Pam McLean
Mon, 24 Nov 2003 16:15:02 -0800
There has been discussion of email as against broadband connections, and of the reality of mediators in written communications.
On Wednesday, November 19, 2003 Don Osborn wrote: ..(snip)... > I'm not at all comfortable with the notion of person-to-person or > web-to-individual(s) information being mediated where it's not > absolutely necessary, and then only as a temporary strategy and with as > few transformations as possible. ..(snip)... I'm writing to agree. We have to go with what we can get, but mediation is not an ideal long-term solution. OOCD 2000+ (Oke-Ogun Community Development Agenda 2000 Plus) is working with various kinds of mediated and non mediated information. At <http://homepage.ntlworld.com/pam.mclean/BaaleAgbe.wmv> there is a video clip from Ago-Are. It shows the Baale Agbe, who is the chief of the farmers in Ago-Are. I had been asked to find out what farmers needed, so David, the project manager, arranged a meeting with the farmers through Baale Agbe. The meeting was conducted in Yoruba. Afterwards Baale Agbe spoke to the video camera, in English, following a structure that was used for a series of similar interviews. The background noise comes from people chatting after the meeting. Its not a perfect video - but David and I were video-camera novices trying to overcome the digital divide and enable people to speak for themselves. I offer it as an example of ICT use and an illustration of our desire to enable direct communication, not to limit it, or to mediate it. I will further illustrate the present situation regarding communication with another example, this time one of various kinds of family communication. It is best understood if you have first been introduced to the family in question, the Oyawale family. The initiator of the OOCD 2000+ project, the late Peter Adetunji Oyawale was born in Ago-Are, Oke-Ogun, Oyo State, Nigeria (where OOCD 2000+ opened its InfoCentre in June this year.) His vision was for an integrated information, education, training and communication service that would be built on existing local community structures, and would emphasise the spoken word in the local language so that illiterate people, like his parents, would be included. Tragically Peter was killed when the project was in its very early practical stages after years of ideas and planning. Peter had been working in the IT industry in the UK. He had a British wife, Agnita, and four children. Agnita, and I supported the project on the UK side. Other people had started to support Peter in Oke-Ogun. Agnita knows about letters that try to cut across illiteracy and language barriers. There are no telephones in Ago-Are. After Peter's death the family tried to keep in touch. Handwritten letters came to Agnita, written by intermediaries, passed from hand to hand by people travelling between Ago-Are and Agnita's part of London. When I visit Ago-Are I usually take letters from Agnita. The family use email more now. Peter's Uncle Timothy speaks English. He increasingly uses email rather than letters to contact Agnita, or me, on his own behalf or to pass on family messages. Mr Timothy Oyawale is a farmer in Ago-Are. He serves on the OOCD committee and has worked very actively to help David, the OOCD project manager. Mr Timothy gets David to actually send the email when he travels to Ibadan. (David provides a similar service for various people in Ago-Are) We can't send photos via the Internet into Ago-Are (although David sometimes sends me photos about the project from Ibadan) but it would be good if we could.. Last time I went to Ago-Are there was no opportunity to see Agnita before I left to take letters. However I was taking my laptop with me, so Agnita emailed me some recent photos of herself and the children. I shared the photos with the family in Ago-Are on various occasions. One of my abiding memories is sitting with Muji (from the InfoCentre) next to Peter's mother in front of the laptop. I named the children as the various photos came up, and Peter's mother reached her hand out to the pictures of the grandchildren she has never met, nodding, smiling at them, speaking their names, and (as Muji told me) praying for them. Videos are even better than photos, and, technically, can of course be sent via the internet (like the Baale Agbe clip mentioned earlier). I am not, in principle, against applications that are more bandwidth hungry than email. In theory it could even be done in real time. Video is great for family communication, and all sorts of other applications. The day that I was due to leave Ago-Are Peter's mother came to visit, along with Timothy Oyawale. She sat in front of my video camera, speaking her heart out for Agnita and the children, in Yoruba. Uncle Timothy sat by her repeating in English what she had said. It was infinitely more than the old handwritten greetings could ever convey. Agnita has the recording at home now on a VCD to play on her computer. My role was simply to fill the physical communication gaps that are covered elsewhere by ICT infrastructure. Of course there are lots of desirable things that can only be done with broadband. However I live in the real world, and I connect with a rural area that doesn't have any connectivity, and I'm not a techie. We haven't been part of any pilot project with any kind of donor push. This is a small local grassroots needs led project. We started just as a tiny group of people with an urgent need to communicate across the digital divide, and driven initially by an emotional need to ensure that Peter's vision survived his death. Now we have one InfoCentre (without connectivity) and the vision for ten more and community radio and connectivity. We are not part of the world that some list members refer to where "money is not a problem". It is a very real problem, so if people tell me that we could get email sooner and in a more sustainable way than we could get broadband, then I say, "Yes please, let's try for that." Do I think that email alone is good enough? Of course a simple email connection is nowhere near what we need in order to do all we want to do - but it would be a great start and a lot better than nothing, especially if we could get it in all ten places that Peter hoped. The OOCD team, and the communities they try to serve could start to communicate effectively with each other across Oke-Ogun, and from Oke-Ogun to Ibadan, and to the rest of Nigeria, and to friends and relatives, who, like Peter, have left home in search of educational opportunities and work. In addition, the OOCD team could communicate directly with the international connected community instead of going through me (limited by individual email costs of course). At last it would be possible to send an email to David and expect a reply in hours or days, instead of weeks or months. We could get information into, as well as out of, Oke-Ogun, and when email were not enough we could back them up with CD-Roms and suchlike as we do now. Naturally, once we could communicate better we would want to move the project onto its next stages so we would soon be pushing for more bandwidth. But this project has always had to go a step at a time, directed by the vision Peter left in the UK, and realised locally in Nigeria, by Peter's supporters there. Getting David, via VSO was one great step, running HIV/AIDS awareness was the next, opening the InfoCentre was another, starting the first services and training at the InfoCentre, albeit in a small way, has come next, connectivity is another objective. Getting email services would be a great step forward, well worth striving for both in its own right and as a first step towards something more. Pam McLean CAWD UK on behalf of OOCD 2000+ ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org