The recent turmoil in the Arab countries, and the hope that we will see democracy in a region of the world where despotism has been norm for decades, has made politicians to turn to new technologies for cues on the future of international aid.

Only days apart, both the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the Swedish minister for development cooperation, Gunilla Carlsson, has made public announcements that resources will be made available to develop Internet technologies in the service of democracy (link in Swedish).

The approach from the Swedish government is pretty hands-on and through a public invitation (link in Swedish) there’s a call for suggestions on how best to use the resources. Bambuser, the streaming video service, has been mentioned (link in Swedish) as an example of technology that could be interesting. I also hope for more radical projects like Freedom Box (even though it might be sensitive considering it can also be used to circumvent “our own” laws?).

Net activists are encouraged to contribute at a meeting held on March 10th.

A Silver Bullet?
It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I’m believer in international aid and democratization. And, that I believe that technology can play an important role in redefining societies. At the same time it is important to consider that technology itself is not an end but merely a mean. While the Internet surely played a part in the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, it should not be considered a silver bullet. This is not the first time that new technologies are catalysts in revolutions. Just imagine how the telegraph changed the world. Or the phone system. Or radio!

In fact, I would suggest that any societal shift in paradigm have been, to some extent, enabled by the use of new technology. At the same time, there was never a guarantee that all societies with access to the same technology would evolve along the same path.

The most important role for new media is to increase access to the public sphere, strengthen civil society and providing a channel for news, views and reports from the most remote corners of the world. It’s a slow-moving and tedious job.

Though the fight is less Batman and more committee, the UNs latest report on how ICTs can be used to alleviate poverty is interesting and highlights a very important role for technology to play. There are no guarantees that improved access to ICTs leads to poverty reduction. Information accessed through ICTs has to be relevant and appropriately presented to benefit the poor, reflecting the needs, skills and capabilities of the latter.

Better information – better decisions
Poor people often lack access to information that is vital to their lives and livelihoods, including weather reports, market prices and income-earning opportunities. Such lack of information adds to the vulnerability of the people concerned. In terms of livelihood strategies, information plays a dual role: informing and strengthening the short-term decision-making capacity of the poor themselves; and informing and strengthening the longer-term decision-making capacity of intermediaries that facilitate, assist or represent the poor. The contribution of ICTs to poverty reduction through enterprise lies in their power to give poor women and men access to improved information and better communications to help them build livelihood assets.

Evidence-based insights
Far more needs to be understood about the emerging new roles and impacts of ICTs in poor communities. As few empirical studies have looked specifically at this question, the evidence base remains weak. By placing the spotlight on this area, this the UN-report points to the need for more attention in terms of research and policy analysis to help identify the best ways forward in order to seize maximum development gains from the new ICT landscape.

Wireless is the way forward
Access to most ICTs continues to grow in poor countries, but at very different rates depending on the technology. Growth also varies by region and income level. Access to fixed telephone lines in the poorest countries is extremely low and almost negligible in rural areas. By contrast, mobile access deepens each year as networks extend to more of the formerly unreachable. After a radio or a television set, the next most likely ICT device found in poor households is a mobile phone.

The use of mobile phones to access the Internet is growing rapidly and may eventually become more prevalent in developing countries than in developed countries. In East Africa, for example, Internet access via mobile phones now far exceeds fixed Internet subscriptions. This underscores the potential for mobile phones to transform Internet use in the developing world.

The operating system for the OLPC is now available as a virtual appliance that can be used together with the (free) VMWare Player. Instructions are available here at Tom Hoffman’s site.

The $100 Laptop is coming along nicely, and although I’m sure Mr Negroponte would have liked to have a few more units ordered to secure the projects success, it’s starting to look more and more like a finished product.

I have set up a mirror of the appliance to help with the bandwidth (it was very slow when i downloaded it). Download the OLPC from my mirror (In Sweden) from TPB. Or from other servers here or here. The file is 135 Mb in size.

India’s Zeenews published an article on the use of cellphones to increase the flow of information and help making business decisions. And not on 5th Avenue in New York, but in rural South Africa. The story is not quite unlike the one I blogged about the other month.

Mashva is one of around 100 farmers in Makuleke testing cell phone technology that gives small rural farmers access to national markets via the Internet, putting them on a footing with bigger players and boosting profits by at least 30 percent. “Mainstream farmers have access to market information so they can negotiate better prices. This cell phone enables poor rural farmers to get that same information,” said Mthobi Tyamzashe […].

The United Nations have approved the launch of a Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development. The idea is to find a platform to secure and promote the achievements of some of the Millennium Goals.

The mission of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development will be to facilitate and promote such integration by providing a platform for an open, inclusive, multi-stakeholder cross-sectoral policy dialogue on the role of information and communication technology in development. It will thus contribute to linking the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society with the broader United Nations development agenda.

Press release here.

This story about how access to cellphones can make a difference in the real world comes from India. Robert Jensen of Harvard University have studied the Kerala fishermen, and conclude that introducing simple technology can put food on the table for people in rural areas. Narrowing the digital divide – in a very concrete way.

[C]ellphones ended the wastage of 6% of the catch due to a lack of buyers in some markets: the entire catch was sold, and nothing was wasted. […] Even the consumer benefited: fish prices came down because of the increase of 6% in the quantity supplied as the wastage ended. It was a win-win-win situation.

India Times have the whole story.

A new book called Wireless Networking in the Developing World – A Practical Guide to Planning and Building Low-Cost Telecommunications Infrastructure, tries to explain exactly what its name implies. Using cheap hardware and existing standards, it is possible to create new networks much more cost-efficiently than with any wired approach, and this publication attempts to explain how and why. The logic is that people in rural areas – in developing countries – can operate and maintain their own network, if given the proper knowledge how these things work. In every village, there are people who can build just about anything – so why not networks?

I am certainly not an engineer and my experience with radio doesn?t stretch beyond flipping the channels on an FM-receiver and some basic high school physics. However, I found the book to be an exiting read. I had no idea you could use cookware and a USB-dongle to make a parabolic dish, or that an empty tin can double as a waveguide. It’s both theoretical and practical in its approach, and explain very well how everything fits together.

The authors are all specialists in their area, and have worked for years with putting these things into practice. Some of the projects are described as case studies in the last chapter of the book.

The whole book can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license.

UNDP has decided to back the One Laptop Per Child-project, initiated by Nicolas Negroponte, Routers and AP reports. The United Nations will work together with the non-profit foundation, to help sell the $100 computer to governments.

Also, Lo?c Le Meur posted a podcast with Nicholas Negroponte, from the Economic Forum in Davos.

Intel however, seems not impressed with the initiative, calling the cheap computer merely “a gadget”, since they seem to believe it lacks both capacity and software. Yeah, I bet you’re scared: If people could put such low-spec computer to good use – how can you make people buy faster and faster chips? Besides, it is a learning tool, and it may well be beside the point whether or not it can compete with products costing many, many times the price.

MIT Media Lab unveiled a working prototype of the $100 laptop at WSIS in Tunis, last week. The project, as reported before, will bring computing en masse to less developed areas of the world. More information and specs is now also available.

Apparently, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer offered his latest operating system to the project for free, but was turned down by the Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the project, who opted for strictly open-source software.

Pictures from the demo (1 2 3) and press photos.

There once was a time when Internet did not come in megabit speeds. In those days, people connected though modems hooked up to noisy analog telephone lines. Just ten years ago, I used a 28k8 baud modem – barely usable with the World Wide Web – but a huge upgrade from my previous 2k4 baud modem I had before. The thing is that I have become so accustomed to speed, that I have (almost) forgotten the chores of optimizing code and images. I have a 100-megabit pipe straight into my living room: over four thousand times faster than my first modem.

A lot can be said about the wonders of video broadcasting on the Internet, but for a majority of the world’s population, data is still transmitted over extremely low bandwidth carriers. (Let me remind you that GSM for example, can only handle 9k6 kbit/s in its original configuration.)

Lately I’ve been experimenting with trying to provide access to content trough narrowband channels, and for clients with a very small (and/or low-res) screen. Luckily, the tools are very easy to use. HTML is very adaptable and works well for most computers, micro-browsers and handhelds, and most mobile phones contain a WAP-browser that handle WML-documents.

Using (slightly modified) plug-ins (wp-mobile.php and wp-wap.php) to my blogging software, enabling access for other terminals proved to be a breeze.

My perspective is simple: By enabling WAP-access, for example, I enable an exchange of ideas with virtually all mobile phones on the planet. Needless to say, there are a lot of people who lack access to computers, but own – and know how to operate – has a cell phone. Isolated, as in this blog, it is irrelevant. No one cares.

But, if we are serious about projects like One Laptop Per Child, we must also be better at enabling content for those without fiber optic Internet connections, or Apple Cinema Displays.

It’s not as sexy as Podcasting. Not as cool as IPTV. But, if it can bring millions of eyeballs – I’m game.

This blog through text only HTML
This blog through WAP

At Davos, Switzerland MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte presented the idea of producing a US$100 laptop computer, something he believes will revolutionize the way children are educated. The project – One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) – would market the machines directly to governments who can distribute them much like textbooks. Initial talks have been held with the governments of China and Brazil.

The computer would be based around open-source software, and basically do everything you’d expect from a laptop – but with less storage capacity.

Initially up to 100,000 units would be manufactured, followed by up to a whopping 200 million units by the following year.

One particularly interesting idea is that the laptops would be WiFi-compatible, and although Internet access might be hard to come by in some areas, the computers can form ad-hoc meshed networks and communicate with each other independently of network access.

An important question not yet addressed by Mr Negroponte, is what measures a government like China is likely take in order to limit the uses of the machine. My experience is that would you put this technology in the hands of children, some unexpected things are bound to happen. Any software can be hacked, and if anybody can to it, it’s a million teenagers who just want to have fun. For a recent example of this, see the Kutztown 13.

Update: More information about the project at The Register.

Following up my post about The Economists leader about the digital divide the other day, I’d like to point interested parties to the report Completing the Revolution – The Challenge of Rural Telephony in Africa, written by Murali Shanmugavelan and Kitty Wariock and published by Panos.

The guys at WSIS can talk about global internet ad infinitum, but without even basic telephone services these countries will be forever left in the dust.

At present, the lack of rural connections is often hidden behind impressive overall figures for the growth of telephony. Important development initiatives such as NEPAD and the World Summit on the Information Society focus on internet-based ICTs, and where they mention telephony at all it is in general terms.

The report provides both case studies (Uganda, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Zambia) as well as insight into the processes of privatization and deregulation. For example, how countries are interpreting the Universal Service-directive and what methods are used to give access to citizens.

The Economist devotes one of its leaders to discuss the digital divide and the UN’s creation of a Digital Solidarity Fund. The magazine argues that creation of for example community computer centers, cannot bridge the real divide because the illiteracy rate is too high in many of the affected countries. Instead, they say, the real gap is between those with a cell phone, and those without. And, how to achieve high penetration of mobile phones? Less UN involvement and more liberalization of the market, of course.

Well…

UNESCO is currently working on the Convention on the Protection of the Diversity of Cultural Contents and Artistic Expressions, a document originally designed to let individual countries decide on measures to – in a world where media conglomerates expand globally – make certain culture is not reduced to a commodity.

However, due to recent changes to the Convention suggested by “certain countries”, Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) released some opinions of the draft. For example, that the Convention must not be made subordinate to existing or future trade agreements and that it must balance any references to the protection of intellectual property rights with reference to protection of the cultural commons.

CRIS’s suggested changes to the Convention