The Q-cycle is about to begin throughout the Ubuntu realm. Quantal Quetzal is the name of the game. Quetzal refers to a bird that is found in Mexico while Quantal refers to an on-off state.
A quantal world is black and white. When it comes to the Digital Divide in the United States, the matter is now not a quantitative matter let alone one of binary opposition. Connection quality is what matters.
Strangely enough, the area ranked by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration as having the best penetration of broadband access for the consumer in the United States is the Illinois county named Cook. Cook County is better known as the home of the Blues Brothers let alone a silly city called Chicago. The rest of the top ten include locations like Houston, Dallas, Detroit, San Antonio, Philadelphia, and New York City.
Beyond those areas, there remains quite a bit more of the United States population. Many of those people have very little choice as to available broadband provider. In some cases there is none at all. The bottom of the ranking list for counties relative to broadband penetration includes areas that are more than just Pacific territories such as locales in Oregon, Alaska, and Texas.
In the Q cycle it might be appropriate to consider tools to help improve access to the support architecture undergirding Ubuntu. We have to avoid assumptions that the average user will have broadband access exceeding the minimum definition held by the Federal Communications Commission of 768 kbps down.
The package architecture undergirding Ubuntu assumes an active connection to the Internet available on a somewhat consistent basis. The maps available at broadbandmap.gov show quite a bit of disparity across the fifty states of the United States when it comes to connection quality. The ability to access packages from the archives and install them can be impacted if it takes a relatively long time to install something like scribus compared to a small package like curl.
Strangely enough, there are tools that help bridge these issues like apt-zip and apt-offline. The use of apt-offline combined with a relatively inexpensive USB key allows for updates to happen with the package queue even when your machine is disconnected. Provided you use apt-offline to update the contents of the package archives, even synaptic is equipped to build scripts that you can take to another machine to download packages.
A big gap is that these tools are not part of the standard minimal base for any install regardless of flavor. Thankfully apt-offline is a small enough package that it might get installed in a situation with low levels of connectivity bandwidth. Including it on an installation CD would help ensure ease of access.
Two small tools weighing in under a megabyte in size may help open doors in deploying Ubuntu with those having less than optimal access to the Internet. Since the Internet disruptions that happened in North Africa at the start of 2011, the world has started to see examples of just how fragile the Internet is. Ensuring alternative access modalities to the software package archive and mirrors is a way to help reduce friction to adopting Ubuntu where the Internet is not the greatest.
UDS-Q has not started yet but this should be something to think about as further adventures for 2012 are plotted and planned.