ICTlogy

Notes from Simposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social (e-STAS: Symposium on Technologies for Social Action) held in Málaga, Spain, on March 26-27th, 2009. More notes on this event: estas2009. More notes on this series of events: e-stas.

Battle of experiences between Ken Banks and Christian Kreutz, conducted by Jaime Estévez

Ken Banks, Kiwanja, frontlineSMS.com

The best way to understand what’s happening in a developing country is to go there. In Nigeria, he set up a project using mobile phones, or better said, how mobile phones could be used on the ground in developing countries.

With Kiwanja software it is possible to use SMS to get information and to create conversations by means of SMSs.

Christian Kreutz, ICT4D Consultant

After working for GTZ, now he’s a consultant in helping organizations to use ICTs in development issues.

There is a lot of unrealized potential — or even unknown actual applications — in ICT4D. Lots of people use ICTs for activism, or for development cooperation, and don’t even “know” they’re doing it. The question, hence, is not “what can be done” but to be aware of “what is being done”.

In this train of thought, an important challenge is to make people and organizations to think beyond their (narrow) scope and see what others are doing in same or similar issues. Putting people in contact so that they share innovation is as important as raw innovation.

Q & A

Jaime Estévez: ICT4Ds for democracy? Kreutz: the more data that is published, the more transparency, hence more democracy. Banks: communication (through mobile phones, voice or SMS) is also a good symptom that we’re moving towards democracy, and this is happening in Africa more and more every time. Every citizen’s ability to monitor and report elections brings a lot of transparency to the whole process.

Estévez: how do ICTs transform participation? Kreutz: how do you combine top-down organizations with peer-to-peer collaboration? The pressure that organizations have to be open and horizontal is huge and most likely to be unstoppable. Banks: There’s a huge potential for people participation, the big challenge being bringing access to these people.

Estévez: how will ICTs impact organizations? Kreutz: it is very likely that ICTs will promote openness in organizations. Banks: Indeed, some top-down processes still have to be top-down (e.g. SMS banking services, because of regulations, etc.). The thing is how do create an environment for people to interact, but not necessarily imply the top-down debate.

Q: How can ICTs reduce violence in Africa? Banks: Public exposition (because everyone is monitoring and everyone reporting) has been crucial for actually reducing violence in the whole continent.

Q: Why helping “others” if we have problems “home”? Banks: this is a globalized world. There’s no more “others” or “home”. Indeed, the projects that work abroad will work too home.

Estévez: where do you get funding for your activities from? Kreutz: Most times you start with your own time and commitment. Banks: after a threshold (of time, and success) is reached, it is possible to raise money to keep on with the project and make it reach a wider scope. But the real stuff happens when people contribute on their own interest, in a decentralized way, and the project is supported by the community (of users) itself because the project matters. Kreutz: the case of Nabuur is just that: exchange of expertise, nothing to do with money or funding, and perfectly possible through the Internet.

Q: what approach should we take on ICT4D? Banks: (a) speak of target communities as yet another community, not “developing countries” and other condescending terms (b) benefit from the already existing knowledge in the places you want to work with. Kreutz: connecting people the most important thing to do.

Q: how to assess impact? Banks: it’s very difficult to measure the number of users of a technology or tool, what do they use them foor, etc.. A proxy for measuring impact can be to go and search for feedback on that impact. If you’re able to find (e.g. in a forum) feedback of an end user having actively adopted a technology or used a tool, that’s really useful for the promoter of that project.

Notes from Simposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social (e-STAS: Symposium on Technologies for Social Action) held in Málaga, Spain, on March 26-27th, 2009. More notes on this event: estas2009. More notes on this series of events: e-stas.

Empowerment for Social Innovation, introduction by Ignacio Martín Maruri, Adaptive.

What’s empowerment? Why does not “empoderamiento” exist in Spanish? What’s the relationship between empowerment and innovation? Is it innovation just technological innovation? Or can we innovate in the field of citizenship? Is innovation good for empowerment… or bad, because it makes people comfortable and lazy? Or is it just the seek for comfort that makes people look for empowering innovations?

Empowerment? What for? Freedom? Progress?

Group work

Fernando Botelho: a main issue in empowerment is control. Empowerment without control — or with tools which are under the control of third parties — is not real empowerment. Open systems contribute to providing control (over the tools) to the empowered ones.

Roland Traumuller: Advances have to be taken in steps, steps that can be followed. Technology provides simple steps towards progress, towards empowerment.

Christian Kreutz: In the line of control, does empowerment makes sense within walled gardens?

Ismael Peña-López: empowerment is not about outputs, but about processes, which includes the selection of the (re)sources that are going to feed your processes.

Pierre L. Carrolaggi: Is it possible full control? Isn’t it an illusion? Not even in the free software field can you control everything.

Fernando Botelho: Absolute independence might not be possible or even desirable. Which does not mean that open protocols enhance interaction and interdependence — quite different from dependence.

Wilhem Lappe: Open protocols open the door for collaboration. And even if they’re not under one’s control, they make it possible to act and interact.

Christian Kreutz: There’s a difference between being empowered and potentially being able to be empowered. We might not be aware that there’s been a huge advance in the possibilities of empowerment, even if it has not materialized. This is why output is also very important, as it realizes the possibilities of some advancements towards empowerment.

Summing up:

• control (of the tools, of the environment) is important for empowerment
• processes matter more than output
• though successful output raises awareness and shows reachable goals
• control (of the tools) can be substituted by openness (e.g. open protocols) so that interaction happens freely without the need of control
• the creation of potential empowerment (vs. real achieved empowerment) has to be brought under the spotlight as it is a successful achievement too

Notes from Simposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social (e-STAS: Symposium on Technologies for Social Action) held in Málaga, Spain, on March 26-27th, 2009. More notes on this event: estas2009. More notes on this series of events: e-stas.

Interview to Carlos Argüello, Studio C., by Jaime Estévez

Founder and director of Studio C, Carlos Argüello has over 20 years of experience in graphic and digital design. Has stood for excellence as a creative and artistic director in the world of renowned companies such as Walt Disney Features, Cinesite (Kodak), Synthetic Video and PDI (Pacific Data Images). One year later, in 2001, he returned to his homeland, Guatemala, and created Studio C. His aim was to work with local talent offering their design and production experience in the fields of architecture, audiovisual production and graphic design.

Carlos explains how he began working as a waitress and accessing computers at random, learning their usage and focusing in multimedia edition. He then travelled to the US and began to work with Hollywood, which represented quite a personal leap in his career (working for Terminator II, Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” videoclip, Armaggedon, SpaceJam, Waterworld, etc.).

At the sweetest peak of his career, he used to come back to Guatemala (his homeland) but saw it through the eyes of a tourist. Then a plane crashed in front of his own eyes while waiting to take a plane in Cuba. And felt the need for a personal change, a change that could bring change to other people. And thought about doing something in Antigua, Guatemala that was beyond the typical local wish to emigrate to the US.

He created a team of geeky kids and teens that already played with computers, and taught them to create products for the media industry in Guatemala. The project grew and they moved the office to the capital. One of their flagship projects, working with “The Chronicles of Narnia“, which was a national event. Not only the technical output was high quality, but the “moral” output was: putting on the map a developing country in the arena of hi-tech media productions.

Besides these more commercial projects, they are also producing educational projects for minorities (e.g. the Maya community).

Now the project’s become a regional one, not only working in/for Guatemala, but also Mexico, almost all Central America and part of South America. The good point (or bad, depending on how you look at it) is taht there’s never been public funding to create the offices, which means the project is absolutely sustainable. All the resources come from the private sector. Which does not mean that the project is looking for wider support to enlarge its reach.

Q & A

Q: what’s the priority: the Economy, Education or Politics? A: They are interdependent. It is difficult to state whether a solution in one particular issue can come without the other two changing too.

Javier Estévez: is technology the solution to poverty or to inclusion? A: No, it’s not, but it’s a very powerful enabler and catalyst. ICTs are creating new paths of development. And, most important, paving them for any kind of people, whatever is their origin (e.g. indigenous people).

Q: Is this project a personal one? Would it survive would the leader (i.e. Carlos Argüello) quit it? A: Yes, it would. There’s been a deep empowerment of the people involved in the project, which have made of them independent and responsible people, and leaders at their time of their own local communities. On the other hand, they are no more stuck to their homelands, but have become citizens of the world and have established their own networks.

Q: Is this project a new example of “cognitive neocolonialism”? Will these trained people emigrate to other places where they’d be better paid? Is the project favouring brain drain? A: Most people involved in the project do not want to go and live and work abroad. If given good conditions at the local level, people have no reasons to emigrate. The key is local development at large, not developing a minority that, of course, would most likely emigrate.

Jaime Estévez proposes a headline: Carlos Argüello went to the US and came back to make Latinamerica less dependent from the US.

NOTES: the post cannot reflect neither the richness of Carlos Argüello’s talk nor how well conducted the interview was by Jaime Estévez. Thank you both!

In 2007, half the world population — 50.10% to be true — were subscribers of a mobile telephony service, representing 72.1% of the total telephony subscribers (fixed, mobile, satellite, etc.). The datum is even more shocking if we move into the African continent: there, still only one third of the population has (actually, is subscribed to) a cellular phone (28.44%), but it is important to stress the fact that this third stands for 89.6% of the total subscribers to telephone lines, the highest proportion of the five continents. Though it is but an average that goes way higher when looking into specific countries like Tanzania (98.1%), Mauritania (97%), the Congo (97.2%), Kenya (97,7%) or Cameroon 96%), just to put some examples.

These data absolutely support the creation, in 2008, of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group (MW4D), fostered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This interest group — a part of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative — has as a purpose to:

explore how to use the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on Mobile phones as a solution to bridge the Digital Divide and provide minimal services (health, education, governance, business,…) to rural communities and under-privileged populations of Developing Countries.

Some projects using mobile phones for development

• Kiwanja and their projects: FrontlineSMS, to help nonprofits to benefit from using SMS for advocacy and monitoring; nGOmoblie, a competition to encourage them to think about how text messaging could benefit them and their work; and Silverback, a game for mobile phones to raise awareness about gorilla conservation
• TradeNet, to access and manage market information (specially on agriculture markets) from the mobile phone;
• M-Pesa, to transfer money and make payments through text messaging;
• Ushahidi, a platform that crowdsources crisis information, allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.
• Kubatana.net and their experience monitoring the elections in Zimbabwe, now converted into a handbook on How to run a mobile advocacy campaign

These and other projects, stories, people and organizations using mobile phones for social impact can be found at MobileActive.

On the other hand, Stéphane Boyera and Ken Banks, co-chairs of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group will be at the II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation, where there is a whole track on mobile telephony for development.

More information

• Mobile Phones and the Digital Divide, article by Ken Banks in PC World
• The meek shall inherit the web, article at The Economist
• Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development, workshop about mobile phones for development taking place in Maputo, Mozambique, on April 1 and 2, 2009.
• Most mobiles…, Johathan Donner’s blog on mobiles for development.

From 10th to 12th February 2008, the Development Cooperation 2.0: II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation will take place in Gijón, Spain.

Last year’s edition featured a interesting collection of international speakers from the Development Cooperation and the Information Society world that rarely come together. This year’s pool of speakers lists an equally impressive range of personalities from which to learn — and debate with: Stéphane Boyera, Ken Banks, Ana Moreno, Vikas Nath, John Dryden, Eduardo Sánchez, Alexander Widmer, Carolina Figueres, Merryl Ford and Najat Rochdi.

The central topic of the conference will be Innovation in ICT for Human Development, with threethree associated thematic axis, namely:

• ICT and Quality in Development Cooperation
• ICT and Mobility for Development
• Development Cooperation Networks

Being interested in ICT4D and Development Cooperation, this is one of the two events taking place in Spain that you dont want to miss — the other one being e-STAS: Symposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social (more information to come).

More info

• Official Website
• Call for open participation
• The tag of the event will be cooperacion2.0

Next 24th and 25th April, 2008, takes place the third edition of e-STAS 2008: Symposium de las Tecnologías para la Acción Social [Symposium on Technologies for Social Action].

I was convinced that the Development Cooperation 2.0 Conference that took place in Gijón in January would have been the event of the year related to the Information Society and Development Cooperation, ICT4D, Nonprofit Technology and so. Well, they will have to share this honor.

e-STAS 2007 was a great event, an event to network, learn and reflect. It was also a conference that succeeded in bringing in very interesting people from all over the world, renowned and respected in their fields. Compared to other events, it really facilitated participation from the audience, both in site and online.

The Program is not ready yet, but it will undoubtedly be of highest quality. Actually, you can follow the blog of the event (in Spanish) to be up-to-date on what is going on behind the curtains.

As per the goals and program itself, it has been split in two axes. One geographically, by continent, and the other one by content.

The contents that are going to be dealt with are:

• ICTs and the Millennium Development Goals
• Infrastructures and low-cost devices
• Technological contents and services to foster sociodigital inclusion
• Corporate social responsibility, NGOs, volunteers and ICTs
• Sample programs and projects showcasing good multisectorial networking practices using New Technologies for Social Action and Development

This is one of these events that, being in the world of ICT4D, Nonprofits and, most especially, Nonprofit Technology (NP-Tech) you really cannot miss, even if you cannot speak Spanish: last year there was translation service, so, hopefully, so will be this year as it is expected circa 20% of foreign attendance.

As last year, I’ve been invited by the organization to take part into the event. That’s being lucky. I don’t know yet what am I supposed to do, but I accepted and offered all my help unconditionally. This is how I see the conference. If anybody’s interested in attending, or has already planned to, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.