digitalcommons

G@ID Conference: UN Meets Silicon Valley

G@ID  conference: "UN Meets Silicon Valley"

Mountain View, California. Febrary 28, 2007

The core group of G@ID had met the day before I walked in late to the Silicon Valley meeting of the UN's Global Alliance for ICT and Development  at the Computer History Museum.  There were over 300 people in the audience, a couple of dozen using laptops and a decent wireless network (unlike the overloaded one at the emerging telephony conference the day before). Several tables were laden with hefty publications, CD's,  and brochures for a myriad of upcoming ICT fests in Asia and Italy. G@ID seemed to have most of the large paperback titles, but IDRC/Microsoft had the most lavish: a specially boxed book and optical disc on their telecenter projects. On first glance I thought it might contain some wonderful Belgian chocolate, a Hermes scarf, or a new low cost computer for the masses.  That was to come later.

There were giveaways other than material to read on the plane ride home. The Malaysians had a big supply of attractive leather card holders, cloissonee pins, and a brochure on the 16th World Congress on Information Technology May 2008, not to be confused with the December 2007, meeting of the Global Knowledge Partnership, also in Kuala Lumpur. The May meeting includes a golf tournament, a motor sports event, a program for spouses, a Batik fashion show, and something to do with IT. Because it's an industry show most of the brochure was about sponsorship. The "Pinnacle" package offers a 30 minute dinner address or prime time keynote for $1 M U.S. Down the chain are the other sponsor packages: diamond, global impact, platinum, gold, silver, bronze...lead, deplete uranium... Well, let's stop at bronze "one 60 sec.lunch commercial" for $50 K.

The events of our day were devoid of outright such commercial infomercials.  It consisted of panels, short talks, plugs for different ICT projects and inspiring anecdotes. I find it hard to sit and listen to panels, but each speaker aside from his or her promotion of ta project or point of view did allude to barriers and problems that needed to be addressed.  Jim Fruchterman  of the Benetech Initiative spoke about some of the intellectual property constraints, a whole session on the lack of local content, Lynn St. Amour of the Internet Society on serious Internet plumbing challenges, and ex-Intel CEO Craig Barrett (who heads G@ID) on how to put all the discussions of the day into action. He had a pretty good wrap-up session and had quickly digested some of the main issues of the day.

The program is here, and the organizers have indicated that the presentations will be online later.

The real value was the space between the panels: a couple of 20 minute breaks, 90 minutes for lunch and then a wine/cheese event in the museum afterwards. Everyone wanted to continue talking even as the ushers lowered the voltage on the cattle prods to get us back into the auditorium. For me it was a mix of seeing people from the years before I went offline in 2004 to chance meetings with people I knew little about: a Haitian setting up phone service for Haitian ex-pats, the publisher of a rather nice print magazine ICT4D (India), the head of Boliviamall.com, the fellow who runs Commonwealth of Learning out of Vancouver, several Digital Vision scholars from Stanford from Brazil and South Africa, and the head of Geekcorps which is doing some cool projects in Africa with USAID money.  Si vous lisez le Français, Moulin est très intéressant.

Intel had a table set up to show the Classmate PC. It is already in production, and is (carefully) being marketed through certain channels to avoid cannibalizing other Intel products in developing countries. It's aimed at grades 5-10 (and for kids with rather good eyesight). Built-in wireless and a digital pen to use with a little sketch/writing program. I found the keypad small for QWERTY typists, but it's probably okay for fifth graders. It runs either Microsoft or Linux and can last 4 hours without external power. As the brochure says, "full compatability with standard PC ecosystem." Price is in the$300 range (depending on the country).

I said that in poor countries or any place with security problems for goods worth stealing it might be a challenge for a student or her family to adequately protect the device. The Intel representative said that the school (or ministry of education) can set an electronic certificate for  time to expire if the computer is not connected to the school internal network. That means that if the Internet is down or service has been cut for financial reasons, the school can still allow the PC to function. It could be set to run a day or a month before shutting down. While I did not have time to play with it more than a few minutes the publicity indicates the designers have scenarios for teacher-student collaboration as well as teacher-parent communications tools. On the back are contact addresses in Brazil, India, and Mexico. I now understand by Nicholas Negroponte and his XO computer project will not be part of G@ID efforts in the education market.

I am convinced that using Open Space to plan a good part of any future conference would please the participants more than the standard panel with moderator, but might not meet the goals of the sponsors and conveners (Intel/UN). Perhaps having an anchor speech and one workshop pre-arranged before the event and then letting the attendees plan the rest would be a good compromise. People want to talk to each other and not just sit and listen. In most cases the audience has more combined ideas and experience than those selected to be on stage. It certainly has been the case when I have given talks in the past.

Jaipur Foot: "world's largest limb fitting society"

A private school in the area invited D. H. Mehta, the cofounder of this organization, to speak to the students. A wealthy venture capitalist had paid for a number of the teachers to visit China and India. Some went to Jaipur, a large city west of Delhi, and spent some time at Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti--or BMVSS, the Indian name for the non-profit. They have branches in various Indian cities, and they set up camps in different countries when they have full sponsorship for the trip. They make artificial feet and above-knee leg prosthetics at extremely low cost. Some are land mine victims; others have lost feet or legs in accidents, and the organization has provided limbs by the thousand in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Somalia, Sudan, and other African and Latin American countries.

The operation runs on about $2 million a year, with 60% coming from the state government and the rest coming from large and small donors. Dow makes some of the technology used in later versions of the foot (which is somewhat flexible) and they donated $50 thousand. Checks come in from foreigners as well as Indians living abroad. However Mr. Mehta spoke at a conference in India and asked where the Indian corporate equivalents were of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. He hoped to spur more corporate and individual philanthropy.

We asked Mehta how he became involved when his full time job was head of the Indian securities and exchange and as a banker with the government. He said that in 1969 he broke his right leg in 43 places and the doctors thought they'd have to amputate, but he was young and in good health and he recovered. He got some money to start a non-profit and after meeting the developers of the Jaipur Foot, he founded the BMVSS in 1975. His philosophy is to keep expenses low (4% operating overhead, i.e. no fancy offices, SUVs, big expenses but adequate salaries for the workers) and he was quite critical of the lavish expenditures he saw in some of the non-profits in other countries. His austerity was admirable, but most don't seem to share this once they begin operating. He also talked about advisors who kept him and the organization true to the stated goals and ethical path.  Earlier he showed a lot of interest in the mission of the Santa Clara University's goal of stressing the use of skills to help others and the business school's course in social entrepreneurship.  He left for another appointment after being invited back for a talk to a larger group and, in turn, an invitation for SCU people to visit Jaipur.

We watched a rather compelling DVD of the operation forming the early and latter versions of the limbs  (both materials and processes have changed a lot in 25 years) as well as young men climbing trees, running, jumping from some height, doing exercises, and dancing. Really quite extraordinary when you consider the low cost and the huge output the Society has. Besides limbs they do some surgery, provide tricycles and hearing aids to other patients.

Incommunicado reader

In June the Institute of Network Cultures hosted a conference. I wrote a report following the meeting. They have a reader (print/CD) which is available online.  You may also request a free hard copy though the ones I received yesterday had no CD-ROM included. There is a wide variety of topics covered: info development, open source software in Brazil, urban issues in Bangalore, piracy, international remittances. The download is 17.5 Mb as a single file.  Well worth the time, but the printed version is easier to read.

Here's  The Table of Contents

Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle,  Incommunicado Glossary
• Jan Nederveen Pieterse,  Digital Capitalism and Development:  The Unbearable Lightness of ICT4D
•  Bernardo Sorj and  Luís Eduardo Guedes,  Digital Divide: Conceptual Problems,  Empirical Evidence and Policy Making Issues
•  Lisa McLaughlin,  Cisco Systems, the UN, and the  Corporatization of Development
•   Shuddha Sengupta,  Knowing in your Bones  that You’re Being Watched (Transcript)
•   Roy Pullens,  Migration Management: Export of the IOM Model
•  Alexandre Freire, Ariel G. Foina,  and Felipe Fonseca, Brazil and the FLOSS process
•   Kim van Haaster, The University of the Future:  Software Development in Revolutionary Cuba
•  GovCom.org,  Digital Cartogram
•  Scott S. Robinson,  Diaspora Incommunicados - IT,  Remittances and Latin American Elites
•  Glen Tarman,  The Biggest Interactive Event In History?
•  Ravi Sundaram,  Post-Development and Technological Dreams
•  Nnenna Nwakanma,  The mirage of South–South cooperation in  ICT4D: Reflections from African Civil Society
•  Loe Schout,  Why Civil Society is not Embracing FOSS
•  Heimo Claassen,  Formatting the Net: Trusted Computing  and Digital Rights Management to Accelerate  the Proprietary Seizure
•  Steve Cisler,  What’s the Matter with ICTs?
•  Solomon Benjamin,  E-Politics of Urban Land
•  Maja van der Velden,  Cognitive justice:  Cultivating the diversity of knowledge
•  Jo van der Spek and Cecile Landman,  Info-Solidarity with Iraq

LionShare: academic P2P file sharing

LionShare is an effort to set up a peer-to-peer file sharing environment for educational institutions (presumably not any K-12 schools).It is based at Penn State and is meant to enable students and faculty there and at other schools to share "legal" files. The member sharing will not be anonymous. People outside of Penn State must register to download the software which will be released to the public on September 30, 2005.

Technology transfer: bio-knowledge

Eva Harris is a professor of public health at U.S. Berkeley and author of the  book A Low-Cost Approach to PCR: Appropriate Transfer of Biomolecular Techniques. She had a conversation  in 2001 about her own experience with technology transfer in Nicaragua some years ago.  It adds a human face to this kind of knowledge sharing.

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 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).

ICANN, ITU, WSIS, and Internet Governance

Geoff Huston is one of the clearest writers on technical aspects of the Internet. This opinion piece will give you a very good introduction to the historical role and current controversies regarding the way the Internet is run and the problem facing ICANN. It was published in the March 2005 Internet Protocol Journal.

Summit for the Future Report 2005

The Club of Amsterdam is a think tank looking at what they call "preferred futures." They involve those people actually trying to shape the future. In January 2005, they held a summit and issued a report which includes a number of presentations on health knowledge systems, sci/tech knowledge, and an overall look at what speaker Vladimir Petrovskiy calls a knoweldge society. The site also has video, presentations and other background material.

Saskia Sassen

Dr. Sassen is one of the speakers on the first panel. "Developing a knowledge commons" at the forthcoming conference. In a 2004 interview with Bad Subjects she makes a statement which should be considered during each part of the conference:

"We have technology to travel throughout the world but we're unable to provide water, food, vaccines, or jobs for more than three billion people. It's not a consequence of some scientific inability, but of economic and political projects that don't pursue common well-being."