A massive earthquake hit Haiti last night, with an epicentre only 15 kilometers from Port au Prince, the capital city. It will be some time before the extent of the devestation is known, but early reports suggest that thousands are likely to be reported dead. Major landmarks, including the Presidential Palace, National Assembly and Port au Prince cathedral have been destroyed. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and the damage from the earthquake will compound the massive challenges the country already faces.

Reporters are racing to Haiti to report on the disaster, but voices are already making themselves heard from the decimated city. Georgia Popplewell, Global Voices’s managing director and pioneering Caribbean blogger, has been rounding up tweets coming from Haiti on our site. Some of the tweets include photos that show the intensity of the destruction.

Photo sent to twitter user marvinady by Carel Pedre of Haiti’s Radio One.

Georgia has started a list on Twitter, aggregating accounts of people who are posting from Haiti. Pooja Bhatia is apparently posting from Port au Prince and reported last night, “quake happened as sun was setting but in plenty of time to see that all the slum houses built into the hillsides disappeared”. Her posts today have documented the devestation of various landmarks and people’s increasing concern about obtaining food and water. Other Twitter users are enroute to PAP and writing about their progress and setbacks in reaching the city.

Troy Livesay, a missionary in Haiti, is writing long, informative blog posts as well as tweets. This morning’s post reveals the extent of uncertainty the island is feeling:

There are buildings that suffered almost no damage. Right next door will be a pile of rubble.

Thousands of people are currently trapped. To guess at a number would be like guessing at raindrops in the ocean. Precious lives hang in the balance. When pulled from the rubble there is no place to take them for care Haiti has an almost non existent medical care system for her people.

I cannot imagine what the next few weeks and months will be like. I am afraid for everyone. Never in my life have I seen people stronger than Haitian people. But I am afraid for them. For us.

Response to the tragedy has been rapid online. My twitter-scanning scripts estimate that 1.5-1.8% of tweets on Twitter this morning have mentioned Haiti – that’s much higher than mentions of “china” or “google”, refering to the major story breaking in technology news, Google’s decision to stop censoring search results in China. Much of the Twitter conversation centers on ways to help the Haitian people – in the US, texting “haiti” to 90999 donates $10 to the Red Cross to support Haitian relief efforts. Chris Sacca offers five more ways you can help, donating to other worthy organizations and learning more about relief efforts as well as about Haiti’s history and resilience. Jen Brea is tracking reactions from the Haitian diaspora and efforts to help, including the project organized by Haitian-American rap artist Wyclef Jean.

We’ll be tracking the crisis and response in Haiti closely on Global Voices and expect to have a special coverage page up within an hour. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone in Haiti and Haitians in the diaspora around the world.

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (”Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

What do you know about Fiji?

Before getting involved with Global Voices, I knew that it was an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific much beloved by vacationers and honeymooners and that, despite being an island nation surrounded by seawater, they export a lot of high-priced bottled water.

As I’ve followed Michael Hartsell’s reporting on Fiji on Global Voices, I’ve gotten a very different impression of the nation. The tensions between ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians have divided the nation politically, leading to rewritings of the constitution and severe government instability. Fiji has had four (or four and a half, depending on who’s counting) military coups since 1987 and is currently under the thumb of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who’s taken power three times since 2000, twice via military coup. (Earlier this year, the Fijian supreme court declared his 2006 coup illegal. Bainimarama stepped down from his post of interim Prime Minister for 24 hours, while the President abrogated the constitution and fired the judiciary, then immediately reappointed him as Prime Minister. That’s the half coup, for those of you counting. Confused? This might help.) Fiji has been expelled from the Commonwealth, condemned by Amnesty International for arresting opposition politicians, church leaders and journalists, and today, severed diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, its two largest and most powerful neighbors.

(This last one is a doozy. The row with Australia and New Zealand concerns Bainimarama’s plan to hire Sri Lankan judges to replace the justices fired earlier this year, when the supreme court was liquidated. Australia and New Zealand have had travel bans against senior members of Bainimarama’s government in place, and when the Sri Lankan judges travelled through Australia to Fiji, they were informed that they would be subject to the same bans once they took their positions in the Fijian government. Bainimarama argues that Australia and New Zealand had banned transit; Australian authorities say they merely informed the Sri Lankan judges that they’d not be able to return through Australia once joining the coup government. Given the importance of Australia and New Zealand as trading partners, it’s hard to imagine this ending well for Fiji.)

I’ve been fascinated for years with the concept of “nation branding”, an idea promoted by Simon Anholt, a UK-based researcher and consultant. I heard Anholt on a BBC broadcast years back making the salient point that Ethiopia has a great brand for recieving famine aid (even if that’s an outdated understanding of the country) and a lousy brand for tourism. It’s an idea I’ve found useful in understanding some of the challenges that African nations face in encouraging tourism and foreign investment – if everyone thinks your country is impoverished and ill-governed, who’s going to want to visit on vacation or buy shares on the local stock exchange? Part of the challenge of rebuilding Africa is rebuilding an image and narrative of the continent that shows it as open for business. (See “Africa’s a continent, Not a Crisis” for more of this line of thought.)

Fiji is somehow blessed with a nation-brand that many African nations would kill for. Despite the 2006 coup, Fijian tourism brought in nearly $500 million in 2008, 24% of GDP, more than the nation earned from the next seven industries combined. Major international hotel chains have large properties in Fiji, and air travel patterns suggest the importance of tourism – international flights land in Nadi, the tourist capital, not the governmental capital Suva, which is served by a prop plane from Nadi. Fiji Water is now the leading imported bottled water in the US, and represents 20% of Fijian exports and 3% of GDP, benefitting from and reinforcing an image of Fiji as an unspoiled tropical paradise.

Defending the brand of Fiji has become a major political cause for the Bainimarama government. In April, after expelling a number of foreign journalists, the government instructed journalists that they needed to begin practicing “the journalism of hope“. Some journalists responded by filling local newspapers with non-news – the Fiji Daily Post ran stories titled “Man Gets on Bus” and “Weather to Improve Soon”. Bloggers have filled in the gaps, taking great risks to publish ferocious political commentary, usually under psuedonyms.

Anna Lenzer, a journalist for Mother Jones, found out just how serious the Bainimarama government was about nation brand when she came to Suva to report on the various ironies that surround Fiji water – a green-branded product with an immense carbon footprint, a premium bottled water produced in a community with no drinkable tap water, a dominant player in the local economy with a stated disinterest in Fijian politics. She was detained and questioned after sending an email from a cybercafe with links to articles critical of the government, and fled the country with the help of the US Embassy.

Her article, “Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle” is an excellent introduction to the strange phenomenon that is Fiji water, though I think she lays too much blame on the Fiji Water company and not enough on the military government and the circumstances that led to the recent coups. It’s worth reading Fiji Waters’s response, even if it’s something of a cop-out – I think Lenzer is right to point out that it’s hard for the company to position itself as environmentally and socially responsible while working with a repressive government. And I can’t argue with this line: “The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.”

Fiji may be a case study in eclipsing a complex reality with a shiny brand:

- Start with a country with low media attention.

- Invest massively in tourism, presenting visitors with a reality that’s not wholly, though mostly, divorced from ordinary life in the country. (All tourist destinations do this to one extent or another. Fiji appears to have embraced this strategy thoroughly, providing a string of five-star compounds insulated from the outside. This blog post complains that, at some resorts “Fijian society is reduced to over-chlorinated swimming pools and overpriced palm hats which fall apart in the departure lounge of Nadi Airport.” At the same time, the author wonders why service at these resorts seems so poor these past few months, and worries that, “It appears to be lethargy and uncaring when a guest asks for something. I think all of this is more dangerous to the future of Fiji Tourism than anything else, including the oft-mentioned ‘political instability’.”)

- Build or embrace an export that reinforces your brand image.

- Surpress contrary media voices via censorship or exile.

What would it take for circumstances on the ground in Fiji to damage brand Fiji? What would it take for Fiji to move beyond this mirage and build this vision of a nation in reality?

I’m reading Paul Collier’s controversial new “Wars, Guns and Votes” (NYTimes review), where the brilliant development economist addresses the uncomfortable question, “What if democracy doesn’t bring prosperity to very poor nations?” Collier’s research suggests that autocracies are more likely to protect citizens from political violence up to an income level of $2700 per capita, at which point democracies function better. I’m not deep enough into Collier’s book to address concerns about his thesis or suggested interventions – though I’m looking forward to reading these responses from Mutuma Ruteere in Kenya and from a team of development economists writing in the Boston Review - but I’m already struck by the power of Collier’s core argument.

Collier posits that what we see in many underdeveloped nations isn’t democracy but “democrazy”, an adoption of some of the most visible trappings of democracy (most notably elections) without the underlying structures (free press, independent electoral commissions, educated electorate, post-ethnic political structures) that make it possible to have functional elections. By overemphasizing the importance of elections (remember the Bush administration’s drive towards elections in Iraq, or the Obama administration’s push towards the deeply flawed Afghan election?), we may nurture political structures that aren’t democratic and which reward certain types of electoral fraud and abuse.

I was thinking of this as I looked at a project launched by my friend and colleague, Sami ben Gharbia. Sami is the head of Global Voices Advocacy, the free speech arm of Global Voices, and he’s a passionate advocate for political and human rights reform in his homeland, which he’s been exiled from. In anticipation of Tunisia’s presidential and parliamentary elections on October 25th, he’s launched Babtounes.com, a lovely tool to aggregate and visualize online conversations – most notably Twitter conversations – about the Tunisian elections. The tool uses a Wordpress blog and Juitter to aggregate several searches against the Twitter database and give a one-stop shop for watching that online conversation.

Sami knows full well who’s going to win the election. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has held power since 1987, when as prime minister, he impeached Habib Bourguiba, the first president of an independent Tunisia. (Wikipedia uses the wonderful term “a medico-legal coup,” as Ben Ali had Bourguiba declared medically unfit to serve.) Ben Ali has “won” “elections” in 1999 and 2004, with margins of 99.66% and 94.48% of the vote, and his victory in 2009 will likely be by a similar majority.

An essay in the Arab Reform Bulletin by Hamadi Redissi helps explain why the election outcome isn’t much in doubt. The country’s electoral system gives 75% of parliamentary seats to a party that wins a simple majority in elections. Since Presidential and parliamentary elections are held simultaneously, you need only rig one election every five years and you’ve got unrivalled control of the country. You can use that control to limit candidate lists (Socialist challenger Dr. Mustapha Benjaafar was excluded from the 2009 election through interpretation of a requirement that a candidate be the elected leader of his party for two years before elections) – there are only three candidates running against Ben Ali, and two have made it clear that they’re not interested in being president, simply in demonstrating support for the electoral system. Being in power also gives you control of the state media, and allows you to oversee the election through the Interior Ministry – there is no independent electoral commission.

So, if the election is fait acompli, why watch? My guess is that Sami is watching so that we understand precisely how the election was stolen, so that activists can challenge the legitimacy of Ben Ali for another five years, and so that they can demand a reform before Ben Ali’s successor runs in 2014, or the old man changes the constitution to allow a sixth term. But the other reason might be to try to maintain interest in politics in the face of an electorate that has become – understandably – cynical and disinterested. Magharebia writes about the use of Facebook in Tunisian elections – that Ben Ali’s Facebook group has received only 6,000 members seems remarkably low to me. Perhaps it reflects the sort of disinterest expressed in this (deeply sarcastic) poem by Nakhlet Oued el-Bey (Translation by Mona Yahia for Magharebia):

The nation cast their votes transparently and with freedom of speech
Having discussed programs and issues of destiny.
Results were soon announced with no cheating or forgery.
Having gone through ballots,
It turns out that people’s main concern is bills
And their only wish is to save some dinars.
They are after a life with no thought or debate,
Except about the championship and who the Cup will go to.

Fair enough. There’s a lot more drama in the World Cup than there will be in the upcoming Tunisian elections. But that doesn’t excuse people who care about the future of human rights and democracy in North Africa from watching.

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.

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.

Clotilde Fonseca of Fundación Omar Dengo urges us to broaden our vision of technology and look at the potentials of technologies, not just how we believe they’re best used. She starts with a story about Avancemos, a foundation that provides small grants to children and youth. Many of the kids of received these grants went off to buy mobile phones. This led to debates about whether this was a good or bad usage of funds. Adults analyzing the situation thought that it was troublesome that the children were spending so much money on phones. But kids saw them as watches, calculators, messaging tools,and resources for community building. They weren’t especially interested in them as telephones.

Quoting Marshall McLuhan, she suggests that we face the danger of “looking at the future through the rear-view mirror.” Instead, we need to look at larger potentials of technologies. We have to avoid reductionist thinking, overly centered on the Internet. The revolution we’re experiencing is a digital one, not just an Internet one – we can see the potentials of these tools, beyond uploading and downloading into the cloud, the potentials from productivity and communication tools.

We need to look forward because we need to make decisions about prioritizing investment. Otherwise, we end up with a deeply shortsighted strategy. This means addressing not just digital divides, but the cognitive divide: the intellectual gap to be able to profit from these technologies.

In the wake of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), it’s disappointing that our plans continue to be so limited and technocentric. We need digital visions that focus not only on the technology but on bridging the cognitive gap that allows people to fully participate in Telliard de Chardin’s noosphere. We need to consider the power of social netorks and the challenges to ensuring full access for developing world communities to these spaces. And we need to be careful to look for indicators which can actually capture the impact of these new tools.

(Fonseca’s paper is here.)

Sabri Saidam (his paper), the advisor to Mahmood Abbas on telecoms and IT, suggests that we need to talk to the man and woman in the street about their perceptions of ICT. Based on his conversations, Saidam tells us that there are six key concerns he’s developed:

- Lack of leadership – most leaders in the Arab world – and the world as a whole – don’t understand the power of this technology and how it can help lead or impede development

- Senior citizens are rarely included in thinking about ICT

- Nations tend to be deeply allied with donor communities, and sometimes act against their own interest to satisfy donor needs

- The legal environment isn’t conducive to technology development. Sabri has been working on the tender for a new mobile phone network. He tells us “I’ve been threatened with assasination so many times … people tell me, ‘The cost of getting rid of you is only a dollar or two, and you’re costing us millions of dollars.’”

- Our educational system is weak, and it’s dominated by Microsoft – we aren’t getting exposure to other ways of building software and information systems.

- There isn’t sufficient market competition – that competition only appears to be fierce.

He offers a demo of a statical tool developed to analyze IT usage in 10 Middle East markets. He shows a strong correlation between underlying literacy rates and the spread of ICT systems other than mobile phones, like Internet penetration.

Ineke Buskens (paper) wants us to consider the power aspects that underly our use of ICT. “The top of the pyramid is a problem as well as the bottom.” She warns us that “separation is an illusion” – problems like global warming and financial decline show us that we’re all connected.

She warns that deep dynamics underly our assumptions about technology and power, citing a tension between Darwin and the church that doesn’t rely on scientific timelines (creation within seven days) but on the idea of the fall. If there’s evolution, perhaps there’s no fall, and therefore no path towards redemption. She notes that the fall is inevitably blamed on women, in all three religions of the book.

ICT can “become the handmaiden of the systems, replicating the divisive characteristic of the systems”. She references a case in South Africa (I believe) where
mobile phones create a class system within a women’s group, a division women who could afford to make calls and those who could only afford to beep.

“People adapt their preferences to a power-imbalanced world in order to survive in it.” This explains what happened in Zimbabwe at a computer lab where students were given time based on a first come, first served basis. Men gained almost all the access, and women were pushed away. When female students were asked why they weren’t using the machines, they “spoke about their duties of wives and mothers at home keeping them away from the computers.” She argues that the students didn’t have a conceptual framework to understand the access dynamics – when a researcher’s intervention gave them a conceptual framework to question their role, they were abel to address their lack of access.

“There is no neutral space when it comes to knowledge and knowledge construction. I see a minefield of power dynamics everywhere,” and if we don’t analyze this minefield, we only discover the mines when we step on them. She suggests we engage in “continuous and endless questioning of the concept of openness.” She suggests that Harvard’s decision to publish academic papers on the university website will likely force other academic institutions to do the same – this technique will increase openness at the same time as it expands Harvard’s prestige and influence, a virtuous cycle. She sees in open source “a dream for a more egalitarian society.” Our challenge is to ask what openness will be used for, what the intents behind the decisions to be more open.

Nancy Spence (paper) suggests we broaden our search for what matters most in considering gender and the digital divide. Millions of Bangladeshi women have become mobile users and providers. This isn’t just about economic empowerment – it’s also about relationships. “Family and social relationships are the highest contributors to well-being,” in human development – if mobile phones strengthen our interpersonal ties, that might be a benefit for human development.

We also should consider ICT and personal security, as well as ICT and disaster recovery – these subjects are of major importance for women.

When we consider ICT challenges that matter, we need to think about women as ICT producers, developers and decisionmakers, not just as consumers. This doesn’t remove the need to consider access – there are vast challenges in this space – but our consideration needs to move farther and wider.

Spence tells us about a group called Asia Pacific Women’s Watch. This group closely moitors a set of trade issues that affect women. These aren’t just traditional literacy issues – these are issues about the WTO and the implication of power structures for women. She reminds us that we need to consider a very wide range of issues when we consider how technology affects women – when we think of girls education, we’ve learned to think about the importance of separate latrines, women teachers, incubation centers that help women’s businesses. We need a similarly broad and complex set of understandings of women and ICT.

I apologize for not capturing the full dynamics of our discussion in this session – I was one of the discussants, and spent the discussion dodging extremely difficult questions about technological determinism. For a sense for what I said, here’s my paper. I will mention a lovely joke from Sabri Saidam, about three dictators who love technology:

One holds two fingers to his ear and starts talking – the other two ask, “what are you doing?” He responds, “I’m receiving a call.” The second dictator starts blinking on and off, and the other ask, “What’s going on with you?” He responded, “I’m receiving a video.” The third is Yasser Arafat, notorious for mumbling and for his quavering lips. The other two asked, “What are you doing?” Arafat answered, “I’m receiving a fax.”

Pablo Flores has been instrumental in the spread of the OLPC laptop in his native Uruguay, helping communities learn how to use these new computers to blog and communicate to the wider world. (See this blog as an example of the work he’s doing with the support of Rising Voices.) Through Project Ceibal and One Laptop Per Child, 350,000 laptops are being distributed to children from 6-11 years old in Urugay. There’s also a widespread project to build wireless connectivity to support those laptop efforts.

At Ars Electronica, Pablo focuses on the thorny social questions necessary to answer if we’re to bring people like a young shepherd, pictured holding his OLPC, into the cloud. He posits that we need, at minimum:

- health, food, a roof
- functionging homes and educational systems
- access devices and internet access

But that’s probably not enough. For people to really take advantage of cloud intelligence, we need both good tools and a culture of accessing and making good use of the cloud in the real world. He points out that most Uruguayan parents aren’t using the internet without external help – they wonder why it would be helpful. We also need a culture of sharing knowledge, a culture that includes a careful, responsible approach to online publishing. This culture emphasizes support, including peer support – he cites an conversation between Brazilian and Uruguayan students which started as a peer support effort and turned into a conversation about culture in both countries.

Finally, Pablo suggests that we need to avoid black box technology. The success of OLPC in Uruguay has to do with the openness of the Sugar system, and he points to the ability for people to add onto and expand Wordpress as a reason his blog work has succeeded.

Andrés Hernández of MIT Media Lab is a great guy to talk to about open, expandable systems. He’s working on Scratch, a programming environment that encourages people to learn Smalltalk, a powerful and extremely creative programming language. He sees Scratch, which is designed to let people share and explore each other’s code online, as a step towards democratising cloud computing. “Most people don’t have the knowledge necessary to build cloud systems,” but systems like Scratch may change that balance over time.

Scratch has gained a great user-base – there are 320,000 registered members, who’ve posted 500,000 projects including 12 million scripts. The largest userbase is young teens, between 12-14, but there are a lot of adults in the community as well, and they often end up mentoring younger users.

There’s a fascinating virtual team aspect to Scratch – Andres shows us a collaboration between young kids in different countries who’ve jointly started a software design company, collectively building games. It’s an amazing peek at a cloud future and what it might mean for kids.