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!
Last week a 2004 article turned up on Eldis: a consideration of how to measure the impact of ICTs in women’s lives. The article begins with a great discussion of what a gender perspective means for people working with technologies of communication. (It cites the United Nations as finding that ICT access is the third most important issue facing women, after violence and poverty.)
The conclusion of the study is essentially that those who implement ICTs must take into consideration the real lives and conditions of women, else they are liable to perpetuate inequaliy.
“Computer technology (like any technology) is shaped by the values, assumptions, goals and prejudices of those involved in its design, engineering and financing. Its use and influence in society is shaped by the roles, values, assumptions and goals of those who own it and those who can access it. Technologies introduced into environments characterised by inequality tend to reinforce and even exacerbate it.”
I found it especially important that they emphasize the necessity of involving women (indeed all stakeholders in the program equally) in the design and implementation process.
This connects fundamentally with a participatory evaluation approach, the concept that you have to (in the author’s words):
- Involve stakeholders as the evaluators of your program (those who determine the meaning of success).
- Link evaluation findings to action.
- Encourage evaluation that is truly “participatory (by all stakeholders): involvement of all types of stakeholder in the evaluation process, particularly at the grass roots level, and support for accountability.”
- Be context sensitive to the reality of the user environment.
Via Eldis.
Here’s an interesting feature from a nonprofit organization called the gov3 Network, which appears to be a kind of ICT government consultancy. They have a interesting feature on their website that dynamically draws data comparing a country (of your choice) to other countries with regard to their ICT-sector growth.
Put a country and comparison region into this Digital Dashboard, and the result is a data-dense graph that is intended to give governments a sense of how quickly they are moving in the right (or wrong) direction for growing their tech sector.
I think this could be a useful tool, but I’m wary of provate organizations seeking (lobbying?) for “more proper” regulation of the ICT sector as being a thin veil for simply giving opportunity to industry, not people. That said, they have a stated interest in promoting “a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society.Also, they’ve recently won an award at WSIS for DirectGov, a website that brings together a mess of information about UK government services.
Woo Hoo! Wind-powered wireless!:
“A University of Texas professor creates tiny windmills to tilt at providing electricity: The prof has developed a system with his group that uses piezoelectric crystals which, when flexed by the small pressures provided by a 10-centimeter windmill running as slow as 17 kilometers per hour, can produce 7.5 milliwatts of electricity. This could be enough to power wireless sensors. After reading an excellent article on flywheels in Wired back in 2000, I envision a nifty future in which remote wireless transceivers could combine a small windmill, solar cells, and flywheels (instead of batteries) for a long-lived and low-maintenance power trio. Wi-Fi, of course, drains much more than 7.5 mW, and other technologies would be even higher. But this is an interesting start. If it’s cost effective someday to build tiny windmills, it may also be reasonable to build small, but not absolutely tiny ones that meet the downward spiral of wireless network power requirements in the middle. His paper from last year can be downloaded….
“
Read it: Windmills for Wi-Fi
(Found on:802.11b Networking News.)
While poking around on stuff related to the WSIS in Tunis, I found this excellent document about wireless internet in Africa, which was used at the first meeting of the WSIS in 2003. I only wish that there was an updated copy somewhere …
“The most intriguing application [of wireless technology] in developing nations is the deployment of low-cost broadband Internet infrastructure and last-mile distribution.
The rationale for such interest is simple in theory: The digital divide cannot be resolved any time soon because of the prohibitive cost of deploying conventional wired infrastructure in developing countries. Wireless Internet, however, has the potential to solve this bottleneck, as the collection of articles and case studies in this volume demonstrates. …
So, why should this topic become central to the World Summit on Information Society initiative? First, wireless Internet may be a very effective and inexpensive connectivity tool, but it does not carry any magic in itself. It can only be successfully deployed as demand for connectivity and bandwidth emerges in support of relevant applications for the populations served. These may be supporting e-government, e-education, e-health, e-business or e-agriculture applications. But those are not easily implemented in the developing world. They do suggest that wireless Internet can indeed be sustainably and in some cases profitably deployed in support of economic and social development objectives in developing countries.
The greatest aspect of this document is that it represents how often the most successful cases of adoption is grassroots and local — this type of development does not work well when it is imposed by some NGO or corporation.
You can read the entire document at infodev, an organization created to “promote better understanding, and effective use, of information and communication technologies (ICT) as tools of poverty reduction and broad-based, sustainable development.”
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).
The Citizen’s Summit is perhaps the best thing going for an otherwise depressing Tunis conference — and, depressingly, Tunis has already acted to block the independent events from ever happening.
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.
Here’s this:
“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.]“
Read it: Keeping Communications Equipment Powered in an Emergency
(Found on:Today in TechSoup.)
Here’s this from global-minded site about broadband technologies:
“And now for the fun part….
Did you know that Iceland is only behind South Korea, Netherlands and Denmark in Internet penetration, and 84% of its households have Internet connection?
Australia adds 40,000 broadband connections every month.
In Spain, you can get a 20 megabit/second connection for $36 a month and that includes free phone service and a wifi router from a company called Jazztel.
Nearly 60% of Indians get their broadband at cyber cafes that dot the country?
Uruguay’s telecom monopoly sells a 512/256 kbps connection for $190 a month.”
Read it: Five fun facts from Broadband Wiki
(Found on:Om Malik’s Broadband Blog.)
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 the NYT article about computer dumping:
Read it: NYT > Technology.)
The Scottish government has an excellent collection of resources regarding the use of Information Communication Technology in classrooms. They have multi-part articles grouped by subject (Biology, Drama, Physics), and examples of how, for example, you can show students living cells using microscope and digital camera, or how to use th einternet to teach French. Most of it is not Scotland-specific, though they do feature Scottish schools.
My major criticism of the site is that it doesn’t explore low-cost options (such as using open source software). Correspondingly, this site won’t be as useful in less-developed countries. That said, it is a great example of free, user-friendly tutorials for “best practices” education.
Here’s the site:
www.ltscotland.org.uk - Secondary
Kathyn Cramer, based in New York, is doing great work with Google maps. The following information is quoted from her blog.
Step 1: Go to Google Maps and enter the address. Click on the button that says “Hybrid” on the upper right. You will get an image with a speech ballon pointing to a thumbtack showing the location of the address on the satellite photo.
[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Bless their hearts, Google Maps has added a "KATRINA" button to New Orleans areas searches, so they have automated some of the process I describe here! Yee haw!]
Step 2: Click up and down the vertical ladder-like bar to see the image at various scales until you feel you can find the place on a satellite image.
Step 3: Compare your image to this superimposition of the FEMA flood map on a New Orleans satellite photo, created by the Google Earth Current Events Community. Here is a small version. Click on it for a much bigger picture.
If the address you are checking is fairly centrally located, you can also check your address image against the DigitalGlobe satellite picture of the flooding.
For more detailed instructions, visit her blog.
Ever since the first Vatican broadcast of a sermon on the radio in 1931, there has been little doubt about the power of broadcast media as a part of religious practice.
Contemporary “church-theatres” (typically the kind with the lights and music shows) are taking the role of media much more seriously, and it appears that they’re adapting to some of the most advanced uses of ICT in the world. In an article in today’s New York Times, it’s noted that individual podcasts from sites like theatrechurch.com and godcast.com are attracting thousands of subscribers worldwide. That’s a number that’s relatively unheard of at this point in the podcasting evolution.
What is happening is that these communities, already acclimated to the idea of technology-aided practices, are becoming heavily invested in using everything at their disposal to achieve their mission.
But I think the point in all this is more than just an impressive development in the religious sector. The willingness of religious groups to adapt to podcasting and other ICT-based forms of community practice means that this is viable — that this really works. Podcasting and blogging’s implications have thus far been clear to a few geeks and technologists, but there is, at least among certain populations, a sense in which these religious communities are making it a reality.
But if youre thinking of Pat Robertson televangelism, consider the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.
The marches, speeches, meetings of the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s — that was what I would call a serious community. And much of it was deeply spiritual, coming from a critical Black religious movement.
There is much work to be done in revitalizing the religious fuel for the social justice fire, and, judging from the excitment generated by the current developments in worship, there may be a wealth of underdeveloped resources for doing so in the near future. ###
See also: NPR’s article: “Now Playing on MP3: iSermons“
Educational Testing Services — they’re the folks that make the SAT and GRE — has a new test for ICT literacy. Despite a humorously useless Flash intro, the test appears to be fully baked. The sample questions on the ETS website look at the ways a test-taker would represent and evaluate information in an online context.
Test taking is boring. It’s a boring subject. But you can’t direct change in any environment without having some feedback. So this investment in ICT literacy evaluation is good to see.
Give them a visit:
ETS ICT Literacy Assessment Tests Information and Communication Technology Proficiency and Computer Skills
As of April, there is a new journal devoted to researching the (primarily sociological) aspects of Technology’s influence. It’s free, how lovely: Human Technology: An interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments
A Major O’Reilly Open Source Convention next week in Portland (OR) is hosting a panel of women developers (Update- It’s even worse; women’s representation in IT generally has gone down 20% since 1994.)
A technology conference yesterday in England was host to a speaker Iqbal Quadir, who has sold about 100,000 cell phones to poor folks in Bangladesh. These are people who otherwise would have no digital communications, and Quadir feels that their new phones are empowering them more than the development strategies of the last 60 years.
The approach is eloquently summed up on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog as a bottom-up approach to economic development. Here’s a bit from his recent post:
Iqbal points to a top-down approach favored by the World Bank and others and notes that it puts power into the hands of authority, not into the hands of people. The US didn’t develop this way - technological empowerment from below led to success in developed nations. Technology can amplify voices, make it possible for individuals to have a voice that gets heard by central authorities.
I love it.
But I always find it disturbing that his bottom line is productivity — the extent to which their communication means that they are participating in the market.
I write this in spite of the obvious fact that the real goal of progressive ICT is the empowerment of people, ie, the elimination of poverty. So there is always an element of market-think undergirding the need for communication.
But by understanding people’s lives in terms of an economic equation, there’s some unquantifiable (romantic, perhaps) aspect of communications-based development that is lost. Because, after all, of we were all well fed and clothed, we’d still be suffering without the ability to communicate.
The Journal of Community Informatics, a new, academic approach to community technology, is now in its third issue.
It has an informative, though often long-winded, selection of peer-reviewed articles. The field is new and often misunderstood or poorly defined — which makes it much more interesting to read the various perspectives that the researcher-authors bring.
The Journal of Community Informatics
Community Informatics (CI) is the study and the practice of enabling communities with Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). CI seeks to work with communities towards the effective use of ICTs to improve their processes, achieve their objectives, overcome the “digital divides” that exist both within and between communities, and empower communities and citizens in the range of areas of ICT application including for health, cultural production, civic management, e-governance among others. The Journal of Community Informatics brings together a global range of academics, CI practitioners and national and multi-lateral policy makers. Each issue of the Journal of Community Informatics will contain double blind peer-reviewed research articles as well as commentaries by leading CI practitioners and policy makers.
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.
Read the entire article: Washington State Center to Bridge the Digital Divide