Development

The biggest story in the technology policy realm for the last few months has been the FCC’s commitment to network neutrality. Following a few transgressions from ISPs, the push to codify non-discrimination rules for the Internet intensified as consumer advocacy groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge stepped up their lobbying efforts. They faced a concerted opposition from ISPs, but with the election of Obama and the installment of FCC Chair Julius Genachowski, net neutrality advocates have finally found the official support they desired.

In a major speech last month, Genachowski outlined his vision for a open Internet by establishing two new FCC principles. The first “four freedoms” (adopted by Kevin Martin’s FCC) required that Internet users be able to (1) access and send any lawful content, (2) run or use any lawful applications, (3) connect or use and lawful devices, and (4) benefit from unrestricted competition amongst content, applications and devices.

Genachowski has added two new principles:

1. Except for reasonable network management, ISPs cannot discriminate amongst content and applications, and
2. ISPs must be transparent about their network management practices.

Importantly, the new FCC chief has also proposed extending these principles to wireless broadband as he sees it as an extension of wireline service. The big question, though, is whether or not regulation is needed to enforce this. Nearly everyone agrees that net neutrality is important, but as Tim Lee pointed out in his paper on the subject, it isn’t clear that regulation (with all its potential downsides) is needed to preserve the open Internet; perhaps strong advocacy is enough.

I think the fight for net neutrality is an important parallel for the ICT4D world where corporate interests may align to the detriment of development efforts. As mentioned below, despite the current fervor over the role that mobile phones can play in development, dependency on this specific technology has serious downsides. Just as there is a strong need for consumer advocacy on network neutrality, there is important work to be done championing socially responsible models for using mobile phones for development.

This is one of the motivations for Steve Song’s new Fair Mobile project. In the starting blog post, he explains that the uncompetitive mobile markets and the closed nature of the networks makes innovation far more difficult:

If we were able to drive down the barriers to mobile voice and SMS use through reduced cost and more Open Access style networks, individual and small-business innovation in the delivery of novel voice and data services would very likely blossom on the continent.

This is important work – telcoms are notoriously slow to innovate and given the potential to use mobiles for all sorts of development work, these barriers have real-world consequences.

In his paper that proposed a wireless network neutrality for the USA, Tim Wu listed dozens of features that carriers had “blocked, crippled, modified, or made difficult to use” – call timers, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, SMS, Internet browsers, email, and SIM card mobility. The iPhone has certainly pioneered a new way forward by allowing the development of applications for the phone (though, obviously, their specific model is filled with shortcomings). But where the typical phone is capable of nothing more than voice and SMS, innovation is still wildly constricted. Even more, as Steve points out, the high price of mobile phone use in the developing world is another barrier.

As a starting point, Steve is proposing an index of the cost of typical mobile use in the developing world. In time, he wants to expand the project to emphasize the extraordinary profits telcos receive and the opportunity cost of their walled gardens.

One of the reasons I think this is so exciting and important is that the developing world typically lacks the strong consumer advocacy groups that operate elsewhere. Similar to the net neutrality effort, Fair Mobile is seeking to advocate openness, but, as is appropriate for a development focused project, it is layering on price as a factor – think of it as the 7th FCC principle (one that African regulatory bodies are slowly waking up to, like in South Africa where the telcos are fighting hard to keep charging extraordinary amounts).

In the States, the effort to ensure an open platform for innovation has been largely successful; in the developing world, much still needs to be done.

[The following is a book review originally written for a development course.]

All too often, the public discourse about the past, present and future of African affairs is dominated by foreigners who lack the nuanced understanding that comes from a lifetime on the continent. That is why smart, eloquent and strongly pro-African voices like that of Wangari Maathai are such a welcome addition to the debates that swirl around Africa. In her new book, Maathai, a Kenyan who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her support of the environment and democracy, continues her tradition of powerful, and at times controversial, visions for the future of Africa. However, The Challenge for Africa: A New Vision suffers from a number of shortcomings, not the least of which is the microcosmic lens, weak researched support and a view of the past that is, for the most part, too rosy.

Maathai’s vision is sweeping. The book aims to establish “a set of principles for what it will take to change the life of [a typical] farmer, who represents 65 percent of Africans who continue to rely on subsistence agriculture.” The framework through which this should be accomplished is described as a three-legged stool where democratic space, sustainable and accountable management of natural resources, and cultures of peace – “fairness, respect, compassion, forgiveness, recompense and justice” – support the development of Africa. Key to this, the author believes, is a “revolution in leadership” for both politicians and citizenry. Her strong denunciations of corruption and negligence are a much-needed refrain, but as to the practicalities of ending the cycle of delinquency, Maathai comes up short. She writes,

“Even the poorest and least empowered of Africa’s citizens need to rid themselves of a culture that tolerates systemic corruption and inefficiency, as well as self-destructive tendencies and selfishness.”

But, not only are those about whom she speaks unlikely to ever read The Challenge for Africa, she ignores the systemic causes of corruption, preferring to trust in worthy leaders and groundswells of civil society to check the possibility of nefarious action.  Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be enough, and, at times, Maathai comes close to acknowledging this point: she provides an important critique of George Ayittey’s concept of a youthful “cheetah” generation rising up to replace the aging “hippo” leaders. As Maathai points out, Ayittey’s cheetahs could very well become hippos – corrupt, stagnant leaders who work not for their citizens, but for themselves. Yet, to the book’s detriment, Maathai does not seriously explore how best to align the social, political and economic context with the goals of honest, fair governance. African history is strewn with heroic leaders who become horrific with age – Robert Mugabe was a heroic leader who has done horrific things to his country. Although donor agencies have done much to make it a meaningless buzzword, there is good reason to focus on governance, as opposed to simple leadership. By discussing the work of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Maathai demonstrates a passing acknowledgement that good governance is more than a cultural feature that can mature, but she misses the opportunity to use her important voice to explain, for example, the economic underpinnings of corruption.

The exciting and all-to-often ignored call for Africans to decide the future of their continent is one of the most important contributions of this book. “Ultimately,” Maathai writes, “the fate of the continent depends on its citizens.” She also recognizes that although her focus is on subsistence farmers, the richness of Africa’s population now extends far beyond the continental borders. Taking India’s lead, Maathai calls for a “collective effort, particularly through the embassies of African states, to provide systems and institutions to support Africans outside of the continent, so they can adjust successfully to their new environment.” Not only is this good governmental stewardship, it will allow African emigrants to become good ambassadors for a continent that suffers from a severe public relations disaster in the global North. Even further, by enabling the international success of Africans, African nations will be more likely to materially improve the country of their birth through remittances, knowledge and investment.

The grand vision of The Challenge for Africa, though, undermines some of her points. Most obvious is Maathai’s pre-occupation with the legacies of colonialism. This is not to dismiss the impact that centuries of foreign occupation and exploitation have, but the call for Africans to make their future is limited by the substantial weight that is placed on colonialism. In fact, these legacies are well known, and dedicating so much time to the past comes with considerable cost in the form of lost opportunities to move the debate in a new, productive direction. Writing about the popular image of Africa, Maathai says it,

“Only reinforces the perception that African solutions for African problems don’t exist, and that Africans are not equally equipped to propose a vision for Africa’s development or provide concrete actions to bring it about.”

This is certainly true and worth repeating, but too often Maathai’s pro-African voice approaches a likeness to autarky and isolation. For example, when she addresses the economic future of Africa, the book suffers from a severe myopia of global economic trends. “Africa has an opportunity to add value to those commodities by generating finished products…. The coltan of Congo could be added to capacitors in the same country it is mined from…” This is far too simplistic of an analysis; even were the DRC able to construct a competitive electronics factory, it likely lacks the infrastructure, business climate, and human capital to compete with the East Asian economies.

When she addresses the Washington Consensus, The Challenge for Africa is not “a new vision,” but an already tired criticism of a flawed endeavor. What’s more, her support of import-substituting industrialization totally ignores its large failures, such as in India where Nehru’s socialist policies created a legacy that still stunts the industrialization and growth of his country. While she notes that private capital flows surpassed aid for the first time in 2000, Maathai does not lend her credibility to the need for economic openness. That is, except when it comes to the new Chinese investors, who she believes are better than European or American firms due to a “common experience with Africa as victims of imperialism.” If Maathai believes that the Chinese investors, using largely Chinese labor, are motivated by historical legacy, as opposed to cold economic reality, she is sorely mistaken.

In fact, Maathai frequently approaches the quixotic when she addresses the global North. She contends that foreign “accoutrements” such as “soap” were “forceful symbols of the intruders’ self-image and power.” What might have been dismissed as the frustration of a genuinely well-intentioned author is shockingly contrasted with her assertion, a mere thirty pages later, that the governments of Africa should “make it their mission to provide a latrine in every household and teach basic hygiene…” Labeling hygienic tools as weapon of oppression is both hypocritical and callous. For example, even more sophisticated hygienic options, though Western in origin, are worthwhile. Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Kristof notes,

“There’s growing evidence that a cheap way to help keep high-school girls in school is to help them manage menstruation. For fear of embarrassing leaks and stains, girls sometimes stay home during their periods, and the absenteeism puts them behind and eventually leads them to drop out. Aid workers are experimenting with giving African teenage girls sanitary pads, along with access to a toilet where they can change them.”

Surely Maathai does not contend that such “accoutrements” are tools of Western power, as soap once was?

This desire for cultural stagnancy, perhaps even revision, is one of the recurring themes of The Challenge for Africa. Maathai is a strong proponent of traditional African culture, spending considerable time addressing what she sees as a serious misunderstanding of the historic make-up of African society. Preferring the term “micro-nation,” as opposed to tribe – a word she feels has negative connotations – Maathai proposes a full embrace of the micro-nations of Africa. She sees

“The loss of traditional culture as one of the major causes of troubles such as the misuse of alcohol and drugs, behavior toward women and girl children, high secondary school dropout rates, prostitution, theft, the breakup of family relationships, and the commercialization of religion.”

This, obviously, is no small claim, but the support comes more from anecdotes than rigorous study. While I tend to agree that “the tenants of modernity – with its belief that material goods, greater technology, and innovation… – are insufficient to provide an ethical direction for our lives,” that is also insufficient reasons to avoid them. In truth, those tenants of modernity are important inputs for economic growth, a necessary component of development.

Although the author recognizes that “Africans cannot change the past; they can only manage it and determine the future,” considerable effort is spent painting a rosy picture of pre-Colonial times. In fact, Maathai proposes to enshrine cultural identity, as embodied in micro-nation membership, in formal assemblies at the nation-state level. This ignores the fluid, evolving nature of culture and identity and risks institutionalizing barriers that are just as likely to harm, as they are help.

Maathai is, as expected, at her best when she addresses her true passion: environmentalism. Her impassioned appeals for conservation and sustainability are as important today as they were when she began her work with the Green Belt Movement. She rightly points out that environmental degradation, such as the overfishing of African stocks, have very real geo-political implications. She points specifically to the forests of the Congo to demonstrate just how fragile and important ecosystems are. Yet, for all her experience, there is limited time spent addresses the specific mechanisms or steps that can be taken. For example, in the Congo, much of the deforestation is caused by the local population’s reliance on charcoal for fuel. This is a powerful economic reality that will not be overcome by long-term worries about sustainability. Instead, those organizations should create alternatives, such as has been done by Dr. Amy Smith of MIT, whose method of creating biomass charcoal creates real hope that the causes of deforestation may be addressed practically.

Secondly, The Challenge for Africa misses one of the primary trends affecting the environment and global commerce: urbanization. Although she notes that rural farmers are still the majority of the African population, the incredible migration towards cities is occurring fastest in Africa. This brings with it new environmental challenges that thought-leaders like Wangari Maathai must be ready to address. Further, as this book is primarily concerned with the sustainable development of the African continent, it must recognize the changing economic conditions that urbanization will entail. In her desire for the historic roots of Africa, Maathai misses the role that industrialization plays in growth. Factories need not be unsustainable, and as the Chinese population is increasingly absorbed into more sophisticated manufacturing and services, Africa could very well aim to place its newly urbanized in positions of industry.

Three hundred pages is not a lot of room to construct a new vision for Africa, let alone analyze the challenge for the continent, so it is likely that Maathai, whose life has been dedicated to this work, is ready to address these short-comings; however, in attempting to refocus the debate, she frequently misses the mark. That is not to say the book is without merits: the world needs more strong African voices, and Maathai is clearly one of the most important.

There is an enormous wave of interest in the role that mobile phones play in development. The widespread access to increasingly sophisticated mobile phones have opened up an information and communication platform that is improving, among other goals, livelihood, health and stability. Two new articles remind us that they come with a heavy price.

First, Ethan Zuckerman writes about the implications for innovation and activism that result due to centralization:

Creating novel functionality on a mobile phone network is much harder [than on the Internet]. Truly revolutionary applications like mobile money transfer have generally been deployed in tight collaboration with network operators – M-PESA was not an independent startup, but an initiative of Vodaphone/Safaricom with support from IBM and DFID. It is unclear whether Safaricom would permit a rival mobile banking system to develop expanded functionality and deploy on the same network.

Mobile applications in the developing world generally focus on providing services via short message services (SMS). This is due in part to the need to provide services on a wide range of devices, and in part to the comparative ease of deploying SMS gateways without cooperation from network operators. Voice-based services (IVR – interactive voice response) would often be a better technology for the needs of low-literacy users, but it’s difficult to deploy at scale without co-locating equipment with network operators… Unlike with the Internet’s decentralized DNS system, assignment of shortcodes is generally centrally controlled, giving operators control over the promotion of platforms by refusing to issue easy-to-remember codes. (Imagine if Skype had needed permission from AT&T or France Telecom to register skype.com.)

Because mobile phone networks are centralized, they are more easily controlled by governments than the Internet. Filtering and censoring the Internet has proved a frustrating cat and mouse game for both governments and activists. Despite millions of dollars spent to filter the Chinese internet, hundreds of thousands of Chinese users access and publish banned content. By contrast, Ethiopia simply turned off SMS services in June 2005 over fears that students were using the technology to organize protests against rigged elections – and services remained turned off for more than two years.

Secondly, Yochai Benkler notes that the expense of traditional computers puts them out of the reach of individuals in the developing world, thus limiting the radical redistribution of capital that has occurred in the West. Although mobile phones are affordable and increasingly powerful, Benkler reckons they may be a Faustian bargain that “comes at the expense of a truly open, neutral network.”

As we think of ICTs for development, we must understand that the challenge is a focus on widespread distribution of high-capacity devices, in the hands of a highly skilled population, over open networks running simple and non-proprietary standards.  Devices must be cheap enough to be widely distributed as basic background features, owned by individuals in a pattern uncorrelated with pre-existing power relations.  Devices must be accompanied with skills training in the use of the device and the open network, so that the difficulty of use does not continue to drive people to the simpler devices that deliver the more predictable, controlled, and “safe” applications.  In the near future, this may mean programs focused on women, much as micro-lending has been, or youths and children.  In the longer term, it must mean an emphasis on cheap computers from the lineage of the personal computer, not souped-up mobile phones.  Or, in the alternative, it means that we need a heavier focus on regulatory interventions that will require mobile phones and phone networks to be more open and flexible—although this is a harder row to hoe.  And in all events it means devices coupled with training.

The networked information economy and society promises a radical shift in power and capabilities from industrial, centralized forms to decentralized forms that counterbalance market dynamics more effectively with social dynamics.  To achieve this, a highly distributed physical and human capital structure is necessary.  Understanding this requires that our focus on ICT for development should be on achieving the radical, decentralized distribution of flexible, open, physical capital throughout the population, coupled with the necessary training to harness the wisdom, insight, and creativity that is already there.

This is not to say that mobiles for development should be sidelined. I believe quite the opposite, in fact. But these reminders of the properties and structure of the mobile phone ecosystem should weigh heavily on those working in ICT4D.

[P.S. These are from a new collection of articles posted by Berkman in preparation for the high-level Sept. 23rd discussion on communication and human development.]

Update: Steve Song has posted his recent presentation on the Village Telco project that seeks to create a better network.

Manuel Castells, for those that don’t know, is one of the most prolific, well-respected scholars of our time. I know his work around the networked society – the ramifications of the information and communication revolution – but he is also a ground-breaking student of sociology, urbanization and politics.

He is currently spending some time in South Africa giving various talks at universities. Tonight, I attended one at the University of Cape Town (somewhat poorly) entitled “Prospects for Cities in the Global South.” Instead of trying to synthesize it, I thought I’d post some striking points:

• Castells sees two linked processes shaping our world: globalization and metropolitanization. To him, urbanization refers to an out-dated model of change. Instead of cities as popularly understood – city center surrounded by suburbs and followed by rural areas – population concentration these days comes in the form of “metropolitan regions.” He didn’t specifically say it (he used examples from China or Europe), but think of D.C., Philly, B-More, NYC (and maybe even Boston) – regions of urban areas with policentric metropolises. The metropolitan region is the spacial form of our era, and it is not equivalent to the cities of yore.
• Although the world just crossed 50% urbanization, Latin America has been 80% urban for ten years. Brazil is 85%!
• This is an inevitable trend because metropolises are necessary for face-to-face interaction which define high-level activities. The globally networked nature of these regions allows this high-level interaction to be transferred internationally to more low-level activities. This spacial concentration enables innovation (think Silicon Valley), but you need both the concentration (nodes) and the dispersed network.
• Universities are not necessarily creators of knowledge. They need to actively generate development from their knowledge and create “self-programmable learners” because the skills they learn in school will soon be obsolete.
• In rural areas, people have no chance at survival. They know this – every effort to stave off rural-to-urban migration has failed. [Aside: then why is Sachs & Co. working on the Millennium Village project?]
• Spacial concentration has a number of challenge, for which we must prepare:
  • Major environmental crisis: our livability on this planet is in danger because even though cities are the major engines of economic growth, the are a major cause of environmental damage.
  • Concentration of poverty and social exclusion at unprecedented scales. Highly linked to ecological threats such as pandemics: “Viruses don’t stop at the door of the a rich neighborhood.”
  • Lost public spaces to private centers, and therefore lost identity.
  • Mobility has become a recipe for immobility. Notion of relying on the automobile is unrealistic when space is limited and plenty of people cannot afford them. “We are in permanent gridlock.”
• Although the metropolitan region is the key size for this century, we lack the institutions to plan them.
• Cultural tolerance and openness will be key due to population migration.

I really have no where enough experience with these topics to criticize what seemed like a thoughtful and smart talk. Next week, though, I hope to attend the launch of his new book, Communication Power – a topic I am more comfortable with.

One of the most exciting projects I was involved with at infoDev was a website that aims to bring together knowledgeable people to debate the appropriate role of technology in education around the world. The aptly named Educational Technology Debate is already in its fifth month of existence and has hosted great discussions about 1:1 vs. communal computing, the effectiveness of ICT, and mobile phones vs. personal computers.

This month’s debate focuses on the educational content needed for teaching:

Will educational systems, and the stakeholders that support them, be able to adapt existing and new content onto these devices? Might this adaptation facilitate a more egalitarian content creation structure, challenging the existing pricing structures and vested interests of current curriculum production & dissemination models?

In addition, should this content focus on ebooks and other electronic media that replicates existing content? Or is this an opportunity to change the way in which content is created, teacher’s educate, and students learn?

We have two experts, Richard Rowe and Angus Scrimgeour, who will lead the debate, but we’ve tried to make this as interactive as we can, so post your thoughts in the comments and help shape the discussion.

My favorite class this year was about the rise of China and India as international powers. It was taught by a former World Bank economist who has done much of the work on these two countries’ “knowledge economies.” My term paper examined intellectual property in China and India.

Although many objective observers see stronger intellectual property rights as an amenable, even necessary, policy for China and India, there are significant downsides to increasing IPR protection and enforcement. Strengthened IPR is likely to disproportionately advantage the developed world, decrease the ability of China and India to diffuse productivity-enhancing innovations, prove both insufficient and unnecessary for promoting innovation, and even be counterproductive to the countries’ innovation systems.

Here’s the entire paper. (Also available for download here.)
There Is No Harmony In a Patent Thicket: Towards an Effective IPR Regime in China and India

(Some caveats: I’m relatively new to this subject, don’t have on-the-ground experience and haven’t yet read ‘Small Is Beautiful’.)

If you hang around ICT4D long enough (that is, more than a day or so), you’re sure to hear people promoting “Appropriate Technology.” The important idea is not widely understood outside the ICT4D community, but refers to designing and using technology with special consideration to unique environmental, cultural and economic situations. People that work on these issues know that the same technologies that are successful in Silicon Valley are unlikely to be successful in the Great Rift Valley – there are simply too many differences to make it possible.

Supporting “Appropriate Technology” (AT, to those in the know) is taken as something of an article of faith for ICT4Ders – worthy of my admittedly obnoxious capitalization. But, outside of broad (and rather useless) generalizations, how useful is the concept?

Take laptops. The OLPC was touted as AT because it was dust proof, highly readable, mesh networkable, etc. Where my MacBook Pro would kick the bucket in 24 hours, the OLPC would hum away contently. However, plenty of folks have argued that, actually, OLPC is inappropriate for education in important developing countries. In fact, maybe the ubiquitous mobile phone is better suited for educational technology. Or could it be radio? Or (*gasp*) simple paper?

My (half-formed) idea is that “Appropriate Technology” may, in reality, be of very little use to practitioners a priori. Obviously, the Mac isn’t right for a rural Rwandan classroom. But, in determining what specific technology to deploy, I think there are broader, more determinative, aspects of technology utlization such as the passion and dedication of the users and implementers, than simply designating some tech as appropriate and some as not. There are many possibilities and I worry that we lose sight of the non-technical aspects of ICT4D when quibbling about the ICT.

[By the way, infoDev has recently launched Educational Technology Debate, an interactive debate website, that will address issues such as this in the field of ICT for education. Check it out and spread the word - there are a bunch of fun debates coming up.]

Evgeny Morozov on a potential downside of (unrealized) connectedness:

Here is the main problem with the new networked public sphere that has emerged to replace our national and mostly self-contained public spheres: when one node on the network blunders, all other nodes have to suffer through the consequences. In this case, the blunder is Britain’s and the rest of us have to suffer from interminable Savage coverage on television and the Internet, as both mainstream media and bloggers feel some desperate urge to air Savage’s juiciest and most offensive quotes over and over again. It’s a real pity that the British authorities still believe in a world that recognizes travel bans; whether we like it or not, the only use of travel bans in the world we currently live in is to trigger viral tsunamis.

Blaise Alleyne on false dichotomies in technology policy:

The spectrum of technologies Thierer presents has “tinker-friendly” and “safe and simpler” at opposite ends. Why don’t we demand both? WordPress defies this spectrum; a hosted blog at WordPress.com is safe and simple, but that code is available at WordPress.org for anyone to install and tinker with on their own servers. Few would disagree that Firefox is safe and simple, but it’s also “wide-open” free software with which anyone can tinker.

Hans Rosling on the media ignoring the real global killers:

I just went to a very interesting book talk by Stanley Nollen, a professor at Georgetown, and Neil Gregory of the IFC. Their new book, “New Industries from New Places: the Emergence of Hardware and Software Industries in India and China,” examines the reasons for the rise of different ICT sectors in the two Asian giants.

They began by showing graphs of the exponential rise in software revenues in both China and India since the 1990s, but when broken down into exports and imports, it becomes clear that Indian software is predominently written for exportation while Chinese software is for the domestic market. And although India does not have a similarly developed hardware industry, when that sector is analyzed, Chinese hardware is overwhelmingly exported while what hardware India does make is for domestic consumption.

A number of explanations are typically given for the difference, notably India’s English language proficiency, its higher education system that created a large labor pool of software engineers, and the overbearing regulation that was not extended to Indian software firms. The authors of this book believe that while these are necessary explanations, they are not sufficient. Using a variety of data, including firm-level interviews with 300 Chinese and Indian companies, they think they have flushed out the answer.

Their research suggests that Indian management, not labor, and their pool of larger, better educated professionals were largely responsible. The management can be applauded for seeking quality certifications for Indian software firms and utilizing the diaspora ties. Further, they strategically partnered with far more American software companies than the Chinese did – 60% of surveyed Indian firms had Western partners, compared to only 12% in China. (There was a lot of data thrown into the presentation that focused on the software industry, but I didn’t copy most of it down.) A final reason offered by the authors, more tentatively, was a cultural explanation – Indians tend to be more outspoken and tolerant of ambiguity. Because software creation is a creative enterprise, perhaps they have an inherent comparative advantage.

During the Q&A, Professor Mike Nelson offered some helpful insights from his time with the American IT industry:

• In hardware, you can thrive with 2-3 clients whereas in software, you need many more. Therefore, overcoming the “foreignness” of China is more of a factor than in India where multiple Western clients can be easily courted due to the relative institutional familiarity.
• Timezones shouldn’t be discounted – India is apparently much easier to schedule with than China.
• Given India’s relative governance instability, software (with lower fixed costs) is a more flexible industry – Wipro or Infosys can leave localities more easily than OEMs.

Overall a very interesting talk that adds great data to the debate while debunking commonly held beliefs like the importance of Y2K.

I just finished watching Nathan Eagle speak at O’Reilly ETech 2009 about his start up, txteagle.

Dr. Eagle’s interest in mobile phones and their broader roles in society brought him to East Africa where really fascinating innovations are taking place. While there, he saw a number of problems:

1. With unemployment in Kenya hovering a little below 50%, many relatively educated people have lots of idle time. With the exploding popularity of mobile phones, a cell phone is often present during downtime.
2. Cellular operators are searching for ways to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and to distribute the traffic volumes more evenly (less at peak times).
3. Corporations have millions of tasks that humans can do better than computers and cheap communication networks allow those to be distributed via crowdsourcing.

Dr. Eagle’s elegant solution pays Africans (in airtime or mobile money) to complete simple tasks like surveys, translations and transcriptions. As he says, think of it as “mobile Mechanical Turk.” And as he explains in the second half of his speech, there are a number of exciting secondary effects of this empowerment.