Dear Colleagues, I am intrigued by this statement by Vickram Crishna:
> I mention these two examples only to show that the realities of social > change are very very complex and shouldn't be simplified into > 'corporate' vs 'other model' - such divides do not serve the purpose > that are sought by questions such as this topic line suggest. .. and I agree with it. My response here, by the way, is a real-time, (almost) one draft wonder, so please expect me to change some of what I say in further iterations and in other places. Let me introduce myself. I am Lee Thorn, chair of Jhai Foundation <www.jhai.org> which has developed, among other things, the Jhai PC and communication system. We have worked primarily in Lao PDR and are now branching out. I have worked on the ground - or near it - on social change projects for over 35 years, starting with Vietnam veterans organizations like and including Vietnam Veterans Against the War, where I worked briefly with John Kerry. I have an MBA, come from a business family, and taught organizational development in a graduate business school. I am a community organizer mainly ... by nature and training. One generation before me my family members were mainly farmers and rural entrepreneurs. I know myself a bit and the picture is ok, but not great. I believe I still can, as Sartre once suggested, improve my biography. I'm 61 and having a good time. I understand that Bill Gates and AMD are announcing a new product that will compete with the Jhai PC and communication system, they hope, in China and India. It is a low-power, low-cost, they say, computer. It will use Windows, as I understand it. I believe the Jhai PC and communicaton system will beat them ... or they and we will decide to work together on some aspects of what so many of us want to help people do: connect, often for trade, no matter what folks' economic status is or however remote their localities are. I expect the former; I'd love the latter. AMD and MS have all the advantages of corporate power and connections: vast money, pre-existing, successful organizations, facilities, and processes ... and wide connections among all - but one - important potential allies. It is the lack of connection with end user that will kill them. What they do NOT have is a product that: 1. Was developed with the direct help of people in poverty in the areas they intend to reach who put together not only a collective and clearly expressed needs statement, but also helped design the process of implementation, including their own business plan. 2. Was developed by people who have good connections with grounded ngo's with long track records in the communities they work and who are trusted, even adopted by, these communities. Or alternatively, was developed by family members in these communities and family members elsewhere with a set of skills and contacts and enthusiasm the communities want to make use of. Or both, as in Jhai's case. 3. Was and is being developed through open source, open design protocols which actually encourage the revision and redesign of both software and hardware by the maximum number of people. These protocols even include, I should say, the opportunities for others to rethink and remake the initial products and systems and make them their own. 4. An operational understanding that people are full and whole human beings who are very interested in communication and connection ... arguably more than any particular information or even economic betterment beyond the stage of just-past self-sufficiency. Almost everyone I have ever met want full lives, want to keep their traditions, and want to enjoy the diversity they see and hear about. People are not consumers. Consuming is one thing people do. So, is the answer adoption of another way of doing business and/or another way of doing development? I don't know. I am not comfortable on that level of abstraction. What my experience tells me is the picture is murky and very localized. What my experience tells me is that what is most interesting is what is most unlike what I can fit inside my cookie cutter, in fact, what forces me to get rid of cookie cutters as much as I can. What my experience tells me is that greed does not mobilize for long. What my experience tells me is that what mobilizes people best is hope and faith that their families and communities, including those in diasporas, can reconnect and connect better for the purpose of keeping their traditions ... while finding ways to increase their income without giving up their traditions. Iin many rural settings like where many of my relatives still live, the question is: how to we keep one or two kids per family on the farm? And here's something else: people know, especially poor people know, when they are getting hustled. They know even better when they are getting disempowered or are in danger of disempowerment ... eventually .. but they need to know they can support their children before they take much risk. So often poor people go along to get along ... and to get some food in the stomach. This path is downward though and often leads to dependency or even colonialization. It is by anyone's measure second best to choosing something for yourself and owning it. So how does all this fit with working with big corporations like MS or AMD, for example, if it comes to that? People who are grounded in community have exactly what MS and AMD and others sometimes forget they need. Connection. Deep knowledge. Healthy skepticism. And exact information on local conditions and desires that are given because community members trust grounded people they know. (They also are almost always hospitable to all outsiders by deep and honorable tradition, but that relationship is something entirely different and should not be confused with trust.) But why should people grounded in community work with folks like MS and AMD? First, there is always the option - and one that is likely - they don't want to and they won't. However, Jhai Foundation might choose to adopt the Geode chip or use a similar Intel chip, for example, and still remain an open source, open design project. We may choose, as we are choosing, to work with Cisco and cooperate with them and receive some of their knowledge, on an open source, open design basis, as we decide whether or not to include some of their devices in the system's re-design. There are infinite ways of cooperation. But who drives? The driver in our model becomes the people closest to the ground. The rest of us are facilitators at best and hopefully increasingly irrelevant. The point is to meet real needs. The people who express those needs and redefines those needs, the end users, drive. That's what we shoot for and for seven years have mostly achieved at Jhai Foundation. And I think farmers in small communities can drive in projects that show the most radical kind of respect. This, we call in our case, the reconciliation model of development. We get to know people by working with them first on quick easy wins of their choosing. We teach farmers fundraising right away and help them get success. We then, after becoming something like friends (a sure sign is having a fight and getting through it), help them develop a 10 year vision. We immediately facilitate six month work plans with them where they set their own priorities and we work together to find solutions. There's more to this and I'll get to it in other places. What is important here is that it is exactly this method by which we developed the Jhai PC and communication system. And it is this method we will teach - or better we will modify ... with the help of grounded people in different parts of the world - to make the Jhai PC and communication system work in varying milieus among various communities for huge numbers of purposes. Using this method the farmers in Phon Kham, Vientiane Province, Lao PDR, developed their own business planning and operations tools. We helped them by getting them with local businesspeople who knew the costs they did not know. We helped them further by getting some Stanford students to help them refine their tools. But the farmers had the final say and we expect the tool will be modified by each community of end users. So what I am suggesting may seem to many like a whole set of interlocking paradoxes. That's good. The relationship between 'corporate' and 'community' has no single shape and there is no need for a struggle between these two entities ... although there may be many struggles and that can be useful, too. The age of cookie cutters is over, but tools can be developed that serve lots of communities, if those communities have the chance to modify them for their own use. Experts have expertise and that's good (Al Hammond told me I'm an expert!), but they have not as much relevant expertise as nearly any end user. A key aspect of any development is building up the community. Even experts can be part of communities as these communities develop their own solutions. ;) Feeling part of a community and having fun is more important than more money for most of us and more motivating than greed. Vincent Rauzino proposed in 1982 that "the goal of a truly right-brain augmentation computer would be to harness the complex set-associating, pattern-synthesizing, gestalt-processing right-brain machinery into coherent and predictable equations." ... Rauzino stated that the qualities of association, inference, and extrapolation, often indentified as higher-order intellectual traits than computation and correlation - the province of computers - are as yet largely out of the range of today's computers. (from "Conversations with an Intelligent Chaos,", 1982) What I propose are not new computers, but many radical 'marriages' - between people of wild imagination and the kings and queens of the most anti-social Nerds, between corporations and radical communitarians, ... among peoples, across cultures, without expectations of ease or comfort, .. but with expectations of quite a bit of fun ... and the chance of a life lived in all its God-given fullness. Why settle? yours, in Peace, Lee Thorn 28 October 2004 ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
