Hi all,
We are organizing an Open Session at ICTD 2012 focussed on 'financial
sustainability' of ICTD Projects. Included below is a brief about it. If
you feel for the topic or have a perspective, please do come by and
express your thoughts. Here, we will try to gather inputs from people from
different domains, discuss each other's perspectives and then come up with
a few concrete suggestions on what we ought to do next.
In case, you are not able to attend but would like to tell your story/give
your thoughts, please do email us and we would be happy to consider it for
inclusion in the program.
Thanks!
All of us
(Anupam Jain, Arun Kumar, Amit A Nanavati, Nitendra Rajput, Jerome White)
IBM Research - India
p.s Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this email.
Sustainable ICTD
Date/Time : March 12 (10-11:15am) (11:45am-1pm)
Room: Conference 3
Overview
The last 5 years have seen an interesting momentum in the growth of
technologies primarily meant for developing regions. Various research
conferences, diverse social and technology platforms have seen an upsurge
in ICTD literature as the world sees some amazing ideas and innovative
solutions to problems that have the potential to help the next billions.
It is a well known fact that the end users addressed by these efforts have
a very limited financial income. But has there been enough research done
in the area of financially sustainability for projects done for this
population? We may have funds for good research work, good field studies
and pilots but we may not always have enough funding for full scale
deployments of these wonderful technologies to continually help the next
billions in the long term.
There's an imminent need to figure out ways to generate enough revenue
from 'within' the development projects themselves and hence make them
self-sustaining. The advent of Web 2.0 enterprises that offer everything
for free to end users and generate income via third parties (like
advertisers etc.) is one example of how financially sustainable models can
be created for technologies where charging the end user may not be a
viable option.
Though we may touch upon technical, social, and organizational
sustainability during the session if and when required but we intend to
primarily focus on financial sustainability of ICTD Projects.
Speakers
Dr. Richard J. Gowen, IEEE Foundation
Dr. Kentaro Toyama, School of Information, University of California,
Berkeley
Leslie Dodson, University of Colorado-Boulder
Linda Raftree, Plan International
Structure of the session
Have 4 speakers with diverse backgrounds talk about 'atleast' one of the
following:
1) Their failure/success ICTD stories where financial
sustainability played a major role
2) Their perspective on the need for financial sustainability in
ICTD
3) Their idea of solving the problem
Please note that the speakers may/may not (and are not required to)
converge on their ideas/perspectives on the above or the problem statement
itself
A moderator summarizes all the talks and then the audience splits into
groups for brainstorming.
After a brainstorming session, each group comes up with some concrete next
steps or recommendations.
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