Keeping your documents with you

From Bjoern Hassler

For many, keeping your documents with you means having them on your laptop, or on a memory stick. But now suppose your access to computers and/or the internet is limited. If you have access to a computer, but not the internet, then a memory stick is the solution: You can take your documents with you on the stick, and use them with a desktop computer.

However, thinking about the summer school in Samfya, what if the availability of computers/internet is different? What if you don't have access to a computer at home (or a laptop), but your only access to a computer is at an internet cafe or resource centre (where you also have internet)? Supposing that the internet cafe / resource centre always does have internet (when there is electricity), then it might be worth storing your documents online, because it means you can also get to them by phone (at least in Samfya mobile internet was readily available).

In this case, Google Documents could be a good way of keeping your documents with you, particularly if you don't have access to computers outside an internet cafe, and thus no way of accessing the documents offline anyway, but you do have a mobile: http://docs.google.com/m

It might be not make a big difference compared to the memory stick solution.

Of course what you really want is google gears on mobile, so that you have your documents both online and offline, both accessed through the desktop and accessed through mobile. Who knows, maybe android or chrome ...