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!

(Early reg deadline is on Nov 15th.)

——————————-

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!

India is home to a robust IT and telecommunications industry as well as a huge agrarian economy which supports many of the world’s poor. As such, it is an ideal setting for a conference focusing on information and communication technologies (ICT) and socio-economic development. Every sector is involved – governments, academia, small start-ups, large corporations, inter-governmental organizations, and non-profits and non-governmental organizations. In spite of the tremendous energy and resources behind these projects, scientifically sound research in this space is still just beginning to emerge: What is the actual impact of ICT projects? What novel technology is required to meet development needs? What methodologies lead to success or failure of a project?

The goal of the ICTD conference is to provide a forum for academic researchers working with ICT applied to development. The conference will be scientifically rigorous and multi-disciplinary – papers reporting high-quality original research were subject to double-blind peer review by a program committee of leading scholars in the field. The conference will bring together researchers in both the social and technical sciences, with anticipated representation from anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial design, and so on.

Conference details are available at the ICTD2007 website: http://research.microsoft.com/workshops/ictd2007.

PLEASE NOTE THAT REGISTRATION FEES WILL INCREASE ON NOVEMBER 15 AND AGAIN ON NOVEMBER 30. EARLY REGISRTATION IS RECOMMENDED.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Chair: Kentaro Toyama (Microsoft Research India)

Program Committee Chairs: Balaji Parthasarathy (IIIT Bangalore), Krithi Ramamritham (IIT Bombay)

Advisory Committee: VS Arunachalam (CSTEP), Michael Best (Georgia Tech), Ken Keniston (MIT), Raj Reddy (CMU), S. Sadagopan (IIIT Bangalore), AnnaLee Saxenian (UC Berkeley), Ernest Wilson (U Maryland)

Local Arrangements Chair: Balaji Parthasarathy (IIIT Bangalore)

Publications Chair: Rahul Tongia (CMU)

Sponsors:

International Development Research Centre (Canada)
Microsoft Research India
Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (Univ. of Colorado)

Conference held in association with…

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore

Program Committee

Richard Anderson University of Washington
Akhtar Badshah Microsoft
V Balaji ICRISAT
Anupam Basu Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
John K. Bennett University of Colorado, Boulder
Michael Best Georgia Tech
Subhash Bhatnagar Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
John Canny University of California, Berkeley
John Chuang University of California, Berkeley
Royal Colle Cornell University
Chris Coward University of Washington
Rahul De Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
M. Bernardine Dias Carnegie Mellon University,Qatar
Jonathan Donner Microsoft Research India
Kevin Fall Intel Research Berkeley
Pat Hall Open University
Claire Heffernan University of Reading
Bill Hefley Carnegie Mellon University
Arding Hsu Siemens Research China
Heather Hudson University of San Francisco
Mahad Ibrahim University of California, Berkeley
Ashok Jhunjhunwala Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Atreyi Kankanhalli National University of Singapore
G.R. Kiran London School of Economics
Jim Koch Santa Clara University
Beth Kolko University of Washington
Richa Kumar Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Suresh Lodha University of California, Santa Cruz
Colin Maclay Harvard University
Shirin Madon London School of Economics
Margaret Martonosi Princeton University
Shrikant Naidu Motorola Labs
Brian O’Connell University of Connecticut
Joyojeet Pal University of California, Berkeley
Govindan Parayil University of Oslo
Tapan Parikh University of Washington
Nimmi Rangaswamy Microsoft Research India
Tony Salvador Intel Research
Nirvikar Singh University of California, Santa Cruz
K R Srivatsan International Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala
Christoph Stork University of the Witwatersland
Eswaran Subrahmanian Carnegie Mellon University
Rahul Tongia Carnegie Mellon University
Tim Unwin University of London
Zubin Verghese Siemens