Dear GKD Members, I am sending along my article on the recent annual meeting of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, which focused on issues of ICT and development.
Best regards, Andy Oram ******************************** CPSR conference brings people and Internet together by Andy Oram Oct. 7, 2002 http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/2118 The Internet never looked this way from Harvard Square before. The 2002 annual meeting of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility this past Saturday left the 75 participants enlightened and wildly excited about giving control over information to poor people all around the world. I arrived home at ten o'clock at night and told my wife, "You're lucky I didn't sign up to spend a month in Malawi installing Linux." The title of the annual meeting was "Shrinking World, Expanding Net", a title that nimbly conveyed the dual (and perhaps dueling) trends within an Internet that is quickly becoming a commodity. On the one hand, Internet access is being extended to geographic regions and demographic groups where recently it was considered unfeasible. As access spreads, the new nodes take on characteristics totally foreign to the original users in the developed world: characteristics adapted to poor connectivity, low bandwidth, problems with literacy, and a diversity of cultural conditions. On the other hand, as people realize the Internet's importance, pressures increase to impose some predictability on it, while the pursuit of democracy and community development online gains support. Here is a summary of the day's events, including the ceremony awarding the annual Norbert Wiener Award to networking engineer and ICANN Board member Karl Auerbach: * Development * Human rights * Global representation * ICANN * Miscellaneous The workshop was expertly assembled and carried off in the belly of the beast, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, by Kennedy School professor L. Jean Camp and a dozen student volunteers. (To their credit, the Kennedy School co-sponsored the workshop.) If anything on this weblog makes you interested in working with CPSR, check our list of topics or membership page. Development Elsewhere, perhaps, debate still rages. Do poor people need advanced information technology? Can they make proper use of it? Is it possible to deploy it in remote areas? At the annual meeting we went beyond these questions. Instead, people who actually spent time in India, in Malawi, in the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere discussed what they learned about the value of communications and computers, and how they brought these things to local residents in meaningful ways. Throughout all the speakers talks ran the critical thread: understand your users and their needs. Work with these needs in creative ways. Liby Levison, for instance, while stationed in the capital of Malawi, experienced frequent telecom failures and pitifully slow connections. She learned here an interesting piece of meta-design: that underdeveloped areas need entirely different technologies for information retrieval. There limitations made it unfeasible to use the information retrieval strategy that we use in the developed world day after day: enter a search term into a search engine, browse a few dozen results, request a home page, follow a link to a resource, etc. In rural Malawi, the Internet connection would be down before you were half done. To respond to the needs of Internet users in these areas, Libby developed a deliberately low-tech system with deep ramifications. Her TEK (for "time equals knowledge") system works a bit like Web2mail, making use of the store-and-forward aspect of email to provide robustness in a non-robust environment. A person enters a search term and is emailed the Web pages corresponding to the most promising search engine results. There are more interesting design choices in this system than meet the eye. TEK strips out graphics (depending on the user's choice), information-poor pages such as portals or home pages that have mostly links, duplicate pages, pages in inappropriate languages, and so on. It also deals with lost mail through a protocol that acknowledges received mail and retransmits lost mail after a timeout. Iqbal Quadir, as a financial executive in New York, decided to try to provide cell phone access to the poor in his native Bangladesh. To find a base for action, he approached the Grameen Bank, which is famous for its microcredit for poor entrepreneurs (mostly women). Iqbal persuaded the bank, with some difficulty, that a cell phone could be just as useful as a cow or a generator in forming the engine behind a successful business. Cell coverage is now offered to 30% of Bangladesh's territory, reaching 50% of the population. Across the subcontinent on the West coast of India, Daryl Martyris of World Computer Exchange distributes recycled computers running GNU/Linux to schools throughout the state of Goa. Hardware costs (as well as software costs, of course) are cut to the minimum by hooking minimal clients up to a central service running Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) software. After-hours use by paying adults is popular. Of course, fixing broken systems is a problem, but a small coterie of students has been trained to fill WCE's needs. Hani Shakeel described a research project in the Dominican Republic, which happens to have amazingly advanced communications and computing equipment in hundreds of villages around the island, thanks to a former president's effort to win popular support. In the village Hani chose, these centers are very popular with school-age children, who use the visual aspects of Web sites to overcome any limitations they suffer in understanding languages. Hani designed an asynchronous bulletin board so that people could come and go at their convenience. He also integrated text, graphics, and voice in such a way that people could use whatever medium was most convenient. He even used a text-to-speech synthesizer to allow illiterate people to hear text messages. As we heard the various needs of people in different areas and stages of development, we became increasingly receptive to Judy Brewer, director of the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, as she talked about accessibility. This is not simply a matter of accommodating the disabled (although even that could open up the Web to another ten or twenty per-cent of the public); measures taken for the disabled always have value for other populations too, especially poor people who deal with literacy problems, low bandwidth, poor equipment, or other limitations. Measures that promote accessibility also promote device-independence, a common concern in modern design. A framework for understanding the growth of communications infrastructure in underdeveloped areas was offered by Annalee C. Babb. First one has to provide a physical infrastructure. This allows information acquisition and communications such as email. Next one needs to provide a financial infrastructure with legal guarantees, and then a security level offering privacy, secure transmissions, and authentication. Now the people can develop online markets. The fourth layer is an administrative that attempts to protect intellectual property rights where appropriate "without stifling new intellectual property." So far, we have familiar aspects on online life. But Annalee went further and offered one more levels of access. Operational access reflects people who are creative, who can exploit the telecom infrastructure to produce something unique to their culture and hopefully of value on the world market. This is level where democracy and power reside. A good note on which to leave the issue of universal access is to ask "Who gets to collect and use information?" The ramifications of this subtle question were laid out by Calestaous Juma, founder of Kenya's African Centre for Technology Studies. He pointed out that Western agencies collect an enormous amount of data about Africa that would be of value to local people there, such as rainfall patterns. This information is stored, however, in Washington. The people most affected by the data do not decide what to collect and do not get the information in a timely fashion (if at all). In addition to eliminating the barriers of cost and technical access, agencies have to consult with local users and figure out the best way to collect and disseminate information. Human rights The highlight of the day for me was Dr. Patrick Ball's keynote on the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTS) for human rights. It was so eye-opening that I am saving a description of it for an upcoming article. The talk was a true revelation for those who never previously saw a relationship between free software and human rights; it was informative even for those who did. Robert Guerra described Privaterra, the relatively new CPSR project he started to link computer experts with human rights groups. He described it as "bringing the people with the knowledge together with the people with the needs." Privaterra reflects the key insights of the day: that one cannot help people simply by dropping technology in their laps, but should evaluate their organizations holistically and design specific solutions. Along these lines, Privaterra helps human rights groups set up encryption, firewalls, VPNs, and backups. It also brings back lessons from developing countries to the developed world. Global representation Doug Schuler is a long-term CPSR member dedicated to representation and community-building; he has initiated more such new types of representation than most members have even thought of joining. Doug has written about community networks and played a key role in the Seattle Community Network, coordinated conferences on participatory design, and developed working groups at CPSR. Over the past couple years he has focused on pulling together discussion, community building, and giving a voice to the previously silent through his Public Sphere Project. What all these things have in common is people participating in decisions about their future. But CPSR cannot entirely lose itself in the idealistic construction of new public arenas, it also to deal with existing ones. Thus, Robert Guerra described how we joined with some 80 other non-governmental organizations from around the world to present issues of public interest to the World Summit on the Information Society, a meeting started by the International Telecommunication Union and approved by the U.N. CPSR itself has gone global over the years. While we always had a few members outside the United States, we've just recently had the resources and visibility to start some chapters in other countries. We heard from a Peruvian member, Katitza Rodriguez, about their initiatives in providing wireless Internet access to rural health clinics, promoting Internet access to public information, and leading the debate on the .pe domain. A Japanese member named Nobuo Sakiyama reported on that chapter's intervention into the National ID debate, a Carnivore-like device that intercepts email, and a government-funded, national Internet filtering system with a license that rules out reverse engineering or criticism. ICANN Because it controls such a central Internet resource, and because this year's Wiener Award went to one of its most prominent critics, ICANN deserves its own section. ICANN is many things: a trough at which lawyers and consultants line up to slurp greedily from public funds, a madhouse where complex subdivisions of subdivisions of organizations strive to make their voices heard and are indulged or ignored at the Board's whim, and--not least--a powerful standards-making body whose decisions have a long-range policy impact on the use of the Internet. CPSR chair Hans Klein, in an afternoon presentation, pointed out that ICANN had turned the Law of the Ungovernable Internet into the Myth of the Ungovernable Internet. Although he said that the board's recent elimination of public representation was a classic case of a public body being captured by a private interest, he was cautionary but not totally pessimistic on the question of whether ICANN could be opened up (or replaced). At his evening talk, Wiener Award winner Karl Auerbach, one of the few people who has the honor of getting on the ICANN board through public election (and even the election is the butt of semantic quibbles) talked about the ways ICANN has frittered away legitimacy and support, such as by fighting ridiculous battles with national governments. He described its sheer incompetence in managing the major resource entrusted to it (the Domain Name System) as well as in its basic actions as a business entity. More fundamentally, Karl described the ambiguous position ICANN occupies in between a public and private organization, possessing governmental functions but run like a corporation. Although the U.S. Department of Commerce could rein it in or dissolve it, they are stymied by their confusion over its claim to by a private corporation (and the ideology that says governments should not interfere with private corporations). He also laid out his suggestion for breaking ICANN into four parts along natural fault lines: one part for IP address assignment, one for protocol numbers, one for technical administration of the Domain Name System, and one for policy issues related to the Domain Name System. Miscellaneous On a day like Saturday, everything seemed to fit together. But in writing up the day, some fine presentations didn't seem to go in any particular category. Tu Tran, winner of CPSR's annual student essay contest, delivered a quite professional talk about computer forensics, looking at it from many points of view. Courts are increasingly allowing searches of computers for evidence related both to crimes and to civil suits. Not all searches require a warrant: the court may allow a search without a warrant if the person did not have a "reasonable expectation" that the information would remain hidden. You could lose this "reasonable expectation" through something as trivial as sending the information to a colleague over email; now another party can demand the information. Of course, some critical safeguards remain: they have to show probably cause that the information pertains to a case and give a precise description of the item to be found. And how easily can information be found? Everyday encryption programs are good for most purposes, but can be cracked by a determined opponent. This includes, obviously, the U.S. government, when a journalist in Afghanistan got his hands on a computer and hard disk formerly owned by an Al Qaeda member. Thousands of files were retrieved, although Ms. Tran did not reveal the contents of those files. (Soft porn? Metallica songs?) Deleting files, as most administrators know, offers practically no protection against retrieval. Zeroing out a disk is little better (although it's pretty good when done twice) and even reformatting removes just pointers to files rather than the files themselves. Tran's recommendation: if you want to prevent data from being retrieved, drill a hole in your disk. Carlos Osorio presented research questioning the very foundations of software licensing. Far from being a form of piracy, the spread of unlicensed software in new markets creates a bigger market for licensed versions. This is not simply a matter of familiar network effects. Native users offer the best possible marketing. Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars exporting marketing staff and a canned strategy to a place with a different culture, when end-users copying your software can talk it up with all the friends and colleagues for you? While Carlos suggested several ways proprietary software companies can make their licenses more appealing--such as offering good customer service or releasing new versions frequently--he ultimately recommended the ultimate approach as the most natural approach to gaining markets: distributing free and open source software. The conference was long but never tedious; tiring but not exhausting. Several of us came away with new energy as well as new ideas of where to apply it. I felt great pain thinking that many of the areas where good work is being done may soon see it all swept away by the storms and floods caused by global warming. But as much as we can bring people to the Internet and the Internet to the people, we can increase discussion of this and other critical issues facing us today. Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly & Associates, specializing in books on Linux and programming. Most recently, he edited Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. This article was originally published by The O'Reilly Network. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** 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 Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
