I’ve been recently interviewed by e-mail by journalist Ignacio Fossati. He put clever questions that made me think, which I really appreciated. Some of my answers were grounded on plain evidence, but other were just my own opinion — arguably all of them. As most of the interview dealt with “cheap technologies for Developing Countries”, such as the OLPC project, and we’ve been having some debate lately here, with Teemu Leinonen or at Peter Ryan’s, I thought I’d share them here, so the debate can go on.
In bold characters, the questions; the answers following.
Cheap laptops, what do you think their acceptance will be like in developing countries? Do you think it will be a success?
Personally I think that they will undoubtedly have some acceptance. In...
Lady Virginia Mugarra VelardeEducation 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
María Jesús MedinaCybervolunteering at Iníci@te Programme
[note: in...
In
Online Volunteering,
development,
nptech,
Telecenter,
meetings,
Open Access,
Digital Literacy,
Nonprofits,
Telecentre,
Education & e-Learning,
cybervolunteer,
ICT volunteer,
Digital Divide,
ICT4D,
ICT Infrastructures
Manuel Castells is a scientific I admire. There are things I share — most of them — and things I don’t. Right now I’m working hard with two works of him:
Castells, M. (2000). “Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society”. In British Journal of Sociology, Jan-Mar 2000, 51(1), 5-24. London: Routledge.
Castells, M. (2004). “Informationalism, Networks, And The Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint”. In Castells, M. (Ed.), The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
which I find really interesting and a recommended reading for everyone.
This is why I find so disappointing when an author of his stature can so absurdly sleep out of the road by writing:
the Internet is quickly becoming a medium of interactive...
In
Participation,
facebook,
web 2.0,
beer,
burrows,
instant messaging,
lessig,
manuel castells,
MSN,
SNS,
social networking sites,
ICT Infrastructures
infoDev has published the report of a survey about the state of ICTs implementation in the education sector in Africa.
Some highlights:
Growing commitment to ICT in education on the part of government leaders across the continent. Leadership, leadership, leadership.
Public-private partnerships are important mechanisms enabling the implementation of ICT in national education systems in Africa. Mark Davies also spoke about this at the Web2forDev Conference when he presented Tradenet, and it’s getting a subject on which everyone comes over again and again.
The need for digital content development relevant to local curricula is becoming more
urgent as ICT use becomes more widespread. Surprisingly, there’s few mentions to initiatives such as Creative Commons and no mentions at all...
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...
Student research seminar: Chintan Viashnav
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...
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 as Lego as main founder, and Lego Mindstorms as one of Lego-MIT Media Lab most interesting outcomes.
We there were presented a couple of very interesting projects:
Scratch
Jay Silver
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....
Student research seminar: Fred Stutzman
In this talk I will seek feedback on the potential framework of my dissertation. I am interested in the role social technologies play in the management of real-world social networks, particularly in the management of real world social networks in periods of transition.
What happens with online identity with (so much) Web 2.0 services, subscriptions, etc. How do we create digital identity? What does it mean to have a digital identity? How do we manage it?
How do Microformats play with online identity?
All along your trip through social networks, you can take with you some content, people, resources and leave behind the other ones. Across your transition through platforms… where’s the meeting point? the focal point?
This transition: is a...
Student research seminar: Michael Zimmer
My presentation will include a quick overview of my dissertation research, as well as the “value-conscious design” methodology I am attempting to apply in order to pragmatically engage with the web search engine industry. I will also outline the “next steps” of the work, and my hope is that attendees can help me identify new avenues of exploration and solve some of the methodological and philosophical gaps in the project.
Faustian Bargain: privacy vs. better search, must provide information to participate. Then: how to design good technology with a value-conscious design, including moral and ethical values. Is this bargain acceptable? depends on efficiency, utility and relevancy.
Perfect search:
provide results that suit...
Leads: John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, Rob Faris
Over the past five years, the incidence of Internet filtering has expanded from a small number of states, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to well over thirty countries worldwide. While Internet filtering and content restrictions continue to grow in scope, scale and sophistication, censorship of the Internet broaches many unanswered questions, touching on legal, political, economic, social and ethical issues.
Critics of filtering focus on the frequent collateral damage, the suppression of free speech as an infringement on human rights, the often tenuous legal status of filtering and the potential for negative impacts on economic and human development. For others, filtering is seen as an appropriate remedy for Internet content...
Leads: Jonathan Zittrain
The Internet of tomorrow will not much resemble the Internet of today. What are the changes sweeping over the Net, and who stands to gain and lose by them?
The big change the personal computer brought in — compared to big mainframes — was that one solution — the PC — fitted many problems/questions. It was a multipurpose machine that let the customer use it for whatever he could imagine (or almost). And software was the tool to be used to accomplish any purpose.
The “Hourglass” architecture follows a similar purpose: let’s get anyone connected, but let anyone get connected the way the want and exchange whatever they want. Just some standards are of consensus to make thinks work. Reference: Jonathan Zittrain (2001) The Internet’s...
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...
Here comes the bibliography I’m using to teach my course Technological grounds of the e-Administration belonging to the Master in e-Administration at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
Bibliography
Castells, M. (2001). La Era de la Información: Economía, Sociedad y Cultura. Vol. 1: La sociedad red. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Center for International Development at Harvard University. (Ed.) (2000). Readiness for the Networked World. A Guide for Developing Countries. Cambridge: Center for International Development at Harvard University. Retrieved February 17, 2006 from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/readinessguide/guide.pdf
Copeland, B. J. (2006). “The Modern History of Computing”. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2006 Edition. Retrieved July 10, 2006...
The Congress on Internet, Law and Politics has the aim of continuing the task of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the main changes taking place in law and politics in the information society. This third congress focuses on the questions that currently represent the most important challenges and new developments in the fields of copyright, data protection, Internet security, problems of responsibility, electronic voting, and the new regulation of e-Administration, as well as dedicating a specific area to the current state of the use of new technologies by law professionals.
Presentation to the Congress: Jordi Bosch, the Catalan Regional Government’s Secretary-General for Telecommunications and the Information Society
One of the biggest struggles in History has been literacy....
Robert Guerra kindly handed me three books back when we met in Sevilla. One of them was Internet Governance. Issues, Actors and Divides, by Jovan Kurbalija and Eduardo Gelbstein. As the authors themselves state, there are at least five dimensions to Internet issues: Infrastructure, Legal, Economic, Development, and Socio-cultural. Each one is discussed in the chapters that follow.
Personally, I find the book really interesting and, honestly, much broader in scope and depth than an initial understanding of governance might bring to one’s mind. Actually, I’d compare it to Chris Nicol’s ICT Policy: A Beginner ’s Handbook as they share most of the aim, being Internet Governance. Issues, Actors and Divides more recent, and, indeed, going some steps further than...
The second edition of the World Information Society Report is out, bringing us a new calculation for the Digital Opportunity Index.
It’s a pity that the graphical representation of the Digital Opportunity Map has changed colors, as it makes it more difficult to compare among years. Nevertheless, here come both maps for 2006 and 2005 (remember that the report shows the DOI for the preceding year):
Digital Opportunity Index 2006. Source: World Information Society Report 2007[click to enlarge]
Digital Opportunity Index 2005. Source: World Information Society Report 2006[click to enlarge]
Major improvements — DOI increases above 20%, World Rank increases above 5 places (most of them are two digits increases) — are those of Antigua & Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Cambodia,...
We have here talked about the subject of mobile phones for development several times. Positively, as a proven and effective tool to let poor people access the Information Society, when other more costly infrastructures are unexistent and/or cannot be provided — because of cost or because of technical difficulties (say, cost again, as almost every and each difficulty can be overridden with money). Negatively, as mobile phone in lesser developed countries usually relies on GSM networks, hence, low band networks that while providing access, it is a less quality access than broadband — fixed and mobile — networks provide in developed countries, thus widening the digital divide.
Nicholas P. Sullivan now provides us with another example on how can mobile telephones enhance both local...
Michael Trucano and Marco Zennaro respectively sent me two resources concerning ICT Infrastructures, both of them published by the World Bank.
The first one is the updating of the Quick guide to low-cost computing devices and initiatives for the developing world. The guide is a short inventory of known projects related to ‘low cost ICT devices for the developing world’ authored by Michael Trucano himself. While the list looks quite complete to me, I’d rely on the accuracy of a previous work of him, Knowledge Maps: ICTs in Education, to sincerely believe that the list is surely complete.
The second one is World Bank Working Paper no.27 Telecommunications Challenges in Developing Countries: Asymmetric Interconnection Charges for Rural Areas, by Andrew Dymond. Going against...
The “VoIP-4D Primer” is a free guide available in four major languages [Arabic, English, French and Spanish]. The work is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions.
The 40-page guide targets both technical and non-technical readers. The first part presents the essentials of telephony over the Internet. For those interested in the more technical details, hands-on guidelines and configuration files are included in the second part. The examples provide essential background to build your own low-cost telephony system.
The primer is authored by Alberto Escudero Pascual and Louise Berthilson — backed up by a team of translators, editors and reviewers — and describes in full detail all the hows and whys in setting up your own Voice...
Prepared especially for ITU TELECOM World (December 4-8 2006 in Hong Kong), the 8th in the series of ITU Internet Reports, entitled digital.life, begins by examining the underlying technologies for new digital lifestyles, from network infrastructure to value creation at the edges. In studying how businesses are adapting to fast-paced digital innovation, the report looks at how they can derive value in an environment driven by convergence at multiple levels. Moreover, a great challenge lies in extending access to underserved areas of the world. In light of media convergence, a fresh approach to policy-making may be required, notably in areas such as content, competition policy, and spectrum management. And as our lives become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, digital...
The MIT press has just published a new book in their The Information Revolution & Global Politics series, directed by William J. Drake and Ernest J. Wilson III.
Written by Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba SeyWhile, 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...
Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol is researcher at the Interdisciplinary Internet Institute, where she’s assistant to Prof. Manuel Castells, and Lecturer in Econometrics at the University of Barcelona.
She’s now published, along with Manuel Castells, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba SeyWhile, 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...
Just five years ago, many people thought Chinese society and politics would be revolutionised by the Internet, a supposedly uncontrollable medium. Now, with China enjoying increasing geopolitical influence, people are wondering the opposite, whether perhaps China’s Internet model, based on censorship and surveillance, may one day be imposed on the rest of the world.
Reporters Without Borders have published The list of 13 Internet enemies. The enemies are: Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam (alphabetical order), all of them press freedom predators at least; most of them, much worse than this.
On the other side of Europe, The Internet Governance Forum met in Athens last week and held a workshop to deal...
Most of us still remember — and will for a long time — the book Wireless Networking in the Developing World, created 100% in a decentralised way by people scattered all over the world, free to download or printable through Lulu.
Rob Flickenger and Marco Zennaro did it again, this time joining efforts with Enrique Canessa and Martin Belcher in the editorial coordination, as long as many other contributors. The book is called How To Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization using Open Source Software. I here copy the official release note:
The BMO Book Sprint Team is pleased to announce the release of the new free book, “How To Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization using Open Source...
In some ways, this could be called Web 2.0 and diffusion of research (part IV): the article. History goes as follows:
I give a seminar on Web 2.0 issues applied to research and self-archiving
Colleague César Córcoles joins to improve the seminar and impart it again, adding a deeper technological background and broader range of examples.
A review of the seminar is published
Now, Carlos Casado, colleague of both César and me here at the University has joined the team and the result is the article The 2.0 Teacher: teaching and research from the web, recently published at UOC Papers review. I think (I hope) that the output has once again improved, as Carlos added his own part on blogging in the classroom, besides valuous contributions to the whole. Pity is that 5,500 characters is not...
Taking as a baseline Open Knowledge, Free Society, the 3rd edition of the Online congress of the Observatory for Cybersociety will take place from November 20th to December 3rd, 2006.
Five working groups have been created:
Topic A: Policy and social change
Topic B: Identity and Social groups
Topic C: Communication and culture
Topic D: Education and learning
Topic E: Critic and Innovation
each one still accepting papers for submission (deadline: October 30th).
The whole congress is a gem but, if you focus on ICT4D issues, Topic A. Policy and social change is your place.
If I had to pick one or two tracks — choose or die — I’d take these two:
A-6. Las TIC y la cooperación al desarrollo: después de la Cumbre Mundial para la Sociedad de la Información [ICTs and cooperation for...
Yesterday I had the lucky chance of taking part in a meeting (and dinner!) with Eben Moglen (middle of snapshot), organized by UOC’s vicerector of technology, Llorenç Valverde (left) and UOC’s Law professor Raquel Xalabarder (right).
There’s plenty of things he said, most of them in my own line of thought. My selected quote is, but, maybe quite unusual in the free software movement speeches: birthright bandwidth. Just a concept.
A concept, nevertheless, that just points to the same issue Enrique Dans deals with today, after two articles by Tim Berners Lee and Robert X. Cringely. Put it in my “own” words, the question is whether the internet, or access in general, is a public good and, further, a human right. Dans says “the Net has become a too much...
In an effort to counter the once borderless Internet, states are seeking to create informational boundaries in cyberspace. This is accomplished through a combination of technical and regulatory means — including laws, licensing regimes, industry self-regulation, national filtering, and content removal — thereby creating a matrix of controls.
The OpenNet Initiative: Internet Filtering Map is a quickview way to show this matrix of controls
In other words, it reflects ONI’s work, that is:
The ONI mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices. Our approach applies methodological rigor to the study of filtration and surveillance blending empirical case studies with sophisticated means for technical verification. Our aim is to generate a...
The Economist Intelligence Unit 2006 e-readiness rankings have been published: the world in early 2006 may be proclaimed ever more “e-ready”. This year’s e-readiness rankings reflect such progress, as all but two countries have improved their scores from the previous year.
I absolutely disagree with this following statement: Just as encouraging is the apparent narrowing of the “digital divide” in some facets of e-readiness. This is particularly evident in basic connectivity.
Just out context, the only thing I can say is that "digital" is not only about wires, and that "divide" is a relative indicator, not an absolute one. Actually, basic connectivity is absolutely different than broadband connectivity. Thus, while e-readiness might be...
A zillion thanks to Amy Mahan who answered my call for help long ago. This post is mainly to thank her for all the worthy information she pointed me to. The first reference below was the one that originated her e-mail to me, along with two more resources, but the web links one thing to another and…
I here present the most important references that I’ve come to know thanks to her indications:
Towards an African e-Index: Household and Individual ICT Access across 10 African Countries:
Based on the 2004 e-Access & Usage Household survey that was completed during the course of 2004 and 2005, this report is the result of a demand study of individuals and households and how ICT’s are used across 10 African countries
Knowledge Societies: Information Technology for...