Section: New Results

Folk-IS

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux [correspondent] , Luc Bouganim, Philippe Pucheral.

According to many studies, IT should become a key facilitator in establishing primary education, reducing mortality or supporting commercial initiatives in Least Developed Countries. The main barrier to the development of IT services in these regions is not only the lack of communication facilities, but also the lack of consistent information systems, security procedures, economic and legal support, as well as political commitment. In [5] , we proposed the vision of trusted cells, a data platform for personal data services where the shared infrastructure (typically the cloud) is untrusted, while personal devices (such as smart phones, tablets or set-top box) are trusted execution environments. We revisited this vision to the context of LDCs. We proposed a new paradigm, that we call Folk-enabled Information System (Folk-IS), based on a fully decentralized and participatory approach, where each individual implements a small subset of a complete information system without the need for a shared networked infrastructure. As trusted cells, Folk-IS builds upon the emergence of highly secure, portable and low-cost storage and computing devices, called hereafter Smart Tokens. Here however, the focus is on low-cost of ownership, deployment and maintenance, and on the absence of a networked infrastructure. With Folk-IS and thanks to their smart tokens, people will transparently and opportunistically perform data management and networking tasks as they physically move, so that IT services are truly delivered by the crowd. We have published in [17] the Folk-IS vision and main principles, and in [13] a more detailed paper including technical challenges, specific to that approach and an exploitation and feasibility analysis of the Folk-IS vision.