digitalcommons

Potenco

July 3, 2007. The Institute For The Future hosted a talk by Colin Bulthaup, CEO of Potenco, a spinoff of Squid Labs, based in Alameda, California. Colin characterized SL as a Do Tank, not a think tank.

Fourteen months ago they had been working on smart rope, a rope that knows when it is about to break, but with a grant from the OLPC team they developed a pull-cord generator (PCG) that can be used to charge mp3 players, mobile phones, LED lights, portable batteries, GPS devices, and the XO laptop. 

Their base line human is an eight year old pulling on the yo-yo device. They even tested the amount of CO2 produced as a kid uses it, as well as calories expended (very few). One minute of pulling generates enough energy for 20 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone and four hours play time on an iPod Shuffle.  Colin explained that they had done research on the best kind of string, using some new synthetic material, and as backup, there are two extra sets coiled inside the housing of the device. They have designed it so that it can be hacked. For instance, by removing the cover (top picture) it could be attached to a bicycle hub and generate more than 20 watts of power. Here is a short YouTube video where Colin demonstrate the PCG.

He is interested in how the availability of decentralized electricity will change village life and spur small scale entrepreneurs who will provide charging for others. I suggested that patterns of exploitation in a culture will be repeated with the advent of a new technology, so you might see kids and women assigned/forced to do the charging, but the technology makes much more sense that hauling a car battery around to charge phones in rural areas.

It was relatively easy to pull repeatedly, and the stronger the person the greater the resistance and higher wattage generated. Colin had a hexagonal battery  consisting of an array of LEDs, 2 USB ports (the standard for charging these days), and a DC input. This was a proof of concept, and the commercial battery will look different. Colin discussed the problems of using kerosene for lighting. Besides being very inefficient, it was dangerous and contributed to respiratory disease, and was quite expensive. He sees this advanced lighting  as an important replacement for kerosene.

He also brought an early model of the XO laptop. Many of these will be in rural areas with little electricity infrastructure, so each ministry of education placing orders will have to determine how many PCGs they will need for those users who have no other source of electricity. I asked what the cost will be, and while it was not finalized he said it would add about 10% to the cost of the XO. At this time that would be about $17.  There are plans to sell it commercially in retail, and they have a number of ideas about the next phase, especially in the health sector. One African has developed a low cost defibrilator which could be charge in ten seconds of pulling! Another application is small-scale refrigeration for drugs in hot climates.

He brought an earlier version of the XO and asked who wanted to try it. One person said people had a hard time figuring out how to open the XO, and indeed the researcher who volunteered took 53 seconds to figure out how the screen opened up!

Emerging Telephony--Day 3

Emerging Telephony Conference.

San Francisco Airport Marriott. March 1 (Day 3)

I arrived at noon, in time to hear Mike Liebhold of the Institute For The Future present a somewhat hopeful look at the possibilities of the major mobile carriers opening up their systems to rapid innovation with a much lower entrance cost. He compared the vitality of the Web 2.0 applications and said that kind of user generation of content did not exist in the current networks.

At lunch I spoke with Brian Topping of codehaus. He has been a web developer and is doing some work with mobile applications. He said there is a very informal way of getting help with development since there are not design and programming classes as there are with almost any topic in computer/Web development. He would find a programmer inside a company who would recommend the right tools to use and then be a sort of mentor, answering perhaps one question a week.

Most phones can send geographic coordinates to some parties (the company, law enforcement, three letter agencies, and for a fee parents who want to track a child) but not to the owner of the phone. At a conference he asked a Sprint rep about this, and the guy said to ask Nextel (also owned by Sprint). Nextel had specifically negotiated that spec when they established their network with Motorola.  There has been discussion about the way phone companies cripple existing phones and take OUT features that might work in Japan, for instance.

GeoVector showed some slides and a movie of a pointing phone using their software to give information about an object when the user points the phone at a historic place, a restaurant and gets a review from a friend, or a group of places along the path she is walking along. It is working in Japan where they have mapped and described 700,000 objects on the KDDI network.  One nice user interface was directions for walking in a city. Just follow a large arrow, not a verbal or cartographic reprentation of the destination.

Several speakers could not be present, and others filled in including two students from NYU. Summer Bedard showed The Human Race where you called a number and were put on hold along with others. By answering questions (some humorous and some invasive) you decreased or increased the wait time. 

Botanicalls  assigned plants phone numbers. Each plant had a sensor that measured moisture level, and when it dropped it activated a controller with small xb radios that talked to a computer and this called the owner who heard, "Hi, this is the ivy. I'm desperately in need of a drink. Could you water me?"  After doing so, the plant would call again: "Thanks, that felt like a fresh spring rain."  And you could call the plant and hear it describe itself.  212 202 8348.

Mozes CEO Dorrian Porter showed the multiple ways SMS messages are being used around the world. One trillion were sent in 2006. He reported how the Finnish prime minister broke up with his partner using SMS:  "It's over!"  and the Finns have written a novel using SMS. In talking about developing countries 85% of the new phones are going there. Troops in the Congo have used SMS to coordinate attacks on villages. The British have used it to send messages to all their solders, and they are jamming some systems and blasting propaganda to hostile parties. He said that you can get a divorce by SMS in Malaysia, as long as it's final. 

Phil Zimmermann discussed his new project on VoIP encryption which is one of the proposals before the Internet Engineering Task Force to become a standard. Zfone is aimed at making communications safer, and he invoked all the bad things that could happen and are happening on the Net. He hopes the USG will use this eventually..

Quentin Stafford-Fraser, ED of Ndiyo, talked about affordable access to ICT and displayed the first and second generation of small controllers that allow multiple users have individual screens and keyboards using one LInux box. It has been tested in Soweto, South Africa and Bangladesh. He showed how the main computer was hooked into the MTN high speed mobile network in South Africa, thus avoiding vsat or landline connections. Here is an older presentation about the project

Again, thanks to the guys--Evan Henshaw-Plath and ?- who organized the Free-Tel sub-conference and to OReilly for allowing us into the main conference. The fast pace and informality were refreshing.

Off the grid and do-it-yourself technology

Bourem Inaly is a small village isolated from the electric and landline infrastructure a couple of hours from Timbuktu, Mali. Geekcorps with the help of USAID-Bamako has helped extend the reach of the community radio station by hooking up the Internet PC (on vsat) to stream video to fifteen households (215 members!) with tv sets using a homebrew antenna called CanTV. The stations makes about $45/month renting this gear.

Geekcorps Matt Berg has posted a wonderful video on YouTube that shows a villager assembling a CanTV in fast motion, and there's a great music soundtrack. Highly recommended.

Developing Country Entrepreneurs

The Center for Science Technology and Society hosted a discussion with two outfits last night. Brooke Partridge, founder of a consulting company called Vital Wave Consulting. Her experience is with the HP e-inclusion program that was cut by current CEO Hurd, and she is using her experience to provide multi-national technology companies with reliable market intelligence for developing countries. Her firm makes use of people with on-the-ground experience and stresses the use of sound primary data (which can be hard to come by even in rich countries). It was interesting to hear some of the phrases used such as "ramp time" and "hurdle rates for profitablity." She encourages firms not to fear cannibalization of mature markets by cheaper products they might develop for emerging markets. I asked her for an example of data provided to her firm that was not sound, and she replied that the claim that 99% of Mexican households had electricity was wrong. However, she sometimes uses proxy data that can give hints that may be useful. Knowing which households have plumbing, she said, means you can probably assume they have electricity.

Next, a Reuters Digital Vision fellow named Nam Mokwunye explained his ambitious Nigeria Digital Center Program to hook up and manage computing centers in the 70 Nigerian campuses, with the first three being up and running by October 2007. His father is an agronomist who taught in the U.S. where he was raised after leaving the Igbo area of Nigeria. He returned to Nigeria a few years ago, and is setting up this venture with local partners as well as firms such as Cisco. He gave background on the ferocious growth of mobile phone services (300,000 lines five years ago, now 25 million, mainly mobile lines) and the willingness of early adopters to pay through the nose for hardware and phone plans.   He hopes to provide a variety of services for information, communication, and entertainment to these campuses with the target groups being faculty, parents (who pay the fees) and of course, the students. Bandwidth is incredibly costly in Nigeria, and it did not seem like there would be enough for each of the projected 30,000 clients/PCs if he plans to offer movies (Nigeria has the third largest film industry after India and the U.S.) and other entertainment--along with adequate IP protection.  (See the very interesting article on hybrid piracy in Kano, Nigeria by Brian Larkin: "Degrade Images, Distorted Sounds." ) I wondered if e-text books were feasible, given the amount of time a student needs to be in front of a screen to read and then study the text. This was a problem in Uganda in teaching colleges where much of the information was cached on local servers, but the competition for the machines was too great.

Mokwunye hopes this projects will cross pollinate and provide a stimulus for the towns near the universities and also reduce the brain drain. There was no mention of the current political problems in Nigeria. Who will succeed  Olusegun Obasanjo as president? Even if ethnic conflicts are not present, how will universities in states under Sharia handle the freely available flow of infotainment on the Internet (which some cultures see as very corrosive)?

I spoke with him and recommended a wireless expert who might help him. In fact, eleven years ago he and I lectured to Nigerian academics on wireless technology at a workshop in Trieste, and now perhaps a young entrepreneur will make that a reality.

Mokwunye's blog is here.

Bob Kahn and the Computer History Museum

The Computer Museum in Mountain View holds events from time to time. Last night I was invited to a conversation between Ed Feigenbaum and Robert Kahn. I knew Bob when I was quite involved with the Internet Society until 2001.

Non-members paid ten dollars. At 6 pm there was a reception for the members with long tables of food and donated wine. As the crowd grew it seemed as though 90% were over 50 and some in their 70's. These men, predominantly, were the supporters of the museum. Most had made names for themselves in Silicon Valley and probably did well financially, though from the talk that night it was clear that money did not drive a lot of the early computer and networking pioneers. For instance, Kahn said his family had some money, and when he worked for DARPA he would deposit every fifteen paychecks that he had collected!

My friend pointed out old-timers who has helped invent the integrated circuit, the  mouse, AI pioneers, and I saw people who had helped start Usenet, early Apple employees, Donald Knuth, and a fellow who had worked on one of the first Internet nodes at SRI, along with the librarian who saved everything from that time and donated it to the museum recently. The museum supporters were the people who had made the history and were still around to help annotate some of their papers, identify donated objects from early mainframe computing, and participate in collaborative restoration projects. This is a tremendous resource. The museum is emphasizing the preservation of software and not just hardware. I also saw Al Alcorn who had been an Apple fellow and was noted for inventing Pong. He is still very active, working on using cell phones to measure people's use of media.

When we all gathered in the auditorium (about 300 or so) there was one man videotaping the session, but I saw nobody using a laptop to take notes or post accounts on their web site, as is common in most tech conferences (where most journalists complain about the overloaded wireless network).

Kahn spoke for about an hour. His background was in applied mathematics, and he took a leave of absence from his position as a young professor at MIT and went to work at BBN in 1966. At that time networking was not a field of much importance. Working on it was not seen as a good career move. He spoke about how hard a sell it was to get support for networking as a long range military research project because the military was not using many computers, and none were time share, so why would their be any interest in connecting them? It turned out that his work in packet radio networks was of more interest and a lot of the Internetworking  work was done as part of packet radio and satellite research. He also spoke about his long collaboration with Vint Cerf who was also employee number two at CNRI, Kahn's present organization (where I first met him).

He emphasized that the setting up of institutions comprised of the main players from the labs and academia was crucial to the success of the Internet. This included the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force and they way the proposals were available and openly debated by peers. This is in stark contrast to the top down ways of the UN's ITU and the ISO protocols which had the support of many PTTs and therefore the governments. However, the standards they were promoting were just not available, and the IP protocols spread because of these human networks and because they were on machines such as the Sun workstation and later personal computers from Apple and IBM.

He seemed at a loss to predict what might happen with the fight over who now should control the Internet. He said apropos of the WSIS conferences (where he spoke in 2003 and 2005) that while the U.S. did not want the UN (or group of governments) to somehow "run" the Internet, others did not want the U.S. to turn management over to "industry." So it remains with Department of Commerce as perhaps the least bad choice.

It was also interesting to hear about his wife's role in protecting the term Internet from challenges by corporations including banks that wanted to use the term for their network of ATMs. After many years the name was secured and while some make it lower case 'internet' I will keep it capitalized.

This was followed by a Q&A, and the first was Peter Neumann who pontificated for about five minutes before the crowd got restless and Kahn provided a partial answer. We left at this point.

Hearing on privacy in wireless networks

Privacy & security in a wireless world

Wireless Silicon Valley is a project of Joint Venture Silicon Valley. JVSC has been promoting ICT infrastructure projects since the mid-90's when it sponsored "Smart Valley" loosely based on Singapore's Intelligent Island but without the intense government involvement. This morning's program is cosponsored by the Santa Clara University Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society.

Several towns in the Silicon Valley cloud now offer Internet access via a wireless network installed by a commercial partner. Some are ad-supported such as Google's in Mountain View or the one in Santa Clara, where this workshop is being held.  However, it does not work inside the theater on the Santa Clara University campus. Connection strength varies as you drive around town, but registration is fairly simple, though a first time Internet user would have problems because they demand an email address. What if you want to get online to get one?

This meeting brings speakers from law enforcement, library, corporate, and the ACLU which has long been an advocate for stronger privacy protection. It is timely because recent articles this past week have pointed up the weakness of popular unlicensed networks such as wi-fi hotspots. Commonly available software called packet sniffers allows snoops to capture data flowing across such open networks.

At the opening I counted 65 in the  audience (14 women) while Russell Hancock, CEO JVSV mad some opening remarks including

  "We are frustrated that the technologies we have developed are still not implemented here compared with other geographic areas." There is a wireless task force comprised of CIOs from cities in the region. They issued an RFP with help from Intel and the 'community of vendors' replied. One will be recommended with a press release by September 5.

Context: when you build something new there are issues, and large ubiquitous wireless systems include privacy and security concerns.  In this network operators will know when and where a connection is made. Some of these systems are supported by advertisements, and they want to know a lot about who is using the system.

Al Hammond. a law professor and head of the Broadband Institute moderated the session. He summarized why there is uneven access to high speed access. He says that without BB, "cities will be left behind."  Cities that are reluctant to use taxes to provide this network will allow commercial providers to have access to subscriber data. <Well, cities and other regions are "left behind" for other reasons besides not having a high speed infrastructure for telecommunications.>

Wireless: easier to tap into and there are greater risks to individual privacy: and general security issues for companies and government. Different policy options:

-free and anonymous access. Leave it to the user

-Registered access: know at all times who is using the system

-Active court ordered surveillance: warrants and subpoenas used to restrain govt. intervention.

Policy question for the task force:

-How should this project manage these issues?

How much of the response. to protect privacy and sec should be for cities or providers or the user?

Once allocated, how should the protection of privacy and security be accomplished?

An agenda and some short position papers were handed out. These will be on the project web site shortly, according to Seth Feary who leads the task force.

Nicole Ozer, ACLU:   [email protected]  one of 3 lawyers tracking new tech for the ACLU. Community members should not have to pay with their privacy to use a free municipal system. Wireless SV did not include a question about privacy and free speech but did say it would count a lot in the final decision. <the head of the task force said it was discussed already>  All three finalists get a failing grade.  they track who you are, where you are, and what you are looking at. All of it could be disposed to other parties.  It's as if you had free phones around town, but there would be ads and all calls would be monitored.  The California Constitution guarantees privacy and it can't be bought sold or traded. These finalists say that if you have money  you can have some privacy. It's up to WSV to have a fast, secure network that protects our privacy.

Don't track users from session to session. This creates a profile in a database.  All three have a failing grade for this.   Our data should not be commercialized.

Legal demands: notice should be given, with court.

The less info kept the better.

Sherman Hall, former IT guy now with the Atherton Police Department.  The competing pressures: privacy vs security. anonymity vs. tracking: He is assigned to REACT (a law enforcement TF) and computer forensics. Generally savvy and supporter of the status quo, as it exists today.   With complete anonymity there is no deterrent.  Record retention: 90 days. He explained the lag time in a credit card theft, the red tape in a police dept. There will be more sniffing in this open network.   He said there is a barrier to getting warrants because of limited resources. Ozer challenged him on this, saying there were provisions for telephone warrants.

Graham Barnes, Covad NextWeb  They are not bidders in the project. We are caught in the middle. With the freedom comes an openness that includes some tradeoffs the user may not understand. Last month was the first time there are more broadband subscribers(200 Kb/sec or greater) than dialup in the U.S.   Two ways of producing revenue: tracking aggregate data. he claims single user data is not valuable to anyone. But he mentions targeted advertising, a la Google.

Lauren Gelman, Stanford Internet Center.  said there's another model to let the market figure out who puts repeaters on the city phone poles.  It need not be a monopoly. She seemed to agree with much of what Ozer said.

John Tuomy, Secure Content, Inc.  Working with school boards on IT security issues. The federal government is not funding ed tech any more. Most superintendents feel like they can't handle any more complexities. School officials are risk averse and they want to protect their kids and data about families. There are more that 1000 schools in many districts for this project. There are great benefits and risks.  Equal access to families  will be useful to those who can't or won't afford it.

SANS institute said that last week was the greatest week for break-ins. Most take place in school and university computer networks. Dangers of porn and My Space. but the universal access will be valuable. This service should not be tied to a credit card. That's why prepaid cell phones are so important in the walled garden of cellular services. Educators don't want a wide-open system; they want to track 'evildoers.'

Jane Light San Jose Public Library.  We have 10 years experience in providing public access to the Internet.  We have about 1.2 million sessions a year on 600 computers. Some do not have access at home; some do. We have fast access and researchers use it along with other sources such as printed matter and site-licensed databases in the library.  More importantly is our many years of experience in providing free and open access and ensuring that it is free to people. Library users expect that their use won't be tracked. Our records are kept confidential unless there is a court order, but this is rare.

Many libraries have added wireless service to their wired networks. This JV program is a governmental action we are taking, so we have to give much more thought to privacy issues.  The standard enduser agreement is completely inadequate for a municipally sponsored project. It's too complicated.  the public expects that the muni access will protect their privacy. Wifi does not do much for those who have no computer. It's a short term issue because of the development of new generation cell phones.

 

Q&A

In other  muni systems these issues have not been addressed properly, especially San Francisco dealing with Google and Earthlink.

Can there be software to detect sniffers and other problem users? Google is going to provide a virtual private network client in Mountain View. this will allow users to encrypt their traffic. <But will they, any more than parents use filters or V-chip on television sets?>

Graham: "when people think they are using the I anonymously and they are not, that is the real challenge."

A big problem is that several vendors want to take a credit card to use the system. Of course this cuts out a lot of kids and people with poor credit or no card. Library card should not be  used as a universal identifier.  It's exempt from the public records act. A credit card is not fair. We could use a student ID.

Gelman said we might have a pre-paid card  for a small amount of time. She thinks this would 'address the digital divide issue"   but this seems ludicrous for what is billed as a free service at one tier. Why should people have to buy something that's free?

How do you audit compliance with the provisions in a service.   Hall: there's a civil incentive to conform to what they say they will do.  Ozer: the Calif article one section one, digital issues are handled.

The session ended promptly at 10 a.m.  In two hours there were a lot of positions stated clearly but little heated debate. As the task force negotiates with the finalists it is hard to understand how they can convince the provider not to "monetize" the user's information and adequately protect our privacy. Much of the public seems willing to give up some privacy and civil rights in a perceived exchange for coupons, free services, and to support the federal government's war on terror.  Think of it, the city of San Jose controls the airport and the library. The intrusions and safety measures we put up with at airports is getting worse and will spread to other parts of our daily life while the oasis of the library where the system is meant to serve and protect the user is not appreciated enough for the values it helps preserve.  -Steve Cisler

Day 2: A quick drive into the future

On Wednesday, one of the attendees, Ian Wright of Wrightspeed, gave others short and very fast rides in his X1 electric car. It is the fastest car for under $1.25 million and goes 0-60 is 3 seconds. Here's one shot and the rest are blurs, but you can see a short video on YouTube.com

IFTF Conference, day 1

I am attending a program at Institute for the Future entitled "Science & Technology in Ten, Twenty, & Fifty years. It is held at a hotel is San Mateo midway between San Francisco and San Jose, California. It kicked off with a reception where I met a few old colleagues from Apple. Tim Oren, managing director of Pacifica Fund explained to me how venture capital is working these days. Their firm's expertise is in technology, as opposed to marketing or finance.  I also saw Harvey Lehtman who helped run the first Network Information Center (NIC) of the original ARPANET in the late 70's.  He has been volunteering at the computer history museum where a mix of old-timers and younger people are running Plato, one of the original online learning systems and Doug Engelbart's NLS/Augment.

At dinner I sat next to Anthony Townsend of IFTF who is also on an advisory committee for the new wireless network that Google/Earthlink are hoping to build--assuming the city council approves the deal. He thinks there will be compromises in what Google wants to do in the realm of privacy before this will happen.   Another interesting person was Tom Zimmerman of IBM Research.  He invented the data glove and other VR items.  He is working with a high school for latino youth in San Jose and has begun to set up a tech club with the help of other volunteers from IBM Alamaden in San Jose. I suggested some projects at other Latino and South American schools that might interest him.

The keynote speech after dinner was by Larry Smarr. He's the guy who headed NCSA in Illinois when it was doing all sorts of supercomputer research and of course they did the first graphic browser for the web: Mosaic back in 1993.  Now he the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology at UC San Diego.

Smarr is, as he puts it, living in the future--when it comes to bandwidth and computing power. His center has 1.8 miilion feet of gigabit cabling.  UCSan Diego has one ten gigabit connection for the whole student body, but his institute has 10,000 gigabit drop in the building. Every researcher has way more than most countries.  Most of their experiements and tests are between centers in Japan and Korea and California.  He tracked the history of telepresence from a 1956 Isaac Asimov story "The Naked Sun" to Star Trek and Bellcore labs to current develop;ments.  The onlyh commercial one is from HP and is called Halo.  At a cost of $500,000 per room it only uses 45 mbit/sec and by the end of this year only 40 will be installed. Smarr's lab systems have 100 and 200 million pixel video walls and can project sat. images of all of New Orleans at one foot (~.3 meters) resolution. He seems to equate more resolution with more reality and stated, "You are looking at this on a one megapixel projector. What we did was six megapixels or six times as real."  He emphasized the reasons for not being in actual proximity with others (cost of transport, time, and annoyances like bird flu pandemics).

I sat there thinking of the reality of the places I (and some of you) have worked in other countries, and I don't share the view that every developed country is moving toward this single point of unlimited bandwidth and computing power. And even further away are the countries with much much less infrastructure or just oases of connectivity in some parts of capital cities.  Smarr also feels that the most efficient communications and collaboration is asynchronous, not synchronous (chat/ cell phones).

I'll try to post at the end of each day of this three day meeting.
-Steve Cisler

3 more conferences

There are several conferences about IT and development, starting today in Berkeley, California, early May in Austin, Texas, and late May back in Berkley…and probably others all over the world.

April 7-8, 2006
http://bridge.berkeley.edu/  Bridging the divide (wow, the persistence of that metaphor!)

May 1-5, 2006
http://www.wcit2006.org/  World Congress on Information Technology 2006, Austin, Texas

May 25-26, 2006
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu:8000/events/ictd2006/   Intl. conference on information and communication technologies and development. Berkeley, California.

2006 Summit in Vancouver

I  am heading home after a three day conference in Vancouver, Canada. Entitled "Strategic use of information and communication technology for communities" It drew most participants from British Columbia, including many first nation towns and settlements. There were some people from the U.S. and Latin America too.

The keynote was by Andrew Cohill, a consultant working mainly in rural areas and former head of Blacksburg Electronic Village. He praised Canada for its continuing efforts and programs in the area of connectivity and stressed the need for communities not to cede control or ownership of networks to outside commercial firms.

There  were as many as nine parallel sessions on every imaginable topic. One that was new to this kind of conference was by the young sons of the conference organizer, Bev Collins.  Brad and Barry are game designers and they described the way the network of companies, hobbyists, gamers,artists, and professional designers interact and the how other young people acquire skills that are useful outside the gaming networks. Their artwork was awesome.

My main reason for attending was to see friends from far away, but I also learned more about a new program which will help  some telecenters/community access sites earn some money and perhaps survive besides relying on government or foundation handouts. i-malls is the placeholder name for a company that will provide a way for people without bank accounts or credit cards to order goods at much lower prices than some in-country shops, and it will help move products from Latin America to Canada and the U.S. (initially) with more ease than is currently possible. There are diverse people and organizations involved: Circuit City (consumer electronics), UPS, a former official at the Org. of American States, and Chasquinet, an Ecuador NGO.  It looked promising though there are many points at which it could encounter serious problems.

The logistics of this conference were handled well, and there were no complaints. In fact, the most applause anyone received during the whole conference was for the food staff in the hotel! The free wireless network  was slow but steady, though not many people had laptops in sessions.

I enjoyed a somewhat chaotic training session on making an iMovie. The videographer for the conference brought six laptops which were shared by about 20 people, and using clips provided we cobbled together short movies. 90 minutes was enough to get started but not really learn all that much. Still it was a useful hands-on effort.

I ran a story-telling session "Tales of ICT" which only drew ten people, but two women, each working with abused women in different parts of the world, were able to tell very similar stories and link with each other. There were young technical interns assigned to each room, and ours commented that 'this was the only session where I did not fall asleep!"   Later I talked with a group of the interns who had a very fresh outlook about working with computers in some rough parts of  Vancouver. I realized that while I may be less than optimistic about many of the grand ICT projects and how the money is spent, I still think many of the people engaged in this industry are very dedicated and in some cases, very inspiring.

Microsoft is supporting the Canadian IDRC's program called 'telecentre.org' and helped bring some people to the conference and paid for a big banquet, but we did not sit through an infomercial before eating (as happened the previous year).  There is a lot of what PR people called collateral materials handed out at the confernce.  telecentre.org handed out 'from the ground up: the evolution of the telecentre movement' It's a lavish .5 kg. book full of some text and tons of pictures and has IDRC's version of the genesis of public access computing centers which omits the first ten years in the 60's and 70's.  It's hard to understand how such a booklet will be used or who outside the relatively small world of telecenters, will even see it.

Manuel Garcia is a Guatemalan who helps run Asodigua, a small telecenter in Solola, Guatemala. Many who use the center are young women skilled at making handicrafts. Manuel brought a few boxes of beadwork, woven goods and sold them to raise money for the center. Other people organized a raffle which provided the center with another good chunk of change.  When the amount was announced it was also noted how much a new computer would cost, implying how this might result in some nice equipment for Asodigua.  However, when Manuel thanked the audience profusely he detailed the devastation of last year's hurricane and how many basic needs had to be met (food, shelter, roads) before he would be thinking about upgrading existing machines or adding to them.

Behind the scenes there were a number of meetings about the development of the new-ish Telecenters of  the Americas partnership which is under some strain, partly because individual members are facing budget and organizational challenges.  With the new Canadian government many people at the conference were worrying about ongoing support for ICT programs  that had been running for some years.