I am obsessed with cell phones right now. Mostly I bloody *hate* them. I haven’t had one for six months, but work made me get one last week. So since they made me get one I am lobbying to get into some cell-phone-type research, partly to figure out my personal issues with cellular voice communication, most mostly because, clearly, undoubtedly, they are the most important technology in the world: they are the network of the developing world. As a BBC article put it a couple weeks ago: “”it’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album …”
“It’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer.The Invisible Computer Revolution
My question is: where the hell are the tools for people who use cellphones in this way? (In particular, where are the banking tools and educational tools?) In the first world we’ve got $600 iphones that can read your freaking mind. But a simple flashcard application for learning a few of the 62 languages spoken in Kenya? It’s not quite as sexy.
So this is the part that I am really obsessing over, as a developer. It just seems to me that there is huge opportunity to really do some huge good by, essentially, hacking on SMS. Or, sure, wait a few years and use cell phones as a proper thin client. (But im more interested in the ultra ultra thin approach, something that would work with one of the classic Nokias, which are used everywhere in Africa . Design for maximum constraints, right?)
Anyway, new content. Here’s a fantastic video from Jan Chipchase at TED, a hero of cellphone ethnography. My favorite line: “”if you want a big idea you need to embrace everyone on the planet…. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. Our [rich people] relevance is about being able to listen.”
[update: there's a great new post on worldchanging.com about this. -cb ]
I spent some time today searching for sailboats in satellite imagery, looking for signs of computer scientist Jim Gray. The story is covered here.
The significance of using this technology to do this work is obvious. Using satellite imagery to find a particular lost person is a dramatic, symbolic moment indicating some maturation of the approach — I can only hope that it will be applied on a larger scale in the coming years.
Likewise I was so deeply impressed by the Katrina PeopleFinder project, and I am eager to see extensions of this type of “humanitarian-tech” project. It just seems that there are so many people who are willing to help do data entry or pattern recognition from their home as volunteers … not to mention the 34,153 geek-brain-hours wasted on programming .ASP shopping carts or similar byte-drivel every day …
And, without being critical of the people involved in setting this up (seriously, cheers to those involved in getting this going!) I think it is interesting to note that the person we are looking for is a famed computer scientist. Besides the contextual irony — he had a lot to do with making this search possible — we should be conscious of the need to broaden our collective altruism. There are so many people that right now could benefit from having a project dedicated to analyzing their needs from above. They just don’t make the newspaper when they disappear.
moulin, the brainchild of Geekcorps volunteers Frederic Renet and Renaud Gaudin, started off as a side project of Geekcorps’ Last Mile Initiative. Frederic and Renaud quickly developed an initial prototype of the system to run on a Nokia 770. Excited by the potential of making Wikipedia more widely accessible, Renaud volunteered for a second tour with Geekcorps and developed the current version of moulin which can be run off a CD.
Congrats to Geekcorps on developing a 400,000+ article no-images version of the wikipedia that fits snugly into a CD. The project is called moulin. I think the approach is audaciously simple, useful and humanitarian. And obviously lo-bandwidth friendly, once you’ve got a copy. Way to go!
Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the recent newsines (trendiness?) about “conflict” diamonds, pointing to a parody site realdiamondfacts.org. It’s a sendup of DeBeers and Co. (It’s an exact parody of their PR-campaign website, diamondfacts.org.)
The bigger issue, Zuckerman points out, is that there are any number of products that the Rich Folks of the world are consuming that cause economic and social trauma in the same way that the diamond industry does (Coltran — used in my cellphone — seems to be worse than diamonds if you ask me … ).
John Maeda writes thoughtfully about simplicity and design at his MIT-based blog. He just posted a great bit about Paul Polak’s design for a low-resouce flashlight. Design under difficult conditions can lead to the same creative insight as design on a limitless budget.
“… this prototype flashlight that is completely solar powered (recharged in sunlight), easily constructed from common off-the-shelf parts, and can last for well over a decade of use.
I’m looking forward to getting this in the mail. I am excited to see a publication that is addressing this type of issue from a nonpolitical stance (or rather, I think, it is implicitly political. If you subscribe now you can still get the first issue from the Need Magazine website.
NEED magazine is an artistic hope-filled publication focusing on life changing humanitarian efforts at home and abroad. … We are not out to save the world, but to tell the stories of, and assist, those who are.
It seems somehow appropriate that the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is being held in Tunis. What to do with a government widely criticized for its repressive watchfulness in the public sphere? Let them host a mega-conference designed to make progress toward a more equitable, open vision of the web and the new ICT-driven world.
I’m not being sarcastic: It sounded like a good idea to me. Tunisia has relatively high internet usage for Africa (just over 10%). What better way to encourage change in a society than to put them on the world stage? I thought they would get their act together.
But this hasn’t happened in Tunisia, and, in, fact, quite the opposite has occurred. Two days ago, before the meeting could really even get underway, journalists and human rights advocates were being beaten at the very doors of the conference, just as they had arrived.
At 09.30 am on Monday, November 14, 2005, at the Place d’Afrique in Tunis, more than 30 plainclothes policemen impatiently awaited international and Tunisian delegates and members of civil society.
Omar Mestiri, Director of the online magazine Kalima and a founder member of the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia (Conseil national pour les libertés en Tunisie – CNLT) was seized as soon as he arrived at the site for the meeting of the coordinating committee of the Citizens’ Summit on the Information Society (CSIS).
When it was decided in Geneva a couple years ago that the meeting would be held in Tunis, they could not have been so optimistic (as I was!) as to think that Tunisia would return the favor by behaving beautifully for the conference — this isn’t the Olympics.
Amnesty International is has been calling for Tunis to be held accountable:
“… the Tunisian government’s record on freedom of expression and access to information is a poor one, and those who speak out in favour of reform and greater protection of human rights are subjected to persecution and harassment by the state authorities. Currently, the Tunisian government maintains strict controls on free speech and use of the Internet, refuses to allow the free operation of domestic human rights groups and holds hundreds of political prisoners, including some who have been jailed for the peaceful expression of their beliefs and are considered by Amnesty International to be prisoners of conscience.”
But this beating of Mestiri at the WSIS is absolutely shameful: The UN needs to be protecting these attendees. I’m worried for all the good folks who are going there, as Ethan Zuckerman says as he blogs his visit there, to visit with friends in spite of sense that it is a repressed, pointless endeavor.
Real discussion of the internet is not, apparently, on the table at WSIS. But meanwhile the blogosphere continues to spin: Andy Carvin is reposting blogs covering the event.
Leadership on the internet is important. WSIS is an essential event. Yes, it may provide opportunity for a host country to clean up their act, but these events are ridiculous. Tunisia is no better for being the host this year, and the world is certainly no better. What a waste.
“An emergency power kit can help you keep important communications equipment running in the midst of a crisis. Read about how to put together your own kit.
[Read more in Technology Planning.]“
A recent article in the New York Times discusses a report that computers are being “improperly recycled” (read: dumped) on developing countries as a way to avoid the expense of refurbishing them before redistribution.
“The report, titled “The Digital Dump: Exporting Reuse and Abuse to Africa,” says that the unusable equipment is being donated or sold to developing nations by recycling businesses in the United States as a way to dodge the expense of having to recycle it properly. While the report, written by the Basel Action Network, based in Seattle, focuses on Nigeria, in western Africa, it says the situation is similar throughout much of the developing world.
“Too often, justifications of ‘building bridges over the digital divide’ are used as excuses to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipelines,” says the report. As a result, Nigeria and other developing nations are carrying a disproportionate burden of the world’s toxic waste from technology products, according to Jim Puckett, coordinator of the group.
According to the National Safety Council, more than 63 million computers in the United States will become obsolete in 2005. An average computer monitor can contain as much as eight pounds of lead, along with plastics laden with flame retardants and cadmium, all of which can be harmful to the environment and to humans.”
This is an obvious insult to those who end up with the broken computers — which are presumably also an environmental hazard because of the heavy metals in a monitors and chassis. But this issue has a more important point in the discussions of the “$100 Laptop” prototype being developed at MIT, one major criticism has been that efforts would be better directed at recycling the mid-grade computer trash — that species of neglected Pentium 3 common in American Suburbia — for use in developing countries. This appears to be a promising avenue for development of ICT capacity: There is so much usable computer “trash.”
I think this is the best alternative to the concept of manufacturing $100 laptops, which seems untenable on a large scale.
But the problem implicit in the NYT article is that computer recycling is also harder than it sounds. The logistics required for a workable refurbishing operation are, I fear, insurmountable. Refurbishing is not cheap even for major companies like Dell, which have pre-existing warehouses to do their refurbishing, an existing website with which to sell their repaired wares, and a massive, efficient distribution system.
Any nonprofit that hoped to get computers to poor countries would have to recreate all of these systems, build an intake system (an address I could ship that Pentium 3 to, if I was inclined), and they would additionally have to deal with repairing the *hundreds* of brands of equipment that they might receive. This is a recipe for an unreliable computer at best, and this doesn’t even begin to address the overhead required for marketing and skilled directors.
Who could do this type of operation? No one I can think of, though I’m willing to keep looking. Until then I think our best bet for cheap global computing is the idealistic Negroponte effort at MIT.
Here’s another update on the laptop debate/idea from Ethan Zuckerman, the ICT-blogger-fellow at Harvard. He usefully recounts the point of the new prototypical $100 laptop as being a radical step toward computer-aided learning in developing countries. I appreciate his skepticism about the project, especially his explicit reference to the late, not-so-great simputer idea, which bombed because of economics.
You know, that pesky money thing. Always a problem when dealing with poverty.
here’s a bit:
“After peppering Negroponte with two hours of questions, I’m fairly convinced that this laptop won’t suffer the problems the Simputer did - I believe it will get produced and distributed and that the software will enable e-books, web browsing, word processing and programming. As much as I enjoy the geekery of challenging Negroponte and others on the fine points of hardware and software design for the developing world, I’m convinced that some extremely smart people are working very hard on the hardware and software side of things. While I might question some of the decisions made, I don’t know that my second-guessing is helpful at this point.
ICT is Information Communication Technology, literally.
More generally, ICT is at the core of a movement that seeks to provide access to technology for people who would normally not have access to it. This, in turn, is part of a larger movement against poverty and inequality.
A great introduction comes from the (via the Digital Divide network); here’s a bit:
The uneven availability of access to information and communication technologies among the world’s population has great importance to public policy and the well being of nations and individuals worldwide. Of particular importance, from a global “public welfare” perspective, is unrealized potential economic and human development that could be achieved through information communication technologies. On an individual basis, this forgone development activity translates into higher rates of poverty, poorer health, lower literacy and quality of life than is necessary.
Paul Farmer is an amazing member of the “nonprofit community,” famous in his own circles of public health and international development. The Standford Social Innovation Review, (an excellent magazine) has a lovely extended interview with him about his work and his perspective. If you have not read about his work, this is a good introduction.
What makes his vision so wonderful, I think, is his ability to keep the big picture right in front of him. He does not let his job come in the way of his purpose. As a public health practicioner, he says this means 2 things: 1.) Remaining a practitioner (and not becoming a more profitable, detached, consultant. ) and 2.) “doing what it takes” to make sure that health needs are being met in communities in need. For him this mean the “controversial” practice of monitoring patient’s perscription drug use. By being more in the post-treatment phase of his patients lives, he has forced himself into a nontraditional role that works. The article touches briefly on this point, but it is captured much better in his book “Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor.” If you have any interest in international health and development, this is a great read.
Here’s a bit from the Stanford article:
In 1987, physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer founded Partners in Health to treat tuberculosis and other infectious diseases among Haiti’s rural poor. Since that time, his organization has expanded to care and advocate for the world’s poorest and sickest, in sites as diverse as Siberian prisons, Peruvian shantytowns, and Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods. The organization has also clarified its broader goal: to address the inequity and injustice that underlie much of human suffering.
Read the Stanford Social Review interview with Paul Farmer: SSIR: Articles
The significance of using this technology to do this work is obvious. Using satellite imagery to find a particular lost person is a dramatic, symbolic moment indicating some maturation of the approach — I can only hope that it will be applied on a larger scale in the coming years.
Congrats to Geekcorps on developing a 400,000+ article no-images version of the wikipedia that fits snugly into a CD. The project is called 
John Maeda writes thoughtfully about simplicity and design at his 