berkman
EthanZ's musings on Africa, media and international development
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Monitor Talent - a group of thinkers, innovators and speakers that I'm proud to be part of, now has a blog, edited by team leader Chris Meyer. Hope to see some of my posts appearing here soon and looking forward to this as a way to keep up with extraordinary folks like Howard Rheingold, Chris Luebkeman, Kevin Kelly and others.
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Great video of Kongar-Ool Ondar doing "durgen chugaa" - a form of Tuvan throat singing that sounds a lot like rap, though it's basically a way singers test each other with tongue twisters. Long live Tannu Tuva!
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Harsh and interesting analysis of William McDonough's influence on sustainability through his "cradle to cradle" idea. Reads as a classic tale of a visionary who couldn't bring an idea to scale and let an obsession with intellectual property stop him from leading a movement… or perhaps it's a hatchet job.
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We were shocked when the number of Japanese bloggers surpassed English-language bloggers. Now the explanations - they're teaching houseplants how to blog. A plant in a cafe is blogging using data from sensors in its pot. It's more articulate than many of the folks I read.
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Fascinating project that's trying to offer language lessons by leveraging web2.0 aspects, letting users correct each other's work and (I think) create teaching materials. Membership-based - you really need to join it to get a sense for what they're doing
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Tips on innovating in a developing world context from Paul Polak, Amy Smith, Design in Africa… and me. :-)
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Nick Carr offers an interesting theory - that as the web expands, we concentrate attention on a few large sites. Seems to miss the point about the technical difficulties of running popular sites, or the power of network affects in large sites. Still, interesting to think about in relation to echo chambers and the homophily problem
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Jonathan Elendu of Nigerian citizen media site ElenduReports.com has been detained in Abuja by Nigeria's SSS. It's likely that his family visit raised attention of local forces who consider some of his highly critical online content to be seditious. This is bad news for Nigeria's vibrant independent media community.
For the past decade or so, there’s been a movement to bring computers, telephones and other “information and communication technology” into developing nations to increase economic development and eliminate poverty. Those of us involved with this movement - colloquially called ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development) - have argued that information imbalances underly major problems in economic development. If farmers don’t know fair prices for their commodities in big cities, they’ll sell for too little money. If students can’t access textbooks or other resources, they’re doomed to a poor education.
There’s a strong critique of ICT4D that argues that the importance of information is overstated and that ICT4D proponents either overvalue information technology because they’re personally attached to the tools, or more sinisterly, because they’re looking to create developing world markets for these tools. Many supporters of ICT4D - myself included - will concede that there are lots of badly thought out and poorly executed projects that do little more than drop expensive technology in areas where it’s a scarce resource and likely to stay a scarce resource for a long time to come.
One bright light for the ICT4D field has been the rise of eGovernment, a movement that tries to get governments to deliver key services to citizens using digital technology. India has been the location for many eGovernment pilot projects, some of which have been very successful in delivering key information services to citizens. In many states, citizens can visit information centers where they can obtain driver’s licenses, business licenses, residency or birth certificates, and other critical documents.
Jennifer Bussell, a political scientist who recently completed a PhD at UC Berkeley, has spent a great deal of time studying these projects and asks a tricky and important question about eGovernment in India - why do some states adopt eGovernance more readily than others? Are there policy environments that we can put in place to make it more likely that eGovernment projects will succeeed and that they’ll affect the lives of citizens positively?
In a talk at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, she offered an interesting opening paradox. The state of Karnataka is comparatively wealthy and extremely engaged with information technology - its capital is Bangalore, the epicenter of India’s technology and outsourcing industries. Chhattisgarh is a new state, carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, and is extremely poor and low-tech. We’d expect eGovernment services to catch on in Karnataka much more quickly than in Chhattisgarh… and we’d be wrong. eGovernment has caught on far more quickly in this young, poor state than in the technology giant, raising questions about what factors actually contribute to the success or failure of eGovernment projects.
To understand what’s going on in these two states - and indeed, across many of India’s states (Bussell developed her theories in seven Indian states and has tested them on nine additional states, analyzing 16 of India’s 28 states) - it’s important to understand corruption, and how eGovernment might affect corruption. Indian citizens pay a lot of money in bribes. It’s estimated that Indians pay $5 billion USD annually to bribe government officials. Sometimes this is wealthy citizens paying money to “jump the queue” and obtain services more quickly that average citizens. But extremely poor citizens pay bribes as well - Bussell references a study that suggests that citizens below the poverty line collectively paid $22 million in bribes to access essential and guaranteed government services.
Taking old, paper-based bureacracies and turning them into “e-government” services appears to squeeze some opportunities for corruption - “rent-seeking”, in the language of political economics - out of the system. It’s not entirely clear why this is - the service centers rolled out in Indian states don’t generally put computers in the hands of citizens and let them access services directly. There’s an opportunity for the operators of these new systems to seek bribes. But the digitalization of India’s massive railway system is a good example of what’s happened in some eGovernment systems. Before digitalization, it was difficult to purchase a ticket without knowing someone to bribe within the system. Now tickets can be purchased online, and transactions within railway stations are simple, efficient and bribe-free (even if you’re a clueless American looking for trains from Rajastan to Delhi, as happened to me not very long ago.)
Bussell argues that e-services tend to systematically reduce corruption, and that they therefore can be threatening to existing political elites. Elites have the power of transferring bureacrats, moving them from a job where it’s easy to seek bribes (the customs service) to one where it’s harder to do so. They exercise this power by demanding kickbacks from bureacrats, which they use as campaign finance. A politician whose political livelihood relies on control of bribes and rent-seeking officials is likely to be threatened by eGovernment efforts and might fight their introduction.
Bussell further theorizes that the removal of bribes could be a threat to political stability within coalition governments. A coalition can be thought of as a group of politicians all seeking a share of the benefits of being in control of a state’s government - part of this control includes control over offices with a high chance for gains through corruption. So she theorizes that we’ll see eGovernment projects succeed in areas where there’s lower corruption, and where there’s a single party in power.
She studies eGovenrment adoption by tracking how many services are available in a given state - some offer just a few, like driver’s licenses, while others offer dozens. Her models try to explain the adoption of eGovernment services in terms of several factors. Some turn out to be largely irrelavent. Technology infrastructure isn’t statistically significant in explaining why some states have aggresively embraced eGovernment. Nor is the time of adoption - states that started eGovernment earlier aren’t neccesarily ahead of the curve. And the level of economic development isn’t statistically significant either.
Corruption, on the other hand, is a strong factor - states with above average corruption (based on surveys by groups like Transparency International) have adopted 10.6 services on average, while those with below-average corruption average out at 20.1 services. Unitary government matters as well - single party governments with below average corruption adopt services more aggresively than coalition governments, even in below-average corruption states.
This is useful information for anyone attempting to build eGovernment systems and roll them out in developing nations, though it doesn’t offer much insight on what to do if you’re in a high-corruption, coalition-governed area. (Duck and cover, perhaps.) And there’s a intriguing larger question - how does the introduction of eGovernment affect corruption in the long term? Do states that adopt eGovernment systems become progressively less corrupt over time? Bussell’s intrigued by these questions and looking for ways to study them going forward, which is good news for anyone who cares about ICT4D and wants to make sure people are doing rigorous, careful evaluation of what works and what fails.
I’ve had an artistic idea I’ve wanted to play with for some months now. It was inspired by a conversation with Dale Joachim, who uses cellphones to study owl populations. By calling forests during the night and broadcasting owl calls, he can listen through GSM-enabled microphones and hear responses.
This idea of listening into spaces has morphed into a much weirder idea, one that I’ll likely never get a chance to do… so I might as well share it with you.
There are lots of spaces around the world that map neatly to one another. A Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Canton, Ohio and another one in Canton, China, for instance. On the one hand, they’re the same spaces. On another hand, they’re profoundly different. (For one thing, the shop in Ohio probably doesn’t sell preserved egg porridge.)
KFC in Beijing, photographed by isriya.
I want to build windows between these spaces. We’d place videoconferencing systems unobtrusively in walls within these spaces - possibly something no more complicated than a flat-screen monitor and a webcam. They’d connect, at random, to one of these mapped spaces around the world, and for some period of time, you’d have a window from your restaurant in Ohio into China… and then a few minutes later, into Pakistan or Poland. You’d be able to hear the conversation in the other space, but it wouldn’t be any louder than the ambient noise in your location. If you chose to turn to the monitor and engage with someone on the other side, that would be up to you as well… which would be incredibly cool, but confusing, I suspect.
I’d like to build these windows in a variety of mappable spaces. Some would map very cleanly onto one another - one Starbucks to another, for instance. Others would be more conceptual - a public space in a shopping mall mapping to one in an outdoor market, like Makola in Accra, for instance. Or installing a monitor in place of the mirror above a sink in a public restroom, which maps to a monitor above another sink across the world.
Makola Market, Accra. Photo by Caroline Beaumont for Transaid.
I think we’d want to make all the video streams available online as well, both to show the diversity of locations and because it would create a great opportunity to monitor any possible interactions.
What would we do faced with these windows? Would we ignore them, the way we generally ignore other people in public spaces? Nod politely to fellow customers across the world and then turn to our own chicken? Or would we turn to face the monitors and introduce ourselves to the men having coffee in Bahrain, the women selling fish in Accra?
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I’d write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping the random algorithm will connect them to their friends, rather than to a room of bewildered, unsmiling Germans.)
I’ve found myself wondering whether anyone at a global chain restaurant or store would be crazy enough to try the idea. I could imagine doing a very small-scale version at Walmart or Best Buy, converting a single television or computer monitor on display into a window. But the charm of the idea, for me, is a window that might not be noticed as part of a public space where people linger, as in a restaurant. Anyone know a truly crazy VP of marketing who wants to make the case that their company is truly a global brand? Someone convinced that stumbling onto international connection can help sell coffee or chicken to xenophiles?
What got me thinking about the idea today was an email from the folks behind Woices - a new web2.0 service that allows you to tag geographic spaces with a small piece of audio. These tags - called “echoes” - were designed to create a new type of travel guide. With a location-aware phone, you could explore audio tags that people had put on a space you were wandering as a tourist, for instance. The company founders decided to share the idea more widely, and now you can annotate random locations on the planet, for whatever reason you’d like. I spent a while today listening to people read the menu in a Japanese restaurant in Tarragona and talking about pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Galicia.
It helps to speak Spanish to get a sense for how the system works at present, but there’s nothing language specific about the technology. And I love the idea that spaces can get overlaid with the voices of local people who love these places and visitors who are trying to understand them. Maybe this is a more practical way to execute my vision and I simply need to start annotating every KFC I eat in, from Canton to Canton.
Update - Tracy points to [murmur], a project similar to Woices that’s began in Toronto in 2003 and has spread to other cities.
Sick of the US election dominating all media coverage? Dreaming of a future date, perhaps two weeks away, when it’s possible that headlines won’t feature Sarah Palin?
You could always turn to international news, where the question seems to be, “What does the rest of the world think about the US election?”
In other words, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”
That was more or less my response some months ago when some of the Global Voices team came to me and suggested we try to cover the US elections through the eyes of the developing world. Through the brilliant work of Amira Al Hussaini, support of authors like Hoa Quach and others, we’ve put together Voices Without Votes, a website that collects international blog perspectives on the US elections. Read today and you’ll discover reports on a shortage of pro-Obama yamulkes,
Voices without Votes, comments from the Philippines about a suspicious misspelling on New York ballots, and the reasons Cubans are hoping for an Obama victory. It’s been one of our most successful projects and one that I’m now inordinately proud of.
Just shows what I know.
Dominique Moisi at Real Clear World has an interesting essay wondering whether Europeans are “blue state voters” and Asians are “red staters”. Her argument is that Asians may be resistant to change and concerned about an Obama victory:
…a majority of Asian elites are awaiting the growing possibility of an Obama victory with some bewilderment and even apprehension.
For example, Japanese elites tend to favor continuity over change. In their mind, the hard power of the United States is more important than its soft power, and their vision of a United States that is “bound to lead” is largely unchanged. For them, Washington is above all the strategic counterweight needed to balance Beijing.
Recent image from theworldfor.com.
Guess those Asian elites aren’t participating in the various online polls designed to show how the world would choose to vote. TheWorldFor.com has Obama leading McCain 89%-11%, with only Afghanistan, the Ukraine and the Svalbard Islands favoring the Republican. Those change-phobic Japanese favor Obama 89-11, the same as the rest of the population sample.
Using a similarly unauthoritative methodology (allow people to identify whatever country they represent), the Economist has assigned the world an electoral college, offering electoral votes based on population. Obama’s dominating that competition, 8,954 to 88, with McCain claiming votes from Sudan, Georgia, Cuba and Macedonia. (How’s that for a voting bloc?) Oh, and the Japanese are 86/14 for Obama in their poll.
Foreign Policy’s map is lots more interesting to me, though somewhat less reassuring to fellow Obama supporters. Using data from the Gallup World Poll - which surveys people in 140 countries - they asked slightly more complex questions than “Obama or McCain?” Voters had the option to answer that they didn’t know or refused to answer. And they asked a second question - whether voters thought the US election would affect their own lives.
The addition of the third answer - don’t know or don’t care - is a fascinating one. In the Phillipines - one of the four countries where Gallup saw an advantage for McCain (28 versus 20), the majority (52%) didn’t express an opinion. Don’t know was the overwhelming majority in India, where 7% favor Obama, 2% McCain and 91% don’t have an opinion. Only 6% of Indian voters thought the US presidential election mattered to them - 87% answered that they didn’t know on that question as well. Given the shortage of undecided voters at this stage of the endless US election, perhaps it would behoove Obama and McCain to move their campaigns to the swing states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Even more interesting are the people who actively assert that the US presidency won’t make a difference to their country. 72% of people in Palestine state that it won’t matter who becomes the US president. (Israel is not included in the survey.) They lead a pack of nations that includes oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, conflict-ridden Burundi, Pakistan and Lebanon, and some nations that are harder to explain: Estonia, Peru, Chile, Austria. The Palestinians, unfortunately, are probably right. And so are the Burundians, I fear.
For anyone who hopes that global support for Obama leads inexorably to victory… well, it’s worth reading up what happened when The Guardian’s “Operation Clark County” urged readers of that liberal British newspaper to send letters to citizens in a swing county of a swing state. Some argue that the letters - which were not well-received by many voters - swung the county for Bush instead of for Kerry.
One way or another, it’s safe to say that you won’t hear Obama claiming global support via any of these polls any time soon.
In the meantime, I’m getting a great deal more from the comments from individual bloggers from the rest of the world. An interesting - and cautionary - note from Naseen Tarawnah of the excellent Black Iris blog (from Amman, Jordan):
My reluctance to get on the Obama bandwagon has mostly been due to the fact that he has this seemingly cult-like following. He is seen as this messiah of change, and is described and depicted as almost prophet-like. I have a problem with anyone who puts that much faith in a single politician, especially an American president. If the on-going history of America has shown the world anything, it’s that change (in the positive sense of the word) is not a big factor in a US presidency. So I am constantly astonished by any Arab who is entranced by Obama and have to constantly remind myself that most of the fan base in this part of the world comes from a particular more-westernized demographic and have been swallowed up by the wave of US election culture that is dominated by Obama. Everyone is entitled to their own perceptions but I remain realistic to the degree of change that is expected with either candidate in the Oval Office.
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A useful riff on my African innovation talk, arguing that a lot of NGO-driven, outside of African innovation won't work and can be damaging to local innovators.
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IFEX documents denial of service attacks against activist media in Tunisia and Burma. There have been lots of reports that important independent media outlets are starting to suffer DDOS attacks and become inaccessible - the belief is that repressive governments are "renting" DDOS, perhaps from Russian hackers
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An interview with Journey's Arnel Pineda about his transition into working with the band. An edited version of the interview made it sound as if Pineda were having difficulties in his new role - this interview includes some strong comments from the Filipino community suggesting that people are mischaracterizing and misunderstanding Pineda's concerns about his role with Journey.
Four talks in eight days, four cities in three countries. (Tihany, Hungary; Barcelona, Spain; Camden, ME; Manchester, NH). I’ve come to two conclusions. One, I need to travel less. Two, I really love librarians.
I’ve had two chances recently to speak about homophily, xenophilia, bridge figures and disconnection to audiences of librarians, and the talks have been extremely good fun. The problems associated with creating serendipity are ones librarians are often well acquainted with. I finished the talk (very well reported at the NELA conference blog) and immediately fielded questions about how librarians could help patrons stumble onto serendipitious information about Nigeria or Niue. (A couple of ideas that came up: Leverage immigrant populations in your communities and ask people to suggest the best books to help neighbors understand their communities and home countries. Pick stories being featured in local or national newspapers and put up collections of resources associated with the countries or issues covered.)
I keep telling myself that I need to speak less and write more. Perhaps the answer is that I need to speak more to audiences that give me excellent and critical feedback, as I got yesterday. Good fun. Thanks to everyone at the New England Library Association for inviting me and for such a fun event.
It’s been good fun hanging out in Barcelona with my fellow speakers, both the wonderful organizers like Juan Freire and Ismael Peña-Lopez and guests like Carol Darr, Andrew Rasiej and Tom Steinberg. Tom was kind enough to hunt me down for dinner on Thursday, and we had an excellent conversation that I’ve been chewing over for the past 48 hours.
Tom is the brilliant founder of MySociety, a British organization that it relentless in its quest to make UK politics more open and participatory. Smart people around the world look to Tom and the folks he works with for ideas on how to make elected officials more accountable, link disconnected people in local communities and use distributed reporting to document social ills and push for change. Given the opportunity to pin Tom down for insights, I asked him about his thoughts on getting people to connect with people across national and cultural lines.
This can be a tricky topic for political organizers. Most organizers are deeply concerned about the erosion of local civic life, as documented by thinkers like Robert Putnam. It’s easy to misunderstand my obsession with pushing people to connect across lingustic, cultural and national barriers as a lack of interest in connecting locally. I see a great deal of importance in both, though I’m sobered by Bill Bishop’s new book, “The Big Sort“, which makes a pretty good case that Americans are sorting ourselves into homophily traps geographically, and that connecting with our neighbors may increasingly mean connecting with people who share our perspectives and prejudices.
Rather than fighting the local versus global battle, Tom offered interesting and provocative advice about what might work to get people who aren’t otherwise inclined to connect to do so. His projects are finding interesting ways to use games to get participation that would otherwise be difficult to organize. For instance, MySociety wanted to align thousands of hours of taped debates in the House of Parliament with transcripts, so that these videos would be wholly searchable. When automatic methods failed, he and his team built a tool that asked users to complete a simple task - watch a video and push a button when a certain person began speaking. Participants would be scored on “league tables” for the number of times they’d pushed the button, aligning the video - some participants ended up coding hundreds of videos for the project, and all the video was tagged within a few weeks.
Using the same technique, Tom’s now trying to get people to classify Yahoo groups for him, specifically Tahoo groups that mention the term “residents” or “neighborhood”. There are 45,000 of these groups, and Tom wants to know what geographies they address. That way, he can build a service where you send a text message containing your zip code to his servers, and they respond with information on online groups you could join that cover issues in your neighborhood or community. (You should pitch in and help him, if you have a chance.)
So riffing on the idea of games and league tables, Tom wondered whether the way to engineer more international connection is football. Specifically, he suggested that Global Voices or some similarly globalizing entity organize online chats around World Cup matches. Chats would invite nationals from both sides represented - Ghana versus Brazil, for instance - to chat online during the game. Trashtalking would be heartily encouraged, but the hope would be to get beyond insults to an actual conversation about football heroes, national pride, politics, etc. I’m guessing this would require a certain amount of careful engineering - we’d probably limit participation so that one side didn’t overwhelm the other (20 Brazilians, 20 Ghanaians per chatroom, for instance) and recruit some bridge-figures, people who spoke both English and Portuguese and had some understanding of each country and culture.
Tom offered another idea, which is either a great way to start intercultural conversations or a surefire way to start a war. He proposes putting together an online database of regional and national prejudices, offering as an example a recent trip he took to Germany where conference organizers declared they’d be taking “a Belgian lunch”, i.e., a very long lunch. What do expressions like this reveal about what we think about one another? Are these opportunities for conversation about cultural quirks, or are these invitations to flamewars and fisticuffs? (I offered the data point that, when I visited Yerevan, Armenia, a few years ago, one of my hosts excused himself to go to the bathroom with the phrase, “I need to visit the Turkish embassy.”)
Ghana’s one of the healthiest societies I’ve ever seen in terms of resolving tensions between ethnic groups. One of the reasons, I think, is a healthy sense of humor. A great deal of Ghanaian humor depends on ethnic jokes and laughing at each other’s perceived quirks. (I watched a Ghanaian comedian bring the house down in Accra by stepping onto stage and singing a song. When my companion finally recovered enough to explain the joke to me, she told me, “He’s an Ewe, and he’s singing a Ga song, but he’s singing it in Twi.” And then she collapsed into laughter again. Guess you had to be there.) So maybe a wikipedia of ethnic stereotype - Tom calls it a “hatebase”, but I prefer the time “haterbase” - isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds in sparking conversation about and across our differences.
I suspect I’ll be rolling around Tom’s ideas around games and crowdsourcing until I can think of a clever way to harness this power for Global Voices. We are, after all, a community based around voluntary participation - finding a way to make that participation more fun, less involved and easier to accomplish is probably a smart thing to think about. I susect that folks like Tom are likely to find a profitable line of work somewhere soon figuring out how complex problems can be broken into crowdsourcing tasks and outsourced either to volunteers or to systems like Mechanical Turk.
Talking about the decision to use volunteers rather than Turkers, Tom argues that people are looking for ways to participate in useful projects. That squares with my experiences as well. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I lent a hand recruting volunteers to enter data on missing persons in the southeastern US - we were completely overwhelmed by people’s interest, and a task we thought might take two weeks was done overnight. I’ve lately been wondering whether one of the keys to getting people interested in international news is attaching the ability to get involved in social change projects. It seems logical that people who are interested in changing circumstances in Darfur are likely to be especially interested in news from Sudan. Is it possible that this runs in the other direction as well, that attaching an opportunity to get involved with a protest or a fundraising effort would make people more likely to read a story on Somalia?
In other words, it was a very good decision to have dinner with Tom, rather than staying in my hotel room and answering email. That’s now my official excuse for everyone’s email I’ve recently failed to answer…
A quick post, but a beautiful story that I wanted to share.
You’ve seen the image from the 1968 Olympics. Two American runners - Tommie Smith and John Carlos - stand on the medals stand, bow their heads and raise their fists in the air in a black power salute. They were promptly ejected from the US olympic team, but the image of their protest is one of the lasting icons of the Olympics and a powerful statement about race relations in America - and globally - in the 1960s.
In an excellent piece for the BBC, Caroline Frost reminds us that there was a third man on the podium, silver medalist Peter Norman. An Australian caucasian, Norman had no special reason to be in solidarity with his co-medalists. But he was - it was he who suggested Smith and Carlos share a pair of black gloves when Carlos discovered he’d forgotten his. And Norman wore a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights which Smith and Carlos had given him.
The reaction from the Australian athletic community was swift and harsh. Norman was censured, and was left off the subsequent Olympic team. 32 years later, when the Olympics came to Sydney, he was the only Aussie olympian not invited to participate in the opening ceremony. The US olympians embraced him instead, inviting him to stay in their lodgings during the game and honoring his role in the civil rights struggle. When he died two years ago, Carlos and Smith travelled to Melbourne to serve as his pallbearers and to offer eulogies.
The comment thread on Frost’s story is interesting as well. Some Aussies are saddened to learn about a sad chapter of their Olympic history; some Americans (myself included) are proud that our athletes honored Norman’s solidarity. John Turnbull from the UK offers a contrasting point of view:
People should be careful how they conduct themselves when representing their country. Something that a lot of international sportsmen and women all too easily forget. The moment you accept the invitation to wear that jersey, and represent your nation, you must accept that your personal views are no longer your primary objective. I have great respect for men and women who stand up for their beliefs, but I wonder how much more Mr Norman could have achieved if he had become a spokesperson for the subject and used his fame from the Olympics as a springboard, rather than ending his career (albeit unfairly) under a shadow.
Don’t especially agree with that point of view, but thought this was one of those well-crafted stories that does a great job of inviting reactions, positive and negative.
One of the great fears as a speakeris that you’re going to give a talk too similar to the person you’re sharing the stage with. Clay Shirky and I gave talks at an event a year or so back, and discovered that we were using two of the same stories in our presentations. (I, unfortunately, found this out by listening to Clay’s talk and frantically editing mine in response.)
That wasn’t a problem today at the seminar on the Information Society in Barcelona I’m participating in. I had the good fortune to share the stage with Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit for Spanish telephone giant, Telefonica. Domingo is working hard to bring some of the most successful tools and techniques of web 2.0 into a large and often conservative telehone company. He’s a classic
early adopter, with a Nabaztag and a Pleo in his office, and a blog that he’s abandoning so he can spend more time Twittering.
Inside Telefonica, Domingo’s hoping to unlock information and increase communication between members of his team by aggresively embracing social media. Rather than trying to dig ideas out of a giant document repository, the knowledge management system that so many large companies have embraced, he’s instituted an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues - some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.
I’d been asked by the organizers to talk about how NGOs and social change organizations innovate, with the special challenge that I wasn’t supposed to celebrate innovative projects so much as I was to talk about the process of innovation. As I thought about this, I realized that I a) didn’t have much understanding of how social entrepreneurs innovate and b) didn’t have much confidence that social entrepreneurs generally did a good job of innovating with social media tools. Generally, I think that social entrepreneurs place far too much faith in social media tools and assume that they’ll be more popular, useful and powerful than they actually turn out to be.
So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation - African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances - constraints - and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.
I offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:
- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)
- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)
- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)
- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)
- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)
- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)
- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)
The most experimental part of a very experimental talk was applying these seven principles to three ICT4D experiments - One Laptop Per Child, Kiva and Global Voices. Ismael has a review of my talk including the scores I offer for each of the projects on these criteria.
The talk was pretty well received, and it’s great, great fun to try out new ideas on stage. I’m looking forward to thinking through whether these seven rules are the best way to characterise the lessons of the sorts of innovations I watch on sites like Afrigadget, and just what these rules mean for those of us trying to use internet tools for social change - thanks to my friends in Barcelona for a chance to start playing with these ideas, live on stage.
