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.”

For the past decade or so, there’s been a movement to bring computers, telephones and other “information and communication technology” into developing nations to increase economic development and eliminate poverty. Those of us involved with this movement – colloquially called ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development) – have argued that information imbalances underly major problems in economic development. If farmers don’t know fair prices for their commodities in big cities, they’ll sell for too little money. If students can’t access textbooks or other resources, they’re doomed to a poor education.

There’s a strong critique of ICT4D that argues that the importance of information is overstated and that ICT4D proponents either overvalue information technology because they’re personally attached to the tools, or more sinisterly, because they’re looking to create developing world markets for these tools. Many supporters of ICT4D – myself included – will concede that there are lots of badly thought out and poorly executed projects that do little more than drop expensive technology in areas where it’s a scarce resource and likely to stay a scarce resource for a long time to come.

One bright light for the ICT4D field has been the rise of eGovernment, a movement that tries to get governments to deliver key services to citizens using digital technology. India has been the location for many eGovernment pilot projects, some of which have been very successful in delivering key information services to citizens. In many states, citizens can visit information centers where they can obtain driver’s licenses, business licenses, residency or birth certificates, and other critical documents.

Jennifer Bussell, a political scientist who recently completed a PhD at UC Berkeley, has spent a great deal of time studying these projects and asks a tricky and important question about eGovernment in India – why do some states adopt eGovernance more readily than others? Are there policy environments that we can put in place to make it more likely that eGovernment projects will succeeed and that they’ll affect the lives of citizens positively?

In a talk at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, she offered an interesting opening paradox. The state of Karnataka is comparatively wealthy and extremely engaged with information technology – its capital is Bangalore, the epicenter of India’s technology and outsourcing industries. Chhattisgarh is a new state, carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, and is extremely poor and low-tech. We’d expect eGovernment services to catch on in Karnataka much more quickly than in Chhattisgarh… and we’d be wrong. eGovernment has caught on far more quickly in this young, poor state than in the technology giant, raising questions about what factors actually contribute to the success or failure of eGovernment projects.

To understand what’s going on in these two states – and indeed, across many of India’s states (Bussell developed her theories in seven Indian states and has tested them on nine additional states, analyzing 16 of India’s 28 states) – it’s important to understand corruption, and how eGovernment might affect corruption. Indian citizens pay a lot of money in bribes. It’s estimated that Indians pay $5 billion USD annually to bribe government officials. Sometimes this is wealthy citizens paying money to “jump the queue” and obtain services more quickly that average citizens. But extremely poor citizens pay bribes as well – Bussell references a study that suggests that citizens below the poverty line collectively paid $22 million in bribes to access essential and guaranteed government services.

Taking old, paper-based bureacracies and turning them into “e-government” services appears to squeeze some opportunities for corruption – “rent-seeking”, in the language of political economics – out of the system. It’s not entirely clear why this is – the service centers rolled out in Indian states don’t generally put computers in the hands of citizens and let them access services directly. There’s an opportunity for the operators of these new systems to seek bribes. But the digitalization of India’s massive railway system is a good example of what’s happened in some eGovernment systems. Before digitalization, it was difficult to purchase a ticket without knowing someone to bribe within the system. Now tickets can be purchased online, and transactions within railway stations are simple, efficient and bribe-free (even if you’re a clueless American looking for trains from Rajastan to Delhi, as happened to me not very long ago.)

Bussell argues that e-services tend to systematically reduce corruption, and that they therefore can be threatening to existing political elites. Elites have the power of transferring bureacrats, moving them from a job where it’s easy to seek bribes (the customs service) to one where it’s harder to do so. They exercise this power by demanding kickbacks from bureacrats, which they use as campaign finance. A politician whose political livelihood relies on control of bribes and rent-seeking officials is likely to be threatened by eGovernment efforts and might fight their introduction.

Bussell further theorizes that the removal of bribes could be a threat to political stability within coalition governments. A coalition can be thought of as a group of politicians all seeking a share of the benefits of being in control of a state’s government – part of this control includes control over offices with a high chance for gains through corruption. So she theorizes that we’ll see eGovernment projects succeed in areas where there’s lower corruption, and where there’s a single party in power.

She studies eGovenrment adoption by tracking how many services are available in a given state – some offer just a few, like driver’s licenses, while others offer dozens. Her models try to explain the adoption of eGovernment services in terms of several factors. Some turn out to be largely irrelavent. Technology infrastructure isn’t statistically significant in explaining why some states have aggresively embraced eGovernment. Nor is the time of adoption – states that started eGovernment earlier aren’t neccesarily ahead of the curve. And the level of economic development isn’t statistically significant either.

Corruption, on the other hand, is a strong factor – states with above average corruption (based on surveys by groups like Transparency International) have adopted 10.6 services on average, while those with below-average corruption average out at 20.1 services. Unitary government matters as well – single party governments with below average corruption adopt services more aggresively than coalition governments, even in below-average corruption states.

This is useful information for anyone attempting to build eGovernment systems and roll them out in developing nations, though it doesn’t offer much insight on what to do if you’re in a high-corruption, coalition-governed area. (Duck and cover, perhaps.) And there’s a intriguing larger question – how does the introduction of eGovernment affect corruption in the long term? Do states that adopt eGovernment systems become progressively less corrupt over time? Bussell’s intrigued by these questions and looking for ways to study them going forward, which is good news for anyone who cares about ICT4D and wants to make sure people are doing rigorous, careful evaluation of what works and what fails.

In the spirit of attending OPCs – “other people’s conferences”, conferences where you’re invited, but not part of the demographic/professional group the conference is aimed at – I’m now at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. I’m not a computer scientist, not university teaching faculty, and I’m not doing any research sponsored by Microsoft… all of which turns out to be okay, as it’s a pretty interesting gathering looking at current research topics in computer science, with a strong emphasis on the study of social networks… something that interest me, even if I’m not doing a ton of active work on the topic.

This emphasis on social network studies helps explain why I’m currently sitting in a packed conference room, learning about an extension to Excel. Even at Microsoft conferences, Excel extensions don’t usually get this type of attention. But the extension, .NetMap, has been developed by Marc A. Smith, a pioneering researcher on social networks who’s done important work on analyzing relationships in Usenet groups in his time at Microsoft Research.

Much of Marc’s recent work has looked at behavioral patterns in technical support newsgroups in Usenet. As it turns out, these groups are still hugely important for people looking for technical support (even in the days of pervasive spam) and Microsoft is interested in cultivating the utility of these networks. Rather than analyzing the content of these newsgroups (hard to do, as they’re huge), Smith and his team looked at structures. They did a great deal of network mapping, graphing the posts and responses, and seeing the structures that emerge. At least three types have emerged:

- Answer people – these people almost never post new threads, but answer the queries of a large number of unconnected people. In network terms, they’ve got high out-degree and low in-degree. These folks are utterly essential in the functioning of technical newsgroups, as they’re the folks that newbies end up getting support from

- Reply magnets – some people have a gift (or a technique) for posting in a way that gets responses. Reply magnets are the opposite of answer people – they post infrequently and everyone answers. Smith sees roughly 0.5% of these people in newsgroups, but their posts get 30% of the responses from roughly 30% of all users. Basically, these folks are specialists in setting the agenda, which has interesting implications for political discussions in newsgroups, as these folks are capable of nominating agenda topics with much more success that the average user.

- Discussion people both post and answer a lot, and have long, sustained connections with lots of people. They’re the classic discussion group user, but they’re less common that we tend to assume.

If we can ennumerate these discussion types, we can characterize different ecosystems in terms of what users live in what ecosystems. It’s possible that these roles change over time – so far, Marc observes that most people seem to stay in their roles, but attenuate over time, becoming less active. It would be very interesting to see whether there are networks where people become more interactive over time. (Facebook, for instance.)

Smith observes that as social media becomes the dominant media online, we’re moving from the anonymous to the “named” internet – content created generally has an identity, real or psuedonymous, attached to it. As such, we’re getting incredible sets of data that social scientists can study, because “all social media leaves ties”, and “our relationships are increasingly self documenting.”

Here’s the thing – it’s increasingly easy to find this data, but hard to map it in meaningful ways. Smith observes that there are a couple of good Java toolkits for social network mapping but, oddly, no feature in Excel. So he and his group have built one. Using their tool – .NetMap, which can be downloaded at Codeplex, Microsoft’s Source Forge-like repository for open source projects, plugs into Excel and lets you enter a list of relationships, and get output as a network map. The tool is integrated with Windows to provide one of the coolest demonstration feature – the tool will index your mail and graph your personal social network based on your mail interactions.

One thing that becomes very clear is that you want to filter these maps – with some pretty simple excel manipulations, it’s possible to filter a map to the strongest ties and to visualize the vertices in different ways. As Marc gives his talk, one of his collaborators crunches a set of data from Digg and is able to demonstrate that there aren’t small, competing groups within Digg who upvote on only certain topics – what there is instead is a core of highly active users who tend to upvote across different topics.

I’m looking forward to using the tool, but a bit disappointed that it currently works only on Windows – I suspect a lot of social scientists are using alternative platforms, and hope that as the project moves out of the research space and into the mainstream, it will be more widely supported.

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.