Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) is a revolutionary community education approach, packing all of the world's best open learning content into inexpensive knowledge hotspots. We empower schools, libraries, clinics and individuals the world over, when the Internet is not possible, in developing countries especially. From years working with schools in Haiti, Mexico, and in countries across Africa, we have learned a lot about deeply unnecessary digital divides between people with opportunity, and those without.
Internet-in-a-Box supports many capabilities from Wikipedia, Khan Academy, healthcare libraries, and OpenStreetMap (OSM), open books, and videos localized for and customizable by each community. As technologists, we should not be dictating what learning content should predominate—so we enable community organizers, teachers, and learners to curate their own ‘learning bouquets’. We provide:
- - An open source technology stack with out-of-the-box applications and capabilities for learners worldwide
- - An admin interface to enable easy curation of learning content
- - A living FAQ document that’s updated frequently
- - Virtual and in-person support from an active and passionate developer community
In this talk, we focus on one of our capabilities - IIAB Maps. In November 2025, we soft-launched new maps capabilities: a modern, self-hostable mapping stack using maps.black for both street and satellite tiles, plus optional full-text search via Nominatim. While IIAB has supported serving static maps via pre-generated raster/vector tiles, delivering interactive and customizable OpenStreetMap experiences offline was a challenge due to the complexity of tile servers, rendering pipelines, and data management.
These updates improve usability: a “low-resolution” default build remains small (hundreds of megabytes), while a “high-resolution” option supports detailed street + satellite maps (on the order of tens to hundreds of gigabytes), all accessible via the same IIAB Wi-Fi hotspot. This talk draws on real-world experience in open-source infrastructure, automation, and self-hosted systems — highlighting how simple tooling can expand IIAB communities with high-quality maps and satellite photos for everyone.
We’ll demonstrate how to use the new IIAB Maps to launch fully interactive, customizable offline OSM-based maps, on highly constrained hardware (e.g., Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W). We’ll walk through the installing, enabling, and accessing maps on an IIAB. We’ll also highlight configuration options (low vs. high-res, satellite, search), expected storage/resource needs, and performance trade-offs.
We will describe some big steps forward the project is now taking — in the footsteps of One Laptop Per Child where we began this fascinating journey over a decade ago — and how conscientious citizens of all kind can now partake as librarians for our planet!
