On Eko's "third way" - <g>, nice allusion - re NGO(s):
I had my own illusions, especially on north-south-oriented,
"development" NGO, and learn the hard way: almost all of the people
there are the most willing (if not stupid) victims of letting
themselves be lured into the technology trap. Latest fad is to get
iMacs with the M$ office suite (sure, on the sponsored money, mostly
from gvt. or public funds) and to blow their memos over wires bloated
into fifteen to fourty times the content volume by multiple formatting;
well, they don't *see* on the screen that it's doubled and tripled into
idiot waste - and they don't *care* to see, and anyway they don't pay
the bill themselves either (public funds...) But they feel
personally insulted (and not: helped) when made attent to that.
Nevertheless I still consider this "gray" area as highly important and
relevant "target" as wll as "growground"; and there *are* good
examples - look at HealthNet (and their stringent users guidelines!)
Ironically, a key word in that is "good governance": which would keep
to public standards and accountability, and thus would keep the field
open for development in the direction of efficiency and added common
value - and not into the direction of appropriation of public funds by
private monopolies: the gvt of Northrhine-Westfalia, the biggest and
richest of the German states, some months ago did exactly that latter
and gifted, granted[!] the whole public educational system's
"Information Technology" - from schools to univs to local
administration's to regional network building - to Microsoft Inc. And
another historical irony, speaking of "good governance", is that the
very "capitalistic" US, for instance with it's ADA [Americans with
Disabilities Act] has done so much better in that respect.
It's on such reliable public ground (good rules, some least existential
security, good scholarship system for students for instance) that you
can expect both developers and ("developing") users to thrive.
A BTW - Michael Polak's esteem of efficiency (which is not given with
the M$ way, and not yet there with Linux, thus still leaves quite a
large field for "some kind" of DOS) might see its corresponding
reaction in the very business world which up to now fattened an
inherently wasteful development of IT - that explosion of
communication costs will have its backlash precisely over the "systems
managers" who have caused the ever-increasing eating-up of the stake-
(and share-)holders' profit.
// Heimo Claasen // <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // Brussels 1999-08-31
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