The IGF

Well it sure wasn't Rio, and from accounts it wasn't Athens either. The 2008 Hyderabadi version of the Internet Governance Forum has not met expectations. Maybe I was spoiled by Rio (who wouldn't be?), or Mobile Active; maybe it was the Mumbai bombings that led to a good number of delegations and participants canceling; or maybe it was the fact that Indians didn't show up (or weren't let in?). Whatever the reason may be, most people felt Hyderabad lacked the requisite "it" crowd, the engaging panellists and good connectivity. I'm afraid to say that even GK3 seemed more innovative.

Is this a symptom of  a larger problem with the global Internet space or was this something related to local conditions and exceptions? I'd suggest the latter, and hence would still recommend that we might want to look at Cairo as an important venue for sharing knowledge on Information society and development  related issues. However more effort needs to go into ensuring panels are chalk full of compelling speakers and evidence of what has happened since WSIS and, more importantly, what could be done. We should also engage with organisers to ensure unconference principles are built in, because there is general fatigue with IT ministers blathering on about nothing for hours.

Is there anything I've retained about the the key issues that needed to be discussed here amongst the ITU, ICANN and govt delegations? No. I'll read a few blogs to get the gist, but coming here I would've liked to have felt I was in the thick of things. 

As  always with these conferences, the opportunity to network with partners, pitch new ideas, follow-up on old ones, is the most important value of coming here. 

In general, I'm disappointed, but at least we had all of our good and useful events before IGF and that might be the most important lesson.

ICT and Development studies: Towards Development 2.0

One of my colleagues shared this paper from Mark Thompson in 2007 looking at the importance of better understanding the relationship between ICTs (although generally defined as Web 2.0 type processes) and development studies. It also looks at how the lack of integration between the two is inhibiting each other's success.
I thought the paper was interesting considering it comes at a period when Heeks has been pushing this idea as well, not to mention larger bodies such as the ICTD conference circuit (the fact that there is a debate between the notions of "ICT4d" - considered a technologically deterministic, almost normative notion and "ICTD" which takes a neutral approach to the relationship between technology and development is also telling). This tension is at the heart of our own programming (or at least in my own head), as we want, on the one hand, to foster critique of the field (with the goal of ensuring a body of knowledge exists that helps to inform us on the conditions necessary for interventions to succeed), but also want to foster positive change and test innovations (advocating or intervening for positive change should always be based on evidence, however in the case of issues related to new technologies evidence doesn't always exist). One of the ways of dealing with that tension is ensuring that research and interventions are grounded or aware of prevalent theoretical constructs and frameworks. This is essentially what both Heeks and Thompson argue.

The interesting argument from Thompson, is that, in his view there is a sense of urgency. One the one hand, ICT investments and activities are growing tremendously in developing countries (think mobiles) and yet development researchers haven't fully been able to appreciate their impact. This, in turn, means that ICT interventions are often devoid of thinking about broader issues related to the political economy or other power dynamics. Moreover, Thompson sees Web 2.0 processes as an enormous potential for traditional development thinking, as it can have an incidence on each of the key debates (participation, critical modernism, clinical economics, new institutional theory).

I question some of his enthusiasm for Web 2.0/KM/KS processes, especially considering some of failed experiences with OKN and other larger user-generated content/social production type activities, but mobiles certainly put a potential new spin to it. the most interesting point for me, is how neatly ICTs fit into many of the current theories of development:

• "participation": no brainer, Thompson could have added hundreds of other examples, from people power in the Philippines to strengthening social capital and agency
  
• critical modernism: the facilitation of participation evidently leads to the facilitation of participatory development experimentation, that one can continually learn from;
• clinical economics: the weakest of the arguments in my view, especially considering that so much of the evidence points towards minimal instrumental use of new technologies, like mobiles (notably from Donner, who he strangely cites as positive evidence for his thesis)
• new institutional theory: the ability of technology to be disruptive and change the way people work has an incredible effect on power relationships and institutions

My principal critique of Thompson's paper is the over-emphasis of the term Web 2.0, which means so little to be people outside the IT world and is also generally associated with savvy marketing. The key point is to understand how we can harness an evolution of technology that now includes the ability to produce and share information at a grander scale than could have ever been imagined by early ICT4D practitioners, particularly through the advent of mobiles. As far as I'm concerned, the relationship between mobile (a pervasive technology in developing countries) and the Web (or Web 2.0 in this case) is key: will web 2.0 work effectively on a mobile platform?

AU: Mark Thompson
TI: Ict and development studies: Towards development 2.0
SO: Journal of International Development
VL: 20
NO: 6
PG: 821-835
YR: 2008
CP: Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ON: 1099-1328
PN: 0954-1748
AD: University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
DOI: 10.1002/jid.1498
US: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jid.1498

The rise of collective intelligence

I'm in the process of reading the report from a workshop (July-Aug 2007) on "The Rise of Collective Intelligence: Decentralized Co-creation of Value as a new paradigm for commerce and culture" from the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society program
A few elements of interest:

• the examples used for the wisdom of crowds: baseball fans collectively manage a baseball team in the US...it fails (why?); 1000s collectively play Gary Kaspraov online (Kasparov wins, but he does state it was the hardest game of his life); Wikipedia; "We are smarter than me" book created as a wiki, but only 12 people actually contribute substantially;
• Open education/learning: John Seely Brown sees this period as the perfect storm from incredible advances to happen in the educational area ("major transformations in fundamental processes of education"); the OER movement, eScience and eHumanities and web 2 are converging for the perfect storm; education couyld be reinvented in ways that foster collaboration and participation on a global scale. This is a field we need to keep our eye on. Ito notes many wikipedians are outcasts from the traditional education system but have become "bookworms for the common good"
• Cloud computing: changes in technology towards cloud computing will transform business from a push mass market world to a pull micro world. The importance is leveraging network effects and the long tail at the same time. Amazon, google and eBay charaterise this new world. Coleman sees the rise of cloud computing spurring the end of the IT industry (software industry won't exist as Foss is seen as good enough). The cloud will also threaten the powers of nation states, govts, IP etc...therefore new institutional arrangements are needed.
  

The report raises important issues for us to be thinking about when trying to program in the area of ICT4D, particularly when thinking about what decentralised co-creation means for development. Much of the discussion on peer-production, cloud computing, OER, etc, is based on ubiquitous networked societies, but what does it need for the unconnected? Will a mobile suffice to become a co-creator or connect to the cloud?

Links of interest research and political economy

A few links I came across that could be of interest:

http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/index.asp

The Campbell collaboration is the social science equivalent of the Cochrane collaboration "that aims to prepare, maintain, and disseminate high-quality systematic reviews of of studies of effectiveness of social and educational policies and practices"

International Political Economy course syllabus and links from UC Berkeley
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/%7Egobev/ipe/syllabus.html

Online dictionary of the social sciences
http://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.pl?alpha=A

The social research methods knowledge base (a great reference site): "The Research Methods Knowledge Base is a comprehensive web-based textbook that addresses all of the topics in a typical introductory undergraduate or graduate course in social research methods."
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/index.php

Musings on GK3 in Kuala Lumpur, December 2007

Looking back at GK3, I was, at times, disappointed with GKP’s focus on marketing spin rather than substance, especially considering this was an opportunity to take a step back and look at 10 years of activity in our domain and focus on what we have learned since GK1 in Toronto. This is key to ensuring our area maintains credibility in the development and academic arenas. That said, we work in a domain where there are large country donor and private sector interests and some of the trade-show marketing hype can be attributed to that. Looking back at some of the plenary events, I sometimes felt like much of the “hype” was aimed at those particular segments rather than the "geeks", “researchers” and “activists” who are at the heart of much of what we do, which may have led to some of the backlash observed in the blogosphere.

It should be stated, however, that holding this type of large event has innumerable advantages for IDRC. Amongst the key ones are the possibility to disseminate research, network and build the capacities of our partners. Many of my team members, as well as key PAN partners, went above and beyond their usual duties and put in long hours to make sure this would happen. The evaluation workshop and the Panacea training workshop on methods and outcomes were perfect examples of this.The amount of work that goes into these types of activities is often not appreciated and I would like to commend my team members for having done a great job.

With regard to the GK3 conference itself, it included key discussions on the way forward, important thinking about useful public and private interventions, discussions of lessons and opportunities in the area of health care, governance and other key development sectors. One person mentioned to me that the most useful sessions were those that discussed sectoral issues, where there is evidence that ICTs can improve sectoral interventions, rather than the ones that focused more on the technology itself or on access, which were generally superficial. I can also point to certain concrete outcomes such as a desire amongst partners in the US, South Africa and Asia to collaborate on open standards for data collection systems for the health sector; a collaboration on supporting the survival of minority languages through localization efforts in Africa and a potential collaboration around using ICTs to increase the agency of sex workers through the use of ICTs: all issues that are related to important development problems. These are of course just a sample of the outcomes related to GK3. They are, however, generally intangible, and hence difficult to measure, but we certainly need to continue trying.

However, one key question remains for us: was this the appropriate event to focus on to achieve those outcomes or are there other events or venues that might have helped us meet our objectives without dealing with some of the transaction costs that came from working with GKP? I recently sent out a trip report on the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil that gives some insight into this. There is no easy answer. But, after having been to both events, if we want to play in the “global venues”, which seems warranted considering our leading role in this sector, we may want to focus on the events that could afford us more opportunity to disseminate research to influential actors and, maybe, produce change. From my observation, I believe more influential actors were at IGF than GK3. IGF included a greater number of key global and national policy-makers and practitioners who could act on or be part of our research development process. Moreover, I believe there would be engagement at a substantive level from the organisers of IGF events.