Elder Musings

cool infographic on the internet

2011-09-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

Securing the cyber-commons conference (Munk Centre March 2011)

2011-05-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

This was a well-attended conference organized by Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, our partners within the PAN supported Open net Initiative Asia project. A veritable “who’s who” participated, including Margaret Atwood, Mel Cappe (ex-Clerk of the privy Council), senior military, intelligence and foreign affairs officials from various countries and top academics and practitioners in this field (Evgeny Morozov, John Palfrey, Ethan Zuckerman..), Some key points from the conference: After the Egyptian revolution a contract was found in the ministry of information in Egypt on information security with a German firm. This highlights the need to better understand the relationship between western firms and authoritarian regimes. Moreover, most at the conference speakers felt that “Mubaraking” (i.e cutting off) the Internet, didn't last because it had become socially impossible and economically self-defeating. Deibert highlighted key trends that are changing the relationship between society and technology: (1) demographic change: two thirds of internet users are under 25 ( digital natives). This youth bulge is reshaping the Internet and, in turn, society (hacktivists, anonymous, etc..) (2) States as a result of the use of technology for liberation purposes, are building large firewalls. States are also becoming aggressive at using the Internet (repression 2.0: crowdsourcing protester identification). (3) Militarization of cyberspace. (4) Globalized cyber crime. However, the greatest agent of change is the growing problem of the cyber-enabled disenfranchised: “they will hack their way out of poverty”. With the growth of groups like Anonymous, hacking is becoming the norm (Cyber jihadists , anonymous , botnets are for sale in china, etc..). States are left scrambling for a solution: Is it an Internet kill switch?
A key take away comment for me was mentioned by Mel Cappe: in the tension between those who see the need for a safe and secure Internet and those pushing for a more open internet, the former have a clear value proposition that is understood by politicians and lay citizens: the internet can be a dangerous place where terrorists and pedophiles roam, it therefore needs State intervention for law and order purposes. Do advocates of a more open internet have a similar, simple, value proposition? It isn’t clear.

To be or not to be a Tunisian Social Media revolution

2011-01-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

The usual digital activism pundits, Zuckerman, Morozov, York, Sullivan , et al., are all commenting on their various views on the extent to which the Tunisian coup (and possibly revolution..i'll only judge it a revolution once the majority of the existing power structure is toppled, not just its head) was enabled, facilitated, catalysed, caused or driven by social media and the Internet. It's an important debate as the previous "Twitter revolution" in Iran was unsuccessful. This left many (even non-tech) experts skeptical of the power of the tools since the Iranian State had possibly more efficiently used the tools to track down activists and blur what was going on. Much of the Iranian example seemed to corroborate Morozov's principal thesis in the Net Delusion: technology benefits authoritarian States more than it does activists who are fighting them. Tunisia is different. The coup was, seemingly, successful and the Internet certainly was part of what was going on.

I don't feel there is anyway I could judge who is right in this debate, not having the kind of first hand accounts and data that would normally allow one to draw such conclusions. However, Zuckerman's view seems the most plausible, so taking an Ocham's razor approach I'll side with him. The only problem with it, is that it's kind of unsatisfying in how simple it is. Yes people are the drivers of revolutions, not tools, and yes, communication is only part of a larger eco-system of interactions, ideas, power-struggles, economic and social contexts etc..etc.. But the exciting question is Morozov's: had the protests taken place before the advent of the pervasive use of digital tools would it have been successful? (note I use "digital tools", because I think we miss the boat on laying everything at the feet of social media. A digital camera with a usb stick could be just as powerful as twitter). Although I have no evidence to base it on, I don't think so. My hunch is based in part on the interesting musings about the role of the print press during the French Revolution highlighted by Zeynep Tufekci :

"So, I think most of the people using the term “social media revolution” are using it in the sense of a material cause. As I asked on Twitter during the debate, would we call the French Revolution a printing press revolution? Surely, the invention of the press is a strong antecedent of that revolution. But also surely, that revolution was made by people, through political action. So, the printing press just defines the milieu in which the revolution took place; it is an inseparable part of the French revolution even though it is not the efficient (political uprising) or the final (establishing a republic) cause of the French revolution. But you cannot really imagine a French Revolution, of the kind that happened, without the printing press."

Back to reading the news...

Data overload

2010-04-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

An article in Information Week on Eric Schmidt's talk about the primacy of mobiles caught my attention not because of the insights on mobiles, but because of his comments on information overload and one interesting fact:

"And so if you think about the information problem—interesting statistics: between sorta the birth of the world and 2003, there were five exabytes of information created—that's the total over that period. In the last bit, we create 5 exabytes every two days. "
At first I thought that the "two days" was a typo, but I'll assume Google knows what its talking about in this domain. That certainly puts into perspective the problems of data overload and dealing with data complexity.

Of smartphones and scooters

2010-03-03T18:12:00.000-08:00

I quite often like to put my historian's hat back on, so I was interested in the history of the Internet that Heloise and Kathleen sent out (http://sixrevisions.com/resources/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/ ). As I read through it, I was reminded of how slow and torturous a road it actually was. Is it possible we might sometimes be expecting too much, too fast, from developing countries in their path to the information society? Is it also that these paths might be different but that ultimately they'll end of in pretty much the same place? Maybe, with time, those paths could be converging, or, at the very least, they might adapt more appropriately to their various contexts?

As i was thinking about this, I was struck by the analogy between the transportation and telecommunications environments, particularly as they relate to the difference between the developed and developing world. In the developed world (although I'll restrain my thoughts to North America for the sake of my argument) the transportation environment is dominated by cars and trucks, which are used for both economic and leisure purposes. Bicycles, and to a certain extent scooters, are used mainly for leisure purposes (disappointingly). In the developing world (again let's say Asia for the sake of our argument) bicycles and scooters have dominated much more of the transportation environment. (I should say I'm excluding mass transit - or public access in a way- as it doesn't really relate to my analogy for now). Bikes and scooters are also used much more for instrumental purposes, than social or leisure ones, in the developed world. Cars and trucks aren't as prevalent there, seeing as they simply aren't affordable enough (yet). Some of you will now see where I'm going with this. Is it fair to say that there is an analogy with the situation with mobiles and PCs and the path to (internet) connectivity? In the telecommunications environment, replace car with PC, bicycle with phone and scooter with smartphone and I see interesting similarities. You can even extend the analogy to thinking about a super-highway - that essentially refers to the Internet (yes, rather than a "series of tubes"..), with dirt paths being low bandwidth GSM/CDMA networks.

Bicycles (mobiles) need to ride on dirt paths, and can't access the super-highway (Internet). You still have recurring costs related to accessing the dirt path, but it's much cheaper than the super-highway. Of course the bikes on dirt paths don't go to all the fabulous places that the super-highway takes you to, and you can't carry as much as cars, so there are much smaller scales of benefits compared to a car, but the scale of benefits is probably commensurate with the potential of local economic opportunities.

The interesting thing is scooters (e.g. smartphones) are able to get on the superhighway but the on ramps in developing countries are prohibitively expensive and generally force you to pay by usage. Most people in developing countries can't afford the scooters or the tolls to get on superhighways, but scooters are still more affordable than cars and paying by usage is generally a more cost-effective strategy than a monthly subscription for the super-highway. Consequently, it can be expected that in the medium term there will be a lot more scooters out there, more and more of which will be traveling on the super-highway. There would be a growing number of cars in the developing world as well (especially Tata-like cheap cars - which is analogous to the OLPC, Asus, etc.) - and more people getting super-highway subscriptions, but the rate of growth would be much lower than that of scooters getting on to the super-highway through usage-tolls. The biggest problem though is that curently those who own the dirt roads (i.e mobile operators) control the tolls and decide how much it will cost to access the superhighway and attempt to control how you will experience it. (The best solution to this is generally that there be a greater number of toll operators who need to compete with each other for the use of their on-ramp, but also, potentially, that the government step in to regulate toll operators.)

What's also interesting is that as time goes by there is less and less distinction between scooters (e.g. smartphones) and cars (eg. PCs), as Tuk Tuks and other three wheeled scooters seem to suggest. Some of the scooters are gaining in speed and power, which makes them quite effective on the super-highway.

Now I've certainly taken this analogy too far and have obviously over-simplified the different environments, but I still think there are potential lessons for us:
- in the transportation environment we don't try to suggest that nations in the developing world should build a super-highway before they have an adequate network of lesser roads and paths
- the decision to purchase and use a bicycle, scooter or car is based on many complex decisions, based on costs, incentives and sometimes simply uniqueness. Why for example is Burkina Faso full of bicycles, Benin full of scooters and Senegal full of cars? I assume the difference is due to costs (differences in affordability and purchasing power); incentives (regulations, infrastructure, government programs, etc..) and uniqueness (cultural factors, etc..). The same can probably be said of the choice to purchase mobiles, PCs or anything in between. Decisions will be based on those three sets of factors which, in turn, will create very different environments in different countries (think for example of the difference between the Philippines and its mobile omnipresence and that of Indonesia and its - relative - PC/wifi prevelance)
- It still isn't clear that there are more than marginal benefits to having a car, as compared to a scooter in the developing world. I think the same can be said of the difference between the benefits of a PC and a smartphone. The same can be extrapolated, in my view, from the difference between access to the Internet and access to mobile telephony in the developing world. The case has not yet been made that the economic and social benefits of the Internet, as compared to those of mobile networks, warrant the added costs. Economists might suggest that developing country citizens have chosen quite rationally to spend money on the tool they felt was most appropriate for their needs - the mobile - (I'm not sure that's right, but it's certainly a possible hypothesis).

Bike indicators: http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/indicators/C48/

the impressive immensity of the Internet

2009-12-09T18:50:00.000-08:00

Created by Online Education

Authorship dump

2009-07-15T07:12:00.001-07:00

a repository of my own writing on these issues...

Title	At the crossroads: ICT policy making in East Africa
Authors	Florence Ebam Etta, Laurent Elder, International Development Research Centre (Canada)
Editors	Florence Ebam Etta, Laurent Elder
Edition	illustrated
Publisher	East African Educational Publishers, 2005
ISBN	9966254390, 9789966254399
Length

Link to book:

Including: "Chapter 16. The Uganda Knowledge and Information Society: Early Lessons from ICT Projects"

David Obot, Fredrick Kintu & Laurent Elder

Elder, L. and Clarke, M., "Past Present and Future: experiences and lessons from telehealth projects " in Open Medicine, 2007 - openmedicine.ca Vol 1, No 3 (2007

Elder, L. and Clarke, M., "Experiences and lessons learnt from telemedicine projects supported by IDRC" in TELEHEALTH IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

Edited by Richard Wootton, Nivritti G. Patil, Richard E. Scott, and Kendall Ho

Royal Society of Medicine Press/IDRC 2009

Rashid, AT, and Elder, L. "Mobile Phones and development: An Analysis of IDRC Supported Projects" in EJISDC, 2009 - ejisdc.org, Vol 36 (2009)

Elder, L. "Baraka Telecentre : owned by the community...it lasts!" in Sustainability of CMCs
Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron and Hezekiel Dlamini, UNESCO, 2005

Elder, L. "ICTs and African Communities in Uganda and Senegal: Meeting their Expectations?"
in Connect World, Article in Africa and the Middle East I 2003 .

Upcoming chapter, in Mobile Information Communication Technologies Adoption in Developing Countries: Effects and Implications
Harmen, J., Rashid, AT. Elder, L. "Use of mobile phones in education: Perspectives and evidence from Asia "

Upcoming Forum Article in Information Technology and International Development Journal ,
Smith, M. and Elder, L. " ‘Open Development’: ICT mediated social innovations transforming the developing world "

Words, words, more words and acronyms

2009-04-13T14:31:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to see that the issue of what the "field" of ICT4D, ICTD (or whatever ) is, has been the topic of several discussions on blogs and email lists. Chris Coward for example ( http://chriscoward.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/ict4d-ictd-or-what/ ) seems to feel new words or concepts are needed to describe what it is we research and do (although I'm not certain something along the lines of "underserved communities.." does justice to what we do, especially as this is essentially a telco/regulatory concept). I do agree with him, that donors and the private sector have probably dictated too much of what "ICT4D" is, with the consequence of not allowing for the study of certain issues, that are arguably important to society, but are deemed by the "field" to not be relevant as it isn't linked to development.
I had a similar back and forth discussion with one ICT reseracher-practitioner who felt a topic like "internet addiction" wasn't an appropriate issue to study in ICT4D, as it wasn't a priority for poverty reduction. I won't go into the intricacies of the arguments, but basically I feel that if society deems a topic relevant, characterised by significant media attention, as well as goverment, civil society and commercial interventions (as is the case of internet addiction, particularly in Asia), it is worthy of study. The ICT "4D" aspect would however mean that the research would need to be instrumental (no need to get into post-modern critiques of positivism, thank you....). However, I could see ICTD being interested in simply describing the phenomenon, without needing to find an instrumental purpose for the research.
Anyway, I continue my search for a post-ICT4D concept...

What's in a word continued

2009-04-12T07:50:00.000-07:00

The results of the tag cloud below are interesting: they essentially show that "information" "communication" and "technology" are the most prominent words in the "common" field, which actually justifies using "ICT" as the principal concept. So much for trying to uncover new words to explain a field and concepts :)

Next step will be doing the same exercise with actual tags from the journals and then try to chart the evolution of language through time.

What's in a word

2009-04-12T06:23:00.000-07:00

As I've been going through the DOAJ to look at common and popular concepts around information systems, computer science technology, openness etc.., some things were quite apparent

computer science is by far the most important "technology" in the DOAJ, representing 141 journals in the "technology and engineering" section. the next largest section is "general technology" at 51 and the third "Electrical and Nuclear Engineering" (28 journals). Now this could of course be explained by the fact that fields related to the computer sciences were often involved with open access activities, but I still think this says something about the fact that computer science dominates discourse in the technology field.
Within the social sciences, "media and communication" has a respectable 62 journals, and "library and information science" has 93, both of which are in the middle of the pack. By far the largest category in the social sciences is "Education", which likely has quite a few IT related topics.
Even in the general technology and general social sciences section, numerous journals relate to information and communication (haven't checked if there is double counting though)

I was surprised by how prominent fields related to ICTs were, especially once you aggregate into a common multi-disciplinary field. There certainly doesn't seem to be any question that there is significant research going on, particularly in "Western" universities in the field. The question then becomes what language and which words can tie this field together, particularly of we didn't use the term "ICT". To get some inkling of this I took most of the titles from the above mentioned journals and but them in a tag cloud.

created at TagCrowd.com

Origin of ICT4D

2009-03-19T13:39:00.001-07:00

Interesting discussion on our ICT4D Futures list, with regards to the origin of the term "ICT4D". I must admit I was curious and not quite sold on some of the suggestions so I started digging around. Part of the problem is that the term "ICT" itself isn't that old and seems to stem from the US (although I'd love to hear form those who'd know more about this), possibly from the educational field ( see for instance: http://www.maximise-ict.co.uk/ICT-01.htm ) through a study by David Blunkett (UK education secretary as far as I can tell) that seems to have first coined the term. I can't seem to find the original report however, as that would help to pinpoint the date for the creation of the term "ICT" that would then help triangulate when we could start looking at the term "ICT4D".

More browsing led to the realisation that GK 97 was all about knowledge or information for development but never a mention of "ICT4D". Neither do early Acacia and Bellanet documents. My hunch however is that many mentioned "ICT for development" but maybe not the acronym "ICT4D". Was IDRC the first?

To be continued as I obssess over this

The IGF

2008-12-04T00:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-08-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Research on the relationship between internet use and grades in the US

2007-11-14T04:49:00.000-08:00

a few interesting points from the monitor on psychology looking at "Children and the Internet: It's fun, but does it make you smarter? www.apa.org/monitor/nov07/itsfun.html :

"In her research, published in a 2006 Developmental Psychology (Vol. 42, No. 3, pages 429–435) special section on Internet use, Jackson studied 140 urban children as part of HomeNetToo, a longitudinal field study designed to assess the effects of Internet use in low-income families. Most of the child participants were African American and around 13 years old; 75 percent lived in single-parent households with an average annual income of $15,000 or less. The children were also underperforming in school, scoring in the 30th percentile on standardized reading tests at the beginning of the study.

Jackson and her colleagues provided each family with a home computer and free Internet access. The researchers automatically and continuously recorded the children's Internet use, and participants completed periodic surveys and participated in home visits.

They found that children who used the Internet more had higher scores on standardized reading tests after six months, and higher grade point averages one year and 16 months after the start of the study than did children who used it less.

"A big challenge to researchers here is that we are dealing with a major generational gap—we are still struggling to catch up with evolving technology and how young people are using it," says Elisheva Gross, PhD, of the Children's Digital Media Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The publication lag of scholarly research is also at odds with a technology that's changing and expanding by the day.

"Especially when you talk about books published on this topic, they are historical documents at this point," says Gross.

Research in Africa by Rocare has come to the same conclusion. All points that "Everything bad is good for you : how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter" by Steven Johnson. Hopefully more evidence like this will demonstrate the complexity of understanding how the Internet is having an impact on our lives and society and help to debunk some of the recent myths about how the Internet is having a detrimental effect on children.

of "open uppers" and "closed downers"

2007-11-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

At a recent workshop to help unpack the issue of the impact of public access to ICTs, jointly sponsored by IDRC and Gates, a few key insights were shared in terms of process and ideas:
- the definition of public access is a complex issue that is charged with inherent meaning (eg from publicly funded to a public space). Getting at those definitions helps to navigate the ideological waters that are prevalent in any discussion about this issue.
- at the core of the impact of public access is the issue of whether one thinks we are in the throes of a paradigm shift (in which case trying to measure change through the lens of benefits and costs related to public access is incredibly complex and possibly futile, but where the potential benefits of public access are enormous) or whether we are simply dealing with an evolution in efficiency in an existing mode of production, where information is a good, either publicly provided or privately traded (in which case public access can be measured against other access modalities, many of them private).
- Richard Heeks reminded us that in workshops there are generally "closed-downers" (i.e people who want to close debate on an issue and get on with the work) and "open-uppers" (people who want to get back to define the "what and the "why" and re-open debates that were perceived by some as closed). There are generally tensions between those two groups, but they are both necessary to developing a productive research agenda
- Discussing tensions in the research area you are looking at (impact of public access) is a simple way of uncovering some of the challenges to undertaking research
- Mike Best pointed to the importance of doing impact assessments with an impact, i.e. allowing one to gain from research findings and improve the field of study (eg improving women's participation in a telecentre once the researcher finds out its lacking)

A Swan Song

2007-10-19T12:16:00.000-07:00

It's the last day at IDRC of one of the great thinkers, implementers and motivators in ICT4D at IDRC: Steve Song. He will be leaving his position of programme manager of Acacia and Connectivity Africa, to take up a fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation (of Ubuntu fame). I worked for Steve for several years. He is a consummate techie but also the epitome of the renaissance man: he can debate a telecommunications regulator, discuss the gender implications of mobiles, make a mean caipirinha and renovate your house. Although he hasn't left a big footprint in the academic literature, anyone who wants to take action on or research issues in the area of ICT4D should ask for his opinion. He is also quite passionate about a few issues, most notably open source and its potential for developing countries. The move to the Shuttleworth Foundation should be seen in that light as well.
I will sorely miss him, as he was an inspiration as well as a good friend. However, if I was Telkom South Africa right now, I'd be a little worried.

In the beginning...

2007-10-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

Well I've succumbed to the idea of a blog. Never one to be an innovator or early adopter, I let the idea stew in my mind for a while and finally felt there were more reasons to do it, than not to. I'm still not certain whether this will be more personal, miscellaneous or work related, but I imagine I'll find my way. Alea Jacta Est.

Maybe I should start with a little bit about me. I'm a 36 year old Canadian (with French citizenship as well, by way of my mother), who works at the International Development Research Centre ( http://www.idrc.ca ) in Ottawa Canada ( map ) . I'm mainly interested in new technologies, digital culture and, more specifically, socio-economic research issues related to those areas. My professional life focusses on the intersection between those areas and development, however I do have a personal interest in that as well. Other interests I have, which I generally won't bore you with, include medieval history, world politics, hockey and travel.