Omidyar is known for challenging their grantees to move towards financial stability, a path that we'd already made a high organizational priority. With support from Omidyar, we're planning to expand our readership online and via email, to enter into syndication agreements (like the ones we have with La Stampa and Reuters) with at least five new partners and to start creating original content in French and Spanish as well as in English.

Funding from Omidyar is also helping us shore up the infrastructures necessary to manage our complex and international team. GV editors and contributors are on every continent but Antarctica and our management team is scattered across the globe. While we're committed to being a virtual organization without offices or filing cabinets, we've got a lot of practical and administrative challenges to face to ensure we're able to continue amplifying and sharing citizen voices from around the world. Anyone who has worked in the nonprofit community understands that support for these unsexy sorts of activities is the hardest sort of money to raise - we're particularly grateful that Omidyar is making an investment in our whole organization and not just a specific project.

We're really excited about this new development and to working closely with our friends at Omidyar, especially Stephen King, Omidyar's Senior Director of Investments. Later this year, we'll be expanding our board of directors by two members, including Stephen and a third representative elected from our staff and volunteer community. Thanks to Omidyar - and all our wonderful supporters - for making this community possible.

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We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Rohinton Medhora of IDRC notes that we've spent much of this conference considering what's changed in the world of ICT in the past six years. We've not talked much about how development and poverty have changed. The first Harvard forum, six years ago, looked at how ICT might apply “here, there and everywhere.” The critical example from that discussion was Mohammed Yunus's story about women learning to use mobile phones and to build businesses. This forum's story might be Amyarta Sen's story about using a phone and resulting photos to change public opinion in Pakistan.

He offers a model - data - information - knowledge - wisdom - to help understand how ICT might affect education. “I suspect that ICT is only a small element in the gap from knowledge to wisdom.” Education is the great leveler in society, and we don't yet understand how ICTs play out in the education field.

ICTs are moving from natural monopolies to public goods, merit good, and club goods. We're seeing confusion on the regulatory side. In many cases, regulators don't know what to make of technological developments - should LAN houses be considered as gambling houses? We've got a wide range of regulatory structures, and they're very different in terms of mobile phones versus broadcast media, despite the increasing overlaps in these technologies.

Rohinton wonders about Mike Best's idea of a set of “grand challenges” for ICT4D. We often talk about the unpredictable nature of the development of information technologies. “It's not that these things are ‘unpredictable' - it's that our confidence interval is wider and wider.” This may mean it's hard to figure out what those big questions are, but doesn't change the importance of raising and answering them.

Yochai Benkler is worried that we're oversimplifying the relationships between markets and states (or other authorities). Ronaldo Lemos's stories about working with the International Development Bank to allow
musicians in Brazil to distribute music and build their own labels so they can make a living shows the complexity of these relationships. The formal market for digital music in Brazil is dysfunctional - tracks cost $1.50, an absurd price in a medium-income country - and so the next steps are to create markets that actually work and find reasonable prices.

“Opposing market versus state, market versus regulation, market versus social organization is too stark… We need to get beyond these dichotomies, towards an integrated market that allows people to innovate and make a living off of it.” Open platforms at the physical layer are part of this. But we need to realize that people are using these platforms to try to avoid the bureaucrats, both the state leaders and the corporate ones. There are ongoing tensions between freedom and control and that control can be markets and profits, political power, or patriarchies.

Yochai worries that there's “pressure on those of us coming from left intellectual traditions to accept the idea that it's okay for musicians to make money, that it's okay for Onno Purbo to charge for community wireless workshops.” We need to expand our dialog beyond a discussion of pure market incentives versus state interventions. He recommends moving beyond talking about “incentives” to “motivations”. Motivations allows us to consider factors like solidarity, not just market forces. Introducing these factors helps us explain why people will support musicians, paying an average of
$1.25 a song, $8 an album for tracks they're invited to download for free - voluntarily - as they have to support Jane Sibbery for years.

We need to understand that unserious applications - like LAN Houses - can lead to very serious implications. World of Warcraft may turn out to be an excellent environment to train leaders, or to help teenagers find adult authority figures they can rely on. (Joi Ito tells a story about an 18 year old kid who came to him, as WoW guild leare, for advice on whether he should join the military. Joi was the only adult who's had his back for years, which made him the logical person to ask for this advice.) Because government influences and can undermine what we can do for development, we need to accept that open systems don't always behave in ways we anticipate, and be open to the idea that we need to take seriously things we're tempted to ignore.

Michael Spence acknowledges that we might not want to base our theories of economic development on Milton Friedman, but suggests that the great economist did get one important thing right - he made the point that you can't solve problems without paying attention to incentives. “We fail his test all the time” in the field of development economics. And because we don't think about incentives, we end up with Nash equilibriums that favor the powerful and leave the weak at a disadvantage, whether they're in the public or private sector.

He asks us to think about focus, faith and measurement. “The problem of measuring the impact of ict4d is too hard to solve.” He urges us not to let it trip us up too badly. To explain the difficulty of studying effectiveness, he references the 1949 Communist takeover in China. “China in the 1950s did the best job any country has done educating children, at least through elementary school.” In a few years, literacy rates for men and women approached 90%. But China didn't see significant economic benefits, because happened, because other aspects of the state and the economy were mismanaged and broken. When other aspects of economic management changed, the “potential asset” of a literate population rapidly turned into a real asset, one that's helping the country grow at a profound rate.

“You can have progress in areas that affect people's education, or access to information, but it might not have a visible effect,” because it's blocked by other factors. Spence asks us to consider information technology in developing nations. Nations like the US made heavy IT investments for over thirty years and we saw few, if any, measurable gains. Recently, we've seen a steady 3% productivity increase, which we believe comes from taking the “potential asset” of IT and unlocking it via the Internet.

“Development economists try to measure impact of education via regression analysis. The results they turn up are mixed or negligible. But no one sensible would make policy decisions based on those results.”

With that, Spence asks us to have faith. “Assume that education and IT in various aspects are going to turn out to be terribly important.” And then get on with it and don't worry much about measurement.

Education, in particular, is an area in which we need to have a great deal of faith. “Assuming some preconditions, development is the process of acquiring knowledge, not just by individuals but within systems.” He warns us off the term “knowledge economy” - it's not that we've gone from shovelling coal to shovelling bits - we're engaged in the process of making our citizens and systems more knowledgeable. To the extent that IT systems are knowledge systems, we need to keep our focus on education, on health, and on e-government, to the extent that government controls access to essential services.

He ends with a warning about stability. “A huge, important application of modern IT is the global supply chain and financial system. The financial trading superstructure is impossible without IT.” We need to think about the stability of these systems because the instability we just experienced wasn't accurately predicted by anything. Our problem may be models - we interpret systems via models, and if those models are insufficiently accurate, we can see stability where we might need to anticipate instability.

We end with parting shots from dialog participants, who felt that points weren't emphasized enough. I made the case that ICT was critical not just for education and entrepreneurship, but for creating an inclusive public sphere, and asked the room to take seriously the phenomenon of particiatory media, not just through blogs and viral videos, but through mobile phone calls made to community radio stations. Ineke Buskens warns us that, in a profoundly sexist world, attempts to treat ICT as gender-neutral will end up perpetuating power imbalances. Bill Melody warns us that the developed world is likely to ignore infrastructure, now that infrastructure works well, and that development projects can't abandon infrastructure efforts. Clotilde Fonseca urges us to continue building pilot and demonstration projects so we can experiment with creative ideas that could be scaled and replicated. David Malone warns that we need to protect human rights from governments, which are inherently authoritarian and prone to exercise control.

In other words, to sum up… there's a lot to sum up. As Mike Best observed last night, this field appears to be plagued by the problem that we need to consider dozens of factors simultaneously. If there's a conclusion from today's discussions, it's that we all need a good bit of reminding of the key factors that need consideration to make sure we've got a sufficiently broad view of these issues.

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

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We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Yesterday's conversations at the Harvard Forum on ICT4D orbited two general themes:

- the need to include conversations about inclusion of women, the poor, the marginalized into dialogs about ICT4D
- a debate about whether we embrace the success of the mobile phone as a tool for development or ask for more capabilities than we're able to gain on mobile networks.

Today's conversation starts with discussions of “knowledge gaps”, open questions we need to answer through research so we can understand what's succeeding and failing in our field.

Clotilde Fonseca of the Omar Dengo Foundation suggests that we focus on creating effective indicators of impact. Educational projects often have difficulty expressing their impacts in language understood by development banks. Success stories are dismissed as anecdotal and not scaleable. Evaluating impacts just in terms of results on standardized tests, the standard evaluation framework, aren't considering “ecologies of learning.”

Beyond evaluation criteria, we need to work on the development of standards, especially standards for teacher development. Scaling up projects from pilot phases to replicable states involves massive teacher development - this, in turn, requires us to ask questions about whether teachers are learning the skills and tools needed to scale and expand these projects.

Fonseca worries that we aren't sufficiently studying “learning communities”, the power of collaboration, networking and sociability for education. These techniques are increasingly recognized as key to learning, but we're not putting sufficient research into the value of networking and communities to education.

We need to broaden our views of what technology can mean for development. We tend to have limited and restricted views of what technologies are and can do. “There's lots of magical thinking,” and a tendency to use a simplistic model - technology and development is the product of infrastructure plus content. She worries that while we understand what infrastructure is, we might not fully understand what content is and needs to be. The interventions suggested post-WSIS tend to be very technocentric and may overfocus on infrastructure over questions of content.

To allow a new generation to learn 21st century skills, we need to face cognitive issues, and learn how the mind actually functions. We need education to create learning skills. It's been risky for governments like Costa Rica to address these issues, but it will be critical to solve these problems to fully embrace potentials for a digital future.

Laurent Elder of IDRC offers three concrete questions about knowledge gaps.

- We're trying to create not just a knowledge society, but an inclusive, equitable knowledge society. Does openness help us achieve these goals? We worry that we've seen with the rise of the mobile phone doesn't necessarily eliminate inequality - we're seeing the GINI coefficient increase in countries with high mobile phone penetration. If we're trying to increase inclusion, do open principles, open content licensing and open innovation help? We don't know yet.

- IDRC sponsored a great deal of research and interventions around telecentres. There's a debate about whether these telecentres were successful. Now IDRC is trying to determine whether building interventions (build our own telecentres) or incentives (support the construction of telecenters or other projects) is more succesful.

- How do “knowledge turns” - the cycle from hypothesis, testing, results to new hypothesis - affect different fields. In the semiconductor industry, knowledge turns take about 18 months, making this a very fast field. The health industry has a knowledge turn of about 8-10 years. Can we embrace these faster-moving cycles? How do we spur innovation at this pace, and what are the consequences of moving this quickly?

Mike Best takes on the emerging cleavages within the ICT4D field. He notes that we're in danger of building unhelpful disciplinary walls, and that this wallbuilding contributes to the “common tendencies for this field to jog in place.”

A recent Doha conference on ICT4D raised the idea that we may want to split the ICT4D field into at least two camps. The computer scientists worry that their fields don't see ICT4D as real computer science. In the hopes of raising the profile of this work, they're planning an ACM special interest group, and considering a CS-only conference in conjunction with the next ICT4D conference in London. This, Mike argues, is a really bad idea.

Computer scientists tend to build ICT4D projects with this method: I decided to build this thing. I worked on it, I adjusted it. I took it to Ghana. I asked ten people - nine of them liked my thing. Computer scientists tend to dismiss work that doesn't fit this paradigm, and especially work that doesn't include fundamental technical innovation. Social scientists wonder whether fundamental techological innovations are really required for ICT4D work. “For either group to think they don't need to sit at the same conferences together is worrisome.”

We're making major mistakes, Mike worries. We tend to view the access to knowledge field as if “knowledge is a reified thing over there amd our job is to offer access to it. Schools, in this cartoon, is where children as empty vessels have information poured into them.” This may be a straw man, but it's too common a point of view, and it's a dangerous one.

We're failing to be a progressive field - we fail to stand on the shoulders that have come before us. And since this field is only a decade old, we've failed to stand upon each other's shoulders. Most projects end in failure - absolute failure, sustainability failure or partial failure. That's not the problem - problem is our failure to learn from our failures.

Mike offers four suggestions to help save our field:

- We need to return to our interdisciplinary roots and read each other's literature. It's a problem that we're all rewarded for writing, not for reading, our collective literature.

- Avoid technofetishism

- Find patient money that can support our work over time - Most projects Mike has worked on are 18 months or under.

- We need to find shared problems and methods especially in the realm of evaluation and assessment. Much as David Hilbert put through key problems in mathematics, we might want to identify the “Hilbert problems” in our field.

Onno Purbo makes it clear that he's an activist, not a researcher. He's both, actually, and he's been one of the key figures in building open, community wireless networks in Indonesia. These networks are designed to save the expense of buying technology from the outside world. “You can use kitchen tools to create a network,” he tells us. “These networks are easily replicable in communities, but its a surprise that it's possible to do these things. People don't believe it's possible until they see it on TV.”

Purbo sees a profound need to make information on community networking accessible to Indonesian communities. We need to translate from English into local languages. He's able to measure success by looking at Google Trends and comparing searches for networking information using English and Indonesian terms - the interest in the Indonesian terms is increasing over time, suggestion more people comfortable in Indonesian are seeking this information.

One area where Indonesians are producing and sharing knowledge is around the idea of the “healthy internet”. Parents and schools are interested in providing access to the internet, but filtering out pornography - they share tips and techniques through blogs that discuss “healthy internet”. He tells us that there are now 2 million blogs in Indonesia on this topic, and a weekly blog award for the best writings on the topic.

Purbo's wife focuses her work on ICT for women. She helps run a training program that spends three days teaching women how to operate office applications in Linux. The problem isn't the course - it's getting women to be able to take three days off from their work to take the training. Hivos has funded a salary for women participants, but this isn't a sustainable model.

Purbo's latest project involves using the internet within Indonesian schools. Only 4,000 or 240,000 have internet access, so the tools of choice are blogging platforms run from LiveCD or LiveDVD linux distributions, allowing for community publishing within a school, rather than on the live internet. (He offers us a distribution, but warns that it uses the Indonesian translation of WordPress.)

Finally, Purbo lets us know why he's videoing our proceedings. “People in Indonesia are more inclined to learn from video than from text.” He asks that groups like IDRC consider offering incentives for video creation rather than for creating more texts.

Alison Gillwald reacts to Laurent's provocations suggesting that open standards are neccesary, but not sufficient, to create innovation. On the idea of incentives versus interventions, she suggests that there are worthy activities - community media in minority languages, for instance - that can't ever be profitable but are still worth doing. Addressing Mike's questions about research, she notes that it's very hard to find African scholars writing about ICT4D - “the African academic ethos is highly uncritical.” We need to fund local policy interventions that have community involvement, and this might help create local scholarship to analyze the success of these interventions.

Rohan Samarajiva worries that the policy progress we've made is modest, and short term. “The real achievement would be long-term, enlightened policy,” not oriented towards quick wins.

David Malone wonders what we're missing in our discussions. He notes that we've focused heavily on mobiles, but hardly considered satellite television, which has also been a dramatic force for transformation in much of the world, especially the Arab world. He notes that Egypt's media environment has transformed almost entirely - no one watches state-controlled media anymore - they watch Al Jazeera. But this hasn't translated into activism on the ground, perhaps because activism on the ground doesn't pay.

Anita Gurumurthy is concerned about Laurent's question regarding interventions versus incentives, seeing an incentive strategy as overfocused on market mechanisms. She wonders if telecentres have failed because they were too early to provide services and content really useful to poor users. She points out that technologies are transforming public sphere, letting people come into the public sphere in new ways, and suggests that these capabilities go beyond the simple analysis of market supports.

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

Written by Ethan Zuckerman · comments (1)
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We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Professor Mike Best of Georgia Tech is our host at beautiful Ames Courtoom on the Harvard Law School campus for a conversation on ICT, development and freedom. The panel is absurdly illustrious: Amartya Sen, Michael Spence, Yochai Benkler and Clotilde Fonseca. Mike Best points us to Publius, where the essays framing our conversation today and tomorrow live - you can also find them on Global Voices.

Colin Maclay from Berkman notes how much of the conversation about ICT and development intersects with work we do at the Center, and nods towards our co-hosts IDRC, who he describes as doing the best work in the field of ICT4D. IDRC's president, David Malone, reminds us that his organization was founded by another Nobelist, and has a unique mission in development - conducting original research on what does and doesn't work in combatting poverty around the world.

Professor Best's introduction is interrupted by a (staged) phonecall from his mother. It leads him to declare, “This is an instrument of tyranny! Why do we celebrate the mobile phone as an instrument for human development in the Global South?” And he wonders if this is all we need to solve problems of communication in he developing world.

Dr. Sen notes that the mobile phone makes Mike's mother freer to call him. And he notes that the mobile phone may be considered in the same class as better nutrition - something we consider as an expansion of freedom, even if we can concieve of cases in which these devices have negative consequences. Improved nutrition can lead to increased domestic violence. But you'd never use this as an argument against better nutrition. A woman with a phone is free to call and report domestic violence, as a woman with good nutrition is free to work harder and share the benefits with her family. In other words, answering the question, “Do mobile networks enhance capabilities for the poor, his answer is: “Yes, yes, and but…”

Dr. Spence points out that when this group last convened, six years ago, mobile phone penetration was quite low. We speculated that mobile phone networks might outpace land-line penetration, and this has, in fact, come to pass. Mobile phones have avoided some of the effects of the “dead hand of the regulator”. Phones are a tool to fight oppression, he notes, as well as a tool that can allow you to save, invest and build a business. The cellphone allows delivery of key services - safe savings, the provisioning of credit. And it delivers information (or information lite) efficiently, and allows us to solve coordination problems.

Is that the whole answer? No. There's a whole set of answers about knowledge translation and learning which aren't well answered by the mobile phone. In our sessions today, Dr. Spence tells us, we agreed that the mobile phone is probably not the key ingredient in delivering education and knowledge transfer.

Mike asks Dr. Clotilde Fonseca to address mobile phones and learning environments in Costa Rica. She offers that the mobile is not yet a powerful device for learning, drawing a distinction between voice and data. Most of the mobiles and cellphones in the developing world don't carry data well.

Communication is complicated, she tells us. Parents give children phones, hoping for better communication… but kids view this as an invasion of their privacy, and often enjoy the phone for other uses - calculator, IM device, watch. Right now, these tools are most useful for communication, and not for learning.

Professor Benkler fields a question about the mobile phone and centralization - does the mobile phone centralize communications and knowledge, or does it open access to information? He points out that everything is relative. The mobile phone is enormously decentralizing as a tool for sharing information, he reminds us, noting the story of fishermen using the phone to seek the optimum price for their fish. He references mobile phone cameras and their power to capture protests in Iran, and the potentials of mobile banking through systems like M-PESA, these systems are radically decentralizing in relation to baseline structures of power.

But when you compare this architecture to the architecture to the internet, it's found sorely wanting. There are certain things you can and can't do with mobile phones. Brazilian software developers can compete as equals in the free software market, but not on a mobile phone - you need a much more complex machine and a more thorough set of skills. He references a story I told about Ushahidi and the ability of the phone company to slow the process with the issuance of a shortcode - the shortcode ends up being the bottleneck to certain types of innovation. Relative to the industrial economy of the 20th century - it's decentralized. Relative to our new world of the internet - it's weak, and we need to move more to this generative networks where new uses can be introduced without permission.

Mike celebrates the nuance of these answers, noting that there's generally been mobile phone euphoria in the ICT4D community. He turns to our online audience for questions about mobile phones - one of our questioners wants to know what levers for pressure we have over mobile phone networks to improve our current capacities and abilities?

Dr. Spence notes that there's nothing better than competition to create price pressure and increased quality of service. The worry we have is that regulators may now arrive and screw up what we've accomplished with this new network. Dr. Sen notes that there are situations where the market sends misleading signals - it's worth distinguishing between activities that are profit-friendly and those that aren't. Profits come in many different ways - lack of competition is one way to generate them, and that's how some mobile networks generate profits. In the US conversation about healthcare, we're experiencing fear about competition from a public competitor - apparently, that's enough to terrify people, which seems a bit absurd from a human development perspective.

Sen tells a story told earlier today, about the impact of mobile phones in changing Pakistani opinion on the Swat valley - see my earlier post. The point is that a mobile phone photo of a woman being flogged by the Taliban managed to change political opinion about a deal with Taliban authorities. The ability to take photos - and pretend you were calling your mother while you took them - turns the phone into a very powerful device. Regulation is important, he offers, but doesn't help us with these unexpected, unpredictable uses of these technologies.

Yochai points to the FCC Chairman's announcement of a net neutrality policy, pointing out that one of the most surprising aspects was an extention of the net neutrality principle to wireless access, specifically along the non-discrimination of applications. If we don't have perfect competition - a duopoly or similarly closed market - our next best bet is to ensure that these networks are open and behave much more like the internet. This is a step in the right direction - towards standards, habits and practices - which suggests you might create a more generative network in the US and the developing world. He point to networks in France and the adoption of wireless networks attached to a fixed wireless network to create a large, nomadic wireless network (ala Fon). If you push back a little on the idea that the solution all needs to be mobile, it's possible to build better, more open, more functional networks.

Mike tosses the classic “either/or” question to Dr. Fonseca - does it make sense to give a computer or a mobile phone to a person who doesn't have food security? This is a false dichotomy, she tells us. Development is not linear. We need to consider the capacities a person needs to be part of a new economy. Improving livelihood and access to better food, to the capacity to learn and to solve problems may all be connected. Mobiles are just devices that link to more powerful devices - if we just seem in isolation, we misunderstand the whole picture. They can be devices for capturing information and data, for communicating and connecting with objects. We need to think of these devices as ones that help solve problems in our community.

Sen echoes the skepticism about “this or that”. He feels like this sort of thinking plagues policy circles. “When I first came to India, someone asked me, ‘What three things would you do to better India?' I answered, ‘Why only three things? Why accept those limits?'… Food first, freedom later is the wrong way to think about it.” Complexity can be a difficulty, and sometimes we need to simplify, but simplifying into “which first, which later” isn't helpful - thinking about what the priorities should be is a more helpful way of simplifying.

Dr. Spence wonders about a dysfunctional propensity in debates over the developing world to look for silver bullets. The either/or question is a form of silver bullet - it's not something we ask in Silicon Valley, for instance.

Spence wonders whether the ability of people in developing nations, like India and China, have an advantage in discussing these ideas because they tend to be more practical and less ideological - they tend not to have the religious attachment to markets we have in this country. In China, if the financial leaders think there's a housing bubble, they go to the banks and increase capital markets for loans - we never do that in the US, because we believe the market takes care of it. It horrifies the purists - but we need to combine wise, analytical thinking with practical wisdom.

Yochai quotes Sen, saying, “I've heard democracies don't have famines.” He notes that government matters - it's possible to design ICT systems that help squeeze our corruption, as they seem to be in India as eGovernment systems come online. He references Ronaldo Lemos's story about LAN houses, 90,000 mostly illegal cybercafes, housing musicians who distribute using Orkut - a market that's entirely outside of existing market mechanisms, payloa systems for music. In a decentralized system, you get massive new opportunities for entrepreneurship, which leads to economic growth.

An online question focuses on the balance between preserving traditional knowledge and embracing remix culture. Questions from the audience concentrate on electric power, and reflect fascination with solar power charging battery systems? Another question wonders how governments can move from encouraging IT consumption to entrepreneurship. Mike asks Ineke Buskins to ask about gender - she asks what we can do in policy interventions to get rid of the mistake of dysfunctional “gender-blind” policies.

Dr. Spence warns us that decentralized energy systems don't relieve us from the responsibility to spend 5-7% of our economies on building infrastructure. They're transitional technologies. “If you want to enable rural people, you need to build roads so they can get in and out,” and participate in the market economy. You can work on these interim solutions, but don't let them blind you to the need to spend - significantly - on infrastructure that enables growth. Outside of the 13 fastest growing countries, infrastructure investment gets crowded out and stalls development.

Spence argues that gender-neutral isn't a good policy “in a world that's not gender neutral now. He notes how hard India's working on these projects - in India, he says, most people think that affirmative action to deal with systematic discrimination from the caste system, is a fair thing to do. Safety to and from school, appropriate lavoratory facilities are asymmetric interventions, but they make the process of education fairer for girls, making it possible for them to enter productive adulthood.

Yochai fields the question from the net on remix culture and cultural preservation. The ICT4D debate has been about distributing basic material capabilities to environments where they can be combined with human capabilities, increasing the potential for knowledge production and human development. The other resource beyond intelligence and creativity is culture - “we make new knowledge out of old knowlege, new culture out of new culture.”

We've had a parallel debate on open access to cultural materials. It's been part of the generalization of the trade system, the creation of the WTO and the incorporation of intellectual property into the world trade system. That's created a strong relationship between IP exporters (US, Europe, Japan) and IP importers (everyone else) where the exporters ask for their IP to be protected in exchange for opening their non-IP markets. The problem isn't that you don't have material tools, or creativity - the problem is that you can't use knowledge or culture because it belongs to someone else.

In a case of intellectual jiu-jitsu, we can protect indigenous knowledge with the same tools we use to protect Hollywood movies. This may not be intellectually coherent - we might argue that patents aren't useful for most inventions while trade protections are a way of protecting indigenous knowledge. Yochai worries this is a bad argument, a hard one to sell, and that we might be better off simply seeking complete open access to knowledge.

Sen notes that there's not only no gender-neutral situations - gender dynamics are buried, and harder to identify than class-based dynamics because there are no class lines within nuclear families. He references an old study in India - if you ask men “are you ill?”, 45% confess to being ill. 0% of women offer that answer. There was a theory, briefly, that perhaps women were healthier than men based on a statistical illusion, which had to do with an overreporting of dead male relations over female ones. Now, we're seeing in current studies in Calcutta similar health reports from men and women, suggesting that women are increasingly willing to grumble, which Sen takes as a good sign.

Fonseca references the OLPC and its experiments with powering computers via alternative energy sources. Alternative sources are important, but so is building extremely efficient computers and phones. On issues of technology literacy, she believes we need to look for technology fluency, the ability to understand the principles digital technologies interact within, and the existence of a cohort of young people who can move ahead, creating new applications, not staying connected to ones that will be obsolete in the short run. Finally on the gender discussion - she suggests we need to move beyond a purely policy-focused discussion, to a discussion about how men and women relate to technology. A Seymour Papert and Sherri Turkle paper identified diverse ways of interacting with programming and suggests we need to recognize different approaches, and not force a single mainstream approach.

And that's where we end. Mike Best suggests there's no way to summarize these discussions… but offers the observation that our field is filled with “ands”. Regulation matters, and technology matters, and capacity matters and government and infrastructure, and investment and women matter. “We need to embrace and and avoid or.”

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

Written by Ethan Zuckerman · comments (0)
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We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Had enough ICT for development? Me neither. But Professor Spence may have. He introduces the question for our last closed session, “Can we agree?” He suspects the answer is no, and invites us to go out for cocktails. But first he suggests we identify questions that are top research priorities for the ICT for development field.

Berkman Center's Yochai Benkler wants us to clearly identify our goals as concerns ICT and development. Are we seeking income growth in relation to relative poverty? Use of ICT that enables a sense of self, of well-being in the world, knowledge creation?
Important tension that we need to deal with in defining research agendas is how much of the agenda needs to be defining a range of plausible goals.

He sees an intriguing tension between systems that favor openness and freedom through a decentralized systems versus the relatively rapid diffusion of devices that enable communications through more centralized networks. We can think of this as mobile versus internet systems, or carriers versus open wireless networks. Again, to study this research agenda involves how strong assumptions about what questions we're trying to solve.

In our discussions today, we've seen a shift to thinking of knowledge, learning and innovation processes as social and economic practices. ICT is part of these processesm but it's layered on top of these social structures. In the past, we tended to think of knowledge and development as being about diffusion from high-knowledge to low-knowledge parts of the world. We now realize that creativity and insight happens everywhere in the world. Knowledge is always a creative reappropriation of what worked in one place into another, not a simple translation of a practice in one place to another.

Finally, Yochai offers a thorny question: are ICT issues simply a small part of much larger issues like gender and power relationship, povery and class relationships? If they are, must we solve these larger issues before addressing the ICT component. Or is
there a legitimate way of influencing these other systems through smart ICT interventions?

Rohan Samarajiva of LIRNE.net feels like he can agree with one of the people in the room, Nobel-winning economist Michael Spence, who believes we need to embrace the success of market forces in combatting poverty. Poverty reduction has occured through global markets, the spread of knowledge, the development of infrastructure and the establishment of “learning cultures”.

These are critical foundations for a knowledge-based economy: personal security, infrastructure, and learnign culture. But then we should leave application development up to actors in different countries. We need to embrace multiple innovation practives, letting computers and users innovate. “Who are we to decree who and how we innovate?”

Mobile networks are the networks for innovation for the developing world. Directly addressing my concerns that mobile networks are centrally controlled and less generative than open networks, he points to My Gamma, a social network for mobile phones. The company managing the network has users in 86 countries, without agreements from mobile phone networks. It is ad supported, without marketing salespeople, just based on online ad sales. He tells us that the service's inventor observed, “I don't aim to serve the blue-collar guys, but they seem to be using my service.”

(MyGamma, as it happens, is a web service running over WAP on data-enabled phones. In other words, the reason it works in 86 countries is because it's running on open protocols on a decentralized network.)

The evidence seems to be showing us that poor people won't be connected by anything other than wireless networks. ICT4D projects shouldn't build wireless networks - even telecentres are now connecting on the 3G networks. We need to embrace this wireless future.

Hernan Galperin offers some ideas we all shoudl be able to agree on:

- ICT matters to countries at the aggregate level.
- On a general level, we know what policies need to be in place to promote ICT investment and adoption.
- We cannot outperform the private sector in terms of scaling of communication networks.

There's a vast amount we don't agree on. We don't know what the true effect of ICT on poverty, and we don't know which policies are most important to building successful ICT policies. He critiques “the Benkler standard” - the idea of connectivity that's affordable, neutral, generative, open - as an unrealistic gold standard that describes no more than 10% of the reality of the developing world (Yochai interjects, “That much?”) He believes we need to embrace and celebrate technologies that might be less open but have greater reach, like indigenous programming on Brazilian satellite television. It's broadcast, not interactive media, but maybe it's the right way to reach large audiences.

We need to think more carefully about what we're trying to achieve. There are huge sunk costs in developing any of these paths - they require huge investments to build infrastructure, and it's hard to change path once we've gone in certain directions.

Finally, we need new indicators, beyond the small set of indicators that seem to have worked for the past few years. How do we define access? If I've got a telecentre 5km from my home - is that access? How does it compare to 10mbit/sec at home? How do we consider if communications are affordable? How do we measure people's skills? We need to answer these questions so we can see how we're doing in the long run.

Alison Gillwald acknowledges that mobiles are the default platform for the poor. But she wonders, “Is that all poor people are entitled to? Are we not creating greater equity issues between them and those who have access to high bandwidth?”

Before we accept the current situation, we need much better research and understanding of potential impacts of ICT. We need to understand what the high costs of communications in developing nations are doing not just in terms of personal usage, but on marginalized economies as a whole. Costs of bandwidth in Africa are orders of magnitude more than in the rest of the world. What does this mean for African development in the long run? Will it increase the gap between Africa and other developing nations?

Gillwald agrees that there's a basic set of good governance practices we can all agree to. She wonders why so few African nations have implemented them. “We're just reiterating the same solutions without understanding why they're not being implemented.” We need to look at the factors that make it so difficult to put these policies actually into place.

She notes that we have the tendency to celebrate people's creativity, innovating from constraint, inventing techniques like flashing. “Should we be satisfied with them? Perhaps this is all that's possible at the moment, but should we be content with this state?”

She worries that, in developing ICT4D policies, we tend to assume a functional state capable of managing processes of innovation - what's missing in the literature is discussion of large-scale institutional failure providing massive bottlenecks and constraints.

In South Africa, she worries about the rise of the state in terms of provisioning and operating communication services. “The historical record in this isn't good.” There's a backlash against markets due to economic crisis. She asks, “Wwhat's the role of the state in deploying ICTs for economic recovery? Is it spending state money on building a multi-million Rand backbone, or for creating an investment environment that enables this sort of development?”

Bill Melody of LIRNE.net takes his stab at a statement with “unquestioned agreement”: Poverty reduction is the empowerment of individuals and institutions in communities in poverty. Communication tools are powerful tools of empowerment.

But we disagree on appopriate uses of these technologies. We've remarkably bad at predicting how these technologies will be used. Based on study of the literature, it seems that use for communication is roughly ten times what was predicted by network designers. No one predicts where the communication will be - they usually expect users to connect to the capital city, but they tend to connect to one another in rural areas. The economic and social uses are different than what's predicted, and most predictions are totally wrong.

That's what we learned with the explosion of mobile telephony. We claim that mobile phone companies opened this market - that's totally false. The mobile networks were the innovation of poor people when they were enabled to use it the way they wanted to. Poor people spent much more income than we ever thought they would.

Melody revisits the old parable of teaching a man to fish so he eats forever, to make a comment on regulation and business: “If you teach a man to fish, that means he needs fishing equipment, which means he needs a business model to pay off the loans, and he needs a license and ways of dealing with quotas.”

He offers this story as a way of considering universal service funds, funds taxed from mobile phone operators to provide connectivity in rural areas. In many cases, these funds can't go to support community wireless networks. We celebrate openness and liberalization, but participation hasn't made it down all the way to local people.

The process of regulatory reform is a complex one. We all tend to recommend reforming the telecom industry, then the ICT sector. But communications providers are “anchor tenants”, who make it possible to extend networks to underserved areas. And while everyone wants a free, open market until they get in, once everyone is established in business, they then want to close the doors behind them.

Melody ends with kind words for our sponsor, IDRC, who he describes as the most farsighted funder in the ICT4D space.

Michael Spence offers the observation that economies that grow by building inclusive economies, economies that encourage involvement in multiple dimensions. He asks what IT has to do with inclusiveness, and suggests that it has “something to do with knowledge, and something to do with access to crucial services, like savings channels, access to credit.” There's great potential for entrepreneurship in poor populations - the issue is that there are missing pieces of economies that prevent that instinct from being exercised, like credit facilities.

Addressing the issues I raised in my paper and presentation, Spence says he doesn't dismiss the notion that technology choices should be made with an eye to the capacity to control, interfere with and shut down these network. (I'm suggesting, of course, that we choose tech that's hard to shut down and interfere with.) While he agrees that this consideration is “not crazy”, he suggests we not overfocus on this. “There are institutional failures all over the place - they're the main cause of stalled growth… If you're in a state that shuts down communication channels, there's something larger wrong.”

(He admits that this sets up an intersting paradox, as China is growing incredibly quickly, but shows extremely high willingness to control these communication channels.)

Spence offers the observation that our discussions may center on a very simple idea - we're seeing insufficient investment in infrastructure. If an average commitment of public sector resources to critical infrastructures, including education, might be 3 to 4% of government spending, the countries that are experiencing the most significant and sustained growth are spending 5 to 7%. The private sector can help, but if you don't see that high level of government spending, you won't see the improvements in infrastructure, education, and capacity necessary to sustain growth over long periods of time.

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

Written by Ethan Zuckerman · comments (0)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the conversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Clotilde Fonseca of Fundación Omar Dengo urges us to broaden our vision of technology and look at the potentials of technologies, not just how we believe they're best used. She starts with a story about Avancemos, a foundation that provides small grants to children and youth. Many of the kids of received these grants went off to buy mobile phones. This led to debates about whether this was a good or bad usage of funds. Adults analyzing the situation thought that it was troublesome that the children were spending so much money on phones. But kids saw them as watches, calculators, messaging tools,and resources for community building. They weren't especially interested in them as telephones.

Quoting Marshall McLuhan, she suggests that we face the danger of “looking at the future through the rear-view mirror.” Instead, we need to look at larger potentials of technologies. We have to avoid reductionist thinking, overly centered on the Internet. The revolution we're experiencing is a digital one, not just an Internet one - we can see the potentials of these tools, beyond uploading and downloading into the cloud, the potentials from productivity and communication tools.

We need to look forward because we need to make decisions about prioritizing investment. Otherwise, we end up with a deeply shortsighted strategy. This means addressing not just digital divides, but the cognitive divide: the intellectual gap to be able to profit from these technologies.

In the wake of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), it's disappointing that our plans continue to be so limited and technocentric. We need digital visions that focus not only on the technology but on bridging the cognitive gap that allows people to fully participate in Telliard de Chardin's noosphere. We need to consider the power of social netorks and the challenges to ensuring full access for developing world communities to these spaces. And we need to be careful to look for indicators which can actually capture the impact of these new tools.

(Fonseca's paper is here.)

Sabri Saidam (his paper), the advisor to Mahmood Abbas on telecoms and IT, suggests that we need to talk to the man and woman in the street about their perceptions of ICT. Based on his conversations, Saidam tells us that there are six key concerns he's developed:

- Lack of leadership - most leaders in the Arab world - and the world as a whole - don't understand the power of this technology and how it can help lead or impede development

- Senior citizens are rarely included in thinking about ICT

- Nations tend to be deeply allied with donor communities, and sometimes act against their own interest to satisfy donor needs

- The legal environment isn't conducive to technology development. Sabri has been working on the tender for a new mobile phone network. He tells us “I've been threatened with assasination so many times … people tell me, ‘The cost of getting rid of you is only a dollar or two, and you're costing us millions of dollars.'”

- Our educational system is weak, and it's dominated by Microsoft - we aren't getting exposure to other ways of building software and information systems.

- There isn't sufficient market competition - that competition only appears to be fierce.

He offers a demo of a statical tool developed to analyze IT usage in 10 Middle East markets. He shows a strong correlation between underlying literacy rates and the spread of ICT systems other than mobile phones, like Internet penetration.

Ineke Buskens (paper) wants us to consider the power aspects that underly our use of ICT. “The top of the pyramid is a problem as well as the bottom.” She warns us that “separation is an illusion” - problems like global warming and financial decline show us that we're all connected.

She warns that deep dynamics underly our assumptions about technology and power, citing a tension between Darwin and the church that doesn't rely on scientific timelines (creation within seven days) but on the idea of the fall. If there's evolution, perhaps there's no fall, and therefore no path towards redemption. She notes that the fall is inevitably blamed on women, in all three religions of the book.

ICT can “become the handmaiden of the systems, replicating the divisive characteristic of the systems”. She references a case in South Africa (I believe) where
mobile phones create a class system within a women's group, a division women who could afford to make calls and those who could only afford to beep.

“People adapt their preferences to a power-imbalanced world in order to survive in it.” This explains what happened in Zimbabwe at a computer lab where students were given time based on a first come, first served basis. Men gained almost all the access, and women were pushed away. When female students were asked why they weren't using the machines, they “spoke about their duties of wives and mothers at home keeping them away from the computers.” She argues that the students didn't have a conceptual framework to understand the access dynamics - when a researcher's intervention gave them a conceptual framework to question their role, they were abel to address their lack of access.

“There is no neutral space when it comes to knowledge and knowledge construction. I see a minefield of power dynamics everywhere,” and if we don't analyze this minefield, we only discover the mines when we step on them. She suggests we engage in “continuous and endless questioning of the concept of openness.” She suggests that Harvard's decision to publish academic papers on the university website will likely force other academic institutions to do the same - this technique will increase openness at the same time as it expands Harvard's prestige and influence, a virtuous cycle. She sees in open source “a dream for a more egalitarian society.” Our challenge is to ask what openness will be used for, what the intents behind the decisions to be more open.

Nancy Spence (paper) suggests we broaden our search for what matters most in considering gender and the digital divide. Millions of Bangladeshi women have become mobile users and providers. This isn't just about economic empowerment - it's also about relationships. “Family and social relationships are the highest contributors to well-being,” in human development - if mobile phones strengthen our interpersonal ties, that might be a benefit for human development.

We also should consider ICT and personal security, as well as ICT and disaster recovery - these subjects are of major importance for women.

When we consider ICT challenges that matter, we need to think about women as ICT producers, developers and decisionmakers, not just as consumers. This doesn't remove the need to consider access - there are vast challenges in this space - but our consideration needs to move farther and wider.

Spence tells us about a group called Asia Pacific Women's Watch. This group closely monitors a set of trade issues that affect women. These aren't just traditional literacy issues - these are issues about the WTO and the implication of power structures for women. She reminds us that we need to consider a very wide range of issues when we consider how technology affects women - when we think of girls education, we've learned to think about the importance of separate latrines, women teachers, incubation centers that help women's businesses. We need a similarly broad and complex set of understandings of women and ICT.

I apologize for not capturing the full dynamics of our discussion in this session - I was one of the discussants, and spent the discussion dodging extremely difficult questions about technological determinism. For a sense for what I said, here's my paper. I will mention a lovely joke from Sabri Saidam, about three dictators who love technology:

One holds two fingers to his ear and starts talking - the other two ask, “what are you doing?” He responds, “I'm receiving a call.” The second dictator starts blinking on and off, and the other ask, “What's going on with you?” He responded, “I'm receiving a video.” The third is Yasser Arafat, notorious for mumbling and for his quavering lips. The other two asked, “What are you doing?” Arafat answered, “I'm receiving a fax.”

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

Written by Ethan Zuckerman · comments (1)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

The primary format at the Harvard Forum is short presentations by invited participants. We've all submitted two-page papers (a very few of which actually occupied only two pages) and speakers are taking turns amplifying and expanding these papers, and receiving feedback from the room.

Ronaldo Lemos, the director of the Center for Technology & Society at the Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School in Rio de Janeiro, is a leading advocate for Creative Commons and open access to knowledge. His paper focuses on LAN-houses, a unique, local form of cybercafe. Lemos notes a comment from Professor Sen, that “ICTs are important because unpredictable things happen.” These LAN-houses are a good example of this unpredictability.

The Brazilian government subsidized the purchase price of home computers. Adopters of this program used the subsidy to buy computers to build gaming labs and cybercafes - LAN-houses. 49% of people in 2007 in Brazil were accessing the internet through one or more of 90,000 LAN houses. That compares with 2,000 movie theatres or 2,600 bookstores - the LAN houses span the country from extremely poor neighborhoods through the middle of the Amazon.

These LAN houses, Lemos argues, are changing the Brazilian public sphere. The forthcoming elections will be the first where a majority of Brazilians are online. In the previous election, the government simply banned the use of online technologies for campaigning. There's been a lively debate, and now there's somewhat restricted access to the Internet for campaigning and political discussion.

The media landscape in Brazil has, traditionally, focused on “classes A&B”, elite classes. The potential of digital media is to expose the culture of lower classes. He points out that YouTube videos for widely known Brazilian artists like Jobim have perhaps a million views, while “underground” artists are getting tens of millions of views. This represents a democratizing of the media landscape.

Lemos suggests we look at Orkut - a social network on Yahoo used mainly by Brazilians - reflects Brazilian society as a whole. Upper-class Brazilians, he suggests, are fleeing to Facebook, aided by a media narrative that condems Orkut. But the Orkut community is 30 million, while there are only 4 million on Facebook. There's a new word - “orkutized” - to describe a place too popular to be useful anymore.

Anita Gurumurthy, the founder and director of IT for Change, asks us to imagine people independent of the gadgets that connect them. There's tremendous range for women to be involved with community IT efforts, but we also need to concentrate on their needs independent of this technical context. (Her paper is here.)

She reminds us that previous focuses on ICT4D have promoted a social enterprise model, led by private sector interests. This, she argues, means that arguing for women's empowerment required demonstrating why this is good for the economy. When development strategy focused on eGovernment, it looked strictly at engaging the private sector in building egovernment solutions.

There's been little critique of market-based development, Gurumurthy argues. While some alternative public-finance models did show a way to design telecentres useful to the poor, these models were completely eclipsed by the market-based discourse. When market-based telecentres collapsed, the blame was put on the poor, arguing that there was no demand for services.

Gurumurthy sees this mistake being repeated in the world of mobile phones. We've adopted a proprietary network model where individuals are locked into network providers. She wonders who is to produce services to the poor that market may have no incentive to build, ad argues that the failure of market-led social enterprise models are now being used to prop up the mobile telephony model.

We need to avoid a network society in which participation could be no more than owning a gadget. She suggests there's an overemphasis on privacy, security, individual rights and an underemphasis on institutional tranparency, community computing and informatics, all of which she sees as necessary for an information society that benefits the poor. The questions are more political, not just about practical, palliative solutions to connect individuals with gadgets.

Ophelia Mascarenhas focuses her remarks on PICTURE, a four-country research project she's coordinated from Tanzania. She notes that in the past several years, mobile phone penetration has increased from 1.2% to 25%. The people she surveys say that the biggest change in their lives is the ability to communicate quickly via mobile phone. Countering expectations, these technologies are more used by women than men, more used by people below the poverty line than the rich. The radio is still the most important information technology for receiving information in poor populations, but that function's been displaced by the mobile phone in richer communities.

There's no training in the use of these mobile phones, she tells us, but people discover extremely creative ways of using these tools - sending simple messages by “flashing” or “beeping” while avoiding the cost of completing a call. These costs are extremely high, and there are real disparities in access between rural and urban areas. Notably, financial transfer systems like M-PESA don't work in very rural areas - instead, there's only the ability to transfer airtime, which is only useful for much smaller sums.

She warns that ICT can be a way of siphoning money out of a country. “In East Africa, we're receivers of the technology. Money flows out when we bring the tech in.” There's no local R&D and production of technology. She wonders how African countries can build local capacity, and wonders whether we shouldn't be seizing some of this capital outflow to fight poverty.

At the end of her remarks, Mascarenhas notes that she hadn't discussed the internet at all. Simply put, access to the Internet is so limited in Tanzania, she doesn't consider it nearly as important to discuss as mobile phones.

Lawrence Liang, the founder of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, offered an especially provocative and creative paper to the Harvard Forum. The paper refers to a visit by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere to a set of cybermohallahs, “cyber-neighborhoods” create in Indian cities to provide opportunity and access to the poor.

Ranciere has written about the fascination French intellectuals of the 19th century had with laborers. Intellectuals praised the life of the laborer to the extent that Ranciere refers to Victor Hugo's praise for the “words of a worker” as “exclusion by homage”, a celebration that separates rather than treating laborers as co-equals.

At the same time, when looking at the actual intellectual life of these laborers, many of the laborers sought to write literature and poetry, seeking the bourgeois pursuits that the intellectuals sought to transcend. Liang argues that “we all need intellectual lives” and that the conditions to lead those intellectual lives are unequally distributed.

The most radical possibilities of ICT suggest a redistribution about who's entitled to participate in shaping a community's sensibilities. Liang sees piracy as the battlefield on which this reshaping is taking place. Ultimately, he argues, we need to move to a dialog that matches equality to equality, not inequality to equality - the very paradigm of providing access to balance inequality can make the playing field unlevel for these interactions.

Alison Gillwald focuses on Gurumurthy's presentation, which she saw as making the case that market models had failed to end poverty. What alternatives was she suggesting? Are those alternatives supply driven, not demand driven?

Gurumurthy explains that she wants to see markets embedded in society, not society embedded in markets. She focuses remarks on eChoupal, a project of an Indian transnational which attempted to both enable poor farmers to sell to larger markets. She sees the project as being more about constructing a market in poor communities for the company's products. The problem, she argues, with the Bottom of the Pyramid model is that it turns the poor into consumers capable of paying for essential social services, like water, education and communication. Is this an inversion of social responsibility that we're really comfortable with instituting?

Yochai Benkler notes that Lemos and Gurumurthy are telling stories that illustrate different complications in the relationship between markets and governments. Lemos's story is a classic example of a government subsidy turning into entrepreneurial growth. It's possible that the government might respond by saying, “Wait, we wanted to you to stay poor, just with a computer, not to build your own businesses!” E-Choupal, as described by Gurumurthy, is a project designed to cut out local middlemen, and its failure focuses on consolidation and elimination of existing market actors. He wonders what dialog there is between Gurumurthy's identification of people's desire to provision and contro their own food, and Liang's observation about the need to control one's own intellectual life.

Rohan Samarajiva offers some data to add to our conversation. He talks about surveys he's helped run in Sri Lanka which ask whether people are using ICT “for the right reasons”. The surveys asked what people used their mobile phones for. “Entertainment and family connection always lead in volume,” but this doesn't mean these tools don't have instrumental - “proper” - uses, like calling the doctor while you're having a heart attack.

Provocatively, he argues that “if we're not using government money, what's the problem?” We're not using government money in the mobile space - “we're freeing up government money” to educate, provision water or buy armaments. So what's our problem with these networks, as they're freeing government to use more of their own funds?

Clotilde Fonseca is struck by Lawrence Liang's talk, which she sees as addressing the importance of the poor being empowered by intellectual development. She cites a recent book by Robert Reich, which talks about the “weakening of the routinary workers and the
power of the symbolic analysts.” Those most empowered are those who have the intellectual power to be creative, to develop their minds. She warns of an “epistomelogical fallacy - equating information and knowledge” - we need to focus less on provisioning information and more on creating the capacity to build knowledge.

Mascarenhas argues that what's being promoted on mobile networks is simply communication and entertainment - if information that could make people more successful and more economically productive, there would be demand for this information and a radically different usage pattern.

Lemos closes the discussion addressing informality. The success of the Brazilian government's subsidy program was its informality - it allowed anyone to go to a store and buy a computer. Had it been significantly more careful, it just wouldn't have worked. The businesses he's celebrating are, for the most part, informal and unregulated. Regulations can be a massive problem - he tells us that a regulation which characterized LAN-houses as gambling establishments meant they could only be opened 2km from schools… which meant there were only two legal locations in Rio, one of them in state forest. Needless to say, without legislative change, these businesses have stayed informal. The question, Lemos suggests, is how to institute necessary formal structures without eliminating the magic of innovation.

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

Written by Ethan Zuckerman · comments (3)
Share: Donate · facebook · twitter · reddit · StumbleUpon · delicious · Instapaper

We're here in part so that you can have a voice in the discussions. Please feel free to post questions on Twitter, using the #idrc09 tag, or as comments on Global Voices posts - we'll try hard to work those questions into the coversation here at Harvard. You may also want to use Berkman's “question tool“, which will be used to put questions to the panelists at a public event this evening.

Professor Sen reminds us of the long history of ICT and international development with the story of a gift made to the Dehli School of Economics in the 1960s. Someone asked him, “Would you like to have an IBM 1620?” He didn't know whether this was a personal gift, perhaps to put on his desk. So he asked, “How big is it?” The answer: “You'll need a couple of rooms.”

The computer was transformational for his students, he tells us, because theywere mathematically skilled but had no access to technology. At the same time, he wonders whether technology can function as a replacement for schooling. “Anything that keeps you at home in front of a box doesn't put you in front of the children from other families that don't share the prejudices your family had.”

Michael Spence outlines two critical factors that have transformed many developing economies, leading to 7-10% economic growth in some societies, poverty reduction at astonishing rates - though not everywhere - but prospectively for 3.5 billion people. These inputs are political leadership that establishes inclusive governance, and access to a global economy. This global economy includes the influence of entrepreneurship, bottom-up and market based innovation, as well as a gigantic global market where businesses can expand, and most critically, knowledge.

Michael offers us a choice - would we rather see a society face complete destruction of its infrastructure while retaining its knowledge, or face some sort of massive amnesia which destroyed accumulated knowledge but left the buildings standing? His answer - it's easy: choose to lose your buildings. “The state of an economy is what it knows how to do.” Countries that are engaging in very rapid growth, like China and India, have found ways to learn very quickly as well.

Prior to our event, participants have submitted two-page papers (you can read them here), and Randy Spence offers a quick overview of the themes identified, focused on the question of “What's changed?” in the past six years of ICT and development. His highlights:

- We've seen a dramatic increase in mobile phone usage. Usage is up to 90% in some developing economies, and there doesn't seem to be large gender or income gaps in usage. That's the good news. But we're seeing monopolization and increasing prices. And there's no guarantee that mobile phones are a smooth path towards full inclusion in the internet.

- Issues of digital rights raise key questions about openness of knowledge. There are open questions about what needs to be done in terms of policy to ensure expansion of apropriate access and protection of the ability to participate.

- We're starting to see the benefits of increased access to ICT. There's more evidence and these benefits seem to be substantial, even if they are uneven. The ability to communicate and organize is particularly important in political terms.

- ICT has become holistically integrated into other development and community action projects, recognizing that ICT is a critical part of development strategies, not a stand-alone activity.

- We need to be careful about cybercrime and other vulnerabilities associated with our digital age and need to minimize these negative impacts.

Michael Spence offers the observation that what's important is not just access, but “access to capability services… what we used to call ‘applications.'” He wonders what the obstacles are to building these useful applications - what's really getting in the way. Bill Melody offers his diagnosis. Discussions about the regulatory environment in the Asia Pacific region show that a protectionist logic are coming into play, especially as regards the US's inflexibility on intellectual property rights.

Yochai Benkler, who's been studying the access to knowledge movement, suggests that we need to consider more than technological structures, but also social structures that encourage experimentation and making mistakes. The focus on ICT4D, he tells us, tends to focus us on technical structures - we need to focus on flows of knowledge, the social and intellectual structures that support learning and innovation. This, in turn, means that patents and copyrights need to be introduced into our debate, as well as the development of a clear understanding of how ICT for development becomes embedded in social structures.

Michael Spence suggests that we need a practical set of solutions to intellectual property questions. We might go down a road that encourages intellectual property owners to engage in multi-tiered property systems as well as government subsidy to encourage this new pricing flexibility.

Rohan Samarajiva urges us not to forget “the basics” as we move into discussions of intellectual property. He points out that Myanmar has only 375,000 mobile phones, fewer lines than fixed telephony lines. When we consider post-cyclone recovery, it's hard to know what we can do in such infrastructure-poor environments. This isn't just North Korea and Myanmar - this includes Ethiopia, Eritrea, Papua New Guinea, Cuba and other environments.

David Malone, the president of IDRC, talks about a proposed project to create a “university of the north”, connecting people in circumpolar regions. Politicians were excited about the idea because they saw it as cheap way of delivering education. Unfortunately, these projects often demand huge investment - we need politicians to be realistic about the costs.

Malone suggests that students around the world are often ill-served by professors at second and third-tier universities who “haven't had an original thought since their graduate studies.” These students turn to the Internet to feed their curiosity, and he warns that few people have the knowledge to navigate the poorly organized universe of online knowledge.

Alison Gillwald notes that countries know about the solutions associated with ICT4D and have “rhetorically committed” to pursuing them, but haven't liberalized markets or created independent regulators that would enable these solutions to be deployed. Connectivity is critical for any of these interventions, especially in Africa where home internet penetration is below 1% - “Can we have discussions about internet governance if we don't have internet?” On the other hand, developing countries need to be involved with debates around intellectual property, or they risk being locked out of these discussions in the long run.

Hernan Galperin offers a distinction between tacit and codified knowledge. He wonders whether IP is really a critical issue on the ground in all the countries we're considering. He points to software and media businesses in the developing world that aren't based on patenting and copyrighting. Intellectual property addresses a specific set of codified knowledge issues - this may not be as relevant in all nations and economies as in some where codified knowledge is the key point.

Ophelia Mascarenhas and Michael Best continue this line of questioning - is intellectual property the key set of issues to consider when we think of ICT4D? Mascarenhas notes that we need to be considering the capacity for developing local knowedge, not just accessing knowledge from the outside. Mike Best references some past research he's conducted in Tamil Nadu that suggests that communication technologies like instant messaging and voice calls are 2 to 4 more times as popular as knowledge-seeking activities online. In Ghana, his evidence suggests that email is the number one activity.

Amartya Sen wonders whether we run the risk of overemphasizing the importance of culture in isolation. He notes that UNESCO had previously emphasized the development and preservation of local culture over global, which “ended up being disastrous.” There is “no such thing as ‘unaided culture',” culture that exists in isolation.

He goes on to suggest we might consider success stories involving technology and governance. There was widespread apathy about Pakistan's deal with the Taliban in the Swat valley, he tells us - people consider Swat to be very far away and almost irrelavent. But when an activist shot video of a young woman being caned on a mobile phone, that video forced action from the Pakistani human rights commission, and went onto national television, generating a great deal of interest and anger. He references Mo Ibrahim, a succesful telecoms entrepreneur on the African continent, who argues for the importance of governance, offering a prize for good governance. But Ibrahim's story suggests that we dismiss the view that nothing can happen until political leadership changes - the massive profitability of his own operations suggest the possibility of positive change through technology.

Reflecting on his childhood in Burma, Sen wonders whether Myanmar might be surprisingly well positioned to engage in a future internet revolution. Not only does the country enjoy a high rate of literacy, but it's been the most literate country in Asia for centuries. He wonders what transformations are possible through “monks wielding internet-connected telephones.” At the same time, he acknowledges that the governing regime is well aware that this level of connection would threaten their authority and is therefore unlikely to allow it to happen.

Yochai is concerned that some “talking past” is taking place regarding intellectual property. There's both local knowledge and learning across borders. IP is important in the wrong ways, he argues - it's important to let a software service company in Argentina or Brazil to compete with a US company because both companies use open source software. As for Mike Best's point about the importance of communications over content - Yochai argues that this demands protection from overagressive IP laws of the ability to innovate and create new communication forms.

Anita Gurumurthy argues that it's a false dichotomy to oppose the importance of access and the terms of access. She takes a swing at Mike Best, arguing that saying that people want communications not content is like saying that Indian girls want to learn to cook and clean, not to learn in school. Randy Spence defends Mike's distinction, listing several critical forms of interaction that involve little knowledge transfer - the transmission of money across a network, the phonecall that includes a job offer. This is clearly a complex issue - Michael Spence offers a closing comment, wondering if there are really policy issues associated with recognizing the importance of communication as well as content. “My own personal view is that, unlike the intellectual property sector, this [communications] is a sector that's doing just fine.”

- Day 1-
1) Update from the Harvard Forum on ICT4D
2) Markets, Mobiles and the ability to make culture
3) The complex world of ICT and gender
4) Are we satisfied with what we've got?
5) ICT4D and, and, and

- Day 2 -
1) What do we need to know?
2) Faith and focus

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Photo by Ghanaelections2008

With this as a backdrop, the Presidential election in Ghana is seen by some as a test for democracy on the continent. Military coup leader Jerry Rawlings was democratically elected twice, and surprised critics by stepping down - as he was constitutionally mandated to - in 2000. John Kufuor of the opposition NPP was elected, and served two terms. The first round of Presidential elections took place on December 7 2008, and ended with NPP candidate Nana Akufo-Addo leading NDC's John Atta-Mills by a small margin.

The runoff election took place yesterday, December 28, and early results suggest that NDC is likely to return to power after an eight year absence. The vote has been extremely close, though some reports suggest that turnout was not as strong as in the first round of voting.

As Elia Varela Serra reported earlier this month, Twitter has become the tool of choice for breaking news around the election. Ghanaelections, a Twitter feed maintained by the African Elections Project, has been streaming news and provisional results throughout. A recent Twitter update noted:

EC to declare results of the Presidential Run-off on on Tuesday December 30 at 12:00 GMT

And a few hours ago:

Provisional Results from 226 out of 230 constituencies: NPP-4,365,158 (49.48%) NDC-4,456,538 (50.52%)

Other Ghanaians are also using Twitter to report on the mechanics of voting and on the reactions of partisans to the results.

Edlynne, visiting Ghana from Toronto, reported on December 26:

Saw police intervene in rally of opposing party supporters in Dwtn Accra 2day. Riot shields & guns. Hope election will be peaceful in Ghana

AfricaTalks is monitoring the media coverage, noting that local radio and television is dominated by analysis of the events. He reports:

big celebration around the NDC head office off Ring Road central in Accra. For an old clip see http://tinyurl.com/a46yrg

It's clear that the runoff election has not proceeded as smoothly as the parliamentary election. CODEO, the non-partisan Coalition of Domestic Election Observers, reports 34 cases of missing election materials and 24 cases of disorder, intimidation or violence at poling places. Despite these troubling reports, an official statement from CODEO confirms the validity of the electoral process:

As with the presidential and general elections of December 7, CODEO observers reported many lapses in the voting process in the presidential runoff election of December 28, including setting up and opening of polling stations, voting and vote counting. However, the problems reported by CODEO observers do not fundamentally undermine the integrity of the overall process.

CODEO is asking the Electoral Commission of Ghana to allow voting to continue in the Tain district of the Brong-Ahafo region. Voting did not take place at some polling stations, and the political situation in the region has been very tense, with the local Electoral Commission office set on fire a few weeks ago. Given the close results, votes from this district could determine the outcome of the election. Kwabena Akuamoah-Boateng wryly notes on Twitter:

has the brong-ahafo retained the title ‘chameleon of ghana politics'?

With the election still undecided, and current victory margins within a percentage point, the situation between political party representatives at the Electoral Commission is understandably tense. But very few Ghanaians are panicking on Twitter feeds or the message boards on sites like GhanaWeb. Quite the contrary, as expressed by Kwabena's enthusiastic update as the counting was underway in several polling stations:

went around some polling stations in sunyani. we're on course. Ghana has already won!

KwameOh, watching from London, is an exception with his sceptical update about the first results:

something smells at EC, figures from god knows where arriving at EC, do not let your mandate be stolen…We call on the International community, to help us at this time, if not there will be bloodshed in Accra tonight we beg

Most observers are far less worried and more philosophical. Ghanaian blogger Nubian Cheetah, in Accra for the holidays, writes:

The populas have spoken in Ghana. They want change!

mawulitse agrees:

change is good, and change will come to Ghana

also noting:

Accra is calm but anxious

AndKofucious simply can't wait for the final results tomorrow:

The 30th??!! come on this is not good! I am not pro-NDC but if they are leading as of now, let them win so they can setup their cabinet

As the results are announced and the implications of the election become more clear, it's likely that we'll see detailed analysis in Ghanaian blogs. Writing before the runoff, Mighty African offered a provocative set of ten questions for Ghanaian voters to consider, the first one of which was:

Don’t you think we need to change ourselves for us to move forward or change, etc?

He also offered ten questions each for the NPP and the NDC.

Omanba, writing on the GhanaThink message boards, offers a breakdown of Ghanaian voters, including categories of supporters like “the swaying swaggermaniacs” and “the deaf, blind and dumb votes”. One can only hope for such colorful analysis of the cabinet picks of an incoming administration.

Any analysis of the 2008 Ghanaian elections will need to look closely at the role of technology in both campaigning and monitoring the vote. Katrin Verclas, twittering at mobileactive, reminds us that the election monitors have been using a sophisticated SMS-based system:

Codeo Ghana also conducted a parallel vote tabulation using SMS for data delivery to ensure that results compiled by the EC are reliable.

Using a rigorous statistical sampling method, the observers have confirmed the closeness of the run-off election and are helping assure domestic and international audiences that the second round has been a valid vote.

Oluniyi David Ajao, a Nigerian blogger living and working in Ghana, reported another novel use of mobile phones in the election:

When I saw a call on my cellular phone from a number +233 10 0000, my heart missed a bit. And why not? This was a very strange phone number that I know does not exist but I still answered the phone, albeit cautiously. Lo and behold, it was the voice of the ruling NPP's Presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, speaking in Twi and essentially asking me to vote for him. The message lasted exactly 45 seconds.

I could tell that it was a recorded message. This must be one of the last minute campaign strategies by the New Patriotic Party, to sway the floating voters. I can see that we are indeed moving forward with technology in Ghana.

Akufo-Addo wasted his call, as David reminds us, since as a Nigerian, he can't vote.

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Ivan Sigal, Georgia Popplewell. Both photographed at the Global Voices 2008 summit in Budapest by Global Voices board member, Joi Ito.

Global Voices has been searching for an Executive Director for the past year, transitioning the management of the project from co-founders Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman. In February, we promoted Georgia Popplewell, formerly our managing editor, to Managing Director, where she manages the day to day operations of our international community. Ivan will be working closely with Georgia, focusing on the long-term strategy of the project, on partnerships, fundraising and sustainability of the organization. We're thrilled to have the chance to work with someone so passionate about the potential of citizen media and knowledgeable about the global media environment.

Ivan is an award-winning photographer, currently working on a book on Central Asia. At our recent summit in Budapest, his workshop for bloggers on photography was one of our more popular events. Ivan has been blogging at Ivonotes, and we're looking forward to reading what he thinks about his new role, which he'll begin in mid-August.

Welcome to Global Voices, Ivan - we're glad to have you here.

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This is likely to be an extraordinarily challenging task, but for the right person, it's a terrific opportunity to help our community reach new heights. The job description follows below - please feel free to share it with anyone you think might be helpful to us.

Global Voices is seeking an Executive Director to oversee the Global Voices Online, Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy projects and the community that supports these endeavors. Global Voices is a multinational virtual organization, supported by the paid and volunteer efforts of over 100 people on every continent. Our executive director must possess a wide range of professional and personal skills to help our project reach its potential as the leading international citizen media community online.

The Executive Director will be responsible for the following:

- Management oversight of Global Voices major programs, including direct management of team leaders for the website, language translation, advocacy and outreach projects
- Draft and manage operating budgets for the organization
- Fundraising responsibility, which includes grant writing and creating networks to increase funds
- Maintaining relationships with past, current and future foundations and corporations in order to maintain and increase funding base
- Financial management of the organization
- Maintaining relationships between a governing board, advisory board, paid staff and volunteer staff
- Overseeing PR/media relations for the Global Voices network of projects
- Extensive travel in the course of representing Global Voices

Specifically, we are seeking a director with

- Strong leadership skills
- Experience managing a multilingual, multicultural team
- Experience supporting nonprofit or commercial projects through corporate and foundation fundraising
- Experience working with mainstream news outlets and journalists
- Experience with or strong understanding of citizen media, including blogging, podcasting, and videocasting
- Experience managing substantial ($1m+) budgets
- Strategic planning experience, preferably in a nonprofit or media context
- The ability to work independently and be able to produce results

To work effectively with our community, we would prefer that candidates:
- Have experience living and working internationally, or have traveled extensively in the developing world
- Are active bloggers or creators of online media
- Are multilingual, with fluency in English and at least one other language
- Have experience working in diverse, multicultural environments.

The ideal candidate must have a passionate commitment to the values and goals of Global Voices, they will be joining a well established team of editors and authors who are dedicated to amplifying the voices of world. There is no geographic requirement associated with this position - Global Voices has no office, headquarters, etc. - but substantial travel is expected. Candidates must have access to broadband internet connectivity and comfort working in a wholly virtual environment. We strongly welcome candidates from outside North America and Europe and encourage people currently working on the Global Voices project to apply.

To express your interest, please send a cover letter and CV to “edjob AT globalvoicesonline DOT org” by December 7th.

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Suitable candidates will have a strong understanding of the international blogosphere, journalism or technical writing experience, excellent management and leadership skills, and strong experience as a public speaker or technical trainer. Strong spoken and written English is a must - skill in other languages is a strong plus. We are very unlikely to consider candidates who are not active bloggers - links to the blogs you participate in are a key portion of a cover letter or resume for this position. Active involvement in the Global Voices community is a strong plus.

Global Voices expects that the Outreach Director will focus 40-50 hours per week on the position, with a great deal of schedule flexibility. Some international travel is required as part of the position, including attendance at the Global Voices annual meeting (travel funding will be provided.) The Outreach director reports to the acting managing director of Global Voices, and later to the executive director - she or he will be an active part of the Global Voices senior management team.

This position does not require relocation. All Global Voices jobs are virtual - people work from their home countries and connect with other Global Voices staff via the Internet. This job is open to residents of any nation. Salary will be based on experience.

To apply, please send a letter of interest along with CV or resume to ethan@globalvoicesonline.org

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Suitable candidates will have a strong understanding of the international blogosphere, technical understanding of the mechanisms of internet filtering and circumvention (proxies, Tor, anonymizing techniques), and journalism or technical writing experience. Active involvement in developing world anticensorship efforts is a strong plus, as is active involvement in the Global Voices community.

Global Voices expects that the Advocacy Director will focus 20-25 hours per week on the position, with a great deal of schedule flexibility. Some international travel is required as part of the position, including attendance at the Global Voices annual meeting (travel funding will be provided.) The Advocacy director reports to the acting managing director of Global Voices, and later to the managing director - the advocacy director will be expected to participate in the Global Voices editorial process, serving alongside regional editors, translation editors and our human rights video editor, and to contribute advocacy-related posts to the Global Voices website.

Update Several people have asked if this job requires relocation. It does not. All Global Voices jobs are virtual - people work from their home countries and connect with other Global Voices staff via the Internet. This job is open to residents of any nation.

We are able to offer an annual salary of $25-30,000 USD for this position, based on experience. To apply, please send a letter of interest along with CV or resume to ethan@globalvoicesonline.org

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Portnoy Zheng leads a project to translate articles from Global Voices into Chinese. His reason for launching the project was a sense that it was very hard to get relavent international news in the Taiwanese mainstream media. He began translating with a story from Indonesia on Global Voices, talking about a plane crash caused by overloading a plane with durian which killed a number of Indonesian politicians (Durian is an inherently funny fruit, which may explain why Portnoy felt compelled to provide a pan-Asian translation.) After translating about 100 posts, he met Rebecca in Taiwan and decided to formalize the project. There's now a site - maintained by about 10 translators - which translates a subset of Global Voices articles. There's no clear guidelines to which ones are included - usually posts that talk about China or north Asia, and often articles about controversy in the Middle East, which Portnoy feels don't get covered closely enough in Chinese media.

David points out that Global Voices currently translates only a small subset of the languages of the blogosphere - we translate content from Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, French, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Russian and occasionally Serbian and Ukrainian. In other countries, we neccesarily misrepresent the local conversation, showing off only a few people in the country who happen to be bilingual. He points us to a recent blog post titled “Africa, Global Voices y el anglocentrismo cool”, which argues that if you don't speak English, you don't show up on global voices. David's looking for ways to turn critique like this into involvement - what would be involved with getting the author of this post to help translate GV into Spanish and translate Spanish posts on GV?

David starts outlining some of the questions we're facing in dealing with translation on GV:
- How do we encourage blogger translation? How do we get more people doing this?
- Do we need permission from bloggers before we start translating their work?
- Should we translate non-English comments into English to encourage conversation?
- Should we let people translate all our posts, using the Indymedia model which allows people to click a tab, choose a language and offer their own translation?

This last question raises the issue “Why isn't everything put onto the site also put into MediaWiki, letting people translate on the fly?” The simple answer: maybe it should be - we've not spent enough time thinking through how to making the site translatable. One of our community editors points out that we have to make very careful decisions about what we translate - it's an editorial choice as much as the stories we select for the site.

Two suggestions that got widespread applause and enthusiasm:
- finding a way to reward volunteer translators, perhaps with Amazon Rewards dollars or other currency
- making it possible for people to offer their reading of GV posts in translation from a link on the site.

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The goal of the demonstration is to draw attention to online censorship in the thirteen nations RSF terms “Internet black holes” - by clicking on a map of these nations, users register their protest against Internet censorship and for the release of over 60 cyber-dissidents currently under arrest for writings on their blogs.

The protest takes specific aim at Yahoo!, inviting users to record messages for the company's founders. Yahoo! is a special target for RSF because the company's has cooperated with Chinese authorities in investigations of journalists, supplying information that helped lead to the arrest of Shi Tao, a journalist serving a ten year sentence for “divulging state secrets abroad.”

RSF is also inviting visitors to the site to start blogs hosted by the organization - RSF will feature opinions from these blogs on in a weekly section titled “The Blog View of the World”. Finally, RSF will be launching a version of their site in Arabic, complementing the current versions in French, Spanish and English.

We're very grateful for the hard work that RSF does to promote online freedom and openness. Please visit their site today and show your support for their efforts.

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