[GKD-DOTCOM] DOTCOM Discussion to Continue

[Global Knowledge Dev. Moderator]

Dear GKD Members,

In response to the dynamism and value of your contributions, DOT-COM
would like to continue the focused discussion on Access for Underserved
Areas, through this week. Our deep thanks for the consistent, extremely
high quality of your input.

Best regards,

GKD Moderators




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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What's on the Horizon?

[William Lester]

If we were to ask "What SHOULD be on the horizon?", then I would answer:

IMHO, the number one thing that would help Africa "catch up" to the
technology revolution would be the elimination of the telecom
monopolies. Whether by allowing competition from both internal and
external vendors, privatization of existing government-owned telcoms,
relaxation of laws for VSAT and wireless connectivity, or other similar
choices, African governments could speed up the development of
affordable services running on a sustainable and reliable infrastructure
by letting go of their choke hold on their telecoms.

Ironically, the increase in business that the ensuing development would
enable, would create untold opportunities for money-making schemes, the
very reason that governments cling to those fragile telecoms.
  
Bill Lester 
  
William A. Lester
CTO/Director of Technology
NinthBridge
a program of EngenderHealth
440 Ninth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
(Office) 212.561.8002   (eFax) 212.202.5167
(e-Mail) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
(URL) www.ninthbridge.org
"The Means to The Mission"




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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What's on the Horizon?

[Royal D. Colle]

> 3. Where should we focus our efforts during the coming 3 years? On ICT
> policy? Creating ICT projects with revenue-generation models that are
> quickly self-supporting? Demonstrating the value of ICT to developing
> country communities?

Universities in developing countries need to build their ICT capacity
for a variety of reasons. For the purposes of development, universities
potentially can contribute significantly to the nurturing and long term
support of community telecenters and related ICT resources. As partners,
for example, they can:

(1) Conduct continual research on community information needs so that
appropriate information resources can be developed.

(2) Conduct on-going e-Readiness studies at the regional and community
level and interpret their results for regional and local policy
formulation and action.

(3) Convert its own research and "academic" knowledge into education,
information, and training packages suitable for community use.

(4) Mobilize, interpret, integrate, and package information from
external authoritative sources and tailor it to the needs of populations
in surrounding communities.

(5) Train students in the application of ICTs to development problems
by: assigning them as student interns at community telecenters, having
them collect indigenous case studies and "lessons learned" related to
development initiatives, involving them in data collection and
processing related to e-Readiness and information needs analysis
studies, and training them in the process of information packaging.

(6) Design and execute ICT training programs for various community
groups, especially those that are likely to be by-passed by
conventional ICT training.

(7) Through their participation as students in this program, prepare a
new generation of professionals in various sectors (health, education, 
agriculture) to use and support the application of ICTs and telecenters
for community development and poverty alleviation programs.

(8) Experiment with innovation approaches to ICT4D.

(9) Actively contribute to the Country Gateway (information portal)
system. 

(10) Establish a community ICT access (telecenter) facility as part of a
university program.

We're working on this idea in China and would like to learn more about
other developing nations universities' experiences in these matters.
Would be happy to have messages directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Roy Colle
Cornell University




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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What's on the Horizon?

[Al Hammond]

I agree strongly with Simon Woodside's answers--experimentation, more
modern technology, and broadband. But I was also struck by what another
contributor said, e.g. "Find successful and sustainable activities.
Replicate. Get constraints out of the way. Get funding on the right
basis. Let the demand pull what is wanted." I think the aid community
should continue experimentation, but also be willing to fund scale-ups
of apparently successful models--yes, that would include those that have
a business model--even to the point of making equity investments or
funding additional training and social networking that leverage a
private sector enterprise and its network.  There are beginning to be
some successful models, many of them driven by the private sector, and
some not aimed primarily at connectivity, but at an agricultural
solution or a microfinance solution or a health solution. Nonetheless,
they will spread access perhaps more rapidly. See our case studies at
.


Allen L. Hammond
Vice President for Innovation & Special Projects
World Resources Institute
10 G Street NE
Washington, DC 20002  USA
V (202) 729- 
F (202) 729-7775
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.wri.org
www.digitaldividend.org





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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] How Much Bandwidth is Necessary?

[Yacine Khelladi]

Simon Woodside wrote:

> I would say rather that the different technologies that are available
> are so different and so randomly effective it's impossible to say that
> either low-bandwidth or high-bandwidth is better.

Maybe it is because we are thinking upside down? We should not first
look at the technology, but the needs (not in technology, the  "social"
needs), then identify how ICT can help address them, then build
"meaningful ICT use" strategies and implement them with what ever
technology is available to answer that question.

I believe all projects should be started like this from the needs, and
build a sustainable capacity to manage ICT integration/appropriation.
Whatever technology is used or available. And IMHO yes, every project,
ICT4D project, is somehow unique, not necessarily scalable, as ICT is
just one element in the complex "development process" equation.


yacine




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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Using Intermediaries to Facilitate Communication

[Pam McLean]

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
 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 th

Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What's on the Horizon?

[Vickram Crishna]

My two bits...

> 1. What new "high impact" technologies are on the 3-year horizon? Who
> (exactly) needs to do what (concretely) to make those technologies
> widely available?

Optical frequencies communication for exceptionally low power, very high
bandwidth, short distance communications (line-of-sight) will be very
likely to emerge as a new low cost option, in both desktop (laptop) and
handheld devices.  To deploy it, far more effort will be needed from
grassroots social assistance program workers.

Voice based messaging software programs will also appear on handhelds,
enabling the Grameen model to be deployed much more effectively in other
regions of the world, where cellular and cellular-like systems are being
and will be deployed over the next three years.

> 2. What's the most valuable area for technology development? Voice
> recognition? Cheap broadband delivery? Cheap hand-helds (under $50)?

The most critical area for technology development lies in the
digitisation and support of services in demand, not in hardware per se.
This is an exceedingly local activity, given that software development
by its very nature demands a huge level of interaction between
technologists and users.

In hardware, though, it is both cheaper broadband and handhelds that
need to emerge. Right now, in countries like India, the only really
cheap mobile handsets are obsolete ones, which do not support the kind
of operating systems that run such applications.

> 3. Where should we focus our efforts during the coming 3 years? On ICT
> policy? Creating ICT projects with revenue-generation models that are
> quickly self-supporting? Demonstrating the value of ICT to developing
> country communities?

We need to evolve better funding models, that are better equipped to
evaluate and deliver funds to grassroots projects that are more
appropriate to the communities in which they are to add value. Trying to
opine here in this group about specific projects we get to know about
somewhere else in the world is both frustrating and patronizing.

> 4. What levels of access should we be able to achieve by 2007 in each of
> the major under-served regions? Who (exactly) must do what (concretely)
> to attain them?

We need to get a foothold into these regions. And we need to have
funding in place that will support the growth of that foothold, driven
by local demand.

> 5. What funding models should we develop over the next 3 years? Projects
> with business plans that provide self-sustainability? Support from
> multilateral corporations? Venture capital funds for ICT and
> development?

In a nutshell, none of the above. But see *3.*, for the glaring
weaknesses in these models make it impossible to choose between them, or
even to want to make such a choice.
-- 
Vickram





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