By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 31 January 2008
Main categories: Connectivity, Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Education & e-Learning, Hardware, ICT4D, Meetings, Nonprofits, Online Volunteering, Open Access
Other tags: cooperacion20, cooperacion20_2008, cybervolunteer, ICT volunteer, nptech, telecenter, telecentre
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Lady Virginia Mugarra Velarde
Education for HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases prevention
The role of ICTs to educate about sexually transmitted diseases prevention, especially to educate educators.
An important aspect of such education is to ease the communication between the physicists and their patients.
Goals
- Train educators about these diseases… and how to educate about them
- Sensitize youngsters about prevention
- Mobilize policy makers
The main successes are, above all, the speed and spread of information and training, with a strong focus on prevention, which is where information can actually make a difference.
Tools: a platform with three axes (1) content (2) spaces for debate (3) online assistance
[note: in this session, cybervolunteer = ICT volunteer, not online volunteer. See my Online Volunteering Taxonomy for more details]
Volunteers experts in ICTs to help users in telecenters.
Volunteers are trained about attitudes, techniques, the environment they are going to work in, the target beneficiaries of the several activities, etc.
The public-private partnership between the regional administration (coordinating the project) and the local administrations and telecenters a must for success.
Training for nonprofits about technology for nonprofits, with a strong use of Web 2.0 applications, such as feed aggregation, metablogs, wikis, instant messaging, VoIP, microblogging, online volunteering, etc.
Blogs in the field: use of blogs to raise advocacy and transparency by writing within and from a development project.
Blogs at the headquarters: same, but from the nonprofit headquarters (no need to be really there, but the focus)
Directories of projects and institutions.
Metablogs: Global Voices Online
Planets: feed aggregators, automatically updated once have been set up. The information comes to you.
Wikis: Where nonprofits share their information, handbooks, procedures… and with the possibility that this information can be updated/build collaboratively.
Caveat: some of these initiatives are not top-down, not institutional, but raised by individuals, sometimes as a personal answer (critique?) to the bureaucratic slowness and lack of flexible response of some organizations.
Social networks: some of them using richest media, such as The Hub.
We should shift from talking about technology to talking about the uses of it. The Web 2.0 allows this shift, as technological solutions come more and more irrelevant.
Free flow of information: RSS, copyleft or open licensing, syndication
Slides:
Vicente Carlos Domingo González
humania.tv
To enable media diffusion, especially video, for nonprofits and development issues.
Their role is to act as a new information agency to cover events, projects from nonprofits. It runs on a volunteering basis coming from the media sector + a technological platform to broadcast video.
The goal is not only to broadcast, but have audience too, thus the commitment with high-quality low-band requisites of the portal.
José Manrique López de la Fuente
Opportunities of Mobile Web in developing countries
Success bridging the digital divide
- The will, motivation to access the Net
- Material access
- Personal capacity, competences
- Access to advanced uses
The importance to generate local business possibilities based on ICTs.
Part of the material access and personal capacity interaction is about the ease of use, that should be kept clear in all ICT4D projects.
Mobile Solutions
- Specific applications for mobile phones: maximum integration with the device, but device diversity can generate incompatibilities
- Voice and/or SMS based solutions: simple and working, interoperability could be a pro or a con
- The Web as platform: rich, standards are mainstream
Mobile Web
- Advantage: Integration of existing solutions
- Advantage: Technologies based on open standards
- Problem: user experience, diversity and cost in some places
- Problem: low-tech devices that cannot access the web, mobile carriers not providing access
Carolina Moreno Asenjo
Global Networks and social engagement: ICT integration strategies at Entreculturas
Goals
- Improve quality in education, at a global level
- Foster advocacy through ICTs
- Fight the “loneliness” of the teacher in his classroom
- Cut down costs in training and knowledge sharing
- Create a link to catalyze network building
Leverage communities of practice and communities of learning with ICTs.
Challenges
- engagement of the beneficiaries
- funding
- logistics when setting up the hardware and technological platform
- motoring, coordination
- sustainability
Mobile (connected) classrooms.
Eduardo Pérez Gutiérrez
Geographic Information Systems in Educational Centers for Regional Development
Goals: Develop web-based GISs for diagnose and monitoring of educational centers for regional development.
To fight lack of education in remote, rural areas, governments supply these regions with instructors, that are not actually teachers but have a broader profile, socially speaking, but a lower profile as an educator. So, their social profile is good to interact with the community but the quality of teaching might not be as good as expected.
The GIS should help cross data about the reach of an instructor’s activity, the profile of the population reached by this instructor, etc. and then help the decision-making about the instructor, his activity, the way he spends his budget, etc.
Benefits: focused investments, allows centralized administration, transparency and monitoring, enables confidence, provides context and helps strategy design.
Development Cooperation 2.0 (2008)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 01 October 2007
Main categories: Connectivity, e-Readiness, Hardware
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The OECD has released its Communications Outlook for year 2007
The main conclusions are as follows:
- Voice continues to be the key driver in OECD telecommunication markets
- Mobile subscribers outnumber fixed subscribers by a
ratio of 3 to 1
- Rise of importance of Voice over Internet Protocolo (VoIP), mainly due to rise of broadband adoption, and pressing down prizes on voice services
- Blurring of market barriers: e.g. voice no more tied to fixed analogue lines, but can be accessed through fixed analogue lines, but also through broadband, mobile lines, etc.
- Blurring of market barriers, multiplicity of offers, blurring of regulation.
- Rise of local wireless networks fostered by local administrations.
- Shift from paying for voice to paying for data; shift from paying for data to flat-rate pricing based on bandwidth quality instead of data traffic.
- Trend to lower broadband prizes for better quality.
- Shift of subscription of communication services provided outside the boundaries of a citizen’s country and delivered over the Internet: more pressure on regulation changes.
- Telecommunication trade continues to grow in the OECD area
and now accounts for 2.2% of all trade.
- China is one of the five emerging countries in the group known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa). ICT spending in the BRICS economies increased by more than 19% a year
Summing up:
- The importance of broadband — the new leading factor of the digital divide.
- The pressure on sector and international regulation — the new arena of the debate to achieve harmonization, inside and outside boundaries.
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 25 September 2007
Main categories: Connectivity, Development, Digital Divide, Hardware, ICT4D, Meetings, Nonprofits, Open Access, Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism
Other tags: web2fordev
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The Web2forDev – Participatory Web for Development Conference is taking place at FAO Headquarters in Rome, organized by FAO, CTA, IICD, GTZ, UBC, IFAD, CGIAR, euforic, UCAD, APC, ACP and the European Commission. Here come my notes.
It’s the first time that the revolution is not about the development of systems, but empowerment
.
Holidays for me is getting no internet and no GSM
. It is important not to get drowned by technologies, but to master them
.
Jacques Diouf, Director-General Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
The importance of ICTs in leapfrogging.
Skilled development, that can be enhanced/fostered by ICTs, and has traditionally been forgotten from the (cooperation for) development agendas.
The focus of ICT4D can be focused into mainstream.
Proliferation of online content, along with language/translation tools, bringing in new users that do not come from the developed world.
Web 2.0 removes the barriers on the consumers, creators of content.
Partnerships are crucial, collaboration is critical for cooperation for development, but most especially engagement, which is widely enhanced by Web 2.0, a perfect platform for this multilayer commitment, response.
Sharing is a main challenge.
We need to rethink (cooperation for) development deeply. We have to provide access to the tools, and to let/help people use them effectively.
Participation, decision making, human rights… are new dimensions on development that the Web 2.0 can include on the development debate.
Online participation should be ways to promote a more inclusive society.
More info
Web 2.0 for Development related posts (2007)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 26 July 2007
Main categories: Connectivity, Cyberlaw, governance, rights, Hardware, Meetings
Other tags: sdp2007
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In a highly abstracted conceptualization, both the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet consist of two components: the end-devices and the network that connects them. Traditional telecommunications regulation has assumed the presence of a network core that could be engineered to fulfill regulatory goals as well as a vertically-integrated industry structure that could meet regulatory obligations. In my dissertation, I propose to take the case of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the technology that enables voice communications over the Internet, and argue that disruptive trends in technology are eroding the control in the core that was traditionally possessed by network designers and owners. This eroding control in the core has the potential to render the current VoIP regulation inadequate and unsustainable, requiring that future regulatory response be discontinuous from that of the past. This study uses a system dynamics model to study the dynamic complexity surrounding the current VoIP regulation and to understand policy options for preventing undesirable outcomes. The model consists of four sectors: the consumer adoption sector for modeling demand, the industry structure sector for modeling supply, the regulatory compliance sector for modeling the level of compliance, and the innovation sector for modeling innovation trends.
Current regulatory response to VoIP (goals)
- Public Safety
- Law Enforcement Capability
- Equal opportunity
- Economic Development
- Competition
Of those five traditional aspects, just the two first are really developed. Disruptive trends such as VoIP erode assumed control in the core. With eroding control in the core meeting regulatory objetives will increasingly require regulatory responses discontinous from the past.
The functionality is dispersing to the end-deivde,k at the ownership of the Core (who’s in charge of guaranteeing the procedure of the communication) is fragmenting.
The End of Core can cause
- Regulatory misalignment, and thus
- Inefficiency in achieving regulatory compliance
- Regulatory capture by new players
- And may require discontinuing access-centric regulatory thinking… and understanding the value chain
- Circum-innovation, and thus
- arms race between proponents of compliance and non-compliance
- And may require discontinuing command-and-control regulatory thinking… and understanding a collaborative model of regulation
System Dynamics Model: when a desired regulatory compliance takes place, circumvention actinos seem to wider the existing compliance gap. How to control the whole system?
More Info
SDP 2007 related posts (2007)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 22 July 2007
Main categories: Connectivity, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Education & e-Learning, Hardware, ICT4D, Meetings, Open Access
Other tags: sdp2007
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We’ll never thank Chintan Vaishnav enough for arranging our visit to the MIT Media Lab and OLPC Foundation, impressive places where to work (or study, of course: actually, a place to learn, either official role you get there with), really interdisciplinary.
MIT Media Lab
We visited Lifelong Kindergarden research group, which has Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.
Jay Silver
We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:
Scratch
Jay Silver kindly introduced us to the rudiments of Scratch and how to get started on this tool. Actually, I still wonder whether it is a game, a multimedia design and production tool, an educational technology, a collaborative web 2.0 networking social software or all of them.
I’m pretty sure that Jay Silver was right when he said that tools the like of Scratch actually fit on what Ivan Illich wanted to state on Deschooling Society.
What’s Up
It then was turn for Leo Burd’s thesis Technological Initiatives for Social Empowerment: Design Experiments in Technology-Supported Youth Participation and Local Civic Engagement, most commonly known as What’s Up.
The project joins best of both worlds in VoIP, mobile telephony and social software for community building. The idea is that while the Web is quite spread, in most developing countries the ICT revolution is clearly led by mobile phones. Thus, What’s Up presents the usual community site but empowered with VoIP and all kinds of mobile enhanced features, just like SMS posted text and vodcasts.
One Laptop per Child Foundation
XO Laptop (AKA “OLPC” Laptop)
It is actually relevant that our visit at One Laptop per Child Foundation was lead by Samuel Klein, director of content of the One Laptop per Child Project.
A year and a half ago I wrote Negroponte and the Web 2.0 or the Four Classes of the Digital Divide to state that Nicholas Negroponte’s effort to bridge the digital divide will be worthless if digital literacy and provision of content and services did not accompany the infrastructures revolution and diffusion. Having Samuel Klein as spokesman or PR representative makes a tacit statement on what the One Laptop per Child Project is about: it is not about delivering laptops to children, is about opening them the gates of content, which is the real issue.
As he himself explained, every activity has comunity around it, being the goal to build education networks, an example of it the installation of Moodle for some community projects, being the management and coordination of this free software LMS done by the same educational institutions that provide wireless connectivity to the laptops.
The commitment with content can be on the other hand exemplified with the Summer of Content 2007 initiative to provide content to be packeted with the XO laptop.
Samuel Klein strongly encouraged the audience and anyone interested to both contribute to the OLPC Project Wiki and subscribe to the OLPC Project Wiki mailing lists.
More info
SDP 2007 related posts (2007)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 29 May 2007
Main categories: Connectivity, Hardware, ICT4D
2 Comments »
On December 5 and 6, 2006, the W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries took place in Bangalore, India. Half a year has passed, but the conclusions still apply.
It is very important not to forget the real goal of providing ICT in developing countries. The point is not at all to connect people to the Web but to provide services (health, banking, government service, education, business,…) […] the most appropriate way to provide such e-services on mobile phones is with SMS-based applications. The reasons for that are numerous:
* Easy to use (everybody knows how to send an SMS)
* Low and predictable cost (no cost for receiving a message, low and known cost for sending a message)
* Availability on all phones
Of course, there is a general agreement on the limitations of such applications :
* Low capabilities (text-only, limited size, basic services like single query – answer, …)
* Interoperability problems between operators
Adopting the Web as the platform for developing future services requires work on these blocking factors which have been identified:
* Problems of availability of Web browser
* Problems of configuration
* User Interface
* Cost
That said, there is a general agreement that the Web is providing unique opportunities which may facilitate the bridging of the digital divide:
* a standardized platform to ease service development
* cheap service development and hosting
* large scope and wide audience
* easy reachability and “discoverability” of existing services (search engines, portals, …)
More info
