Herkko Hietanen of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology tells his audience at the Berkman Center that “television is really broken.” The medium isn’t rising to its full potential, isn’t providing consumers with programs when and where they want them. To set the scheduled for what you want to watch, you need to be at your television. And there are frustrating geographic restrictions on programming – Herkko wonders why it’s hard to watch Finnish TV in the US. Television was created to be consumed – it lacks interactivity with broadcasters and other viewers. It forces consumers to sit through irrelavent commercials.

It could be so much better, he tells us. And it would be very hard to pitch a VC on a model of ad supported, broadcast over the air television today.

We can think of the VCR as an early attempt to fix the TV. Predictably, it made rights owners fearful, and they brought in the lawyers. Those lawyers lost. The Sony Betamax decision determined that manufacturers were not liable for direct copyright infringement because the technology had substantial noninfringing uses. Herkko now sees great potential in networked video recorders to fix what’s wrong with television.

He offers a quick history of television:

- In the early days, TV aired over radio masts, and was essentially a local medium, with some local character and color. But governments quickly intervened and restricted who could construct an antenna and use spectrum

- To try to solve the problem of broadcasting over large areas, post-WWII strategies proposed a network of B-29 superfortress aircraft flying above the US, transmitting TV. It’s not actually a stupid idea, he tells us. But it was obviated by the rise of satellite TV, initially used to broadcast programs throughout TV networks, and later moved to consumer dishes. Eventually, companies figured out how to encrypt, and therefore commercialize, their systems.

- Community antennas represent a different model for distributing signals. Communities in valleys had difficulty receiving broadcast signals. This was bad for business for local electronics stores. Some responded by building shared antennas, then running cables to homes to share that signal. This has moved towards a highly profitable business, the cable television business, which manages to charge substantial amounts of money for service that’s often poorer than what’s available for free via broadcast television. (Herkko points out that in Boston, he can actually get more HD channels via broadcast than via basic cable.) But there are other benefits of cable – you can deliver individual streams, including individual streams of pornography, which is always a profitable business.

Herkko sees a near-fatal embrace between content providers and cable companies. They’re co-dependent, and scared of alienating one another. But this dependency can limit innovation in services. We’ve seen less development around on-demand video, the ability to watch on demand than we might expect than we might expect. Instead, we’ve seen “enhancements” like DRM and the broadcast flag, and heavy litigation against anyone entering the markets. Basically, we see a lot of intelligence added at the center of a network, with dumb, constrained edges that are prevented from innovating.

He looks in some detail at recent litigation surrounding Cablevision. Cablevision designed a system that used very dumb set top boxes to communicate a user’s desire to record a show to a central recorder. Users could then retrieve recordings from the central server via the set top box. For Cablevision, this reduced capital expenditure per client, allowing a huge central storage service rather than millions of individual, expensive, failure-prone hard drives. “Every network lined up to sue Cablevision for direct copyright infringement.” But the court saw that Cablevision was making copies for each user, not just sharing a single copy, and ruled in Cablevision’s favor. This contrasts to mp3.com, which had a single copy of each song, not multiple copies.

Home PVRs are either closed and user-friendly, or open and very hard for ordinary people to use, like MythTV. TIVO is the friendly market leader, but it’s a walled garden. Herkko sees the market leadership as related to friendly relationships with networks, pointing out that their main competitor, ReplayTV, was sued out of existence by broadcasters.

“When recorders get connected, users get connected,” Herkko argues. Connected users create social networks , and social networks can enable tinkering at the edges. But rightsholders will try to protect their rights from attack, which will push them towards stupid networked recorders that just record shows. There may be space for innovation from intelligent, open client players. This is a way of turning television tubes into internet tubes, bringing around the “3G” of television.

What might this mean? Users could label ads for one another, which might allow the blocking of targetted ads. Communities could discuss and enhance television, which might be useful for programs like Lost. We could imagine gambling happening alongside live television sports. And he predicts that we’ll see communities imposing collective standards on television, allowing and community or a congregation to collectively filter television for their viewers.

It doesn’t make economic sense to have individual recorders – Cablevision’s model is a better one, in technical terms. And this idea of centralized recording – or even networked individual recorders – opens some big new opportunities. These systems might even save advertising, as they’ll give us far better data on who’s watching what, enabling systems like Nielsen to provide accurate data again. They’d also enable mobile TV – anything you can store online could be streamed to your mobile device. But these systems also store a great deal of valuable information – he notes a recent paper on Facebook that suggests the possibility of determining someone’s sexual orientation by examining a network of friends – could we tell if someone’s gay based on what they watch?

Herkko ends with the observation that social television isn’t a new concept. We’ve seen lots of experimentation with split screens, which allow chat alongside live broadcast. “But television is a lean-back experience,” Herkko offers – you don’t want to share screen estate with your friends. Instead, he believes that social interactions will be before and after the show.

• If you can bomb Africa to enforce good governance, why spare the US
  Ferocious response to Paul Collier's new book, which suggests that military intervention many be necessary to stabilize some of the world's poorest states.
  (tags: kenya nation journalism book review collier poverty development intervention)
• Africa%u2019s SMS crisis – and how to stop it | VentureBeat
  Josh Goldstein looks at the cost issues surrounding African mobile connectivity, with a focus on SMS and Uganda, and thoughts on what cost structures mean for African-led innovation
  (tags: africa mobile phone telephony uganda sms cellphone development ict4d)

My friend and former business partner, Bo Peabody, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post titled “Twitter.org?” He argues that social media is extremely difficult to support via advertising, unlikely to make profits for venture capital investors, and is sufficiently important that we should try to build non-profit models to support emerging infrastructures like Twitter.

Bo’s got some experience to draw from in offering these observations. He was the founding CEO of Tripod, which provided free homepages for over 15 million users in the pre-history of the web (1998) and peaked as the 8th most trafficked site on the web. While Bo, I and other Tripodians did just fine selling our baby to Lycos, the site never came within spitting range of profitability while we ran it. As Bo points out in his op-ed, advertisers were just never that excited about putting ads on a webpage displaying someone’s condom collection. And Bo’s been working in the venture capital space ever since as one of the co-founders of Village Ventures, and has had many an opportunity to turn a skeptical eye towards countless business plans for social media startups.

I enjoy arguing with my old friend, so we got together for coffee today to talk through his ideas at more length. The idea that advertising is unlikely to support social networks sounds right to me. I observed earlier this year that the internet is helping us realize that the value of an ad impression is much, much lower than we believed they were in the age of newspapers. Clay Shirky has sharpened that argument and used it to make the case that newspapers will fail as a model before we’re able to invent a sufficient alternative.

I asked Bo whether targetting would save us – given that Facebook knows where I live, how old I am, what music I listen to, can’t it sell hypertargeted, premium ads to me? Bo points out that Google is rapidly accumulating as much information about me, and has the advantage that I’m searching for something when I use it… while when I’m on Facebook, I’m looking for human contact and interaction, which may not be when I’m most susceptible to being redirected to an advertiser’s homepage. His take? Niche content can support itself via advertising, and search engines will continue to divert us to advertisers as we search for useful content… but social networks aren’t content, they’re communication tools. (This reminds me a great deal of Andrew Odlyzko’s “Content Is Not King“, a paper that’s wrong in many ways, and right in lots of important ones…)

So what? Facebook’s a communication business – lots of people make money on communication businesses. Wouldn’t people pay for Facebook if that was the only way to keep the service running? Bo and I batted this idea around for a while and came up with this theorem – When a major value of a service is its ubiquity, it needs to be free. Let’s imagine Facebook starts charging. Some percentage of users – possibly a significant one – start paying, while the others leave. The tool’s significanty less useful than before. What’s great about Facebook – the reasonable assumption that someone from a previous chapter of your life will be findable online – would be crippled by a more exclusive, paywalled Facebook.

The corollary to this, of course, is that you cam wall off and charge for a network where exclusivity is a feature. My friends at Dopplr just sold their excellent social network to Nokia – congratulations, guys! Dopplr didn’t have am enormous userbase… but the users of the service include a lot of high net-worth individuals and ludicrously frequent travellers, the sort of targetted community that’s excellent for advertisers, or just for Nokia to market to. Dopplr, which allows frequent travellers to share their jet-setting schedules with a controlled list of friends (and yes, I’m a satisfied user), probably doesn’t benefit from supporting millions of users – it’s probably most valuable serving an exclusive niche community.

(In economic terms, this has an interesting parallel to a point Clay made in a talk at Shorentein last week. There’s a real market for financial information, and companies like the Wall Street Journal and The Economist aren’t in trouble in the same way most newspapers are. But that’s in part because financial information is more valuable the more scarce it is – if everyone knows about Uzbekistan’s emergence as a center for hydropower innovation (that’s a joke, folks) they’d all rush into the market and remove the first-mover advantage. It’s possible that the most valuable networks are the hugely expensive, highly selective ones around conferences like TED or WEF, which charge thousands of dollars for access to some content and to a very exclusive network.)

Okay, so maybe the problem is financing social networks which function as communications tools and have strength connected to their ubiquity. This describes Facebook, journaling communities like LiveJournal and may well describe Twitter. Should we simply short their stocks? (Another joke. These companies are privately held, and it’s unclear that any would ever be able to IPO. Instead, they tend to be bought by larger dot.com businesses, seeking to broaden their userbases. Public companies need significant and verifiable revenues, at least to IPO.)

Bo argues that Wikipedia may demonstrate the possibility of running a critical service as a non-profit community effort. I’m not convinced that running Wikipedia is really as hard as running Facebook. (Communications businesses are cursed by the fact that people need them to have 100% uptime as well as preferring zero cost… And given Metcalfe’s law, you can end up with a lot more traffic in a communications service than in a content publishing one.) I’d broaden that argument somewhat – services like Facebook and Twitter are emerging as critical pieces of social infrastructure. It may be worth thinking of them as public goods. We know a lot of different ways to provision public goods – states maintain them using taxation, private entities build them and charge access fees, communities build them and rely on user support, NGOs provide services and use a hybrid of user fees, donations and foundation support. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that this might be how we choose to build social networks in the future… or perhaps if any of the tools we rely on becomes less reliable.

I’m fascinated by the story of Dreamwidth, a socially-conscious for-profit that’s been started to help address some of the struggles LiveJournal has had under new ownership. Some LiveJournal users have been unhappy about SUP’s purchase of the company and worry about the future of their content and networks. Dreamwidth has worked very closely with heavy LJ users to build an open-source product designed to meet the needs of these dedicated users. They’re willing to pay, which could allow Dreamwidth to turn a profit, but they’re interacting closely with company founders and management, trying to ensure that their community remains their community.

I think the forcing function for some future experiments in social network media models is likely to be the spread of these tools into the developing world. You think it’s hard to sell ad inventory targetted to American college students – now Facebook’s got to sell ads targetted to Nigerian cybercafe users. (I’ve long argued that you might be able to make money at this if it were central, not peripheral, to your model.) There are early indications that some firms may be trying to restrict their offerings in developing nations, offering “lite” versions as a way of reducing costs to users less likely to generate revenues. But the real potential of these tools may be in organizing political and social movements in places where other media is closed off. I can imagine a future in which a foundation offers some grant money to seed social media communities designed to provide ubiquity in developing nations for reasons of protecting and encouraging free speech… and I can even imagine these communities becoming more useful and vital than the tools we’ve so rapidly come to rely on in our current social media universe.

Not many Afrophiles shed tears when Lansana Conté, Guinea-Conakry’s long-time strongman, died. But the military coup that followed his demise promised to pile more hardship upon one of the world’s poorest countries. The African Union – rightly – has refused to recognize military governments, which should push those governments to conduct elections sooner, rather than later… but which seems to further disconnect and isolate governments from the family of nations.

Shortly after seizing power, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara pledged to return the country to civilian rule within 60 days. He extended the timelines, promising free elections by the end of 2010, but assured citizens that this move wasn’t intended to let military officers consolidate power – instead, no one in his ruling council would run for office. Surprisingly approximately no one, that decision has been reversed, and council members have been announcing their intention to run for President. When Dadis, the coup leader, began hinting that he would run for President, many Guineans had enough. Up to 50,000 people participated in a banned protest today, which was savagely put down by military forces, who killed dozens of people. (BBC reports “at least 58″, while Bloomberg reports at least 69.) Blogger Oumar of Konngol Afrik pins blame for the violence on the “red berets”, an elite corps of Presidential guards who he reports were involved in violence against the public in 2006 and 2007.

There’s not a ton of citizen media to supplement the wire service reports. Global Voices, covering the coup earlier this year, leaned on MINSA – Missionary International News Service Agency - which reported on demonstrations in Labé last week, and today reports on demonstrators waiting in fear to be arrested at their homes. I suspect we’ll have a roundup of blogger voices as those reports come in.

What’s been interesting for me, in the short term, is watching the few comments mentioning #Guinea on Twitter are focusing on media coverage. Nasser Weddady, outreach director for HAMSA and well-known MENA activist, offered this tweet a couple of hours ago: “In plain English: screw #Polanski, I am more interested in what’s happening in #Guinea than that fugitive pervert.” It’s been retweeted several times, reflecting either a frustration at media coverage, or simply that lack of any other news out of Guinea at this point.

I enjoyed this article in Workers World (not exactly my usual read, but totally worthwhile in this case) by Abayomi Azikiwe of Pan-African News Wire. Azikiwe’s analysis focuses on Guinea’s past as part of a Ghana/Mali/Guinea socialist alliance that sought to develop independently of western (and particularly French) influence. While his recipe for a worker’s revolution sounds like a poor one to my unrepentant capitalist ears, his story of how Guinea could have emerged as a major power based on its mineral wealth is a sad, familiar, important and insufficiently understood story.

A fascinating story you might have missed. Noam Cohen of the New York Times looks at The Budget, a newspaper in Sugar Creek, Ohio that serves a large Amish community as well as an “English” (non-Amish) community. The story appears to be inspired by Jessica Best, a Welsh journalist who had the opportunity to study the paper on a summer fellowship. She blogged about her experiences and wrote an excellent piece for Journalism.co.uk about the experience, and the interesting compromises the paper’s taken in a digital age.

The Budget, Best explains, has two editions – a local and a national edition. The local is a weekly ten-page paper that covers events in Sugar Creek and environs. It includes news on the Amish community – a large presence in Sugar Creek – but the focus is on “English” news… and Best explains that the paper is quite careful about local sensibilities, describing the paper’s decision to downplay news of a murder in the Amish community. The local edition wraps around a much larger national, which is compiled from reports from 400 Amish “scribes” from 41 states. Scribes write reports on community news – who hosted church, the weather, harvests, births and deaths – and mail, fax or, in a few cases, email their reports to the Budget, which compiles reports into a 40+ page national edition.

When The Budget decided to go online, there was a great deal of fear in the Amish community that their news would go online – the community had legitimate fear about privacy, being targetted by scams, or simply opening the Amish lifestyle to online ridicule. (Wait, how’d they hear about 4chan…? Actually, before you go to far down the “An Amish website? Impossible!” line, read Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay, “Amish Hackers“, about the complex conversations in Amish communities about what technology to adopt and which to eschew.) The Budget decided to put the local edition online, but has kept the national edition offline.

While this is probably the right decision, it’s a loss for those who share Best and Cohen’s sense that The Budget’s national edition is one of the longest-standing citizen journalism projects in the world. The sort of hyperlocality that friends like Lisa Williams have been studying (see her Placeblogger project) has a long track record via The Budget, and the constancy of this record has some interesting social implications. The archives of The Budget become a search engine for the Amish community. Cohen reports that people in the Amish community are able to use reports from the Budget to obtain birth certificates for home births that weren’t reported to local authorities.

Benedict Anderson’s brilliant “Imagined Communities” makes the argument that a community’s identity is shaped, in part, by a shared media. He offers the image of a British empire, where citizens in Bombay, Cape Town and London might have imagined a nation united by little, day to day, but the Times of London… and speculates that the ability to imagine these other readers is a way of imagining a nation. It’s intriguing (for me at least) to think of The Budget in this context, and in the context of an archive of data that might serve as an Amish internet.

So, you’re the leader of a UN member nation. You’re invited to the UN general assembly in New York. And that can be fun – you might get the chance to join the 20-minute long scrum of leaders assembled to shake Obama’s hand after his speech. But you might get stuck listening to Qaddafi’s 96-minute rant. All the good stuff happens in the hallways anyway. You might find yourself asking, “Why did I come in the first place?”

Legitimation. There’s only a very few things you need to be a nation – territorial integrity is nice, but not mandatory; a flag’s a good idea, but easy enough to design and sew; you can always rent a military. But you’re not a nation unless other nations recognize you as such. Ask Somaliland – they’ve managed to put together a reasonably functional economy and government in a very difficult neighborhood, but they aren’t recognized by their set of peers.

So that helps explain why Andry Rajeolina has come to the UN in force. My Malagasy blogger friends tell me that there’s a group of about 20 Malagasy officials and media, eager to proclaim Rajeolina’s legitimation by the general assembly. But that process isn’t going to smoothly…

First, a quick refresher on Malagasy politics. Marc Ravalomanana was elected president of Madagascar in 2006. (He’s been in office since 2002, when he took power after a disputed election.) He’s done some questionable things in office, including cracking down on independent media, spending state money on a private jet and putting forward a plan to lease a huge chunk of the country’s agricultural land to Daewoo. (See my previous posts on the topic.) In December of last year, Ravalomanana shut down the television station owned by Andry Rajeolina, the mayor of Antananarivo. This move was widely condemned and sparked a political battle between the two. With some popular and army backing, Rajeolina took control of the country in early February of this year, and has been seeking legitimation ever since. And since then, things in Madagascar have been complicated.

The plan must have looked so good on paper. Come to the UN, give an address, shake some hands and bask in the bright light of legitimation. But there have been a few stumbles. At a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the US representative Douglas Griffiths demanded that the governments of Madagascar and Guinea step down and hold elections. This isn’t exactly a controversial stance – it’s what the African Union demanded a few days back – but it’s really nice to see the Obama administration standing up for democratic and constitutional processes on the continent.

This statement might have triggered today’s odd events… or, perhaps, non-events. Rajeolina was slated to address the General Assembly today. He was bumped from the program, without explanation. Voice of Americareports: “Madagascar’s self-proclaimed leader Andry Rajoelina was supposed to speak, but failed to address the assembly as scheduled Thursday morning. Mr. Rajoelina’s government has been rejected by regional leaders in southern Africa, Southern African Development Community, and by the African Union.” It’s possible that he’ll speak later – orange.mg (a news portal run by the international mobile operator) reports that he was simply rescheduled to appear after the Israeli president.

My friends following #madagascar on Twitter are having good fun watching this story, and have been demanding the UN explain whether or not Rajeolina will speak. But this is only part of the Malagasy story this week. On Tuesday, Rajeolina addressed a UN climate change event via a taped video message. Malagasy blogger Rabelazao thought the speech sounded familiar and discovered that a large section had been cribbed from a speech by Jean Asselborn, the Vice-Premier Ministre of Luxembourg in 2007. His investigation is here, though it’s written up in Malagasy – I’m trusting my GV Madagascar friends for their translation and interpretation.

It’s possible that UN-speak is simply so predictable and boring that it’s possible to accidently reproduce 300 words of another man’s speech. And the UN may well let Rajeolina speak – after all, no one even threw a shoe at Qaddafi. But for a week that was supposed to legitimate a Malagasy coup, things haven’t gone very well for Rajeolina. A giant hat tip to my Malagasy friends for following a story that’s going to be virtually invisible in mainstream media – if you guys don’t keep these politicians honest, who will?

Followup, September 28, 2009 – Andry Rajeolina wasn’t allowed to speak at the UN assembly. The events on Friday were confused and chaotic, but they involved a protest by the DRCongo government on behalf of SADC, and a hasty, poorly understood floor vote. It probably wasn’t the UN at its best, and as observers have pointed out, not all coup leaders were prevented from speaking at the UN… but I’m pleased to see AU and SADC taking a stand against governments that don’t have a clear mandate consolidating power and legitimacy.

Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who’s around the table and what we’re planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.

We’re here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we’ll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman’s “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Rohinton Medhora of IDRC notes that we’ve spent much of this conference considering what’s changed in the world of ICT in the past six years. We’ve not talked much about how development and poverty have changed. The first Harvard forum, six years ago, looked at how ICT might apply “here, there and everywhere.” The critical example from that discussion was Mohammed Yunus’s story about women learning to use mobile phones and to build businesses. This forum’s story might be Amyarta Sen’s story about using a phone and resulting photos to change public opinion in Pakistan.

He offers a model – data – information – knowledge – wisdom – to help understand how ICT might affect education. “I suspect that ICT is only a small element in the gap from knowledge to wisdom.” Education is the great leveler in society, and we don’t yet understand how ICTs play out in the education field.

ICTs are moving from natural monopolies to public goods, merit good, and club goods. We’re seeing confusion on the regulatory side. In many cases, regulators don’t know what to make of technological developments – should LAN houses be considered as gambling houses? We’ve got a wide range of regulatory structures, and they’re very different in terms of mobile phones versus broadcast media, despite the increasing overlaps in these technologies.

Rohinton wonders about Mike Best’s idea of a set of “grand challenges” for ICT4D. We often talk about the unpredictable nature of the development of information technologies. “It’s not that these things are ‘unpredictable’ – it’s that our confidence interval is wider and wider.” This may mean it’s hard to figure out what those big questions are, but doesn’t change the importance of raising and answering them.

Yochai Benkler is worried that we’re oversimplifying the relationships between markets and states (or other authorities). Ronaldo Lemos’s stories about working with the International Development Bank to allow
musicians in Brazil to distribute music and build their own labels so they can make a living shows the complexity of these relationships. The formal market for digital music in Brazil is dysfunctional – tracks cost $1.50, an absurd price in a medium-income country – and so the next steps are to create markets that actually work and find reasonable prices.

“Opposing market versus state, market versus regulation, market versus social organization is too stark… We need to get beyond these dichotomies, towards an integrated market that allows people to innovate and make a living off of it.” Open platforms at the physical layer are part of this. But we need to realize that people are using these platforms to try to avoid the bureaucrats, both the state leaders and the corporate ones. There are ongoing tensions between freedom and control and that control can be markets and profits, political power, or patriarchies.

Yochai worries that there’s “pressure on those of us coming from left intellectual traditions to accept the idea that it’s okay for musicians to make money, that it’s okay for Onno Purbo to charge for community wireless workshops.” We need to expand our dialog beyond a discussion of pure market incentives versus state interventions. He recommends moving beyond talking about “incentives” to “motivations”. Motivations allows us to consider factors like solidarity, not just market forces. Introducing these factors helps us explain why people will support musicians, paying an average of
$1.25 a song, $8 an album for tracks they’re invited to download for free – voluntarily – as they have to support Jane Sibbery for years.

We need to understand that unserious applications – like LAN Houses – can lead to very serious implications. World of Warcraft may turn out to be an excellent environment to train leaders, or to help teenagers find adult authority figures they can rely on. (Joi Ito tells a story about an 18 year old kid who came to him, as WoW guild leare, for advice on whether he should join the military. Joi was the only adult who’s had his back for years, which made him the logical person to ask for this advice.) Because government influences and can undermine what we can do for development, we need to accept that open systems don’t always behave in ways we anticipate, and be open to the idea that we need to take seriously things we’re tempted to ignore.

Michael Spence acknowledges that we might not want to base our theories of economic development on Milton Friedman, but suggests that the great economist did get one important thing right – he made the point that you can’t solve problems without paying attention to incentives. “We fail his test all the time” in the field of development economics. And because we don’t think about incentives, we end up with Nash equilibriums that favor the powerful and leave the weak at a disadvantage, whether they’re in the public or private sector.

He asks us to think about focus, faith and measurement. “The problem of measuring the impact of ict4d is too hard to solve.” He urges us not to let it trip us up too badly. To explain the difficulty of studying effectiveness, he references the 1949 Communist takeover in China. “China in the 1950s did the best job any country has done educating children, at least through elementary school.” In a few years, literacy rates for men and women approached 90%. But China didn’t see significant economic benefits, because happened, because other aspects of the state and the economy were mismanaged and broken. When other aspects of economic management changed, the “potential asset” of a literate population rapidly turned into a real asset, one that’s helping the country grow at a profound rate.

“You can have progress in areas that affect people’s education, or access to information, but it might not have a visible effect,” because it’s blocked by other factors. Spence asks us to consider information technology in developing nations. Nations like the US made heavy IT investments for over thirty years and we saw few, if any, measurable gains. Recently, we’ve seen a steady 3% productivity increase, which we believe comes from taking the “potential asset” of IT and unlocking it via the Internet.

“Development economists try to measure impact of education via regression analysis. The results they turn up are mixed or negligible. But no one sensible would make policy decisions based on those results.”

With that, Spence asks us to have faith. “Assume that education and IT in various aspects are going to turn out to be terribly important.” And then get on with it and don’t worry much about measurement.

Education, in particular, is an area in which we need to have a great deal of faith. “Assuming some preconditions, development is the process of acquiring knowledge, not just by individuals but within systems.” He warns us off the term “knowledge economy” – it’s not that we’ve gone from shovelling coal to shovelling bits – we’re engaged in the process of making our citizens and systems more knowledgeable. To the extent that IT systems are knowledge systems, we need to keep our focus on education, on health, and on e-government, to the extent that government controls access to essential services.

He ends with a warning about stability. “A huge, important application of modern IT is the global supply chain and financial system. The financial trading superstructure is impossible without IT.” We need to think about the stability of these systems because the instability we just experienced wasn’t accurately predicted by anything. Our problem may be models – we interpret systems via models, and if those models are insufficiently accurate, we can see stability where we might need to anticipate instability.

We end with parting shots from dialog participants, who felt that points weren’t emphasized enough. I made the case that ICT was critical not just for education and entrepreneurship, but for creating an inclusive public sphere, and asked the room to take seriously the phenomenon of particiatory media, not just through blogs and viral videos, but through mobile phone calls made to community radio stations. Ineke Buskens warns us that, in a profoundly sexist world, attempts to treat ICT as gender-neutral will end up perpetuating power imbalances. Bill Melody warns us that the developed world is likely to ignore infrastructure, now that infrastructure works well, and that development projects can’t abandon infrastructure efforts. Clotilde Fonseca urges us to continue building pilot and demonstration projects so we can experiment with creative ideas that could be scaled and replicated. David Malone warns that we need to protect human rights from governments, which are inherently authoritarian and prone to exercise control.

In other words, to sum up… there’s a lot to sum up. As Mike Best observed last night, this field appears to be plagued by the problem that we need to consider dozens of factors simultaneously. If there’s a conclusion from today’s discussions, it’s that we all need a good bit of reminding of the key factors that need consideration to make sure we’ve got a sufficiently broad view of these issues.

Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who’s around the table and what we’re planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.

We’re here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we’ll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman’s “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Yesterday’s conversations at the Harvard Forum on ICT4D orbited two general themes:

- the need to include conversations about inclusion of women, the poor, the marginalized into dialogs about ICT4D
- a debate about whether we embrace the success of the mobile phone as a tool for development or ask for more capabilities than we’re able to gain on mobile networks.

Today’s conversation starts with discussions of “knowledge gaps”, open questions we need to answer through research so we can understand what’s succeeding and failing in our field.

Clotilde Fonseca of the Omar Dengo Foundation suggests that we focus on creating effective indicators of impact. Educational projects often have difficulty expressing their impacts in language understood by development banks. Success stories are dismissed as anecdotal and not scaleable. Evaluating impacts just in terms of results on standardized tests, the standard evaluation framework, aren’t considering “ecologies of learning.”

Beyond evaluation criteria, we need to work on the development of standards, especially standards for teacher development. Scaling up projects from pilot phases to replicable states involves massive teacher development – this, in turn, requires us to ask questions about whether teachers are learning the skills and tools needed to scale and expand these projects.

Fonseca worries that we aren’t sufficiently studying “learning communities”, the power of collaboration, networking and sociability for education. These techniques are increasingly recognized as key to learning, but we’re not putting sufficient research into the value of networking and communities to education.

We need to broaden our views of what technology can mean for development. We tend to have limited and restricted views of what technologies are and can do. “There’s lots of magical thinking,” and a tendency to use a simplistic model – technology and development is the product of infrastructure plus content. She worries that while we understand what infrastructure is, we might not fully understand what content is and needs to be. The interventions suggested post-WSIS tend to be very technocentric and may overfocus on infrastructure over questions of content.

To allow a new generation to learn 21st century skills, we need to face cognitive issues, and learn how the mind actually functions. We need education to create learning skills. It’s been risky for governments like Costa Rica to address these issues, but it will be critical to solve these problems to fully embrace potentials for a digital future.

Laurent Elder of IDRC offers three concrete questions about knowledge gaps.

- We’re trying to create not just a knowledge society, but an inclusive, equitable knowledge society. Does openness help us achieve these goals? We worry that we’ve seen with the rise of the mobile phone doesn’t necessarily eliminate inequality – we’re seeing the GINI coefficient increase in countries with high mobile phone penetration. If we’re trying to increase inclusion, do open principles, open content licensing and open innovation help? We don’t know yet.

- IDRC sponsored a great deal of research and interventions around telecentres. There’s a debate about whether these telecentres were successful. Now IDRC is trying to determine whether building interventions (build our own telecentres) or incentives (support the construction of telecenters or other projects) is more succesful.

- How do “knowledge turns” – the cycle from hypothesis, testing, results to new hypothesis – affect different fields. In the semiconductor industry, knowledge turns take about 18 months, making this a very fast field. The health industry has a knowledge turn of about 8-10 years. Can we embrace these faster-moving cycles? How do we spur innovation at this pace, and what are the consequences of moving this quickly?

Mike Best takes on the emerging cleavages within the ICT4D field. He notes that we’re in danger of building unhelpful disciplinary walls, and that this wallbuilding contributes to the “common tendencies for this field to jog in place.”

A recent Doha conference on ICT4D raised the idea that we may want to split the ICT4D field into at least two camps. The computer scientists worry that their fields don’t see ICT4D as real computer science. In the hopes of raising the profile of this work, they’re planning an ACM special interest group, and considering a CS-only conference in conjunction with the next ICT4D conference in London. This, Mike argues, is a really bad idea.

Computer scientists tend to build ICT4D projects with this method: I decided to build this thing. I worked on it, I adjusted it. I took it to Ghana. I asked ten people – nine of them liked my thing. Computer scientists tend to dismiss work that doesn’t fit this paradigm, and especially work that doesn’t include fundamental technical innovation. Social scientists wonder whether fundamental techological innovations are really required for ICT4D work. “For either group to think they don’t need to sit at the same conferences together is worrisome.”

We’re making major mistakes, Mike worries. We tend to view the access to knowledge field as if “knowledge is a reified thing over there amd our job is to offer access to it. Schools, in this cartoon, is where children as empty vessels have information poured into them.” This may be a straw man, but it’s too common a point of view, and it’s a dangerous one.

We’re failing to be a progressive field – we fail to stand on the shoulders that have come before us. And since this field is only a decade old, we’ve failed to stand upon each other’s shoulders. Most projects end in failure – absolute failure, sustainability failure or partial failure. That’s not the problem – problem is our failure to learn from our failures.

Mike offers four suggestions to help save our field:

- We need to return to our interdisciplinary roots and read each other’s literature. It’s a problem that we’re all rewarded for writing, not for reading, our collective literature.

- Avoid technofetishism

- Find patient money that can support our work over time – Most projects Mike has worked on are 18 months or under.

- We need to find shared problems and methods especially in the realm of evaluation and assessment. Much as David Hilbert put through key problems in mathematics, we might want to identify the “Hilbert problems” in our field.

Onno Purbo makes it clear that he’s an activist, not a researcher. He’s both, actually, and he’s been one of the key figures in building open, community wireless networks in Indonesia. These networks are designed to save the expense of buying technology from the outside world. “You can use kitchen tools to create a network,” he tells us. “These networks are easily replicable in communities, but its a surprise that it’s possible to do these things. People don’t believe it’s possible until they see it on TV.”

Purbo sees a profound need to make information on community networking accessible to Indonesian communities. We need to translate from English into local languages. He’s able to measure success by looking at Google Trends and comparing searches for networking information using English and Indonesian terms – the interest in the Indonesian terms is increasing over time, suggestion more people comfortable in Indonesian are seeking this information.

One area where Indonesians are producing and sharing knowledge is around the idea of the “healthy internet”. Parents and schools are interested in providing access to the internet, but filtering out pornography – they share tips and techniques through blogs that discuss “healthy internet”. He tells us that there are now 2 million blogs in Indonesia on this topic, and a weekly blog award for the best writings on the topic.

Purbo’s wife focuses her work on ICT for women. She helps run a training program that spends three days teaching women how to operate office applications in Linux. The problem isn’t the course – it’s getting women to be able to take three days off from their work to take the training. Hivos has funded a salary for women participants, but this isn’t a sustainable model.

Purbo’s latest project involves using the internet within Indonesian schools. Only 4,000 or 240,000 have internet access, so the tools of choice are blogging platforms run from LiveCD or LiveDVD linux distributions, allowing for community publishing within a school, rather than on the live internet. (He offers us a distribution, but warns that it uses the Indonesian translation of WordPress.)

Finally, Purbo lets us know why he’s videoing our proceedings. “People in Indonesia are more inclined to learn from video than from text.” He asks that groups like IDRC consider offering incentives for video creation rather than for creating more texts.

Alison Gillwald reacts to Laurent’s provocations suggesting that open standards are neccesary, but not sufficient, to create innovation. On the idea of incentives versus interventions, she suggests that there are worthy activities – community media in minority languages, for instance – that can’t ever be profitable but are still worth doing. Addressing Mike’s questions about research, she notes that it’s very hard to find African scholars writing about ICT4D – “the African academic ethos is highly uncritical.” We need to fund local policy interventions that have community involvement, and this might help create local scholarship to analyze the success of these interventions.

Rohan Samarajiva worries that the policy progress we’ve made is modest, and short term. “The real achievement would be long-term, enlightened policy,” not oriented towards quick wins.

David Malone wonders what we’re missing in our discussions. He notes that we’ve focused heavily on mobiles, but hardly considered satellite television, which has also been a dramatic force for transformation in much of the world, especially the Arab world. He notes that Egypt’s media environment has transformed almost entirely – no one watches state-controlled media anymore – they watch Al Jazeera. But this hasn’t translated into activism on the ground, perhaps because activism on the ground doesn’t pay.

Anita Gurumurthy is concerned about Laurent’s question regarding interventions versus incentives, seeing an incentive strategy as overfocused on market mechanisms. She wonders if telecentres have failed because they were too early to provide services and content really useful to poor users. She points out that technologies are transforming public sphere, letting people come into the public sphere in new ways, and suggests that these capabilities go beyond the simple analysis of market supports.

Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who’s around the table and what we’re planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.

We’re here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we’ll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman’s “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Professor Mike Best of Georgia Tech is our host at beautiful Ames Courtoom on the Harvard Law School campus for a conversation on ICT, development and freedom. The panel is absurdly illustrious: Amartya Sen, Michael Spence, Yochai Benkler and Clotilde Fonseca. Mike Best points us to Publius, where the essays framing our conversation today and tomorrow live – you can also find them on Global Voices.

Colin Maclay from Berkman notes how much of the conversation about ICT and development intersects with work we do at the Center, and nods towards our co-hosts IDRC, who he describes as doing the best work in the field of ICT4D. IDRC’s president, David Malone, reminds us that his organization was founded by another Nobelist, and has a unique mission in development – conducting original research on what does and doesn’t work in combatting poverty around the world.

Professor Best’s introduction is interrupted by a (staged) phonecall from his mother. It leads him to declare, “This is an instrument of tyranny! Why do we celebrate the mobile phone as an instrument for human development in the Global South?” And he wonders if this is all we need to solve problems of communication in he developing world.

Dr. Sen notes that the mobile phone makes Mike’s mother freer to call him. And he notes that the mobile phone may be considered in the same class as better nutrition – something we consider as an expansion of freedom, even if we can concieve of cases in which these devices have negative consequences. Improved nutrition can lead to increased domestic violence. But you’d never use this as an argument against better nutrition. A woman with a phone is free to call and report domestic violence, as a woman with good nutrition is free to work harder and share the benefits with her family. In other words, answering the question, “Do mobile networks enhance capabilities for the poor, his answer is: “Yes, yes, and but…”

Dr. Spence points out that when this group last convened, six years ago, mobile phone penetration was quite low. We speculated that mobile phone networks might outpace land-line penetration, and this has, in fact, come to pass. Mobile phones have avoided some of the effects of the “dead hand of the regulator”. Phones are a tool to fight oppression, he notes, as well as a tool that can allow you to save, invest and build a business. The cellphone allows delivery of key services – safe savings, the provisioning of credit. And it delivers information (or information lite) efficiently, and allows us to solve coordination problems.

Is that the whole answer? No. There’s a whole set of answers about knowledge translation and learning which aren’t well answered by the mobile phone. In our sessions today, Dr. Spence tells us, we agreed that the mobile phone is probably not the key ingredient in delivering education and knowledge transfer.

Mike asks Dr. Clotilde Fonseca to address mobile phones and learning environments in Costa Rica. She offers that the mobile is not yet a powerful device for learning, drawing a distinction between voice and data. Most of the mobiles and cellphones in the developing world don’t carry data well.

Communication is complicated, she tells us. Parents give children phones, hoping for better communication… but kids view this as an invasion of their privacy, and often enjoy the phone for other uses – calculator, IM device, watch. Right now, these tools are most useful for communication, and not for learning.

Professor Benkler fields a question about the mobile phone and centralization – does the mobile phone centralize communications and knowledge, or does it open access to information? He points out that everything is relative. The mobile phone is enormously decentralizing as a tool for sharing information, he reminds us, noting the story of fishermen using the phone to seek the optimum price for their fish. He references mobile phone cameras and their power to capture protests in Iran, and the potentials of mobile banking through systems like M-PESA, these systems are radically decentralizing in relation to baseline structures of power.

But when you compare this architecture to the architecture to the internet, it’s found sorely wanting. There are certain things you can and can’t do with mobile phones. Brazilian software developers can compete as equals in the free software market, but not on a mobile phone – you need a much more complex machine and a more thorough set of skills. He references a story I told about Ushahidi and the ability of the phone company to slow the process with the issuance of a shortcode – the shortcode ends up being the bottleneck to certain types of innovation. Relative to the industrial economy of the 20th century – it’s decentralized. Relative to our new world of the internet – it’s weak, and we need to move more to this generative networks where new uses can be introduced without permission.

Mike celebrates the nuance of these answers, noting that there’s generally been mobile phone euphoria in the ICT4D community. He turns to our online audience for questions about mobile phones – one of our questioners wants to know what levers for pressure we have over mobile phone networks to improve our current capacities and abilities?

Dr. Spence notes that there’s nothing better than competition to create price pressure and increased quality of service. The worry we have is that regulators may now arrive and screw up what we’ve accomplished with this new network. Dr. Sen notes that there are situations where the market sends misleading signals – it’s worth distinguishing between activities that are profit-friendly and those that aren’t. Profits come in many different ways – lack of competition is one way to generate them, and that’s how some mobile networks generate profits. In the US conversation about healthcare, we’re experiencing fear about competition from a public competitor – apparently, that’s enough to terrify people, which seems a bit absurd from a human development perspective.

Sen tells a story told earlier today, about the impact of mobile phones in changing Pakistani opinion on the Swat valley – see my earlier post. The point is that a mobile phone photo of a woman being flogged by the Taliban managed to change political opinion about a deal with Taliban authorities. The ability to take photos – and pretend you were calling your mother while you took them – turns the phone into a very powerful device. Regulation is important, he offers, but doesn’t help us with these unexpected, unpredictable uses of these technologies.

Yochai points to the FCC Chairman’s announcement of a net neutrality policy, pointing out that one of the most surprising aspects was an extention of the net neutrality principle to wireless access, specifically along the non-discrimination of applications. If we don’t have perfect competition – a duopoly or similarly closed market – our next best bet is to ensure that these networks are open and behave much more like the internet. This is a step in the right direction – towards standards, habits and practices – which suggests you might create a more generative network in the US and the developing world. He point to networks in France and the adoption of wireless networks attached to a fixed wireless network to create a large, nomadic wireless network (ala Fon). If you push back a little on the idea that the solution all needs to be mobile, it’s possible to build better, more open, more functional networks.

Mike tosses the classic “either/or” question to Dr. Fonseca – does it make sense to give a computer or a mobile phone to a person who doesn’t have food security? This is a false dichotomy, she tells us. Development is not linear. We need to consider the capacities a person needs to be part of a new economy. Improving livelihood and access to better food, to the capacity to learn and to solve problems may all be connected. Mobiles are just devices that link to more powerful devices – if we just seem in isolation, we misunderstand the whole picture. They can be devices for capturing information and data, for communicating and connecting with objects. We need to think of these devices as ones that help solve problems in our community.

Sen echoes the skepticism about “this or that”. He feels like this sort of thinking plagues policy circles. “When I first came to India, someone asked me, ‘What three things would you do to better India?’ I answered, ‘Why only three things? Why accept those limits?’… Food first, freedom later is the wrong way to think about it.” Complexity can be a difficulty, and sometimes we need to simplify, but simplifying into “which first, which later” isn’t helpful – thinking about what the priorities should be is a more helpful way of simplifying.

Dr. Spence wonders about a dysfunctional propensity in debates over the developing world to look for silver bullets. The either/or question is a form of silver bullet – it’s not something we ask in Silicon Valley, for instance.

Spence wonders whether the ability of people in developing nations, like India and China, have an advantage in discussing these ideas because they tend to be more practical and less ideological – they tend not to have the religious attachment to markets we have in this country. In China, if the financial leaders think there’s a housing bubble, they go to the banks and increase capital markets for loans – we never do that in the US, because we believe the market takes care of it. It horrifies the purists – but we need to combine wise, analytical thinking with practical wisdom.

Yochai quotes Sen, saying, “I’ve heard democracies don’t have famines.” He notes that government matters – it’s possible to design ICT systems that help squeeze our corruption, as they seem to be in India as eGovernment systems come online. He references Ronaldo Lemos’s story about LAN houses, 90,000 mostly illegal cybercafes, housing musicians who distribute using Orkut – a market that’s entirely outside of existing market mechanisms, payloa systems for music. In a decentralized system, you get massive new opportunities for entrepreneurship, which leads to economic growth.

An online question focuses on the balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture. Questions from the audience concentrate on electric power, and reflect fascination with solar power charging battery systems? Another question wonders how governments can move from encouraging IT consumption to entrepreneurship. Mike asks Ineke Buskins to ask about gender – she asks what we can do in policy interventions to get rid of the mistake of dysfunctional “gender-blind” policies.

Dr. Spence warns us that decentralized energy systems don’t relieve us from the responsibility to spend 5-7% of our economies on building infrastructure. They’re transitional technologies. “If you want to enable rural people, you need to build roads so they can get in and out,” and participate in the market economy. You can work on these interim solutions, but don’t let them blind you to the need to spend – significantly – on infrastructure that enables growth. Outside of the 13 fastest growing countries, infrastructure investment gets crowded out and stalls development.

Spence argues that gender-neutral isn’t a good policy “in a world that’s not gender neutral now. He notes how hard India’s working on these projects – in India, he says, most people think that affirmative action to deal with systematic discrimination from the caste system, is a fair thing to do. Safety to and from school, appropriate lavoratory facilities are asymmetric interventions, but they make the process of education fairer for girls, making it possible for them to enter productive adulthood.

Yochai fields the question from the net on remix culture and cultural preservation. The ICT4D debate has been about distributing basic material capabilities to environments where they can be combined with human capabilities, increasing the potential for knowledge production and human development. The other resource beyond intelligence and creativity is culture – “we make new knowledge out of old knowlege, new culture out of new culture.”

We’ve had a parallel debate on open access to cultural materials. It’s been part of the generalization of the trade system, the creation of the WTO and the incorporation of intellectual property into the world trade system. That’s created a strong relationship between IP exporters (US, Europe, Japan) and IP importers (everyone else) where the exporters ask for their IP to be protected in exchange for opening their non-IP markets. The problem isn’t that you don’t have material tools, or creativity – the problem is that you can’t use knowledge or culture because it belongs to someone else.

In a case of intellectual jiu-jitsu, we can protect indigenous knowledge with the same tools we use to protect Hollywood movies. This may not be intellectually coherent – we might argue that patents aren’t useful for most inventions while trade protections are a way of protecting indigenous knowledge. Yochai worries this is a bad argument, a hard one to sell, and that we might be better off simply seeking complete open access to knowledge.

Sen notes that there’s not only no gender-neutral situations – gender dynamics are buried, and harder to identify than class-based dynamics because there are no class lines within nuclear families. He references an old study in India – if you ask men “are you ill?”, 45% confess to being ill. 0% of women offer that answer. There was a theory, briefly, that perhaps women were healthier than men based on a statistical illusion, which had to do with an overreporting of dead male relations over female ones. Now, we’re seeing in current studies in Calcutta similar health reports from men and women, suggesting that women are increasingly willing to grumble, which Sen takes as a good sign.

Fonseca references the OLPC and its experiments with powering computers via alternative energy sources. Alternative sources are important, but so is building extremely efficient computers and phones. On issues of technology literacy, she believes we need to look for technology fluency, the ability to understand the principles digital technologies interact within, and the existence of a cohort of young people who can move ahead, creating new applications, not staying connected to ones that will be obsolete in the short run. Finally on the gender discussion – she suggests we need to move beyond a purely policy-focused discussion, to a discussion about how men and women relate to technology. A Seymour Papert and Sherri Turkle paper identified diverse ways of interacting with programming and suggests we need to recognize different approaches, and not force a single mainstream approach.

And that’s where we end. Mike Best suggests there’s no way to summarize these discussions… but offers the observation that our field is filled with “ands”. Regulation matters, and technology matters, and capacity matters and government and infrastructure, and investment and women matter. “We need to embrace and and avoid or.”

Canada’s International Development Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center are convening a conversation today and tomorrow at Harvard on the future of information and communication technology and development (ICT4D). Global Voices will be participating in the event as a media partner, and I and Jen Brea will be twittering and live-blogging the event. You can find out far more about who’s around the table and what we’re planning on talking about on the Global Voices special coverage page, which includes links to the background papers prepared by participants.

We’re here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts – we’ll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman’s “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Had enough ICT for development? Me neither. But Professor Spence may have. He introduces the question for our last closed session, “Can we agree?” He suspects the answer is no, and invites us to go out for cocktails. But first he suggests we identify questions that are top research priorities for the ICT for development field.

Berkman Center’s Yochai Benkler wants us to clearly identify our goals as concerns ICT and development. Are we seeking income growth in relation to relative poverty? Use of ICT that enables a sense of self, of well-being in the world, knowledge creation?
Important tension that we need to deal with in defining research agendas is how much of the agenda needs to be defining a range of plausible goals.

He sees an intriguing tension between systems that favor openness and freedom through a decentralized systems versus the relatively rapid diffusion of devices that enable communications through more centralized networks. We can think of this as mobile versus internet systems, or carriers versus open wireless networks. Again, to study this
research agenda involves how strong assumptions about what questions we’re trying to solve.

In our discussions today, we’ve seen a shift to thinking of knowledge, learning and innovation processes as social and economic practices. ICT is part of these processesm but it’s layered on top of these social structures. In the past, we tended to think of knowledge and development as being about diffusion from high-knowledge to low-knowledge parts of the world. We now realize that creativity and insight happens everywhere in the world. Knowledge is always a creative reappropriation of what worked in one place into another, not a simple translation of a practice in one place to another.

Finally, Yochai offers a thorny question: are ICT issues simply a small part of much larger issues like gender and power relationship, povery and class relationships? If they are, must we solve these larger issues before addressing the ICT component. Or is
there a legitimate way of influencing these other systems through smart ICT interventions?

Rohan Samarajiva of LIRNE.net feels like he can agree with one of the people in the room, Nobel-winning economist Michael Spence, who believes we need to embrace the success of market forces in combatting poverty. Poverty reduction has occured through global markets, the spread of knowledge, the development of infrastructure and the establishment of “learning cultures”.

These are critical foundations for a knowledge-based economy: personal security, infrastructure, and learnign culture. But then we should leave application development up to actors in different countries. We need to embrace multiple innovation practives, letting computers and users innovate. “Who are we to decree who and how we innovate?”

Mobile networks are the networks for innovation for the developing world. Directly addressing my concerns that mobile networks are centrally controlled and less generative than open networks, he points to My Gamma, a social network for mobile phones. The company managing the network has users in 86 countries, without agreements from mobile phone networks. It is ad supported, without marketing salespeople, just based on online ad sales. He tells us that the service’s inventor observed, “I don’t aim to serve the blue-collar guys, but they seem to be using my service.”

(MyGamma, as it happens, is a web service running over WAP on data-enabled phones. In other words, the reason it works in 86 countries is because it’s running on open protocols on a decentralized network.)

The evidence seems to be showing us that poor people won’t be connected by anything other than wireless networks. ICT4D projects shouldn’t build wireless networks – even telecentres are now connecting on the 3G networks. We need to embrace this wireless future.

Hernan Galperin offers some ideas we all shoudl be able to agree on:

- ICT matters to countries at the aggregate level.
- On a general level, we know what policies need to be in place to promote ICT investment and adoption.
- We cannot outperform the private sector in terms of scaling of communication networks.

There’s a vast amount we don’t agree on. We don’t know what the true effect of ICT on poverty, and we don’t know which policies are most important to building successful ICT policies. He critiques “the Benkler standard” – the idea of connectivity that’s affordable, neutral, generative, open – as an unrealistic gold standard that describes no more than 10% of the reality of the developing world (Yochai interjects, “That much?”) He believes we need to embrace and celebrate technologies that might be less open but have greater reach, like indigenous programming on Brazilian satellite television. It’s broadcast, not interactive media, but maybe it’s the right way to reach large audiences.

We need to think more carefully about what we’re trying to achieve. There are huge sunk costs in developing any of these paths – they require huge investments to build infrastructure, and it’s hard to change path once we’ve gone in certain directions.

Finally, we need new indicators, beyond the small set of indicators that seem to have worked for the past few years. How do we define access? If I’ve got a telecentre 5km from my home – is that access? How does it compare to 10mbit/sec at home? How do we consider if communications are affordable? How do we measure people’s skills? We need to answer these questions so we can see how we’re doing in the long run.

Alison Gillwald acknowledges that mobiles are the default platform for the poor. But she wonders, “Is that all poor people are entitled to? Are we not creating greater equity issues between them and those who have access to high bandwidth?”

Before we accept the current situation, we need much better research and understanding of potential impacts of ICT. We need to understand what the high costs of communications in developing nations are doing not just in terms of personal usage, but on marginalized economies as a whole. Costs of bandwidth in Africa are orders of magnitude more than in the rest of the world. What does this mean for African development in the long run? Will it increase the gap between Africa and other developing nations?

Gillwald agrees that there’s a basic set of good governance practices we can all agree to. She wonders why so few African nations have implemented them. “We’re just reiterating the same solutions without understanding why they’re not being implemented.” We need to look at the factors that make it so difficult to put these policies actually into place.

She notes that we have the tendency to celebrate people’s creativity, innovating from constraint, inventing techniques like flashing. “Should we be satisfied with them? Perhaps this is all that’s possible at the moment, but should we be content with this state?”

She worries that, in developing ICT4D policies, we tend to assume a functional state capable of managing processes of innovation – what’s missing in the literature is discussion of large-scale institutional failure providing massive bottlenecks and constraints.

In South Africa, she worries about the rise of the state in terms of provisioning and operating communication services. “The historical record in this isn’t good.” There’s a backlash against markets due to economic crisis. She asks, “Wwhat’s the role of the state in deploying ICTs for economic recovery? Is it spending state money on building a multi-million Rand backbone, or for creating an investment environment that enables this sort of development?”

Bill Melody of LIRNE.net takes his stab at a statement with “unquestioned agreement”: Poverty reduction is the empowerment of individuals and institutions in communities in poverty. Communication tools are powerful tools of empowerment.

But we disagree on appopriate uses of these technologies. We’ve remarkably bad at predicting how these technologies will be used. Based on study of the literature, it seems that use for communication is roughly ten times what was predicted by network designers. No one predicts where the communication will be – they usually expect users to connect to the capital city, but they tend to connect to one another in rural areas. The economic and social uses are different than what’s predicted, and most predictions are totally wrong.

That’s what we learned with the explosion of mobile telephony. We claim that mobile phone companies opened this market – that’s totally false. The mobile networks were the innovation of poor people when they were enabled to use it the way they wanted to. Poor people spent much more income than we ever thought they would.

Melody revisits the old parable of teaching a man to fish so he eats forever, to make a comment on regulation and business: “If you teach a man to fish, that means he needs fishing equipment, which means he needs a business model to pay off the loans, and he needs a license and ways of dealing with quotas.”

He offers this story as a way of considering universal service funds, funds taxed from mobile phone operators to provide connectivity in rural areas. In many cases, these funds can’t go to support community wireless networks. We celebrate openness and liberalization, but participation hasn’t made it down all the way to local people.

The process of regulatory reform is a complex one. We all tend to recommend reforming the telecom industry, then the ICT sector. But communications providers are “anchor tenants”, who make it possible to extend networks to underserved areas. And while everyone wants a free, open market until they get in, once everyone is established in business, they then want to close the doors behind them.

Melody ends with kind words for our sponsor, IDRC, who he describes as the most farsighted funder in the ICT4D space.

Michael Spence offers the observation that economies that grow by building inclusive economies, economies that encourage involvement in multiple dimensions. He asks what IT has to do with inclusiveness, and suggests that it has “something to do with knowledge, and something to do with access to crucial services, like savings channels, access to credit.” There’s great potential for entrepreneurship in poor populations – the issue is that there are missing pieces of economies that prevent that instinct from being exercised, like credit facilities.

Addressing the issues I raised in my paper and presentation, Spence says he doesn’t dismiss the notion that technology choices should be made with an eye to the capacity to control, interfere with and shut down these network. (I’m suggesting, of course, that we choose tech that’s hard to shut down and interfere with.) While he agrees that this consideration is “not crazy”, he suggests we not overfocus on this. “There are institutional failures all over the place – they’re the main cause of stalled growth… If you’re in a state that shuts down communication channels, there’s something larger wrong.”

(He admits that this sets up an intersting paradox, as China is growing incredibly quickly, but shows extremely high willingness to control these communication channels.)

Spence offers the observation that our discussions may center on a very simple idea – we’re seeing insufficient investment in infrastructure. If an average commitment of public sector resources to critical infrastructures, including education, might be 3 to 4% of government spending, the countries that are experiencing the most significant and sustained growth are spending 5 to 7%. The private sector can help, but if you don’t see that high level of government spending, you won’t see the improvements in infrastructure, education, and capacity necessary to sustain growth over long periods of time.