ictdchick

So (one of my paper reviewers recently noted that one should never start a sentence with “so”) , at the end of the banquet on the first night of ICTD2007, Kentaro (the ictd superman) introduced the two bids for the next ICTD conference. The two candidates? Buenos Aires (aka tourist and salsa heaven) and Carnegie Mellon’s campus on Qatar.

I’m honestly really divided between the two. My vote? That we pick both, choosing one to be ICTD 2010 or 2011, two conferences from now.

One of my main concerns about the content in this year’s conference, is that it seems even more biased towards Indian projects than last year’s, when we had at least one paper from China, as well as keynote speaker Prof Zhiwei Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Out of the 18 papers and 20 posters:

• 22 presented results from work in India alone,
• 4 from India and other countries (”S. Asia”, India and S. Africa, India and Central America, Kenya/India/Bolivia),
• 2 from Pakistan,
• 1 from Nepal,
• 1 from Honduras,
• 5 from Africa (7, if you count the combos: Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana, and 3 South Africa) , and
• 3 non-specific (the meta-ICTD panel)
• 0 from China

I think several regions are under-represented. This is not to say that there is a flaw in the review process - I’m sure part of it is just that Microsoft Research India is just producing a lot of high-quality research, and another part is just that there are a lot of ICTD projects in India, so a good bulk of the submissions are about reasearch in India. Indeed it’s a lot easier to set up WiLDNet links in Tamil Nadu than in, let’s say, Ghana. I might suggest, however, that maybe some communities just didn’t get the invitation? Or that they saw that the conference was in Bangalore and thought the invitation wasn’t for them. Or they saw the program committee and At the same time I’m not sure that there’s much more we as a community can do to draw in more perspectives from projects in other countries; there’s some diversity on the program committee, they provide scholarships for participants from developing countries, and we’ve always been (as far as I can tell) an open and inviting group of people. Okay, well, I guess I for one could start writing more papers on my work in Uganda and Ghana. (Which might mean that this is a generational issue, since many of us wet our toes in India.) But I think a healthy next step could be to hold the conference in one of these under-represented areas. And, unfortunately for my decision-making process, both of these fit the bill. At the same time - given that Rahul Tongia is already firmly on the program committee, along with M Bernardine Dias (who I don’t think I’ve met yet), perhaps it makes sense to use this opportunity to engage with the universities in Argentina. But then again, this conference is still in its fledgling years, so I can also see how one would want to go with a well-known quantity and give the less-well-known quantity a year or so to become a well-known quantity. I know a certain School that does the same thing with PhD applicants…

If I were forced to choose, I would vote for Qatar (I don’t think I actually have a vote). It’s closer to Africa, where I’m likely to be at the time of the next conference. And the Argentine bid’s (I’m really sorry I forgot your name) tourist video was a little over-the-top for me; I think it was so long and so flashy that by the time it ended I forgot whatever academic reasons there were for locating the next ICTD in Buenos Aires. Besides, I’m really not all that into salsa.

But unfortunately not Live! from Bangalore… ICTD2007 (in my opinion) was a smashing success! (With of course very little smashing, except for that errant glass hiding under a chair…). The conference was held at the Ashoka Hotel in Bangalore, India on Saturday and Sunday December 15-16, 2007. Before I digress into my overall observations, immediately below are links to my notes from the keynotes and the sessions I attended. The usual caveats apply.

ICTD 2007 Opening Keynote Notes - Anirudh Krishna
ICTD 2007 Session 1: Design Notes
ICTD 2007 Session 2: Extending the Boundaries of ICTD
ICTD 2007 Session 3: Telecenters
ICTD 2007 Panel Discussion Notes: Meaningful Research for ICTD
ICTD 2007 Session 4: Alternatives to Real-time Internet
(Oops, no notes for Sessions 5 and 6)
ICTD2007 Session 7: Children and PCs
ICTD 2007 Closing Keynote Notes - Paul Polak

The (unedited) notes available in the links above are not verbatim (I can’t type quite that fast), and don’t include everything said. Please don’t attribute content in these (especially the Q&A) to the labeled speakers without consulting with the speakers first - I may have misheard what they said, or paraphrased it in a way that misrepresented their meaning. For the talks themselves, you should refer to the corresponding papers for details and missing graphics, although of course the Q&A won’t necessarily be represented. In any case I hope these notes help you find ICTD work that is of interest to you!

The keynote speakers were both incredibly engaging. Anirudh Krishna spoke on his research on how people move in and out of poverty. For me - two main points were:

1. Poverty is escapable: many people escape poverty every year, just as many fall into it. At a high level, this indicates that while working on ways to help people escape poverty is good, our efforts may be moot if we fail to also prevent others from becoming impoverished
2. The capacity to aspire: Krishna notes a glass ceiling for those in villages; although they may try to aspire higher, their condition (the socio-economic-political context) prevents them from aspiring beyond the level of schoolteacher. Perhaps we can work on ways to provide protection against descents into poverty by connecting talent with opportunity.

Interestingly, two papers spoke directly to the topic of aspiration. Renee and Kathi’s paper on gender and shared computing in Chile and India (Akshaya) looked at women’s aspirations; Joyojeet’s paper on his work with parents of schoolchildren in India talked about how computers factored into children’s aspirations as well as parent’s aspirations for their children.

Paul Polak started off the closing keynote with some of Krishna’s slides on the consistent divisions (asset/status-wise) between extreme poverty and poverty, and between those in poverty and those who are not. And then went on to talk about his last 25 years of work talking with and listening to $1/day farmers, trying to understand how they want to move out of poverty. His takeaway: we need to collaborate and co-design with them to find ways to help them make more money, noting that by starting with the problems they give priority to, one opens up the door to addressing their next priorities… Anyways - his talk was packed with interesting stats, observations, an three-step how-to’s, courtesy of the editor of his forthcoming (Feb 2008) book Out of Poverty.

Tap also did an awesome job with the poster session - probably the most interesting and engaging poster session I’ve attended; since each one was also accompanied by a peer-reviewed conference-length paper, all of the posters exhibited real work, real ideas and were well thought-out. The posters in the same room as the sessions, exactly where everyone was during the break, so they had great exposure to a great audience.. And the fast forward session, in which each author gave a 90 second intro to their work, was a brilliant way for all of us to get an overview so we could quickly target the posters we were interested in during the poster session.

Before I close, there’s a couple of presentations I want to highlight as ones that I thought were especially interesting and well-crafted. (Apologies to those who presented in the sessions I missed - I’m sure J Sherwani and Indrani’s presentations were excellent, and I’ve also heard good feedback about Aishwarya Ratan’s paper on Welfare, agency, and ICT4D.)

ICTD 2007 Session 1: Design Notes

Digital Green provides a sort of “Indian Farmer Idol”/YouTube to farmers employing new agricultural technology advocated by the Green Foundation (see paper for details) . I think it’s really interesting to note their results on how various deployment/video strategies affected the farmers’ adoption of practices, with low receptiveness to expert-facilitated video and hole-in-the-wall/tv-broadcast strategies, and 6-7x more adoption with videos including low/medium-skilled mediators working with local farmers. These results underline ideas and observations from Janaki’s paper on the role of trustworthiness in the Parry information kiosk: information access is not sufficent - “whether a community uses the information services offered by information kiosks depends, among other factors, on the perceived quality of the information offered by such services.”

ICTD 2007 Session 2: Extending the Boundaries of ICTD

This was a one-paper session. Janini’s presentation did a great job of explaining the transnational flows of e-waste, and the associated issues. It would definitely be remiss for us not to consider these issues as we pursue our ends of employing ICTs for development, and as markets (some consequent of ICTD movements) draw more and more toxic materials into developing countries.

ICTD 2007 Session 4: Alternatives to Real-time Internet

I’m really impressed by Revi Sterling. Out of all the papers presented, hers truly integrates theory and practice, enabling theory-backed (driven?) engagement in development using novel technologies.

ICTD2007 Session 7: Children and PCs

Of course in this session (as with Session 3 on Telecenters), I’m a little biased. I think I must have listened to Joyojeet’s research talks at least two or three times each now, but I’m still riveted every time. With all of the (often hype-driven) push towards information-kiosk-as-community-centers and computers-in-schools (with Internet or without), I think Joyojeet’s findings on the engagement of the local communities with these projects are critically important, but often not done because they are, well, hard to do.

Rabin’s paper on usage models of classroom computing gets started on some important critical thinking about how one can plan for computers in schools. Although they did pull out some numbers on public spending in other countries, I wonder how these models translate outside of India. I just visited some secondary school computer labs in Jinja, Uganda (urban, private schools, no internet access), and indeed, the multiple students per shared computer model is the norm, with one school putting 10 students at each of their computers. At the same time - multimouse/multipoint is certainly not mainstream - so their representation, while nice, isn’t representative. In Uganda’s secondary schools, computer education is largely about basic “theoretical” (what is RAM, CPU, etc) and practical (create a word/excel/access/powerpoint document, print, move files) computer skills. While they are taught with 10 students to a computer, they are tested with one person per computer (they have to test the students in shifts, since there aren’t enough computers). I think it’s possible that a multimouse approach might be useful for teaching/learning certain aspects, there are limits to where that approach can be employed in teaching computer skills. I think their main arguments still hold up - even the single-user-per-community-computer model is significantly more financially feasible than the single ownership model.

That’s all she wrote.

But hopefully she’ll also write a couple of submissions for the next ICTD conference!

I’ve been thinking about services and social entrepreneurship and all sorts of good things about making money in such a way that the public as a whole benefits.
And really, that is what entrepreneurship (”social” or otherwise) is about - finding some way that makes things better for some set of customers.  And in many cases, it is about making things free (or virtually so), sometimes by having someone else pay for the service (e.g Google with AdWords, or even Aravind Eye Hospital). It goes to say that “free” does not always mean free.  Sometimes we pay with our time/attention, our screen real estate (remember when we all got free Internet from
juno.com), or even just a counter increment on a web site.  I think freerice.com just wants to build awareness about hunger and poverty while making us learn SAT vocabulary. Well, plus whatever other ulterior motives they may have.  On top of that there’s all sorts of issues about what it means to give people something for nothing. I once went to a Taiwanese youth camp that was originally fully subsidized by the Taiwanese government, but later started imposing a nominal fee because parents thought the experience couldn’t be valuable if they didn’t have to pay for it. Likewise, some of the Mallapuram residents expressed that they didn’t want to go to the Akshaya kiosks because they were perceived as social enterprises for poor people. I think it is some of these issues that make it so difficult to work in Africa. The years of development aid have created 1) an expectation that if they wait long enough someone will come and offer what they need for free (or for a  world bank loan, which is not strictly free but often perceived as such) or 2) cynicism on the part of residents because so many offered “free” projects have quickly evaporated after considerably time and effort on their parts.  For me this manifests itself in the general trend that a lot of my work (e.g. getting things through customs) has simply failed to progress unless I was physically present. Eventually you can achieve momentum, especially if by continuing to come back you dismantle some of the cynicism by building some level of trust.  But it goes to say that our projects have a better chance of being sustainable if we acknowledge up front the investment we expect from them (time, money, etc) in return for what we are supposedly giving them for “free”.

This is where I’ll be come December 15th. I unfortunately didn’t submit a paper this time, since I was in four different countries (not counting layovers) in the week before the deadline. But! a lot of my colleagues have papers that got in, and it promises to be a good chance to talk to other people in this area. It will be a relief to just be a participant this time and not a behind-the-scenes volunteer…

(Early reg deadline is on Nov 15th.)

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ICTD2007 Call for Participation
——————————-

2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2007)

http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/ictd2007

December 15-16, 2007
Bangalore, India

Following on a successful conference at Berkeley in May of 2006 (http://sims.berkeley.edu/ictd2006), we are pleased to announce the second ICTD conference to take place in Bangalore, India!
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So I’m talking to my doctor about possible drug interactions between various prescriptions and he pulls out a… (drum roll) palm treo. Oh okay so that’s probably not a major revelation.. doctors love Palm devices and have loved them pretty much since 3COM started making them back in the 90s. (Can I say that yet? Back in the 90s?) And of course my immediate reaction is to ask him what software he uses, mentioning that I’m looking into what software might be useful for rural clinics in developing countries (e.g. Ghana and Uganda and D.R. Congo). He replied: you only need one! It’s called Epocrates.. like Hippocrates, but with an ‘e’! Clever, huh? (Okay I’m paraphrasing, but only a tiny tiny bit.) Then he proceeded to show me a drug database, a symptoms database, and a diagnosis database, all hyperlinked together.

Of course - before everyone goes off running to deliver this very fine product to the masses of doctors in developing countries, there are a couple of catches. The data is very much geared towards doctors in the US, which has a number of implications. 1) Only the drugs that are available in the US are listed, and then with the US names. So, for example, many of the newer malaria medications which haven’t been approved in the US (like Coartem) won’t be there. And other drugs like paracetamol (as it is known in the UK and former British colonies like Ghana and Uganda) will be listed as acetaminophen. 2) There’s a yearly recurring cost of $100. Of course, this might not be out of reach for these doctors, and certainly is about equivalent in price to the paper versions of these reference guides, and about 1000 times more portable.. 3) The pathology is different - a doctor in the US wouldn’t expect TB, where a doctor in Uganda or Ghana would know to look for TB symptoms.

I bring all this up because I spent part of this past summer in Uganda with the 2007 East Africa Blum Fellows visiting some of the Uganda Health Information Network (UHIN) deployment sites in Lyantonde and Rakai. What struck me most was not the specific programs offered by the project (digital submission of health outpatient statistics, and dissemination of malaria and pediatric health information), but rather how they appropriated the devices, installing and sharing their own applications, and using the Excel application to track inventory and patient logs. They just drink up this data, reading whatever they can get to learn more about how they can care for the wide variety of conditions they see every day. So.. in addition to whatever information management functions I can put into place, I hope I can also help put more information in the hands of the doctors and clinicians and nurses I’m working with.

There’s of course still a lot of other issues to deal with - everything from power for recharging to the cost of the devices themselves (~$70 for a Palm, and $300 for a Palm+Mobile Treo) to maintenance and sustainability. I still want to try putting this type of information in their hands, with all of the appropriate warnings, as well as more locally specific information, like local health bulletins or Hesperian’s translated Where There is No Doctor series. Let me know if you have any suggestions for mobile health applications!

Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest

By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 2, 2007; Page A01

A friend pointed out this article for me. I have to wonder that if in our efforts to look at ICTD academically if we’re going to create another glut of idealists with nowhere to go. But there’s so much to do! I have been watching interest in this area grow over the past three years, and have high hopes that the entrepreneurial spirit of this generation of b-school and international relations graduates will be able to look beyond the traditional NGO positions and forge ahead with their own grassroots efforts. And of course, that this crop of people will be well trained to listen and live with the communities they want to help, and genuinely provide services that the communities need in a way that they can sustain them.

I’m not sure what all the schools are that have a good focus on information technology and international development. It seems that most Poli Sci, Public Health, and Public Policy programs are fairly cognizant of the theoretical issues around development, but are not always as well versed in technology. Haas Business school at Berkeley is fairly experiential in this area and actually sends students (where possible) to developing countries like Ghana. They are also part of the Global Social Venture Competition, along with London Business School and Columbia Business school, which have given rise to entrepreneurial efforts like World of Good and many other socially-minded organizations. Cornell’s Johnson School of Business also has a Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise which sends people to developing countries, knowing that while not everyone will continue to work on sustainable development post-graduation, the experiences they have as part of the program will be useful no matter where they end up. And of course I have to mention the Blum Center for Developing Economies, which sponsors a lot of my research and has recently started a new minor for undergraduates.

From a computer science perspective - developing new technologies explicitly designed for the infrastructural, economic, political, and social realities in developing regions, there is (of course) the multi-disciplinary TIER group at UC Berkeley, some work being done at University of Washington, and Keshav’s Tetherless Computing group at University of Waterloo, in addition to the very capable individuals scattered throughout other universities.

Investing in Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries — A Talk Sponsored by The Blum Center
Wednesday, November 14th
6:00pm
Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Room 290, UC Berkeley Campus
Please join The Blum Center for Developing Economies for a talk on:
“Creating an online investment platform for entrepreneurs in developing countries”
Thierry Sanders and Koen Wasmus, Directors of the Business in Development BiD Network Foundation.
A reception and graduate student mixer will follow.
Please RSVP: http://blumcenter.berkeley.edu/events/BID

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Craig Newmark of Craiglist recently gave a talk as part of my Social Entrepreneurship class. I’ve attached my notes from the talk here (Notes: Craig Newmark on Craigslist), and you can listen to the audio on the ischool podcast.

Craig, as a self-proclaimed-and-proud-of-it geek is a fun speaker with lots of interesting perspectives. As someone who has lucked out by having some really good insights into what people want (simple, functional, straightforward ways of linking people with things to people that want them), he looks at his brainchild from a very technologically deterministic perspective. Give them what you have, listen to what they want. And if they don’t like the principles you stick to, its okay - there’s always another community that will.

And so it turns out that the stuff that I think is really interesting about craigslist (besides the fact that it is so useful) isn’t really all that interesting to Craig. I asked if he could highlight any differences in how different communities have picked up craigslist - if perhaps there were certain characteristics that lend towards the craiglist-principles being more appropriate or not. At the very least, there’s a tipping point - if there aren’t a lot of postings then it’s less useful as a resource for people that are looking for things. Craigslist apartment listings, for example are probably more useful in the bay area, than some random small town. There was a time where it was only useful in the bay area. Although it’s in a lot of cities now so maybe we aren’t so different after all. But try to transfer the idea to another country (madrid?) and see what happens. Do the categories and everything reflect some structural element of American culture, or is their model flexible enough to reflect any culture?

What I’d really like to see is a sort of Craiglist-free tag for connecting specific NGO-needs with micro-donors. A micro-donation marketplace, where approved social entrepreneurs can list their needs and be matched with people willing to donate time or money, either on a one-time or an ongoing basis. We’d have to be careful not to inculcate dependence, but to make sure the projects listed are well thought out. I guess instead of craigslist you could think of it as a kiva.org, extended to allow micro-donations and not just micro-loans, crossed with an idealist.org that recruits people to come and do particular tasks. For example, HEAL Africa, a hospital I do some volunteer/missions work for in the Dem Rep of Congo, could list their needs: salaries for their employees, school fees for the families that take in orphans, oxygenators, etc, and individuals could adopt particular needs, rather than donating to an unlabeled bin called “HEAL Africa”. People like being connected to specific achievements; it just feels more engaging to pay a particular doctor’s salary, than to be writing a yearly check to a faceless NGO.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I’m really glad Craig never sold out - especially to the banner ad people. I stopped using Yahoo! Mail because the banner ads kept getting more and more…umm…skanky. I didn’t really appreciate always having some half-naked model on a banner ad occupying my screen while I was reading email. (Besides, threaded conversations are just so much easier to track/manage.) It’s amazing to realize that a site with 9 billion page views per month is managed by only 24 paid employees. An ongoing problem is that of scammers, something that is as much as possible policed by users, but still a serious concern. And a recurring theme is the one of listening to the users. He who has ears to hear, let him hear. It’s not just about listening, but about hearing what they are saying and knowing what to do about it. And I think that’s what a lot of development-speak boils down to: take the time to listen to your users and you might actually be able to work with them to develop something they will actually use!

As a follow-up to my missions trip to Goma this past summer my teammates and I did a two hour presentation for our church, talking about what we did, and what we’re planning to do.

Normally I’m pretty skeptical about missions. I mean really - what depth is there to going out to beaches over spring break and walking up to random strangers to tell them about God? It’s pure proselytization. But over the past few years I’ve been taking development classes and talking to people in Ghana, and I’ve realized that missions are not purely evangelical; many of the schools and hospitals in Africa are missions in which people have devoted their time and skills towards God’s mission of feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, and curing the sick. But still.. what can one do with two weeks? Short missions trips are always ultimately for the benefit of the person going and not to the community supposedly being served.

This trip was different. We gathered together as a multi-disciplinary group of people who wanted to go to Goma to listen to the people there, to hear what needs were there, and to serve in whatever way we could. We preached, installed wireless routers, and taught workshops on how to play with children. We even painted a mural! I really think we made a difference… and I can’t wait to go back.

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Eventually I’ll post these talk announcements before the fact! The announcement for the panel discussion is below. Click on the “more” link for my notes on the discussion and speaker bios…

HARNESSING COMMUNITIES & MARKETS - NEW WAVE SOCIAL ICT IMPACT.

Please join us for a panel discussion on
‘Harnessing Communities & Markets- The New Wave of Social ICT.’

Jessica Flannery, co-founder of Kiva.org, Darian Rodriguez Heyman,
Executive Director of the Craisglist Foundation and Gerard Speksnijder
from McKinsey’s Technology office in Silicon Valley will discuss the
possibilities and limits of market-based models to alleviate poverty and
create social equity.

Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Time: 12:30 to 2 pm
Place: School of Information, 101 South Hall

This talk is part of the iSchool seminar on ‘Social Entrepreneurship in
ICTD’ taught by Paul Braund and Anke Schwittay from the RiOS Institute.

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