She’s now published, along with Manuel Castells, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey, the book Mobile Communication and Society and has kindly accepted to answer some questions about the book and about the use of mobile phones for development. Here they go:
Question: The book’s presentation says that Mobile Communication and Society looks at how the possibility of multimodal communication from anywhere to anywhere at any time affects everyday life. Can you summarize 392 pages into 3.92 lines? ;)
Answer: Of course I can’t… But here you are some of our main findings:
Having a mobile phone, at least in developed countries where nowadays it is a personal device, means having Relentless Connectivity. Put it simply, we are available 24 hours a day, as well as our contacts are.
Communication is held among the different nodes of our Network of Choice. For instance, some times we prefer to call a friend asking for some indications to get a specific address than to talk to the bus driver.
As we are nodes of a network, we can establish Instant Communities of Practice. Flash mobs are one example, as well as it were the concentrations in front of the headquarters of the Spanish conservative party PP, in the evening of the 13th of March, 2003.
In this context, the Blurring of the Social Context of Individual Practice increases and our different everyday-life-roles are mixed. For instance, a security guard talks to her boyfriend without need of asking permission to her supervisor; students can communicate with other friends outside the classroom and do, at least, two different activities simultaneously, etc.
Q: Surely wireless technologies and applications are not used the same way everywhere, and thus their impact is different two. Could you point the main divergences in use and/or impact between developed and developing countries?
A: In developing countries, among less wealthy segments of population, the mobile phone is the first private telephone available to the family. It allows not only outcome calls but, most important, incoming calls. It is very often a collective device, thus all the members of the family use it… normally as it were a fixed telephone. However, sometimes the handset becomes mobile and goes out of home, often under the mother’s supervision.
On the other hand, boom calls (those made not to be answered) are used not only for fun but also in business. A customer could make a boom call to the milkman to order some milk. Usually, they had previously agreed the meaning of the boom call in order to avoid misunderstandings.
Finally, it is worth to point that in developing countries having a handset is not essential, and the SIM card would be enough to guarantee communication. A SIM card can be used in a mobile payphone, there you can also check if somebody has called you or has sent you an SMS. The SIM card works under a prepayment system so the expenses are kept totally under control.
All in all, the main difference between rich and poor users is that, among rich people mobile telephony is a complementary technology while for the poor it is an affordable substitute of the expensive, and sometimes inexistent, fixed telephony.
Q: Recently, some interesting books on wireless solutions for de developing world ([1], [2]) have been published. What do you think of initiatives such as Grameen’s Village Phone?
A: Around developing countries some innovative and fairly effective mechanisms and products are emerging to address the problem of telecommunication access. Some operators in there have begun to offer scaled down services, as in China (the Little Smart phone) and India (Wireless Local Loop telephony). But there are also grassroots’ projects, as the successful Grameen’s Village Phone program. Created in Bangladesh, it has been adopted in some other countries, as Uganda, South Africa and Ghana, in the same or in a modified form.
There is, indeed, a common agreement that this kind of initiatives increase consumer surplus as a result of reduced communication costs, and improve access to business information, while service providers have gained additional income (up to 40% of household income) as well as social and economic empowerment, especially in gender terms.
Q: Thus, “leapfrogging”: buzzword or keyword?
A: Time will say, but up to day what we can say is that landscape in some parts of Africa has changed. In the main street in a tiny rural town you can usually see two or three mobile payphones, and an antenna in the top on the nearest hill. There is a lot of activity around these mobile payphones.
Indeed, there is not overwhelming evidence to support the leapfrog hypothesis in terms of eliminating stages of economic development. However, and following Coyle (2005) (2.7 Mb), one of the most important identifiers of the potential developmental impact of mobile telephony could be its contribution to moving developing countries as close as possible to universal telecommunications service, which has been shown to have been the critical mass level at which telecommunications began to exhibit significant impacts on economic growth in advanced economies [emphasis is mine].
Q: And what’s next? Where does research on wireless networks in the field of ICT4D head to?
Written by Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey, the book is describes the mobile revolution and how being constantly connected has affected our lives, getting into deep detail on who’s connected and how do they use this ubiquitous technology.
For ICT4D practitioners and researchers, chapters 7 — The Mobile Civil Society:
Social Movements, Political Power, and Communication Networks — and 8 — Wireless Communication and Global Development: New Issues, New Strategies — are of special interest as they deal with participation, development and social empowerment in general.
See also
Site of the book at MIT Press, with full table of contents and sample chapters.
Open Educational Resources: legal aspects
Raquel Xalabarder, Department of Law and Political Science, UOC
In principle, intermediaries (i.e. OER repositories) are liable for infringement of intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, there are safe harbours (exceptions) where intermediaries are not liable, provided they pass the awareness of knowledge test. Mainly it deals with knowing you’re consciously infringing the law and your ability to quickly remove content when required to.
Big problem: there’s no consensus on which law should apply to what at the international level.
Three things that the law empowers the author (not the industry) to do: distribute, communicate to the public and transform. But there are exceptions to the author does not abuse his monopoly, and education is one of them. OER repositories, though intended to teaching — thus, fair use — do open those contents to anyone, be their purpose teaching or not, so we have a problem here of possible infringement.
Creative Commons is, in no way, a registry: you should (also) register your work in the Copyright registry to protect your rights, regardless of what you intend to do with them.
The advice for the OER community should not be just try and see how I apply the law but to lobby and see how this law can be changed, changed so educatinoal purposes are always an exception to copyright, to enhance consumer protection (vs. the industry’s). OER practitioners should aim to bring the debate to the international fora, not just to keep it in the scope of their own (immediate) needs. Rights should be about exploitation, not use.
Open Educational Resources and Virtual Universities
Susan D’Antoni, Head of UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, IIEP Virtual Institute
Knowledge is not merchandise, knowledge divide is deeper than the digital divide [personal note: this is because we think of digital divide as ICT infrastructures divide, i.e. forgetting about informational literacy], OER has the potential to address national policy objectives on the Knowledge Society.
UNESCO (and, actually, the OER community taking part in the fora) should be in position to design a policy framework to enchance/foster/refer OER development and implantation.
Yochai Benkler, The wealth of networks: The importance of policy choices – and the social political choides behin them – in the move towards the information society.
Closing Session
Julià Minguillón, Vice-Director Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, UOC
The OLCOS project has drawn a roadmap and some tutorials on how to implant OER.
Recommendations
There’s a need for information, to spread the word of open access and OER
Top-down and bottom-up approaches
Remove producer-consumer barriers, in the sense that consumers can become producers, and producers become consumers
Stick to standards
Update 20061220: The presentations can now be downloaded here Update 20070517: The videos can now be downloaded here
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UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Third International Seminar. OER: Institutional Challenges (2006)
UNCTAD has released their Information Economy Report for year 2006
The Information Economy Report 2006: The Development Perspective provides unique data on the adoption of ICT by enterprises in developing countries. It also explores ICT policy options in a developing-country context and proposes a framework for national ICT policy reviews and for the design and assessment of pro-poor e-strategies.
As it is stated in this introduction, it is true that the whole report has a focus on development: chapter 1 talks about e-readiness and the digital divide trends; chapter 2 reviews the successful factors to foster the Information Economy (Information Society); and chapter 3 is dedicated to ICT4D and ICT4P (yet another acronym: ICT for Poverty Reduction). Next chapters enter specific sectors such as oil, employment and e-commerce, but always with this development bias.
With regard to the type (or mode) of Internet access, there are large differeces between developed countries, where broadband is growing rapidly, and developing countries, where dial-up is still prevalent. This changing nature of Internet modes of access is a new dimension of the international digital divide.
(Page xxi. Emphasis is mine)
It is interesting to note that UNCTAD uses Orbicom’s methodology to analyze the digital divide, instead of, for instance, ITU’s indices such as DAI or DOI, or UNCTAD’s own index of ICT Diffusion, which, I agree, are most incomplete when considering the whole economy and not only infrastructures.
This Benchmarking system is jointly developed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. Technical development is carried out by the Institute of Software Technology & Interactive Systems of Vienna University of Technology. We gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from the Government of Austria.
The Benchmarking Tool is an interactive web-based system consisting of two modules: MDG Benchmarking and ICT Benchmarking.
The ICT Benchmarking lets you compare country data (provided by ITU: Total Tel. Subscribers, Mobile Subscribers, Main Tel. Lines, Internet Hosts, Internet Users, PCs) with your own quality of access (measured by your own Upload Speed, Download Speed, Google Search, Yahoo Search, MSN Search, access to Government’s Site) or with dataset spreviously saved by other users. Curious.
Dick de Jongasked days ago whether I could provide with some examples of ICTs contributions to solution of water problems. I must admit I am in no way a water expert. And I must admit too that my knowledge in ICTs is not comprehensive or absolute at all. This said, I will nevertheless try and give some examples that do come in mind when talking about water and ICTs. Not magic solutions, just humble contributions. Some of them are common ideas already working, some others are just little variations of the former ones, some are just… just ideas. On the other hand, I’d like to keep this list as a brainstorming, so feel free to use the comments section.
In my limited knowledge of the issue, I guess that there are three ways of looking at the water problem, the so called 3R measures or actions: Reduction, Reutilization and Recycling. Honestly, I think ICTs can act, over all, in Reduction, a little bit in Reutilization and, maybe — but I don’t see how — in Recycling (besides computerized industrial plants, which is not exactly the issue treated here.
Concerning ICTs, I’d take this 5 step approach:
So, with this framework (on one hand the 3R model, on the other hand the 5 step approach), these are things that ICTs could do to work for a better use of water resources:
Infrastructures
We understand by infrastructures everything to provide support where to run content and services. In ICTs, we can group them in hardware, software and connectivity.
Domotics (I): devices to optimize the use of water in taps or find leaks. Besides trivial control to avoid leaving taps open, I’m thinking on gathering data on consumption for all and every water source by date and time. Data analysis could show who’s bathing instead of showering or whether we’re using the toilet bowl as a trash bin. [reduction]
Domotics (II): as lots of energy come from water, everything related to energy consumption. There’s zillions of examples in this field. [reduction]
Artificial intelligence for irrigation systems (I): not just programming to water at night, but also to test soil and ambience humidity, plant real needs according to species, etc. [reduction]
Domotics (III) and irrigation systems (II): once used water is collected, ICT assisted water analysis could provide more efficient reuse depending on the degree of water cleanliness, from clothes washing to irrigation to bowl use. [reutilization]
Office software: not a joke. Taking into account the huge water needs to produce paper, working digitally really makes a difference. Web 2.0 apps just go deeper into this issue. [reduction]
Connectivity: if all the previous solutions/contributions can work in a digital network, there is no doubt that some synergies will arise. On the other hand, [reduction][reutilization]
This section deals with the existence of an ICT sector in any of the three (hardware, software, connectivity) infrastructure fields.
Free software community: this is the typical south-south collaboration. Only with a strong software community of developers, truly localized solutions, based on free software, can be possible. Take “south” in the sense you want. I take it as “anywhere where water optimization is required”, which is everywhere. The “south-south” philosophy is, nevertheless, more widely known. BTW, same applies to the closed software sector — just wanted to stress that open is better, specially when there is a need for open communities to provide more/collective wisdom. [reduction][reutilization]
ICT devices for water optimization: this should be placed before the previous example, but the free software community is a better known issue. So, same thing, but with hardware: localized hardware solutions for local water needs. [reduction][reutilization]
Digital Literacy
While digital literacy is quite a broad concept (technological literacy, informational literacy, e-Awareness…), we take it here in an even broader sense, including ICT driven training. This last aspect clearly belongs to the Content and Services section, but I think it is more pedagogical to deal with it in this section when talking about ICTs as water optimisation tools.
Digital literacy: as itself, to train citizenship on (a) infrastructure issues, so an ICT sector can emerge and (b) use of digital content and services, so people can benefit from the resources about water in the Net. [reduction][reutilization]
Advocacy: digital places (websites, brochures, blogs…) to raise awareness on the water problems. [reduction][reutilization][recycling]
e-Learning: virtual training to develop capacity building in the management of water resources, 3R policies, etc. [reduction][reutilization][recycling]
Content and Services
In other words: the finalist uses of the Internet.
Digital content: open educational resources to help you reduce, reuse, recycle your water. [reduction][reutilization][recycling]
Sort of a corollary of the Connectivity issue in the Infrastructures section, a virtual clearing house for second uses of water could be built, thus easily matching supply and demand for used water. Depending on how intelligent is your installation, demanding, supplying and matching could be done with no human intervention at all. [reutilization]
Geographical Information Systems (GIS): to locate and better analyze field data [reduction]
Mashups: corollary of the previous one, but somehow more in the web 2.0 trend. Web supported, collectively created/authored/maintained, etc. [reduction]
Online volunteering: online mentors to help manage your water resources. If payed, volunteering becomes professional consulting: same thing but more expensive. This example is somehow similar to the e-learning one, but the difference is in the means and the hows. [reduction][reutilization][recycling]
Legal Framework
Of course, this legal framework refers to everything to describe the rules of the game in the ICT arena.
ICT fostered water policies: provided all (or some) of the previous ideas are good, they can be fostered through public water policies or, even stronger, public regulation. Some quality regulations in other sector, all in all, just end up inducing determinate technology adoption by pursuing higher quality levels or industry standards. [reduction]
So, please feel free to contribute in the comments.
(2.7 Mb), one of the most important identifiers of the potential developmental impact of mobile telephony could be its contribution to moving developing countries as close as possible to universal telecommunications service, which has been shown to have been the critical mass level at which telecommunications began to exhibit significant impacts on economic growth in advanced economies [emphasis is mine].
