in his earlier talk, Endless uses storage as a way to work around a lack of connectivity. Pre-loading computers with educational content, and then making those computers available, means that they can be used by those kinds of communities. But there is another aspect to the project, which is to work with these people in their languages, so the project does not just deliver an encyclopedia and other content in Spanish and then vanish. Instead it has been working to provide interfaces and content in the native languages.

"Strangely enough, on the internet, there is not a lot of content in languages that are not written." In Oaxaca, there are also some languages that have only a few living speakers at this point. The "structural discrimination" against indigenous languages in the Mexican educational system tends to further contribute to their decline.

That has led these communities to start creating their own content in their languages. The StoryWeaver tool is being used in Oaxaca to capture local stories for children in a digital form. StoryWeaver also has books that can be translated into new languages, which results in an online book with pictures and text that can be shared with others. FAHHO has a project that is translating some of these books into the indigenous languages, which Endless was able to pick up for its multilingual books and resources offline application.

Support

The project was careful not to simply deliver computers and then walk away. Many of the students—and teachers—in these communities had never used a computer before. Rolling out the delivery of these computers was actually the most work for the project, not because of the logistical difficulties in getting them there, but due to the need for teaching the people about computers and how to use them. In addition, project members needed to work with the teachers on how to incorporate the computers and the content on them into their curriculum.

Solis has been a major part of that effort, traveling to different communities to meet with the inhabitants. He also would try to identify "ambassadors" or local experts within the community who could continue that support work. In 2020, the project accelerated the pace of computer deliveries in the face of the pandemic. Since the process of familiarizing people, including students, teachers, parents, and community elders, with the computers requires a lot of face-to-face time, the local experts were often the only ones who could do so. In addition, computers were given directly to students in some communities, so that they could explore and use them at home.

Working with these groups of people who had little or no computer experience helped Endless refine its GNOME-based OS, McQueen said. The users' struggles would point to areas for improvement, as would direct feedback from some of the early adopters. Improvements based on that would then be rolled into newer versions of Endless OS.

The project has delivered computers to 45 Oaxacan communities throughout the state. Around 2000 Endless OS systems are in daily use in schools and homes. Since Endless OS operates without requiring the internet, it is a perfect fit for communities without connectivity, like those in Oaxaca.

Results

The impact of the computers affects more than just the students themselves, however. Their existence in the communities leads to collective learning opportunities for families and other groups. Meanwhile, Endless OS has been translated into languages that are not available on other computers, such as Chatino. The first computer class given in the town of Cieneguilla was given in Chatino using materials in the same language. So learning can take place "in the languages that these children speak at home with their families".

These computers are also being used to record and transcribe texts in these indigenous languages. Linguistic anthropologist and native Chatino speaker Dr. Emiliana Cruz has been working on preserving Chatino stories and texts using the computers. She has also been working to create written forms of some of the spoken-only languages in order to help preserve the culture and history of those communities.

FAHHO collaborated with Wikimedia in 2019 to add and update articles about these Oaxacan communities and languages in Wikipedia. The Endless OS "Encyclopedia" application is based on Wikipedia and it was updated to include this information. That means the students in Oaxaca can see themselves (and other Oaxacan communities) in this global resource.

The integration of indigenous languages and locally generated content has drawn interest from other places in the world. There are other initiatives by international digital activists for communities that have a lot of the same characteristics as those in Oaxaca. Working with a linguist to turn a spoken language into a written one and then to integrate that with education in the community is something that could be replicated elsewhere—in Mexico and the world.

The project is a demonstration of what computers can bring to areas that have generally been bypassed by the "computer revolution". Linux and free software allow the kinds of customization needed so that these people can get the most out of the experience. These are clearly small niches in the world, which the big players are not likely to see much value in catering to, but having the ability—freedom—to do so is part of what free software is all about. One hopes we will see more of this kind of thing, in more and more places, over the coming years and decades.

A YouTube video of the talk is available.

[I would like to thank LWN subscribers for supporting my trip to Guadalajara, Mexico for GUADEC.]