On Tuesday, November 16, 2004, Ken DiPietro wrote: > To give you a specific example, not including the upstream connection to > the net, we can provide everything necessary to connect and distribute > access to 10 points in a town (with specific RF requirements taken into > account) for well under $1,000 total. While doing so, we are also > creating a small business that would act as equipment manufacturer and > installation service provider, for maintenance and as an ISP. While this > sounds complicated I can assure you it is not and the entire process can > be taught pretty quickly.
We are at Jhai Foundation are very interested in what you can teach, Ken! I will cc some of our folks. For what it is worth, I think Ken is offering us what I often have seen offered and often have seen accomplished in many places in the developing world. Amazing ingenuity...and doing things on the cheap ..and still making enough profit (or creating a sustaining side-business that makes profit) to keep going. I think some of the best thinking on Earth is done by poor people. I think when you open up to this, then many things become possible. Bootstrapping is one. Ingenious solutions is another. Very well-localized solutions are another. This is something that MNCs actually know. Think about drug companies, for example. Where do you think they, uh, steal the ideas for the templates for new drugs? From shamans in remote villages. MNCs tend quite often to forget the respecting this takes...as do most of us, definitely including me. But we can also remember it, if we are prompted. I think the problem is we are all too impressed with ourselves to see what is in front of us. What if this entire discussion was turned on its head? Forget the precision (or vaguery) of good business and economic language. What if we simply asked: how do we get to know poor people well enough that they trust us enough to let us help them create their own solutions? Then we can talk. Then we are bringing something to the table. And what we can bring to the table, if we are smart, is our whole selves. And it takes that to come to any conclusions that hold. It takes all of each of us - our expertise, our mistakes (the base of much expertise), our good and bad relationships, our class, nationality and ..etc...background...all of ourselves. What happens when we bring our whole selves to the table? A brief story. Vorasone and I were working in Phon Kham, Lao PDR, with a bunch of villagers we had known at that time for about two years. We were trying to get them to do a '10 year vision'. They were resisting. They said, 'Just tell us what you can bring and we'll do that.' Vorasone and I kept saying, 'No,' and kept trying to bring the conversation back where we wanted it. This went on for almost two hours. Finally, I was backing out the door of the house pontificating and I stumbled over the door jam and fell to the ground in a heap. I started laughing. The whole group started laughing at the same time - not in response to my laughing but in response to my foolishness. They were not falling in line with my 'laughing' leadership. They thought it was funny that I fell down! Then the head of the women's association for the village, Noi, said, "In 10 years I want..." and listed about six things. Next the head of the Elders association chimed in...and we were off to the races. The only thing I brought of value was my whole self...as foolish as it is. A lot of the frustration I hear in the voices of people close to the ground in this discussion is just about this: how do we turn this discussion on its head? Maybe it is time for us to just fall down, laugh, listen very carefully ..and get on with it. yours, in Peace, Lee Thorn chair, Jhai Foundation 350 Townsend St., Ste. 309 San Francisco, CA 94112 1 415 344 0360 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.jhai.org ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide 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 Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
