Firoze Manji from Fahamu and Pambazuka News gave the Fill the Gap conference a thorough overview of the current crisis in Kenya. He was last in his home country four weeks ago, shortly before the controversial elections and the violence that resulted from the electoral dispute.

The current situation, which Firoze describes as “very, very dangerous” is the result of “an effective coup in Kenya”. He reminds us of the events that have led up to the violence:

- Election commission officials declared that the vote had been rigged
- Within 45 minutes of the announcement that results were fraudulent, the Kibaki government inaugurated itself in the presence of the military
- The private inauguration was followed by a blanket ban on live media
- Simultaneously, security forces were deployed on the streets.

Manji notes that “Everyone is asking for peace. But peace can only be obtained through truth and justice.” Demands being put forward by groups challenging Kibaki’s actions include:

- an immediate independent inquiry into election results
- an invalidation of the results, which includes a recognition that no one is currently in a position to claim the presidency
- a stop to unconstitutional actions, including an announcement of a cabinet, or the calling of the 10th parliament.

In the efforts to bring parties to the table to negotiate, mediated by the AU, Kofi Annan or others, these demands should be preconditions. Instead, the documents that are trying to bring Kibaki and Odinga together implicitly recognize Kibaki as the president, addressing him with the titles you’d apply to a sitting president, not a challenger in a disputed election. Mediators have proposed a committee that doesn’t have the power neccesary to settle the dispute. And Kibaki’s position that a coalition should share power is absurd, given that Odinga’s party has 100 seats to Kibaki’s 40 or so. Manji points out that Kibaki’s party lost 22 cabinet ministers in the election, incluing Nobel Prize winner Wangari Mathai - losses like that display the widespread anger about the dysfunction of his leadership.

Too much of the discussion of electoral violence, Manji tells us, focuses on tribal violence. He offers an analysis suggesting that there are three major forms of violence:

- Spontaneous reaction violence when Kibaki seized power and when the cabinet was announced. “When people face injustice, their unfortunate reaction is to seek revenge.” This revenge can - and has - manifested as members of one ethnic group attacking others, but has also had economic dimensions.

- Milita violence, which Manji argues is more serious that the spontaneous violence. These militias are politically motivated an are engaging in killing, burning, raping and female genital mutilation. We’re not seeing this occur along the coast, but in the Rift Valley, these militias have a history going back to the 1990s, when Moi attempted ethnic cleansing in the Rift. There should have been a parliamentary inquiry in the last parliament, but Kibaki refused to investigate the situation. The church burning in Eldoret is a political, militia action, not tribal violence.

- State violence. Manji asserts that there have been at least 500 extrajudicial killings by state actors, beginning before the elections and continuing through the post-election violence. This aspect of the conflict, he feels, is being completely undercovered.

Given the seriousness of the situation in Kenya that Manji discussed, it seemed almost trivial to return to the topic at hand in the meeting - the question of whether mobile phones can contribute to economic development, or whether the focus of the development community on mobile technologies is simply a matter of hype. Manji and I have been set up to debate the issue, with me positioned as a cyberoptimist and Manji as a skeptic. This isn’t entirely true, of course - Fahamu has done groundbreaking work in using mobile phones for activist purposes, and I’ve written my share of pieces criticizing cyberoptimism.

(Fahamu tried an interesting experiment some years ago, seeking support for a declaration on African women’s rights. They ran an online petition campaign, allowing people to sign the petition via SMS. The campaign got a great deal of media attention, in part because Graca Michel (Nelson Mandela’s current wife) spoke about the campaign at a public meeting and signed the petition from her mobile while on stage. But the campaign, Manji tells us, actually garnered only a few hundred text messages. It was far more effective as a PR stunt than as a technique for political inclusion. And the success of the campaign came from traditional organizing, not the special magic of the mobile phone.)

“Why aren’t we having a conference on pencils?” Manji asked. “Pencils have contributed more to social transformation than mobile phones.” This flusters the moderators a bit, but his point is clear - it’s not about the tools, but about their social purpose. “It’s how people use the tools around them, whether they’re bricks, pencils or mobile phones.” Phones are interesting, I assert, because they’re increasingly pervasive, and because they’re enabling behaviors that aren’t possible with pencils: realtime communication over long distances.

While Manji acknowledges the power of the mobile and its possible importance, he’s insistent that we understand the “political economy” behind the device as well. The cost per minute in developing nations is much higher than we pay for monthly subscription services in the North. “Technology exacerbates and amplifies social differentiation,” he argues. Economic differences and tensions already present in societies are brought into sharper relief with the introduction of new technologies. Suddenly a person wealthy enough to own a phone has powers and capabilities his poorer neighbor lacks.

Manji and I had the greatest difficulty seeing eye to eye when his argument expanded into a general critique of development. Despite a focus on economic development for the past four decades, “there’s been a growth in the size of unemployment, a decline in real living standards, an increase in child mortality and in maternal mortality. We’re worse off than we were at independence.” It’s unclear to me that a focus on developing businesses in developing nations should be blamed for these abysmal results - widespread political corruption, theft of tax revenues and development dollars, and the effects of HIV/AIDS clearly have to take some of the blame as well.

But I take Manji’s point that new technologies can be used for destructive as well as productive purposes. He notes that all Kenyans received a text message from President Kibaki shortly after he’d inaugurated himself, appealing for calm. “How did Kibaki get my phone number? This is a major breach of privacy.”

Ultimately, he and I agree that it’s worth reviewing situations where mobile phones have enhanced existing political movements - activists using mobile phones to organize public actions, to monitor elections, to report gender violence. And we agree that the phone itself isn’t magic, but needs to enhance an existing social movement. As for whether strengthening market-based institutions leads to economic development or towards the ongoing capitalist, colonialist enslavement of Africa… well, that discussion may have to wait for another day.

One of the more interesting ideas that came up in the question and answer session was that of a socially-responsible, NGO-run phone company in a developing nation. Such a firm would compete against for-profit firms, and would have twin goals of bringing prices down for consumers and reinvesting profits in providing affordable coverage to rural areas. My guess is that such a company could have a profound effect on market prices, if - and only if - it could rely on the international NGO/foundation community for startup funding, and if local governments permitted it to function on a level playing field. Still, an intriguing idea.

Thanks to Fill the Gap and the sponsors, which included Hivos, IICD, OneWorld.nl and De Balie - I had a great time and really enjoyed the discussion… even the part where Firoze called me “a romantic”.

My 2008 is off to a running start, with my first transatlantic flight in the second week of the new year. I’m in the Netherlands for a couple of days, meeting with Hivos, one of the sponsors of Global Voices, and speaking at Fill the Gap, an annual event focused on IT in developing nations. I’m giving my standard stump speech on mobile phones and activism, followed by a debate with some of my co-panelists. I had breakfast with Firoze Manji of Pambazuka News, and he and I had a lot to debate over our morning coffee, so I suspect this will be a lively conversation.

Dr. Christoph Stork of the Link Centre at Wits University, is a researcher on the econommic impact of ICTs in an African context. His group has one studies on “household e-access and e-usage”, as well as reviews of the ICT sector across Africa. His most recent study focuses on the relationship between mobile phones and development.

Stork puts the private sector squarely at the heart of economic development, and SME (small and medium enterprise) business as the most important business sector, as most of the world’s poor work for SMEs. His survey covered 3967 small businesses across 14 countries, roughly 280 in each country. This is a difficult group to survey - people don’t like reporting their income to a researcher for fear that it will lead to increased taxation, for instance.

The businesses he surveyed were tech and non-tech businesses - he shows photos of public phones (usually, a mobile phone, a chair and an umbrella, manage by an operator, as well as slides of businesses like hairdressers. He points out that hairdressing in Africa can take many hours, as it can require multiple hours to dress a women’s hair - having access to mobiles can help people find a time when the client and hairdresser both have time to spare.

His group classifies businesses in terms of formality - are they registered for VAT? do they have a fixed address? do they have contracts with their employees? There’s different patterns of usage between the most and least formal businesses studied. Asking each business what terms of communications technology they use - phones, computers, mail, post office boxes - there are very different levels of usage… except with mobile phones. Nearly every business, formal or informmal, uses mobile phones and consider them to be highly important to their business.

Stork found a significant positive coorelation between business turnover and mobile usage, as strong as 0.90 in some sectors. Because coorelation doesn’t prove causation, he uses a complex model to analyze profit margins, labor productivity and reinvestment in business. After showing us a few screens full of ata and equations, he assures us, “There’s no doubt - ICTs help SMEs become more profitable.”

The complaints about ICT in an African context is about cost - about 60% of business owners complain about cost and 8% say that lack of financial resources keep them from using ICTs. Despite these costs, Stork argues that mobiles are the most used tools for support of SMEs.

One of the moderators mentions that these are hardly surprising conclusions. Dr. Stork retorts, “Good social research confirms the obvious.” That’s a line I’m planning on using in the future.

Lottee Pelckmans from the African Studies Center at the University of Leiden is working on a multi-country study of the social use of mobile phones in an African context. The study is going to focus on Uganda, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Tanzania, and look at the “social and local construction of mobile phones.” She tells us that the “mobile phone is a type of intensification process” - it creates more time in the day for the user, the ability to accomplish more things. Phone ownership has become a form of group membership, which has some downsides - people are finding ways to share phones not just so they can communicate, but as a social signifier.

There’s a great deal to be studied in terms of mobile usage and calling behavior. She tells us about “beeping” - soemtimes called “flashing” - where people call and immediately hang up. It’s a way of signaling someone that you want to talk without incurring charges. In Mali, the phone network doesn’t charge you until three seconds into a call… which means that some people carry out 30 minute long conversations three seconds at a time. Christoph Stork points out that you can tell a great deal about social status from flashing - if someone flashes you, they’re assuming you’re wealthier and better able to pay for the call than you are.

Shafiu Shaibu from the SEND Foundation in Ghana is interested in how information resources can transform the life of farmers in north-eastern Ghana. His group partners with the ministry of food and agriculture’s market enumerators, who track prices in food markets across Ghana. They disseminate this information to markets in towns like Salaga, Kpandi and Kete-Krachi on bulletin boards, chalk boards posted in prominent places in the community. The prices show the value of the commodity in nearby urban areas, which lets farmers choose whether they’d like to sell goods locally or export them to a larger market.

Shaibu’s project tried to use internet systems to get price information, but costs of access via VSAT were too high - using the mobile phone proves to be more effective for these small bits of data. The project serves 43 communities, all of which have mobile connectivity, but only three have access to land lines. Those lines are less reliable than the mobile phones, as they can be damaged by copper thieves, and can become inaccessible during storms and other weather. He argues that cost isn’t a major issue, as very low-end, used mobiles might be available for as low as one euro each. “Once you have the handset, paying for the connection is not a problem,” because units are available at low cost.

Dr. Stork was surprised that SEND wasn’t using radio to disseminate this information. Shaibu explains that the only local FM station is based in Tamale and is too far from most communities. Other radio stations simply rebroadcast from Accra and aren’t open to local information. Stork mentions a system in Uganda - send a text message with a commodity name to a certain number and you’ll receive pricing information from around the continent.

I’ve had the date on my calendar for weeks now. I’d meant to get up early in the morning and get one of the first orders in, but frankly, sleeping in seemed like a higher priority. But at 9am today, I placed an order for a One Laptop Per Child XO machine under the G1G1 program - Give One, Get One.

It took about 30 seconds, and the order was confirmed by PayPal - $423.95 including shipping, with the vague promise that they’d hope to get me a machine before Christmas, and an acknowledgement that $200 of the money I’d paid is a charitable contribution to support the purchase of XO laptops for use in the developing world.

I guess I’d been expecting an iPhone-level of excitement about the release of the OLPC machine to the general public. Obviously, my tech for development geek friends are pumped - Wayan Vota, the founder of OLPC News, is quoted as speculating that the 25,000 laptops promised in this release will sell out. Wayan’s doing his part to make that happen, offering information on a shipping forwarder who will allow OLPC machines to be purchased by people outside of North America, the only place the machine is currently offered for sale. Peter Glaskowsky at Cnet’s news blog was up early as well placing his order, and noted that OLPC isn’t promising any service for the machine, encouraging owners to found a community and support each other in using the machine.

I guess I’m used to the idea that developments I’m interested in don’t always capture the interest of the mainstream technology community. While Slashdot has a brief piece on the release of the machine, I couldn’t find it on the top pages of Digg or Reddit. I suspect there will be more excitement when folks start getting the machines, perhaps with the sorts of disassembly posts that accompanied the release of the iPhone. (Should be easier with the XO, which is designed to be taken apart…)

My basic hope is that getting machines into the hands of tech reviewers should end some of the predictable snark about the OLPC project and get people talking about the real potentials and problems of these machines. Gizmodo has another predictable “I’ve never been to a developing country, so I’ll make jokes about it” post about XO machines shipping with a copy of SimCity: “If EA would donate their other property, The Sims, these kids can also practice cooking on a stove, cleaning an overflowing sink, and getting a career as a rockstar—things they can’t actually do in real life because they live in a Third World country.”

Right. Let’s not even begin to debunk that particular piece of misinformed, elitist bullshit, and suggest that putting machines into the hands of people in the geek community will help people understand how powerful and novel these machines are and get them involved with developing useful tools and content for the machines.

Is it enough to come together and talk about important scientific, social and technical issues? That’s a question that Andrew Zolli, curator of Pop!Tech has been wrestling with for the past few years. Conferences like Pop!Tech have the possibility of sparking collaborations - in a new phase of Pop!Tech, which Zolli announced today, Pop!Tech will actively seek to launch and incubate important new social change projects that rise out from members of the community.

Zolli describes this as the third phase of Pop!Tech - the first was a launch phase, followed by a phase he’s led to professionalize and globalize the project. This new phase recognizes, celebrates and nurtures the projects that emerge from the collaborations Pop!Tech makes possible. He tells us about a collaboration between Neema Mgana and Cameron Sinclair which has led to the establishment of the Ipuli Medical Center in rural Tanzania, with the support of Pop!Tech partners. Other collaborations have included al album, Antibabel, produced by Pop!Tech performers Reggie Watts and Yungchen Lhamo.

Zolli wants to refocus Pop!Tech around a new project, the Pop!Tech accelerator. This is a project to support interdiscinplinary, high-impact, worldchanging projects that apply new tools and new approaches to create significant global change. The goal is to make sustainable projects, to make the data generated from these projects extremely transparent (released under open source licenses) and to produce large amounts of media to explain what those projects are doing. Good projects will leverage bottom-up approaches and engage the community, and will learn from advisors like Barefoot College’s Bunker Roy and Clara Miller of the Nonprofit Finance Fund.

The first project the Accelerator will fund is Project Masiluleke, launched by Zinhle Thabethe, an HIV counselor in KwaZulu Natal province who spoke at last year’s Pop!Tech. Working with Dr. Krista Dong, Frog Design and the University of Connecticut, they’re launching a project to adapt a piece of software called “Life Windows” so it can be used by mobile phone in KwaZulu Natal to support anti-retroviral drug use.

Thabethe and Dong take the stage to explain the complexities of fighting AIDS in KZN. There are six million people around the world, Dong tells us, who need ARV drugs immediately. 90% of that global figure is in Africa, and South Africa the epicentre of the epidemic. Life expectancy in South Africa has dropped from 62 to 44 years. In countries where ARVs aren’t available, like Swaziland, the life expectancy has dropped to thirty years. The World Health Organization’s approach to this program - “3 by 5″ - treat 3 million people with ARVs by 2005 - has been a profound failure, treating only 10% of people.

There are real solutions. A single dose of nevirapine can prevent mother to child transmission of AIDS, but many women will resist the treatment so they don’t have to address their HIV status with the nurse who provides the medicine. As a result, 200 babies per day are born with AIDS in KwaZulu Natal alone - a total number that rivals the number of babies born with AIDS in a year. There’s a massive shortage of doctors and nurses that makes it very hard to bring new patients onto ARVs.

But Dong and Thabethe are fighting back. With strong support from funders, they’ve doubled the number of people in their area on ARVs. But they’ve realized they can’t scale the project up - they’ve got only 19 people, and they need some sort of amplifier to make it possible to reach a wider audience. That something may well be “Life Windows”, developed by Dr. Jeff Fisher and Paul Schuper.

Dr. Fisher is one of the founders of CHIP, the Center for Health, Intervention and Prevention, an organization focused on healthy behavior change. The group focuses on marginalized groups who are at especially high risk of disease, working on projects around the world. They’re building interesting, interactive tools to assist caregivers to help people make behavioral changes that lead to better HIV treatment, especially ARV compliance.

One of the most interesting tools is Life Windows, a tool written by Paul Schuper, which uses an interactive video system to encourage, monitor and collect data on patients on ARV, tracking their compliance and teaching them about the intricacies of the disease. It’s a rich-media, video-driven tool that’s going to require substantial modification to be useful in an African context, but it’s clearly a powerful teaching and support tool for people living with AIDS.

Andrew announces another major Pop!Tech change. Next year, the meeting will include up to 50 Social Innovation fellows, individuals who are working on cool social change projects who will come to Pop!Tech both to be inspired and to share ideas. One third will be from outside of the US, one third will be under 35. Pop!Tech will provide some training, inlcuding storytelling and media training, and will match participants to mentors in the community. The new program, plus the fact that Pop!Tech is making its media open and accessible on the web, will be financed by a ticket price increase on people who attend the conference.

Technorati tag: poptech2007

Forgive me, gentle readers. I’m on the road again, in Budapest for the next few days - hence, the sparse blogging. In a desperate bid to get myself off the road for much of the next few months, I’m traveling like mad between now and mid-November. One of those trips is to Pop!Tech, which means you can expect to be blanketed with posts for at least a few days late this coming week.

The reason for trying to get off the road is that I’m discovering that my brain is full. It appears to be taking me longer and longer to process the meetings I attend, the new projects I see, the talks I hear at conferences. So two weeks after returning from Rome, I find myself processing a conversation from the Web2 for Dev conference. I participated in a very strange panel on eAgriculture, where the main topic of conversation seemed to be the fact that none of the panelists quite knew what eAgriculture was or should be.

In the room, but not on the panel, was my friend Mark Davies, who might have had the best answer to that question. He’s the instigator of TradeNet, a promising system for sharing pricing information on agricultural information in West Africa, and enabling online trades between farmers and merchants.

It’s the sort of idea that’s so clearly in the right direction that it’s hardly a surprise that other groups are working on it as well. Speaking at TED Global, Eleni Gabre-Madhin outlined a hugely complex problem and proposed solution - the difficulties with establishing a national market for commodities in Ethiopia, and her proposed solution, the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. In this, Gabre-Madhin is inspired by the Chicago board of trade - in a recent Economist article, she points out that the gangsterism that plagues the Ethiopian commodities market parallels the situation in Chicago in 1848, when the first mercantile exchanges, standards boards and futures trading systems came into play.

Gabre-Madhin’s system is supposed to launch this December. In the meantime, friends at Feedelix, a company that’s built an SMS client that supports Amharic characters, are pioneering a system called BoonaNet, which will provide pricing information on commodities like teff, coffee and berbere in the Amharic, Tigrigna, and Afaan Oromo languages. There’s a very rich powerpoint online showing the success and challenges to the system, which range from technical challenges (like system uptime) to participation of partner farmers and collectives. In some ways, Ethiopia is one of the hardest countries to do this in, as SMS was blocked by the sole mobile phone operator for two years for fear of SMS being used for mobilizing opposition movements.

In our discussions in Rome, one of the subjects that came up was the problem of providing key information to farmers through appropriate technology. In the case of farmers who aren’t literate, even localized SMS may not be the right method - broadcasting information over AM or FM radio might be a better method. It strikes me as surprising that there hasn’t been more work done making interactive voice response systems usable for development purposes. (We funded a project at OSI around this issue, but without much success.) Paul Meyer’s company Voxiva (disclosure: I’m an investor) builds IVR systems for health and microfinance applications - it would be great to see systems like TradeNet or BoonaNet using IVR to deliver key data driven by voice or keypad commands.

An example of how this might work comes to mind because I’m in Central Europe, the land of functional cab systems. A year ago, calling a cab service in Prague, I was stunned to discover a highly functional IVR system that let me choose a language to interact in, let me speak my destination, put me on hold for sixty seconds until a human operator matched by location to the nearest cab, and then gave me the number of the cab enroute to pick me up. When then cab was outside, the system phoned me again and told me the cab was outside. I never spoke to a human during the process, and it was a vastly superior user experience to calling for a cab in Cambridge, which usually involves being cursed at.

There’s a reason to think about using taxi IVR systems for development purposes: part of the challenge of building an agricultural trading system in a developing nation is working out transport issues. If a Ghanaian farmer wants to sell groundnut to a Togolese trader via TradeNet, he needs to put his load on a lorry. Using some sort of IVR system to find a truck making the trip - or to give drivers a chance to bid for the load, having their phones ring when the job becomes available - would be very cool. I suspect that adapting Czech cab-dispatching software isn’t the way to go… then again, the toolkits some companies are offering are pretty damned broad-reaching. (Does anyone know of an open source package that covers this space?)

I’ve got high hopes that Mark Davies, Eleni Gabre-Madhin, my Feedelix friends and others are talking so that they’re developing their tools cooperatively. Perhaps they should invite some IVR folks to the conversation as well.

You’re the mother of a small child in rural Ghana. Your child has malaria - she’s sweating with fever, then shaking with chills. You send your husband to the nearest big city - Kumasi - and make what’s a huge fiscal investment for you in some artesunate tablets. Artesunate and other arteminisin drugs work rapidly and are often able to control serious malaria episodes.

The drug doesn’t work. Your daughter dies, despite the fact that you, as a parent, did everything you could to save her life. She’s one of 1.5 million people a year killed by malaria, a disease that should be treatable in virtually every patient who suffers from it.

The pills didn’t contain any artesunate - they contained chalk, starch or acetaminophen. In a recent study in Southeast Asia, 38% and 52% of “artesunate” blister packs sampled contain no active ingredient. Or perhaps the pills included artesunate, just not enough - 10 miligrams, rather than the 50mg needed to cure the disease. The malaria parasites continue to live and are carried by other mosquitos, but they’ve developed a resistance to artesunate by encountering it in the victim’s bloodstream in a non-lethal dose. The authors of the paper on Asian counterfit drugs state, “We make no apology for the use of the term manslaughter to describe this criminal lethal trade. Indeed, some might call it murder.”

Counterfit pharmaceuticals are a massive problem in West Africa. Dr. Dora Akunyili, the head of Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control reports that, at one point, more than 80% of drugs on Nigerian shelves were fake. Akunyili’s sister, a diabetic, died in 1988 after taking fake insulin. Her personal devotion to fighting fake drugs has helped NAFDAC become quite effective at seizing and destroying fake drugs… so effective that Akyunyili’s car was fired on by snipers four years ago as she drove through rural Nigeria. She keeps the headscarf that was pierced by a bullet over her desk as a reminder of the dangers of her job.

The fake medicines are easy to produce - high-quality color photocopiers can produce official-looking packaging, and firms in China and India have gotten into the business of manufacturing huge volumes of fake, diluted or out of date drugs for sale throughout the world, mostly in developing nations.

You’d expect legitimate pharma companies to be highly active in combatting these fakes. An article by Robert Cockburn in the American Prospect accuses GlaxoSmithKline of burying reports of fake drugs and intimidating people who report the drugs from making public announcements, for fear that it will scare people away from their products. (Needless to say, GSK disputes Cockburn’s analysis.)

Friends of mine are working on a new project in Ghana designed to combat pharma fakes. The project, called mPedigree, seeks to build a system first in Ghana, and then throughout Africa, that tracks drugs from their original producers all the way to the pharmacy shelves, allowing each buyer in the chain to ensure that they’re dealing with a legimate product. The idea of this system comes from the ePedigree system being implemented to track medications in the US using RFID tags.

It’s probably prohibitively expensive to put RFID tags on every box of medicine coming into Ghana. But a system that takes advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones in Ghana, allowing a purchaser to check whether the pills she’s buying in a pharmacy are registered and tracked would be a great use of appropriate technology to tackle a difficult problem. That’s what mPedigree proposes to do. The project is being implemented by a very new company called Syncrytel, which has spun out of a social entrepreneurship project at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.

It’s hard to think of an application in which information can save more lives than in providing information on whether a drug is fake or real. My fingers are crossed for the success of mPedigree and of all efforts to destroy the trade in fake pharmecuticals.

One of the several interviews I did while in Rome was with Guy Deagan of Deutsche Welle’s radio program “World in Progress”. The program covers the use of digital media in the Burmese protests, and in international development as a whole. If you’re interested, please listen to the half-hour show here in mp3 format.

I’m back from the Netherlands, Rome and an exhausting and exhilirating week. Fortunately, I’m home (Massachusetts, if not exclusively the Berkshires) for the next week, which gives me a chance to enjoy the turning of the leaves and the beginning of the Red Sox journey into the post-season. Next Tuesday sees me head off to Budapest, then Pop!Tech and then, possibly Chicago as part of a month that looks like it will include roughly 25,000 miles of travel.

While in Rome, I did a number of interviews with people covering the Web2 for Dev conference, including Burkina Faso-based blogger and journalist Ramata Sore, and with German political blogger Andrea Goetzke, who did a podcast interview with me for Netzpolitik. The text on the page is in German, but our conversation is in English, for anyone interested in how citizen media might fit into the world of international development.

Thanks to everyone who made Amsterdam, the Hague and Rome fun. Looking forward to the next rounds in Budapest, Camden and Chicago.

If it’s Thursday, this must be Rome. And this conference must be the Web2 for Development conference, hosted at the FAO in Rome. My impressions of Rome thus far come exclusively from what I can see of the city from the roof of the FAO complex. According to a friend at lunch, this building is where Mussolini planned his colonization of Africa - there’s more than a few bad jokes about whether FAO is continuing that work.

One of my pet peeves is speakers who show up only for their session at a conference, parachuting in and giving a talk without understanding the tone of a meeting, the speeches that have come before, the context for their words. Today, I’m that jerk. Given the vastness of the topic - how does the world of web 2.0 intersect with the world of international development - I’m left guessing at how to pitch the remarks.

The talk went well, I think, judging from good questions after the session and throughout the day. Ismael Peña-López, who blogs brilliantly on ICT4D at ICTlogy has good notes on the talk, and Tobias from Kabissa has reflections on my suggestion that interactive voice response systems should be a serious priority for international development. You can check out the slides here if you’d like.

I got to catch less of the rest of the conference than I had hoped - I did several interviews, and missed a couple of talks. But some of the highlights from what I caught:

- Thomas Metz from the International Rice Research Institute, who’s led implementation of two major web2.0 projects for his group, observes that there’s a potential culture clash between the behaviors web 2.0 encourages and the hierarchies that tend to characterize bureacratic organizations and research centers. In organizations where every public utterance needs to be scrutinized by a PR department, it’s really hard to encourage open collaboration via a tool like a wiki - Metz regrets that one of his projects was built in a closed, password-protected environment, but it was the only way to make everyone comfortable with the process.

- Kwame Ahiabenu from the International Institute for ICT in Journalism (PenPlusBytes) in Accra, Ghana, makes a persuasive case for the importance of basic tools in online education. His team offers free online trainings for journalists on how to incorporate IT into their journalistic practice and better use IT tools for reporting. The courses are offered via email, and while they encourage the use of fairly complex online tools, they’re accessible to anyone who can participate in the email lists, which helps explain their popularity with users throughout Africa, and as far away as Bangladesh and Australia.

Two overall impressions:

- There’s a great deal of enthusiasm for the tools of web 2.0, but I worry that people are embracing tools because they’re worried about falling behind.

- Those of us who have been working in ICT for development for a while may - or perhaps should - be starting to feel like it’s “put up or shut up” time for these tools. We need to get beyond discussions of how these tools might benefit people and get closer towards ensuring they do benefit people.

More reflections when I’m not so sleep deprived, I suspect.

The One Laptop Per Child team has responded to a good idea offered by countless bloggers, wellwishers, critics and journalists: sell the XO-1 laptop to the general public in a way that helps subsidize uptake of the device in the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte has announced a program called “Give 1 Get 1″, which will allow people in the US and Canada to pay $399, and receive a laptop. The laptop costs approximately $188 to produce, which means that the remainin $211 subsidizes the purchase of an additional laptop for use in the developing world. The laptops go on sale at xogiving.org on November 12th and will be available for only two weeks. (I would recommend signing up for an email reminder on the site if you’re planning on buying one. Walter Bender is quoted on the BBC as saying that the first 25,000 would ship before the end of the year - I suspect this may mean that there’s an anticipated first run of 25,000 and that anyone not in that first group might have a long wait.)

It will be very interesting to see what the market for the laptop is like in the US and Canada. I’m buying one - obviously - because I’ve been fascinated by the project from its inception and look forward to having a device to play with, customize and get to know. I suspect it will occupy a place of honor in our living room and serve as the “lender laptop” to houseguests who show up without one. But I wonder whether there’s much of a market outside the hardcore geek market. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, while the machine is an amazingly slick piece of engineering, it’s not really scaled for grownups, and most business users would be better served with a used laptop than adapting to the OLPC’s itty-bitty keyboard.

What may be most important about this project is the fact that it’s going to put laptops into the hands of the watchers and critics of the project, some of whom are getting downright cranky. My friend Cyrus Farivar has a deliciously nasty article on Slate today with the memorable subtitle: “The latest sign that Nicholas Negroponte’s cheapo-computer scheme will never work.” He points out that the price of the laptop has increased from $100 to $188, moving in the wrong direction to achieve $50 by 2010, and that Negroponte has adjusted the number of laptops a country needs to purchase to participate from a million to a quarter million and now down to 100,000. Despite these reductions, “How many countries have signed up now? Still zero.”

The New York Times is reporting that there are firm commitments by at least four nations to purchase the machines:

Peru, for example, will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas. Mexico and Uruguay, Mr. Negroponte noted, have made firm commitments. In a sponsorship program, the government of Italy has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia.

But the article goes on to mention that large orders from Brazil and Nigeria have yet to materialize. And Negroponte is upfront about the frustrations in bringing the project to scale:

“I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. “And yes, it has been a disappointment.”

It’s worth drilling into that comment. Negroponte has been amazingly effective in selling the vision of a laptop for every child in the world. He hasn’t been very effective in selling the actual laptops.

I don’t think this is because the laptops are disappointing, but because those sales tasks are very different. It’s not hard to convince a nation’s leader that he or she wants citizens to be able to compete in a global information economy, invoking visions of Nigeria turning into an oursourcing center like India. But it’s much harder to get a Minister of Education to commit a huge percentage of an annual education budget to a project that hasn’t been implemented widely anywhere in the North. If I were an education minister, I’d have hard questions about whether my teachers would use these devices, how I’d train them to use them, how we’d develop locally approriate curiculum for them, and so on.

Some nations are interested in the project, but have been chased off by the massive investment required to participate - lowering the minimum purchase will help, but so will putting thousands of machines into the hands of developers, enthusiasts and educators, who may take some of the steps neccesary to demonstrate how the XO-1 can be a useful tool in and out of the classroom.

I think Cyrus is wrong - and I think he knows he’s wrong - when he harps on the price point of the device. Everyone who follows consumer electronics understands that devices drop in price when they’re produced in volume. With larger orders, we’d expect the XO-1 price to drop substantially. Also, as a commenter on Slashdot observed, we’ve seen the value of the US dollar drop sharply since the announcement of the project - that combined with increases in the costs of some raw materials might help explain why the current salesprice of the laptop is higher than promised.

Wayan Vota, another friend and critic of the laptop project, is more sympathetic in his assesment of the announcement:

But rather than kick a man when he’s down, I’d like to say “Thank you” to Dr. Negroponte. He’s surprised me by actually admitting his mistake; I didn’t think his expansive ego would’ve permitted it. In addition, he is trying to correct his mistake and save OLPC production.

See, the OLPC USA sales plan shows failure in Negroponte led sales plan, not the overall idea. The developing world still wants XO laptops, and wants to buy “$100 laptops”, just not in million-unit blocks with no maintenance plan.

I think that’s right on. I think that making it possible for countries to experiment with OLPC, learning how to train teachers and develop content before making commitments in the hundreds of millions of dollars is a smart way to go. And I think there’s a bit of schadenfreude taking place in the geek community when Negroponte gets beaten up. He’s done an astounding job of getting people excited about this device, and until people have the device in their hands - and more importantly, in the hands of the children who are supposed to benefit from it - some people are going to be upset about promises outpacing reality.