Of smartphones and scooters

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

Created by Online Education

Authorship dump

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

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

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

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.

applied broadcasting business communication computer control culture cyberpsychology data development digital education ejournalist electronic emerging engineering informatics information innovation intelligence interaction international internet journal knowledge learning library literacy management mathematics media multimedia networks online open organizational practice problems property research science society software studies systems technical technology telecommunications transdiscipline virtual

created at TagCrowd.com

Origin of ICT4D

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