Many of them are related to knowledge sustainability.
The LAKapps Project. Making localisation effective: user guides and training Sanath Jayasena, University of Moratuwa
Goal: facilitate the use of the Internet through local languages, by deploying Sinhala and Tamil email, web browsing and e-learning software and a selected set of sites (schools, Nenasalas): Firefox, Thunderbird, Joomla, Moodle, etc.
User guides and training material to run this software were also created to help users in their usage, including how to use keyboards to type Sinhala and Tamil characters.
Analysis of factors affecting the effectiveness of telecentres of Sri Lanka L N A C Jayawardena
Telecentre operators: 57% operated by aged from 27 to 35 years, majority of high performing telecentres operated by males (see later for absence of cause relationship).
School students and leavers, and job seekers and employees, most of them have ICT training as the first utility, while businessmen and monks search more office-oriented services (photocopying, faxing).
Key attribute of high performing telecentres
Social network
Managerial skills
Attitudes of operators towards business
Educational background of telecentre operator
There is also a significant relationship of growth of telecentre and relationsihp of owners/operators with mother organization. No significant relationship with gender or age. Effectiveness is related with the kind of services provided by the telecentre. Relationship between growth of telecentres and knowledge about community.
Recommendation:
Proper selection criteria for telecentres
Establishing effective communication between telecentres and mother organizations
Upgrading telecentre service is timely
A responsible authority to coordinate Nenasala centres and use them as ICT education centres, or education hubs
Rural schools, extension services, can use telecentres for profesisonal training, distance learning, farmer training
Participatory methodologies should be used to evaluate the impact of telecentres in rural stakeholders
Back to the Community: the Future of Telecentres Ismael Peña-López
Up scaling and replication? 150 experiences. Niranjan Meegammana
e-Fusion phtv Initiative in Sri Lanka. After some pilot projects in 2007, success brough a huge demand that required an important change of strategy to make it possible to be scalable and replicable.
Design vs. implementation gaps: dynamic re-design, operation flexibility, learning from grassroots.
Continued existence implies maintaining your project team, maintaining demand and increasing social acceptance. To do so, you have to identify participation benefits, innovative partnerships, local support structures, etc.
Telecentres and their role in socio-economic empowerment Chairs: Basheerhamad Shadrach, telecentre.org Academy, International Development Research Centre
If you have a telecentre you need:
A place, the centre
Devices, to connect the “tele”, and they can be computers, a ciommunity radio, mobile devices
But, over all, you need people, a community, that are entrepreneurial, with skills, with the ability to connect
Understanding the people, and bridging the gap between the government and the people is crucial to have effective policies.
To do this, you necessarily need to bring in stakeholders, and do it with a plan.
Unleashing technology to advance social and economic development Tim Dubel, Microsoft
In the next five years we foresee an even increasingly path of innovation in technology, being the role of telecentres how to wrap it in a human way. Indeed, telecentres are not interesting (only) by their mission for inclusion, but because there’s business interest in them. Thus, telecentre operators should “help” the private sector in understanding the possibilities to add value from a telecentre. Thus, both telecentres can achieve their social goal while being sustainable as thei also achieve an economic goal.
New business models:
Kiva
Hopemongers
See your impact
M-Pesa
New delivery models:
e-Health
e-Government
e-Learning
Shared resource computing
One monitor, multiple mice connected to one computer
Multiple monitors, multiple mice and keyboards, connected to one computer
The role of telecentres:
Leverage technology: not only increasing access to technology, but also showcasing specific new technologies
Support innovation: telecentres can serves as laboratories for innovation, where experimentation can be done, especially entrepreneurial innovation
Build capacity: train skills, workforce developement. According to European survey, 90% of jobs in the short run will require ICT skills
Expand networks: to share knowledge, to collaborate with other organizations and institutions
The role of telecentres in reviving a knowledge-based agrarian society Kshanika Hirimburegama, University of Colombo
65% or population in Sri Lanka in the rural sector, but leaving to urban areas because of lack of knowledge and information to stay up-to-date in agriculture techniques.
The course has increased student computer knowledge and given e-mail access to all of the participants. Internet usage has increased from 35% to 93% and most of them have a good level of awareness of online distance learning.
An example of the output is farmers sending information (text, images) to the Coconut Research Institute to find out what the diseases are, or to get advice for their crops.
Most people follow the courses from Nenasalas. Materials are adapted from the ones from the Indira Gandhi Open University, or, sometimes, created from scratch. Language is bilingual, one of them being the local language which changes according to the region where the students are. And everything is managed with Moodle.
The online education programme has proven successful to bring into the educational system people traditionally excluded from it.
Common Services Centres. The Indian Experience Ashish Sanyal, Department of Information Technology, Government of India
Common Services Centre: low cost and/or cost-effective delivery of e-governance services to the rural citizens, benefiting from the increase of penetration and quality of ICTs.
Services: government certificates, licenses, grievandce redressal, law & order, governemnt welfare schemes, market prices, education, news, entertainment, communication, government & private sector mixed services, etc. Availability of government services is a must for the sustainability of Common Services Centres.
These services can be categorized as:
Savings: save you time or money, as e-Government
Buying: help you to shop more or better. Not only e-commerce, but e-learning and important part of this category
Income: help you to actively increase your earnings
Have to find the local entrepreneur, guide and counsel him to set up the Common Services Centre, but then, convince the bank to help the entrepreneur in investing on the Centre, and convince the telcos to provide connectivity services.
Building a Knowledge Society for All. Emphasizing Government’s Strategic Role Supporting ICT Innovations in EducationJyrki Pulkkinen, GeSCI
The gap between developing countries and developed or industrialized countries can be widening due to lower investments in ICT, education and innovation processes in developing countries. Knowledge is increasingly the key factor of production as well as a raw material for economic development.
We need to invest in ICTs that impact Education. But not wasting money in screens that substitute blackboards or handbooks for doing exactly the same things: this is a misinvestment.
One OLPC promoter once said that computers at the OLPC programem could substitute teachers. Then, why give them to children that already go to school instead of giving them to childrent that do not go to school?. We need to prioritizise the excluded ones, not the included ones.
ICT Innovations and educational challenges:
lack of universal inclusive access
poor quality of education
poor management on the education system
incrasing irrelevance of the current educatoin system in the knowledge society, new skills that need to be learnt (and besides e-skills)
Layers of successful ICT integration in education (much more than infrastructure):
Hardware, software: ICT
Warsmware: principal, teacher, learners, parents
Socialware: school, university, institutional development
Cultureware: strategies & policies
What can the government do?
Foster multistakeholder partnerships
Create an enabling environment for development
A blueprint and a roadmap for partners
Key resources: institutional, human and financial
J.B. Dissanayaka, Ambassador for Sri Lanka in Tahiland, Cambodia and Laos PDR
Vidatha (sanscrit): knowledge that is given, knowledge that is transferred.
[interesting speech — impossible to reproduce here — about languages and their usage in ICTs]
Digital Bangladesh: Road to Achieving ‘Sonar Bangla’ (golden Bengal) in the 21st Century Abdul Karim, Prime Minister’s Office, People’s Republic of Bangladesh
Virtual one stop shop for Government services: cost effective, quick, participative, etc.
Of course, connectivity is the issue, that’s why the cretion fo the “mobile lady” and other public access points.
Also a rise of m-Services provisioned by the privaste sector: language learning, health, agriculture information, legal advisory, court case notification, market access and trade, emergency service, etc.
ICT Act 2009 (digital certification, fight against cybercrime), Right to (Public) Information Act 2009, m-Banking.
Q&A
Q: How can ICTs or the ‘Sonar Bangla’ be used to fight government corruption? Abdul Karim: ICTs can ensure proper transactions, as getting rid of paper, and minimizing physical contact of documents, bureaucratic corruption has necessarily to decrease. Pulkkinen: corruption happens when people don’t know. Raising awareness — and knowledge — on public affairs is the best way to reduce corruption. E.g. if the citizen knows how much money should there be in a specific account and the citizen knows how much money there actually is in that account, it is very difficult to cheat and remain unnoticed.
Telecentre for a digital divergence eraFlorencio Ceballos, telecentre.org
More and more mobiles in people’s hands, many of them in developing countries. 4.6 billion estimated by end of 2009. Thus, we might be facing not a digital divide, but a digital divergence: it’s not that people do not have access to ICTs, but that they have access to different qualities of ICTs. Difference between full access to the Knowledge Economy to restricted access to the Knowledge Economy.
Telecentres are a way to share enhanced access to the Knowledge Economy. But not only they provide access, but also skills, etc.
Why shared access? Well, not that new:
Public transportation
Shared bycicles in many cities in the world
Access to water through fountains at streets
Public libraires
Ownership, thus, is not the issue, but access to knowledge. And telecentres are the “sherpas” that facilitate this access to people.
Though sustainability is quite often raised as an issue, in fact, many times is lack of investment what strangles the viability of certain telecentres. With the appropriate investment, more (business) opportinities come at hand.
And public access is not at all a “solution for very poor countries”. Germany, Sweden, Spain, UK, etc. are amongst the countries that have a more developed (in quantity and quality) network of telecentes.
But of course, telecentres have to evolve. Some are using telecentres to access higher education courses, others to bring microcredit to rural areas…
The impact of the Cloud on Public Sector Bash Badawi, Microsoft Public Sector APAC
The cloud:
software as a service,
data as a service,
platform as a service,
infrastructure as a service,
everything as a service.
It lowers the entrance costs to ITs, forces integration.
On the other hand, it’s fully scalable and you don’t even have to care about predicting how much usage, computing power, storage, etc. you will be needing. It’s just a pay-as-you-go.
Building a Smarter Planet: Government Kevin North, IBM Asia Pacific Public Sector Business
We now have the aility to measure the condition of almost anything: e.g. with RFID cards we can constantl monitor the temperature of each and every cow in our herd.
The imperative for government today:
Deliver value
Exploit opportunities
Act with speed
The road to outsourcing:
Staff augmentation
Out-tasking
Co-sourcing
Portfolio outsourcing
Outsourcing
Q&A
Comment by attendant: India is increasing the number of mobile phones by 18,000,000 monthly, thrice the population of Finland.
The Xarxa Òmnia is the largest network of telecentres in Catalonia and one of the largest in whole Spain. The network was set up in 1999 and, since its conception, it has always had a strong community-focused aim which made of their telecentres — or Punt Òmnia [Òmnia Point] — more than just public Internet access points, but more tools of (e-)inclusion and community building.
Now that Xarxa Òmnia has turned 10 years old, the yearly rendez-vous of the whole network, the Jornada Òmnia, will focus on how should the network evolve in the coming years, taking into special account the changes that have been happening in the last 10 years in matters of the Information and the Network Society, and what are the challenges that policy makers and telecentre administrators will have to face to successfully fight the digital divide and the risks of (e-)exclusion.
I have been invited to introduce both these aspects. And my point has been already been made in the way that I write (e-)inclusion and (e-)exclusion: in my opinion, e-inclusion or e-exclusion will increasingly be a matter of inclusion/exclusion rather than being centre on the “e-“. Obvious as this might sound (i.e. inclusion being a matter of inclusion), the devil is in the details:
Real impact of ICTs will come — I believe — by them enabling, enhancing and empowering the analogue part of our lives: e-inclusion should be about ICTs finding ways to help people be part of a community, not about pouring people in the Internet (the “e-” focus of e-inclusion), notwithstanding a recurrent strategy in many Information Society policies;
People not online are, increasingly, people actively refusing to be online. While it is still true that many people don’t go online because of impossibility to access the Internet (hardware, connectivity, affordability, skills, etc.), we also find people that being able to access it, just don’t want to or even walk out of it. Lack of awareness, belief that ICTs bring nothing good to their lives, technophobia, etc. are keeping them disconnected and in risk not of e-exclusion but exclusion at all.
Thus, here’s my presentation:
The main points and rationale of my presentation are:
The Digital Revolution puts at stake the economy of scarcity (at least at the information and knowledge levels), brings down transaction costs and introduces a new actor into the equation: machines that substitute brain work (as other machines substituted muscle work in the Industrial Revolution)
The effect of these three aspects, puts at stake institutions? Do schools, firms, governments, the media or civic organizations still have a role in mediating between citizens? Or will citizens bypass them? What if they do? What if citizens themselves are bypassed by their peers?
If hierarchies and institutions give way to — or are deeply transformed by — networks, inclusion will be a matter of staying connected and being able to re-program oneself to be kept within the network.
New (digital) competences will be crucial for that, from technological literacy to e-awareness.
Thus, we might be needing to reframe our policies and foster pull strategies instead of pull strategies; we might also reconsider the role of our (e-)inclusion tools (telecentres amongst them), that might need shifting from the “e-” to the “inclusion”, strongly focussing on community building, enhanced by technologies.
This presentation is a wonderful occasion for me to gather up things I’ve been working on and thinking about in the last two years. In some way, it collects the reflections I already made in the following speeches (in chronological order):
I want to thank Cesk Gasulla, Noemí Espinosa, Marta Jové, Sònia Castro, Dolors Pedrós and the rest of the organizing committee for the invitation and the valuable chance to organize my reflections and think aloud in public. Moltes gràcies!
The hacker ethic is the cultural factor that emerges from the Network Society. If the Network Society is a new social paradigm, the hacker ethic is the culture that results from all the changes that conform the Network Society.
Pekka Himanen: The Hacker Ethic: The Way Forward after the Current Global Economic Crisis
An emphasis to be made is that the hacker ethic is not only about computer scientists, or about geeks and nerds, but it is a wider cultural transformation in the sense of the number and kind of people that might fit the definition. The hacker ethic can effectively be taken out of the technological sphere.
So, in context, if this is a Network Society and this is its culture, what is the role of hacker ethic in today’s economy and today’s crisis? Beyond economic development we need a broader sense of development. And it is likely that this new ethic can be part of the solution, of this broader sense of development.
Fundamental challenges nowadays:
Clean: Climate change, being radical innovation the way to go forward;
Care: Welfare society 2.0, as inequality increases and more people are unattended;
Culture: Multicultural life, how to cope with the increasing cultural crossroads that globalization is creating.
How can innovation turn challenges into opportunities? How can hacker ethic help in creating innovation-based solutions? Hackers can help to discover cleaner energy sources, biohackers will eventually help in creating a healthier society (being DNA the open source of life), cultural hackers can help in creating new and more meanings in multicultural life.
The problem is that the world economic, innovation and scientific centres are not evenly distributed across the world, but mainly concentrated in the US, Europe and some Asian countries. Why are these so much concentrated?
Innovation centre dynamics, or what do you need to have an innovation centre:
Culture of creativity: hacker ethic
Community of enrichment, where failing is accepted, where entrepreneurship is fostered, where ideas are economically supported (funded)
Creative people
Face-to-face communication — added to virtual communication and knowledge exchange — is what creates this climate or environment of innovation. This is what we find in Silicon Valley around Stanford University, or in other innovation centres around the world.
Increasingly, creative, innovative, knowledge intensive jobs are any more at the edges of the economic system, but at their sheer centre. Thus, it is important to know how to enable and foster the creation of such centres, as they are likely to be the solutions — or the solutions providers — for the crisis and for future development.
Ancient Athens went through an important era of huge investments that concentrated a lot of creative activities driven by Plato, Socrates, Pericles, etc. The Agora and surrounding buildings was an infrastructure for communication and interaction that brought together people from different backgrounds. Just like Silicon Valley and Stanford University.
Hacker’s ethic: creativity, that relies on a community of enrichment, that relies on mutual confidence. In this three layer structure, you both (a) feel like part of a big, powerful community and (b) are actually acknowledged as a person (not as a number). And it is a self-feeding logic.
Debate
Ismael Peña-López: how do you change mindsets? how do you transform a short-run profit system into a meritocratic, hacker system? Himanen: the most important thing to do is to change education. On the other hand, there are plenty of good examples of applied hacker ethic; there are also good ideas that get funding for addressing the more urgent challenges, and maybe what’s changed is that, instead of having a project, or a business plan, is having a mission. Castells: it is not about being good or bad, but clever or stupid. All major innovations come from communities and just rarely from individuals or even small teams. All major advances are based on smart collaboration.
Enric Senabre: What’s the acceptance of the hacker in public opinion? Himanen: hackers are not computer criminals; and hackers are not computer nerds. It is about a real ethos. It’s an informational work ethic, a creative ethic. Castells: The good thing about the term “hacker ethic” is that it challenges many prejudices and ex-ante thoughts at the same time.
Daniel López: How to move forward the concept of “hacker”? What about “craftmanship”? Himanen: Of course, hacker has something to do with craftmanship. But the term hacker is also a self-adopted term by hackers themselves, which makes it special.
Q: Do you consider yourself a hacker, or feel like one? Himanen: yes, it is all about passion, a creative passion, and the way of doing things almost obsessively, though a pleasant obsession.
Q: Is hacker ethic spreading? Is there more people becoming hackers? Himanen: There is some evidence that in two years there’ll be work shortage, as many people will retire. And people will be able to chose their works and do it on a mission-basis or on an environment-basis, more than just wage or other similar conditions.
Ricard Ruiz de Querol: Is the actual crisis a financial crisis? If so, what’s the feeling like in hackers environments about it? Himanen: hacker ethic is a neutral term, it just describes the relationship with work. And it is independent from social values. Notwithstanding, it is difficult that lack of specific social values (e.g. a better world) is compatible with hacker ethic. What, then, would your creativity serve?
Anna Soliguer: How can hacker ethic inspire social movements? Himanen: In some sense, Obama followed a hacker ethic. The thing is how to link participation in social movements with leadership.
Q: Is there any particular reason why hacker ethic is stronger in welfare states (e.g. in Scandinavia)? Are people from the Pirate Bay hackers? Do they pursue a better world? Himanen: Finland, for instance, is a place where, in general, there is this creative environment that is so strongly needed for hacker ethic to emerge (e.g. it took Linus Torvalds 8 years to finish his Masters’ thesis and nobody made an issue about it). On the other hand, if you have some basic needs covered (by a welfare state) you’re not that urged to make profit out of your ideas or personal time. Castells: most hackers come originally from the US, where not welfare but the idea of freedom is what predominates. The idea being that you can have different economic systems that lead to hackerism, but what is necessary is the aim to create and a system that allows this creation. On the contrary, continental Europe, traditionally the craddle of the welfare state, has not a huge community of hackers.
Ismael Peña-López: Reality has change so much from the origins of the hacker ethic in the late 60s and the early 70s. Will the hacker ethic fade out and disappear? What, then, will happen with the Network Society? Himanen: political involvement is only partly true. People where not that involved in politics but in social rights movements, and, on the other hand, people still are involved, though in different ways: people are not interested in political hierarchies, but other ways of engagement. Indeed, people are increasingly engaged, though in newer ways. Castells: hacker ethic is not a cause of the Network Society, but a consequence. Hence, the whole world is entirely inside the Network Society and there is no way back. On the other hand, the creativeness of the hacker ethic had to cut through the system during the late 60s and early 70s, to fight against bureaucracies. Nowadays, on the contrary, it is the corporate world who is adopting hacker ethics (e.g. Google), and most big companies are increasingly relying on the passion to create, even Microsoft is doing this. If we forget about the label “hacker”, we will find plenty of examples of “creativity” and “innovation”, which is at the core of hacker ethic.
Begoña Gros: at our schools, we are promoting neither creativity nor passion. What’s it like in Finland? Himanen: curiosity is fostered in Finland. When you’re passionate about one thing, you begin putting questions about that, and this is something that the Finnish educational system is comfortable with. On the other hand, you’re invited to find what you want to do in life, to find a meaning, before going on (e.g. to the job market). The good thing about Linus Torvalds is not only his talent, but the ability to develop things, to help things become important not only for you but for others. This means, notwithstanding, that we have to go on encouraging creativity and innovation at school, so to make a hacker ethic possible amongst students.
