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.
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.)
Many people had questions for the panel, but there was not enough time to pose them. What follows is taken from the cards submitted to the moderator.
It is predicted that digital convergence is centering on the cell phone. Will it be the mode of delivery to the bottom of the pyramid. Is the cell phone available in small poor villages? When will it be?
Ecuador benefit from the remittances sent by Ecuadorian migrant workers in Spain and the USA. What trends to you observe n using this wealth to create national wealth, rather than to fuel the culture.
It seems that in order to develop a global morality we need to involve young people beginning at a very young age. I recently heard the head of the UNHCR say that we have the resources to prevent poverty and its related diseases. However those of us who are the "haves" perhaps are more interested in holding on to our wealth than distributing it with equity in a way that can prevent. poverty. Consequently perhaps Internet and other technologies can help students in developed countries understand the issues faced by children in the developing countries in a way that will help our youth develop a global morality that will both preserve each culture and improve each culture. Please comment on how our students from kindergarten through college can be involved in empowering people's lives globally by valuing all cultures.
Perhaps the real question is how do we remain human in the world: technological, economic, social, and political--we have built.
What of the idea that "commons" is contingent on the notion of community as a cohesive whole, which doesn't exist evenly throughout the world. Does a sense of commons change, as dependent on the kinds of communities where people live?
What form of government (democracy, Cuban style socialism, etc) best addresses the issues that underdeveloped countries face?
How to build steady relations between North developed countries and their experts and academic people with people in need in the South marginalized countries, especially when most North corporations and their global goals including technology are negative and deteriorate habitat in the South?
Delgadillo mentioned the transnational company extracting the plant of the indigenous people. What would have been the ideal solution that would be equitable and still meet the needs of both the community and the business? (Two similar questions)
How are telecenters making an impact? External change in people's material lives or more internal changes of sense of empowerment? How balanced are the two?
Let's admit that social conditions can be reduced to cultures of use: how the diversity of cultures of use can positively participate to the evolution of ICT, both at the level of research and industry?
Despite some local successes, digital commons are thwarted by lack of viable business plans. It costs money to create such networks. How is the problem of lack of capital addresses?
Market forces, not cultures of use drive significant investment in new technologies. Given limited markets and the lack of resources, how do we design and build technologies to meet the needs of the poor?
What can we do to develop a digital community to solve problems common to third world countries, apart from governmental authorities, that are slow, unwilling or unable to solve these problems?
Posted by: Steve Cisler | April 26, 2005 at 10:29 AM