Archive for May 19th, 2008

The second day of Berkman@10 was less structured and involved a number of smaller panels and discussions. Haven taken a course in economic and political development, I was particularly excited to see the panels on the developing world’s use of technology.

The “Open World” session was led by a number of people doing work in the area. Key points I took away were the importance of both “hard” topics like infrastructure and policy and “soft” ones like culture and language. Because of the oft-discussed digital divide, there is a “latent ingenuity” in poor countries where people are not given the agency to create or innovate with the same ease of their rich peers. Even where ICT infrastructure exists, it is often costlier; for example, African ICT traffic must flow through third parties (e.g. British ISPs) driving up the cost in net hundreds of millions of dollars. How do you create policies which induce infrastructure construction? These are difficult tasks which Ethan Zuckerman thought were possible to avoid in certain cases. He gave the example of cell phone service in DR Congo where an entrepreneur was able to start with just one tower and built it into a billion dollar business, piece by piece. In other words, where nothing exists, something is better than nothing.

The conversation shifted to issues of access. Frequently Internet access is considered a panacea, but access is not everything: people need skills and abilities - literacy is a major one. While the Internet requires literacy, many times in English as local language content is lacking, mobile devices rely on vocal communication which is more accessible. Also, because people are less likely to trust third party institutions or sources in the developing world, mobile phones offer opportunities to communicate with the social network people already trust. Where people are accessing content, say in Central Asia where Beth Kolko does a lot of research, they want entertainment and sports news, not just agricultural prices or weather.

Finally, on one last issue of infrastructure, Professor Jhunjhunwala of IIT Madras lamented the poor state of power sources. Not enough effort has been put into developing inexpensive, reliable power sources which can stand up to the unique tests of the developing world.

The second session I attended was led by Ellen Miller and Micah Sifry who are involved with the important Sunlight Foundation which works to promote government transparency. Please see this post for a lot of the great sources they referenced.

The next session I attended was in much the same vein as the first. It was led by Beth Kolko and Michael Best. It was framed as a debate over the relative benefits of the OLPC versus mobile phones. Is a mobile phone solely a communication and information delivery device, not a platform for deep/rich content, like the OLPC? Or is the mobile phone the best ICT environment for the global South? An audience member for Nokia had interesting commentary about the richness of voice and the difficulty in determining the difference between phones and laptops. Storage, portability and programmability are no longer the domain of just one type of device; a convergence has occurred. Unanswered question: has a convergence of use followed?

Since technical capability may be the same in many cases, what are the policy and ideological implications? Discussion turned to the role of intermediaries. As you know, cell phone carriers exert incredible control over their networks (even though it has lessened slightly recently). With 4/5 of the world owning a cell phone in 5-10 years, do we want these companies to exert such control over the major ICT? Using Zittrain’s framing in his book “The Future of the Internet,” are these devices bound to be sterile (that is without the generative capabilities of PCs or the Internet)? I noted that even though these devices are sold as-is, the presentations of Jan Chipchase suggest that people are quite adept at forcing generativity - opening their phones and forcing new capabilities out. I’ll have more to say about this as soon as I finish Zittrain’s book.

The final session I went to was led by Jonathan Zittrain about “Netizenship” which is his term for the ways in which people vote through their bandwidth or CPU cycles. When people edit Wikipedia or utilize Folding@Home, they are signaling an approval of the goal - universal knowledge or cancer research. Zittrain and a team have created Herdict (not open yet) which will work with the OpenNet Initiative to better quantify and reify the phenomenon of Internet filtering. It is a great example of the entrepreneurial nature of Berkman.

Overall, the conference was eye-opening and enlightening. It gave me a lot of leads and ideas over which to stew. More to come as a result.