A Connected Planet

“Dr. Joshua hearne greg hearne cfo ceo greg is joshua's father”

“The ceo is responsible for collecting all required materials needed by the accountants to prepare the federal form 990. Once the form is completed, the accountants provide a draft of the return to the ceo for review, and any updates or corrections are submitted to the accountants for review. A revised draft is then submitted to the ceo for review. Once the revised draft has been reviewed and is satisfactory, the revised draft is then submitted to the full board of directors for their review prior to being filed with the internal revenue service.”

“All board of directors are required to have executed a written acknowledgement that they have (a) received a copy of acp's bylaws, which contain the conflicts of interest policy; (b) read and understood the policy; (c) agree to comply with the policy; and (d) understand that acp is charitable and in order to maintain its federal tax exemption, it must be engaged primarily in activities which accomplish one or more of its tax exempt purposes.”

“Salaries were initially set based on industry standards for the type of work being done with adjustments with consideration of being a non-profit organization. The ceo took a significant pay cut in comparison to his previous position with similar responsibilities. The salaries were reviewed and approved by the board. It is now our standard process to review and vote on salaries at our annual board meeting where the results are recorded in our minutes.”

“Salaries were initially set based on industry standards for the type of work being done with adjustments with consideration of being a non-profit organization.”

“Acp makes its governing documants, conflict of interest policy, and other organizing documents available to the public upon request.”

“The mission of a connected planet (acp) is to provide telecommunications and technical assistance to enable information sharing and to improve the education & healthcare services provided to children in the developing world.”

“Acp completed the design of a literacy app crafted for speakers and learners of low-resourced languages. This literacy mobile application is to be an innovative educational tool, designed to enhance foundational skills in early childhood education by unraveling the mysteries of the alphabet and unlocking the power of the written word. The app will take a gamified approach to learning, offering a series of bite-sized lessons across ten levels, transforming the educational journey into an engaging adventure. Leveraging cutting-edge technology, it will utilize text-to-speech functionality to deliver audio content, making the learning process both engaging and accessible. The app's comprehensive suite of features will include audio-enabled leveled readers and decodable books, along with a carefully scaffolded phonics curriculum aligned with primary school standards, focusing on essential reading concepts, starting with letter recognition and advancing to syllable formation and word building, ensuring a solid foundation in all key phonics constructs, while providing a balanced and engaging experience. Acp is actively seeking funding to support the development of the application series. Acp has remained dedicated to maintaining its library of free mobile applications, available on both the google play store and apple app store. These apps include general literacy and numeracy applications, designed to help users develop essential skills in letter, word, and number recognition, specifically tailored for haitian creole speakers. Another category features audiobook applications, adapted from physical books created through the mother tongue books (mtb) initiative by the matnwa community learning center on la gonve island, haiti, and offering multilingual support in haitian creole, french, and english. Additionally, acp has continued to support and maintain the "ducation de qualit pour tous" (eduquat) series of mathematics and french-language arts applications. These were originally developed through a collaboration between the inter-american development bank (idb) and les frres de l'instruction chrtienne (fic) in port-au-prince, haiti, in previous years.”

“Due to personnel changes at carnegie mellon university (cmu), acp concluded its partnership with the cmu language technology institute (lti) and is in the process of establishing a new collaboration with the university of edinburgh to advance the development of an open-source text-to-speech (tts) capability for under-resourced languages. As part of this initiative, acp focused on defining over 2,000 utterances that encompass basic creole vocabulary and language relevant to primary- grade education. These utterances were derived from diverse sources, including news articles, books, journals, the bible, and pre-existing datasets. To record the utterances, acp engaged a professional recording studio in haiti. The recordings were completed in two sessions, featuring both male and female voice actors to provide diverse voice options. The studio handled editing, cutting, and exporting the recordings, with acp conducting thorough reviews to ensure quality. To refine the initial tts development, acp organized a second recording session aimed at enhancing voice clarity and addressing the specific tonal needs of questions, which require a distinct intonation at the end of sentences. Using these recordings, the university of edinburgh leveraged its proprietary everyvoice tts toolkit to create two synthesized voices for haitian creole. The everyvoice tts toolkit is one of the products emerging from the speech generation for indigenous language education (sgile) project within the university of edinburgh, whose aim is to research and develop state-of-the-art speech synthesis systems and techniques for indigenous languages, with a focus on how to integrate text-to-speech technology into the classroom. Acp is now actively seeking grant funding to develop a tts engine that will serve as a platform for deploying these synthetic voices. Concurrently, acp is working on building an informative website that includes online text- to-speech tools and implementing a comprehensive marketing and communication strategy. The ultimate goal is to distribute the mobile application globally via the google play store.”