<nettime> Digital Nations & eDevelopment meetings

[cisler <cisler@pobox.com>]

Letter from Cambridge: Digital Nations and eDevelopment meetings
 by Steve Cisler

First Monday, volume 5, number 11 (November 2000),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_11/cisler/index.html


At a time when the concept of nationhood is being questioned by political
scientists, forecasting firms, online visionaries, and political
dissidents, the Media Lab at MIT in Massachusetts held a kickoff event
October 18, 2000, for a new program entitled "Digital Nations." William
Mitchell, whose book City of Bits was one of the first full text works on
the World Wide Web, welcomed a group of several hundred consultants,
educators, technocrats, government representatives, and company
representatives to the Lab, whose director Nicholas Negroponte was
recovering from a recent accident in Dublin, Ireland. Mitchell said that
the fundamental paradox of technology was that the people, groups, and
nations that benefited most were those that were the best educated, most
affluent, and most powerful. The technology adopted, whether it is an
industrial process, deadly military hardware, or information systems, give
even more power to the groups and nations of privilege. Mitchell asked if
we can design our way out of this problem? What are the kinds of policies
and institutional structures that are needed? And what kind of
technologies do we need?

The strength of MIT's Media Lab has been technology but also the way that
commercial sponsors have been able to take part in the process of
experimentation, prototyping, and user studies. The Lab has teamed up with
a group at Harvard whose expertise is not technology but policy and
community development. The Center for International Development, under the
direction of Jeffrey Sachs, worked with the Lab to organize the
eDevelopment seminar which followed the Digital Nations event, and José
Maria Figueres of the Entebbe Foundation in Costa Rica, together with
Sachs and Negroponte, constitute the Digital Nations board of advisors.

This first meeting was free, but like a "free" visit to a time-share
resort, a certain percentage of the attendees were expected to join the
MIT program at a cost of $250,000 per year for five years up to $750,000
per year. It was not a hard sell, but it was sustained. At the same time
they recognize that the nations may need this kind of collaboration the
most may be the most destitute, and they have established a Digital
Nations fund to raise money from other sources to pay for membership for
10 countries for five years. What do they get for their money?

The staff of the Lab, including Sandy Pentland, Mitch Resnick, and other
faculty and grad students answered that by the presentations they made
during the day. This was interspersed with outstanding food, drinks
including some very good French Burgundies and California reds, and an
atmosphere where they hoped prospective members could feel at home and
connected with the excitement of a world class development environment.
Pentland emphasized the importance of "face time" between Digital Nations
members, other corporate sponsors, and MIT staff. Most of us present were
not going to join, but the Lab recognized that convening such a varied
group was a tangible value to those who would join.

Pentland made a good case for the importance to Digital Nations of
low-cost sensors and wireless devices (combined with standard ICT) for use
in sustainable agriculture, medical care (where the user uses this
technology to analyze and care for himself), and community development.
Working with the LINCOS project in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic,
the Lab staff is working to test and introduce, as well as develop, some
of the more promising technology. Pentland showed a Japanese consumer
device that uses the very popular iMode protocol and costs $34 and
explained how a $1 sensor might make this toy for affluent Japanese kids
into a powerful medical device that could be distributed to everybody and
cost "less than the average IMF bailout." He touted cheap wireless devices
like the 802.11 cards as a key to cheap, high speed connectivity for
villages. I think he glossed over the attendant costs in making the
proposed network functional for a group of villagers, but the idea has
already been done by community activists in London and in some developing
countries. In some circles, including the Lab, there is a premium afforded
technologies that are "disruptive" because they shake up sclerotic
institutions and hopefully bring something better in their wake. Pentland
believes that the index that tracks the number of billionaires created by
a new technology is a good measure of success, rather than a powerful
lesson about the technology paradox that William Mitchell stated at the
start of the day.

Mitchel Resnick runs the Lifelong Kindergarten research group. His
interest is in the new ways that people learn, think, and design. He
stressed the need to people in a Digital Nation to be fluent with the
technologies, in the same way that a native speaker can use language for
many purposes, not just very basic communication. His comments revealed
his sensitivity to cultural issues relating to the introduction of new
technology in developing countries, and he described how Costa Rican
teachers appropriated technology for their own use once it was introduced
by Lab staff working in country. The DN projects will focus on children,
seniors, underserved communities, and whole nations. Once the program is
rolling they expect that a project in rural Thailand will cross-pollinate
with one in the Caribbean or Africa. Of course, this is going on already
through other bilateral arrangements, existing online affinity groups on
telecenters, telemedicine, and K-12 education, but the Lab can add
technological value if they can translate the voice and the needs
expressed by poor clients into lower cost, less complex tools for the
target audiences.

>From a pure technology standpoint many of the attendees were drawn to the
open house rather than the presentations. The grad students were
showcasing their projects for us, and the messy, complex lab environment
complete with lathes, fab devices, clean room facilities, provided an
atmosphere for the non-technical visitor that may have been more powerful
than some of the actual research. Students were faced with the challenge
of explaining a long-term project to a non-technical visitor in the space
of a few minutes or however long an attention span the visitor had. The
openness of the Lab to sponsors and patrons has been an advertised
strength, but it can make it hard for some workers to concentrate on their
projects without being interrupted. I imagine that the students still go
by the old Lab adage, "Demo or Die," i.e. lose corporate sponsorship.

I was most attracted to Rehmi Post's $50 handheld Linux computer. It was a
brilliant mix of very low cost but functional computing and networking
components (100 kb/sec 900 Mhz radio, Linux os, stacked circuit boards,
innovative interface with jacks for keyboard and output to a television
monitor). He considered every important issue that a technologist from a
developing country would raise, including power consumption. It uses a
very efficient Motorola chip that draws an incredibly low amount of power
which could be supplied from the grid, a battery, solar panel or through a
windup mechanism. He was surrounded by people from Mexico, South America,
and Vietnam. For more information see
http://rehmi.www.media.mit.edu/~rehmi/pengachu.html or write to
pengachu@media.mit.edu

Another project of immediate use is the telecenter cost estimator
developed by Hani Shakeel. He had a complete set of data for costs in the
LINCOS projects in Costa Rica, and used that in the model. Once the data
has been inputted for equipment, staff, connectivity costs the planner can
play with configurations to match the expected budget. Naturally, if you
are doing this for South Africa or South Carolina, you will need a
different set of costs. The software is available for free download at
www.media.mit.edu/~hshakeel but you will need various MS applications to
use it.

One of the guiding principles of much of the design that might be the most
relevant was to make it inexpensive. In the last decade when I interacted
with the Lab from within the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, the high
costs of prototyping and research did not matter. Equipment with adequate
computing power was not cheap, and nobody expected the prototypes to be
low cost, but the problems in developing countries are so pressing, that
early cost reductions are an important part of the design process for
Digital Nations.

Following the open house, Jeffrey Sachs gave his pitch on development and
ICT. He acknowledged the hype but said the promises of ICT are real and
"could be a real driver for those left behind." He claimed we are all part
of the global economy, but many places, especially Africa, are stuck in
the production of primary commodities (oil, tungsten, diamonds, uranium,
foodstuffs). He explained how any business with clients in other countries
will need the Internet or they will lose out to those that do. He also
claimed that ICT will help society mobilize against corruption in
government, and I thought of the clever ways a recently deposed president
used ICT to hide the money he stole from a World Bank loan before he moved
to the United States. Still, Sachs was echoing the message that concerned
academics like Manual Castells have been writing about for five years.

In the last three years, ever since the Global Knowledge conference in
Toronto in 1997, there has been a rush to stake a claim as a leader in
technology and development. This has been intensified by the activities
centered on countering what some people call the digital divide. Others,
while agreeing that serious disparities exist, find this buzzword a very
poor expression of the suite of problems and power imbalances that exist
in society in 2000. The efforts by the Media Lab and Harvard are two more
institutions (along with the U.S. government, United Nations, numerous
foundations, non-profits, the G7 and a long line of corporations) striving
to plant their flags on the hill overlooking the digital divide.

However, in the wake of low tech/no tech problems of communal, ethnic, and
religious strife, global warming and over-population, some skeptics in the
development field (I really must avoid debasing the word "community" any
further than it has been by AOL and others) would state their doubts in
this way:

"After the Y2K non-event where billions were expended by companies and
nations around the world, much of the noise and the calls to action being
made to invest in information technology and networking infrastructure is
being seen as just another ploy to sell U.S. equipment and services. The
fear-uncertainty-doubt techniques used in 1999 to shift budget resources
to fight the Y2K bug are now being used to encourage lavish spending to
'bridge the digital divide' to 'leapfrog into the 21st century.' Why
should we believe the companies, writers, and consultants now any more
than we did for the Y2K fiasco? Other pressing problems call for solutions
that have little to do with networking technology."

This will be the dilemma for some of the digital nations candidates, and
it will be up to the Lab to make the connection between the technology
solutions and those other pressing problems where ICT can be part of
answer. Should a poor nation spend a good chunk of money on version 1.0 of
Digital Nations or wait for an incremental release, or even version 2.0,
after all the bugs are worked out? At the close of the conference I heard
from two country and one state representative who expressed interest in
joining.

eDevelopment: Enabling communities to shape their future

eDevelopment was back-to-back with the Digital Nations kickoff event, and
many of the same people who presented on Wednesday, continued to share the
stage during this conference: the Media Lab folks, Jeffrey Sachs, and José
Maria Figueres. It's commendable that this meeting was free, once you got
to Boston, and the food and wine were unmatched by any other gathering I
have attended. There was an overlap with the Digital Nations roster, with
attendees from 35 countries, and quite a few young people from Nation1.org
and the Lab. One of the problems with making conferences free is that many
people sign up and do not show up. The meeting was over-subscribed, but at
the end of the conference more than 200 name tags had not been claimed.
This is one reason why airlines have sophisticated overbooking strategies
in order to fill the available seats.

The first session was greatly enhanced the moderator, Hiawatha Bray, the
feisty and critical journalist from the Boston Globe. He began by citing
the evidence in the latest Department of Commerce report "I'm falling
through the net, and I can't get up!" that seemed to show that the problem
of the so-called digital divide was solving itself in the United States.
William Mitchell pointed out that a computer network's usefulness is not
self-evident whereas a water supply system is immediately useful. This
might help us make sense of the Pew study that shows that 57% of those
Americans not online have no interest in doing so. Seymour Papert pointed
out that only 10% of computer users will use the device to learn (and it
need not be connected to the Internet - which might even be a distraction
and negative force).

Bray asked how do we deal with the huge connectivity problems in Africa.
There was a discussion of the AfricaOne cable project and all the problems
it has encountered. Everyone agrees that the need is there, but addressing
the needs and rules in such a huge and fragmented market has been a
hindrance. Sachs talked about the tendency for state agencies and
monopolies to put their own welfare over that of the country, and this
reluctance to change policies in many African countries was one reason it
was so hard to interest investors. Toyin omo Adelakun, an ex-pat Nigerian
from the UK and head of Afrodigital said he thought the problems were too
many languages and too many countries. He said he did not intend to try
and do business in his home country because of conditions there! Instead,
he has chosen six countries where it will be easier to do business.

Bray asked provocatively if we should address the inequity of access by
shoving laptops in parachutes out of the back of C-130's flying over
Africa. Papert remarked that the industry kept a high price point for the
average computer sold by adding more features instead of aiming for much,
much lower priced machines. He spent a lot of time talking about the sad
state of the education system around the world and how a good computer
with the right software could offset the damage done by government
ministries with a fetish for standardized testing.

In the technology panel Gabriel Accascina of the UNDP spoke about his
infrastructure projects which have been in some of the most remote parts
of Asia and the Pacific: Tuvalu, Bhutan, Laos. His program had just
received the prestigious Stockholm Award, formerly known as the Bangemann
Challenge.

The breakout sessions where there was more chance to interact with other
attendees were a major part of Day One. The topics were varied: Nation1:
the first online nation; MediaLab Europe, a new MIT venture in Dublin,
Ireland; unequal access in Cambodia; a primer on global e-commerce; eight
imperatives for a networked world; technology and community building;
smart sourcing; village area networks in Alaska; empowering youth; open
source and eDevelopment; PIE, Playful Invention and Exploration - a museum
project; digitally empowering the poor; IT manpower development in India;
learning hubs; intellectual property and development; IT for medical care
and telemedicine; lessons from India's digital divide programs; Junior
Journal; literacy and e-literacy; IT for activism; leadership and politics
in eDevelopment; listservs, connecting for change; the power of
e-partnerships; rural connectivity, the first mile, and community
knowledge-global collaboration.

This last one was presented by Derrick Cogburn from University of
Michigan. It took about 15 minutes to get the Windows machine running with
Placeware, a conferencing software suite that uses the metaphor of the
lecture hall with slides, voice over IP for lectures, whiteboard and chat.
After Cogburn's lecture, we discussed the software, the environment, and
alternatives (something cheaper, simpler, and perhaps open source).
Cogburn has used this effectively with seminars in his home country of
South Africa as well as Korea.

I led a discussion of telecenters. After a five-minute intro to this very
fuzzy topic, many of the participants (divided between the experienced and
the curious) asked questions and told their own stories of what is
happening or not happening in the field. High marks were given to Peter
Benjamin of South Africa who was not present, but those who had read his
evaluation of centers in that country were impressed. Some felt it was
impossible to work with governments; others thought corporations might
dominate the scene after learning what they could from the early funders
and activists. Though we had less than an hour, we skimmed over a lot of
ground, and several of us noted the difference in this session from the
lackluster participation in various telecenter mailing lists. I tried to
emphasize the importance of place: physical telecenters and meetings such
as this, over exclusively online services and online affinity groups. In a
latter session Dennis Gilhooley, an Irish journalist, policy guy, who is
said to possess a Very Large Rolodex, dismissed telecenters as "hackneyed"
and "dysfunctional" without elaborating. There are some who say these
centers are a desperate attempt to bring the benefits of ICT to the
masses, but that it is not working: return on investment has been poor for
some of the big ones, and continuity in management has not been a
strongpoint, according to critics.

After lunch there were sessions on Latin America and "community." I must
have hit some kind of limit to my tolerance of jargon, hype, and
boosterism in the afternoon. As a kid I sometimes repeated a word over and
over until it lost meaning and sounded like nonsense, and this began to
happen that afternoon. I could not sit through the session where a
consultant treated two ex-presidents of Latin American countries as if
they were precious celebrities. The speakers were not at fault, though. I
did hear Figueras make the analogy (which I'm sure he uses in every talk)
that the arrival of the Intel plant in Costa Rica - where he had been
president - is analogous to removing the VW beetle engine from that modest
little car and dropping an aircraft engine in the back. He said the
country could not be sure it was always in control of this great force,
but it sure was not the same car. He also made a pitch for raising
standards and attracting a better class of investor rather than the much
publicized 'race to the bottom' of labor and environmental standards for
countries hoping to attract sweatshops and dirty industries (not that chip
manufacturing is clean: in Silicon Valley we have some of the worst
pollution and ground water problems of the whole country, and some of that
is traced to the semi-conductor industry). When I hear all the talk of
Intel, it seems Costa Rica has replaced two monocultures (coffee/bananas)
with another: PC chips. If they can grow the peripheral IT industries
around Intel, they will certainly succeed in the same way that Seattle now
has a vibrant IT sector that can survive even if Microsoft is not doing
well.

Sherry Turkle spoke about the inadequate metaphors in technology (the
digital divide is one example) and how technology is changing culture. She
first looked at the disconnect between the utopian view of computer
enthusiasts in the 1980s and the reality that these machines were not
going to effect the kinds of changes they envisioned. Another danger was
the fantasy that gender, race, and age matter less online because you
cannot see most other users. She was able to deliver a rich set of ideas
in a very short time, but I really felt I needed to read them before
hearing her discuss them.

Alan Shaw, whom I had met when he spoke at a community network conference
I organzed in 1994, gave an update on the same project, Linking Up
Villages, which has been tried in the Boston area, New Jersey, and
Jackson, Mississippi. Using computers to link up single mothers in one
project, these women began to organize, use the tools to get more control
of their lives, and more importantly, to think differently about who they
were and what they could do. One woman who had never been on a plane,
organized a trip to Newark airport to show kids (and other adults) what
went on there and to go inside a passenger compartment. These were
compelling stories, but I worried that it took computers and networks to
begin this transformation. My hunch is that the concern and attention
afforded these women by Shaw and his wife were a good part of that
catalytic process. Perhaps the computer communication made it easier for
the women to show concern for each other.

The evening was a special time. Isaac Hayes, the composer who won an Oscar
for the theme from Shaft many years ago, has been working with a young
Ghanaian woman to build Neko Tech, a school in Ade, in southeast Ghana
near the border of Togo. They showed a PAL format video on a U.S. machine
that distorted the images of Ghanian village life, Hayes' honorary
coronation, and the opening of the school and lab this year. However, the
video effects caused me to pay more attention to make sense of what was on
the screen. The villages looked no different from my visit there 35 years
ago, but the lab looked as sharp as a new Bureau of Indian Affairs school
in some distant reservation in America or the primary school in Silicon
Valley where my wife works. Hayes said other celebrities, including Denzel
Washington, Tom Cruise, and John Travolta, had helped with the project.
Though he made no overt mention of the Church of Scientology being
involved in the project, one foundation has declined to assist them once
that link was made clear. Hayes is considered a spokesman for the Church.

Hayes performed for the crowd, singing and playing on his synthesizer,
before rushing to catch a plane, and the second act was by a remarkable
hiphop artist known as DJ Spookey (Paul Miller). He gave an erudite
explanation of what he was exploring in his performances and did an
amazing mix of an old Marshall McLuhan vinyl recording, Isaac Hayes music,
and his own scratching and bass accompaniment. It was masterful.

October 20

The final day took place at Harvard Law School where the Berkman Center
for Internet & Society is located. Director Charles Nesson welcomed us and
outlined some of the challenges of the Internet: Notions of property and
privacy: can the property interests tolerate an open network (recording
industry vs. Napster)? Are we building a surveillance network? How do we
build on top of the technology, the needed layers of education, business,
and law to make it function for the benefit of society (and not just the
most powerful interests)?

Erik Saltzman of the Berkman Center used the metaphor that some nations
felt the Internet was the last ticket on the last train leaving the
station, as if there will not be any chances for some countries if they
don't take advantage of the opportunities. Robert Kaplan would argue that
other forces have already rendered that a moot issue in some troubled
areas of the world (Sierra Leone, the Caucasus, Afghanistan).

The panel on government included the top anti-corruption official for
India, Mr. N. Vittal, Central Vigilance Commissioner; Claudio Orrego
Larrain a Chilean minister of city planning who had a background in social
programs in urban barrios, and Dennis Gilhooley. Orrego is a good example
of a modern, techno-savvy public servant/politician who's willing to
challenge his peers as well as the business community in order to make
this technology work for the people. Orrego put his own financial holdings
on his department web page, though all the others for his colleagues are
in a paper document hidden away in a public agency where it takes a
concerted effort to visit and extract the data. This was in the wake of a
government scandal about severance pay for high level government employees
in Chile.

George Sadowsky of the Internet Society said he dealt with countries which
have their head in the 20th century and their tail somewhere else. He
stressed that the opportunity costs of not investing in ICT needed to be
explained to the reluctant governments. One questioner said that it will
be a hard sell if you are saying that ICT will disintermediate "unneeded"
government workers and make the whole operation more transparent (i.e.
less corrupt). Having a government job where you can enjoy extra, perhaps
illegal benefits, is one reason this line of work is attractive in some
places. Why should they "get on the train?" Trying to convince some of
these people to get Internet religion is about as challenging as the U.S.
foreign assistance programs to encourage crop substitution for tropical
farmers who are doing quite well, thank you, partly because their global
comparative advantage is growing poppies or coca plants and not just
growing more coffee or more bananas. Why change because an outside
consultant or advisor says they should? In the case of coca, Apache
gunships flying over and raining death on the grower can be an added
incentive to change crops. We don't expect similar measures to be used on
the ministries of telecommunications and education.

An Indian spoke up and made a passionate plea to consider the corporate
agenda to influence governments and bring about policy changes to give
them even more power. He felt that governments needed to serve the people
and not just large companies. His was the first time anyone in the three
days had made any reference to this trend. Most of those present thought
it was the right trend or one that almost inevitable, but it would have
been an interesting discussion, had there been time. That is certainly
what has brought activists out in force at each World Economic Forum, at
the Seattle WTO wrestling matches, and of course at the World Bank IMF
meeting in Prague last month.

In the entrepreneurship panel Dennis Smith of Digital Partners said his
firm is starting a conversation between the corporations and the
developing countries about how to help these countries catch up. Smith
sees the agenda of the Internet philanthropists and the corporate affairs
programs as a useful part of this effort to connect the world. Others, of
course, see it as part of the broader corporate agenda. That is why the
donations of the Gates Foundation in the library connectivity program are
seen both as a life saver and the best program since Andrew Carnegie, or
just an extension of a plan to extend domination of personal computing.

Monique Maddy, Adesemi Communications, also on the entrepreneurship panel,
ended the conference with a rather sober assessment of doing business in
countries that everyone was so intent upon connecting to the Internet. A
Liberian by birth, she found that doing business was not a problem of
getting VC funds but of policy and business practices in Africa. "Deferred
Dream", her Harvard Business Review (May 2000, volume 78, p.57) piece on
her venture in Tanzania is a must-read. She also differentiated between
the funders who wanted to do good and those who wanted to do well (i.e.
make money), and the two camps did not mix well. For that reason she felt
the term social venture capital has an oxymoronic ring to it.

Before the Concordes were taken out of service, there were round the world
tours where a select group could fly in luxury, at high speeds and high
altitudes, touching down for fuel and visits in select locations. The
three days were much like one of these tours: we flew high and fast,
covered a lot of territory, with convivial company, good food, and
pleasant surroundings. Some of the speakers and many of the personal
conversations helped ground us in reality: David Cavallo talking about the
successes and challenges in an MIT Media Lab project in rural Thailand,
Maddy's problems in Tanzania, and Alan Shaw working with poor women in
Jackson, Mississippi.

The topics were as varied as the attendees, and had there been an
evaluation form, the organizers might find out what topics they might
focus on in a subsequent meeting. Of course, one can find these conclaves
going on everywhere in the world: IIT in Madras connectivity solutions for
developing countries. FutureWorks in Newfoundland on telecenters; UNCTAD
meetings on ecommerce in developing countries. Just a few months ago
Harvard hosted three overlapping Internet conferences at the same time!
Should there be a followup to eDevelopment? Yes, but perhaps taking place
closer to the target audiences.

Will this allow Harvard C.I.D. and MIT Media Lab a place at the
development table? Of course, but success in the field will earn them
respect above and beyond the cachet of their famous institutions. Help the
Fox government in Mexico productize Pengachu, the $50 Linux box. Work with
the National Library of Medicine on AIDS and malarial telemedicine
programs throughout Africa. Show the masses in the street that privatizing
national telephone companies and water utilities will help the poor as
much as it helps the transnationals who are willing to invest. If good
policies and technologies emerge from expensive organizational membership
and consulting fees, publicize those as quickly as possible using other
avenues than meetings for members and clients. Find ways for any country,
including those without tickets, to get on the last train out of the
station.

About the Author

Steve Cisler is a consultant whose background is in public and special
libraries. He has been a teacher in the Peace Corps, a wine maker and
search and rescue coordinator in the Coast Guard. Now he focuses on public
access projects and community computing projects in the United States and
developing countries. He is currently working with Tachyon, Inc., an
Internet services carrier using Ku band satellite for high speed access.
He has written for Online, Database, American Libraries, Library Journal,
and Wired. Steve has two sons and lives with his wife in San José,
California. E-mail: cisler@pobox.com

Editorial history

Paper received 24 October 2000; accepted 1 November 2000.

Copyright ©2000, First Monday





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