digitalcommons

The Elusive Quest for Growth

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, by William Easterly. MIT Press, 2001.

Though this is not a new book, I have found it moderately useful as I write an essay for the Incommunicado workshop in June. I am not an economist, and he uses accessible language as he interprets economic models and assumptions used since World War II to foster growth which he says is a necessity to reduce poverty. Interspersed between chapters laden with statistics are short tales and testimonies of people in dire straits in developing countries. He wants us to keep these in mind as we consider the theories and the evidence he presents.

In the mid-60's Walt Rostow predicted the country receiving aid would naturally increase its savings as development took off (to use an airplane metaphor), so that after "ten or fifteen years" the donors could anticipate that aid would be discontinued. Now, after $1 trillion (1950-1995) we are still waiting. The ratio of the wealthiest nation to the poorest has gone from 3:1 in 1820 (earliest stats. available) to 30:1 at present (U.S. and Bangladesh, at the time of publication).

He looks at a variety of "elixirs" (HP and Cisco would call them "solutions") to increase growth and discusses how most have failed for the most part: aid, investment, education, controlling population, loans, and debt relief. I found the criticism of the fruitless investment in education to be the most surprising, and he admits it is very controversial. He then discusses the role of technology going back to weaving and iron making and just a bit on ICT--my own interest. However, he does point out the role of knowledge leakage (diffusion) and what makes it effective in some places and not others. There's an interesting chapter on luck, both good (high prices for a resource whose pricing is out of the hands of the country) and bad (tsunamis, wars, weather). Another is about polarized peoples (race, religion, wealth, language). Corruption which plays a huge role in some countries is the final chapter before his conclusions. His basic premise is that people respond to incentives, and it's usually financial. Of course we can consider other social and spiritual incentives: friendship, being part of a team, patriotism, and even salvation.

The question he implies and one that I have had about the kinds of technology projects I have seen developed, funded, implemented, and then disappear is why do people keep repeating the same methods when available evidence indicates that procedures need to change drastically and that the money might be spent in more useful ways.

Euro Libraries vs. Google

Google's massive digitization project in cooperation with Stanford, Harvard, and U. Michigan has provoked the French to organize other libraries in Europe to undertake their own book conversion project, reports Agence France Presse. Details are here in this Australian news item.

Critique of "civil society"

In this 2002 speech at the Overseas Development Institute John Harriss critiques the concept of 'civil society' how it relates to Robert Putnam's ideas about social capital and how it de-politicizes engagement with those in power (See: The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson).

More IP = More Innovation?

There's a terrific column in the Financial Times decrying the idea that the more intellectual property laws there are, the more innovation and creativity. Thanks to Byron Henderson for the tip.

John Seely Brown & Michael Yates

Concluding Session--Where do we go from here?
Michael Yates: It's not about a digital divide or knowledge per se.  In this emerging world how do we make progress on pressing scientific issues. How are the socio-economic issues playing out? 

How can we put together new end-to-end systems and look at new ways of delivering information to new places. Accenture is proud to be backing the Open Knowledge Network in India where the fishing villages had access to Navy wave information. Software has to be optimized for people who can only be online a few minutes a day, for people whose culture is oral.  New IP rights that help local knowledge to be shared but not exploited. There needs to be a business model that is sustainable. OKN is running in several African and Asian countries.

John Seely Brown:
Information comes when we listen with humility. Common ground is not achieved easily. Knowledge ecologies will work but only if they leak. He stressed the importance of bricolage: A bricoleur is one who improvises and and uses any means or materials which happen to be lying around in order to tackle a task: '"The bricoleur is adept at executing a great number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools. The open source is strongly tied to open knowledge.

Last week the people accessing wikipedia exceeded those accessing the New York Times.

"Innovation depends on forgetting as much as remembering."

Yates thought the DOT Force was a good collaboration, though it was rocky at first because of the varying agendas of the participants. However, the cost of the meetings and the resulting paper given in Geneva was a mismatch of input and outcome.

Bowker: Claude Levi-Strauss used the term bricolage to denote the way the 'savage mind' thought and made use of knowledge. Is all knowledge bricolage?  What role can we play at the Center to create a knowledge commons?

Brown: a lot of meaning resides in stories and look at the way they travel and embed themselves. Students want to go into social entrepreneurs and have a foot in business and the other in a social venture. the Center could help negotiate this territory.

Panel Four

Infrastructural Frameworks for Global Knowledge: "What can leaders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, with their wealth of orgnizational acumen and technical invention, do to help address these issues?"

Terri Griffith who heads the program director for innovation and organizational change, introduced the three speakers.

Howard Charney, Cisco Systems. He is talking about a major technology transformation and about how policy sets priority. The latest big transformation was the automobile industry which started in the late 18th century. He gives a rundown of the costs, growing pains. The auto infrastructure needed infrastructure in the form of the highway system.  He compares this to the Internet growth. He points out that there are many divides including the 'relevance divide' He thinks the growing pains are for an inevitable transformation.

Examples of enlightened policies include Jordan, eSlupsk, and eEthiopia.  He thinks the Jordan project is exemplary by building out infrastructure and to create content for schools in Arabic and English. There is also the development of Jordan's IT industry.

eSlupsk is outside of Warsaw, Poland. includes hot spots and 29 public institutions. All future projects in town have to fit in with this e-project.

eEthiopia will have health, agriculture, schools, and Woredanet to link 600 local and 11 regional govedrnment offices. 

the growing pains we can expect are not a bad thing.  the only one solution for divides comes from enlightened policy.

Jim Spohrer, Director of Research, IBM Almaden. Global Development and Service Infrastructure Growth.  What sort of development is going on, and what will contribute to sustained development?
He is head of services research at IBM and showed the top ten labor force (China has about 1/5 of the world's labor force) in the world and how many worked in different sectors including service.

The organizations that grow in a service sector help develop the human capital to escape from Amartya Sen's 'non-freedoms' .  He says there is a need for a new academic discipline in services sciences which are more difficult problems than technological ones.

John King, from Univ. of Michigan School of Information. The first person to talk about a library! In the library at Toledo most of the ancient Greek manuscripts and Arab writings were there. At the end of the 11th century, the library and staff were used and translated into Latin which contributed to the European Renaissance. The archbishop of Mainz drove all the printers from that German town because the printers were disruptive and spread all over Europe which spread the technology.

His own university is working with Google to convert about 5000 titles a week and will do the whole library eventually. He'd like to see what happens when several billion have access to the U. Mich collection, as opposed to the few million that might have access at present. He said we need to remember the function of these institutions (publishing/libraries) may run off the surplus wealth of a society and contribute to innovation and progress in culture.

Bowker: what is coming out that will have change things dramatically? What is on the horizon?
Charney: if the medium is not human, it's a perversion.  Going mobile is more human because you are not tethered. He sees a multi-use hand-held device that will do all sorts of things but at a higher fidelity. Part is wireless.

Panel Three

Legal & Economic Frameworks for Global Knowledge.
Which is easier to solve: the technical issues or the ones related to finance, asks Professor Pedro Hernandez-Ramos in his introduction.

The stage is set with a coffee table, two side tables with flowers and water glasses, and four very comfortable armchairs.

Paul David. Building instittutional infrastructures for e-science (a British term): a multi-disciplinary challenge. He came to this topic through his research in the economics of networks, esp. computer mediated networks and their potential role in promoting creative production in geo-distributed communities. He did studies as an economic historian where open science as a social practice started in the 17th century.

"The potential of e-science will have a new generation of info/com infratructures. It's about global collaboration in key areas of sicence and the next generation of infrastrucute that iwll enable it." to fulfill this dream you will need more ingenious hardware and software and a more sophisticated system design of new tools, and appropriate institutional contexts. The GRID is one such example which might be developed as a P2P architecture, but they are not the same.  There is a comparfative interoperability project that has three projects: GEON, LTER, Ocean Informatics. also a description of eDiaMoND, a diagnotic digital mammography project.

He said that the lawyers slowed down the project because they considered all the possible harm and losses associated with the property and privacy issues of this project.  Can we foster a mode through which this soft part of collaboration can be solved. 

Frank Tansey, IMS Global Learning Consortium. It was part of the national learning infrastructure initiative. Systems were proprietary and content could not be shared. Global issues were not addressed: the lack of good (or any) connections, learning styles. He hopes the next system will help him realize the sweet dream he had six or seven years ago.

Roberto Verzola: Towards Global Knowledge-Sharing.  Intellectual property rights are becoming a liability to sharing science. Pr. David's arguments apply to other fields. Current IPR regimes tilt too much toward the producers (less IPR).  Many are monopolistic and we need no IPR. this is the 'information wants to be free' arguement.   Under the TRIPS agreement under WTO the owners have been favored.  Users are spread out in many countries and have little voice in decision-making.  Moving and storing info is approaching near-zero cost. this should increase sharing but can also yield very high profits. This might be the core conflict in the information economy.  He calls these rent-seekers the "landlords of cyberspace" or cyberlords.

for low cost deployment if development countries: FLOSS, low power radio, video CD player than can access html, work out systems of community ownership. However, the ICTs have built-in biases: English, automation (replacing people with machines), technofix, and globalization (local subsidy for the global players). The new jobs created will be temporary and may be replaced by automation.

It is argued that without IPRs there will be stagnation. However, there are other ways of rewarding the creator without giving a absolute right to the person.

Bowker: even if you make info available you still have a package of attitudes, cultures, etc. that must travel with the information. How do we move that around together? That's what consultants say they can do!

Verzola said that cumpulsory licensing was weakened by the WTO but that it offered a non-monopolistic way of compensating creators.

Panel Two

Institutional Frameworks for Global Knowledge poses the question: to what extent is sci/tech knowledge a public good? Can it be used for social justice? 

Raoul Weiler, an engineer from Belgium, teaches at a Catholic university and is a member of the board of the Club of Rome.  which is sponsoring a conference on capacity building next year. Because of the intellectual heritage he sees the knowledge as common to all of us. Cognitive justice says that all knowledges are equally valid in relation to each other. This counters the negative impact of western science which places itself above other knowledge systems. He quoted a S. African who pushed for recognition of indigenous knowledge as lessening the alienation some have from western science.

Sustainability is an overarching concept. I thought it was utopian and now it's a necessity.Weiler quotes S. African President Mbeki who said that S. development won't happen unless people can use the ICT effectively.  850 million are illiterate indicating there are all sorts of divides, not just technological.  Poor countries will become ignorant countries.  "Only by eliminating poverty can we dream of a sustainable society."  He cites J. Stiglitz saying that education is basic in achieving this.

He asks if health is a public good, and if it is then society will have to change. With regards to intellectual property, he talked about the critics of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and how they are more open to public interest groups and how to protect human rights and consumer rights. Mention of the Geneva declaration on the future of WIPO

Brooke Partridge, HP emerging market solutions, thinks social justice is a concern of corporations. Her company has targeted developing countries through philanthropic giving, but we need to increase profits to justify those expenditures on donations. We are working on developing technologies that benefit developing countries. We have to understand those markets of which 70% are governments. Most companies are not looking at this, but they have had programs for South Africa. She advocates "selling to the bottom of the pyramid" or more accurately the middle of the pyramid--not the poorest of the poor. As a result of the i-communities they have launched the multi-user 441 desktop solution which uses Linux.

Pedro Hepp, a consultant for the Ministry of Education in Chile, started in the early 1990's with the Enlaces (Links) project.  Most children now have access in their schools. It may not be the fastest, nor are there enough computers, but 85% of the teachers also know how to use the tools for improving skills. ICT is the official new curriculum, and about 1,100 schools are open to the community for use bythe public. The kids do not lose by being connected; they gain.  He is optimistic about this.  What is amazing is that this program has survived seven ministers of education and three presidents. 

Bowker is interested in the business model for an institutional framework.  HP sees that as the way they are working with governments. However, most governments do not have an open policy about their own information.  Development of geo-spatial data has been boosted in Denmark and the U.S. by the open policies, but hindered in the UK (and many other places) by its geodata policy.

Weiler would like to see framworks that are more open and where less power resides with one sector (like corporate publishers). We should not leave knowledge in an economic system.   Hepp said that governments don't like to work with big companies, and that's a big mistake. He sees the need to establish common ground for a pilot project.

Bowker: There's a problem with calling something local or indigenous knowledge. It's a problematic term for urban dwellers.
Weiler: the disappearance of cultures and languages means we need to brake the slide into fewer languages and cultures.  Mention of UNESCO's conference on cultural diversity.
Hepp: he talked about the Mapuche Indians in Chile who are using ICT to expand their culture; they are not being wiped out by international web sites.

Partridge was asked about their projects and how they were sustained and how did they make a profit? She said they just talked about the issues and needs of a target community and not about technology. She said they also work with development NGOs and for-profit groups to develop the local solutions (her favorite term).

General comments

What are your overall impressions of the conference? There will be entries for the different panels when you want to make more specific comments.

Panel One

Calestous Juma had a family emergency so John Staudenmaier, who is spending the year at the Center and is editor of Technology and Culture, is substituting for him. He discusses the idea of proprietary knowledge. It dates back to 16th C. Venice where porcelain workers took technology when they moved around, and this displeased their employers.  Privacy: who controls the information about me? Who might get to know my buying habits? What about identity theft? He thinks the technical issues of databases are rooted in the human condition. The global world of the past 150 years has been set by the changes in transportation technology and ICT.  Who should sit at the table when discussing access to knowledge? Certainly more than the corporate owners.

Saskia Sassen

She wants to talk about barefoot engineering which are outside of formal systems. It is found in resource-poor areas.  Also cultures of use: all kinds of important things are happening in a fourth space between the access interface and the user. These two issues allow us to think about formal and non-formal systems.  The excluded (those without power) have a big role in determining history. She says that no formal system of power has lasted forever--except for Catholics!

She is interested in networks that promote sociality and in some barefoot engineering there is inserted some of this interactive technology. Download a file and then using a loudspeaker to broadcast the information.

(The last part of her talk was lost in posting)

Karin Delgadillo of Chasquinet Foundation in Quito, Ecuador.

Opening the way: Learning Together. Knowledge commons and knowledge sharing
She is working with slum areas, street children. 70% are under the povery level. None are feeling that they want a computer. It's about food, about housing, and about health. There is a lack of basic services, and the government is corrupt.

We do not feel safe and education is not a high priority. The pictures show intense poverty and pollution. Some of the people had cancer and could not afford medicine or treatment. With all these problems how can we make a safe place and find a common solution.  One of the answers was the community based telecenter, a sort of communal house where indigenous groups would meet. We looked at the assets and skills that people had and how those might meet the very basic needs of the people (no technology is mentioned yet). 

She says this social development has to be based on meeting very basic spiritual (not religious) needs and thereby bringing about a personal transformation.  they use scanners to record and transmit skin cancers to Doctors without Frontiers who channel treatments back to them.  We use local newspapers, little shops, a loudspeaker, and also the Internet.

Pastocalle: I learned a lot from this mistake. A fellow was documenting the use of medical plants from the high country of Ecuador. He worked with youngsters in this village to put the pictures of the plants on the Net, and a California company was able to exploit this because there was not a good IP regime for this kind of community wisdom.

She highlights the network she heads: somos@telecentros which is starting a knowledge bank for its members.  She would like to see how all the sectors: academic, private, government, and social can work toward this goal

Bowker asks what role intimacy plays in knowledge sharing? Sassen says the new type of poverty has robbed people of knowledge, and intimacy is not a powerful category. The multi-nationals have discovered some of this knowledge and are exploiting it. Karin:  It has been hard to develop spaces where there is trust.

Karin told the story of an ant that was devastating the communal potato crop in Pastocalle. Government workers did not want to come and help, but the began asking the older people for their wisdom about what might work. The community leader also used email to ask for answers, and the people became researchers using a very slow electronic network. so it was a mix of modern and ancestral knowledge.

Staudenmaier talked about who constitutes the commons, i.e. who has the right to use it. Perhaps members need to go through an intimate conversion to be part of any commons.

Bowker: Developing the commons is not all about the technology. there are a lot of other parts to it.

Questions from the audience: how can you build links between academic experts in the north and those in need in the south?    Karin's organization has had good relations with a university in Switzerland. Sassen says we can learn from the barefoot engineers in the south and the ways technology is used in these places that are different from the north. She mentioned Mayan women with some access to markets that 'bypass the transnationals.'

Staudenmaier thinks that the youth can use this technology and feel they have a place and not need to move out.  (I think ICT acts as a magnet that raises expectations and pulls the young from rural areas and barrios.)