Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
Dear Sam, Don, Steve, Peter, Douglas and others, Several points in your contributions resounded with my experience. The vision of ICTs for Development is, by its very nature, top down priorities driven - because its genesis is in rich, developed countries and anything we do in the South, is an adaptation of that. Not that I enjoy this, but it is a constraint that needs to be acknowledged. Achieving any measure of success with ICTs in developing countries requires a certain passion and tenacity to persist against formidable obstacles; a tenacity that often makes giving up your vision quite difficult, when encountering a local agenda. Our real challenge, is to see the closed loop that Sam talks about, and be willing to open our minds to the possibilities that poor people in developing countries have other agendas - and have a right to pursue these. I am a project manager in a developing country, South Africa, where half our population (22 million people) live below the poverty line. I work for a well-resourced NGO with good resources and international contacts and I have 24hr access to email and internet (albeit much slower than yours in the North). I feel privileged in comparison to my colleagues in other development organisations in South Africa, who struggle to find a computer, let alone an internet connection. And yet, despite my position of privilege and resource, I struggle, for a variety of reasons, to find a voice in the international debate. How much more so, do my colleagues who have less access to power and resources? I am well aware of the potential of ICTs - otherwise I wouldn't have the passion to drive my projects. But I am also aware of how closed that loop is - to me, and my colleagues in lesser fortunate positions. In this, I echo Sam's comment that the ideas of the rich stay front and centre, not because evidence is on their side, but because the rich have the resources to claim 'voice'. I agree that the way forward is a more transparent and democratic process. But Steve's point that this is unsubstantiated anywhere else in the development dialogue, is also true. The metalanguage of participatory democracy and open consultation only includes the bigger players. It is, undeniably, extremely difficult to include anyone else lower down on the trickle pyramid of ICTs. But this is our real challenge - to find the voices of the poor - and give them a platform. And as Peter points out - the reflective relationship of accountability is important ... where development projects imposed from the outside, reflect and address the needs that have been articulated by the community that the project serves - ah, if only we could get that right :) I'm not convinced by Douglas's argument that making the transition from the territory of discourse to the territory of real life events is that easy. Perhaps I am not idealistic enough, but sometimes I feel weary at those kinds of statements - nothing about this development work is easy. I try to be realistic, rather than cynical or pessimistic. But the reality is that improving the livelihoods of the poor in a sustainable fashion, takes a very long time to bear any real fruit, and slow plodding - at the pace of the poor, and holding hands with the poor - is more fruitful than imposing a quick fix from outside. No-one speaks anymore about the leapfrogging potential of ICTs ... perhaps we have realised that a whirlwind approach is not going to help the mama in Qonce, rural Eastern Cape. What she needs from us, is to help find a way to get a job, put food on the table for her children, and keep her family warm in winter. Yes, ICTs can do that. Samantha Fleming Project Manager: Chapter 2 Network 'giving a voice to civil society' Idasa [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.advocacy.org.za/digest.asp - - for the latest on social justice issues ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
Greetings to all, The suggestions on the Open Knowledge Network are most welcome and useful. More importantly, they are doable. There is an issue that appears to need some more attention. That is access. Good proposals for input can be attenuated in their performance and expectations by limited access. The bandwidth for Africa, for example, is so narrow and expensive for those we wish to participate that we may not attain the richness we should expect. Or at best, the process may be so slow that it does not attain critical mass, to reach appropriate impact levels for sustainable change and development. What kinds of policy issues and solutions need to be addressed in order to provide a relatively level playing field, and open equitable access, for participation? Olu Ekundayo ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
Dear GKD Members, Speaking personally, I've found the comments on the list about the proposed Open Knowledge Network a helpful contribution to the ongoing debate about the best approach to supporting local content. The idea is for this process to continue for at least another year to include as many points of view as possible as to the best way forward. Two points came out very clearly from the recent workshop in India. The proposed network of southern centres must continue to be 'bottom-up', with new resources focused on existing initiatives, and a continuation of the process of asking local communities themselves what they themselves want at the local level. Being demand-led continues to be vital. Secondly, it was clear that any such ICT network should be technology agnostic - working with the most appropriate systems as they emerge in each different southern context. Where it might make sense to focus on WorldSpace, road-side phone shops and cable TV in South Asia, the situation is very different in Africa or Latin America. However, the underlying principles being discussed, which are based on work that many people have been doing in the sector for many years, seem to me to be worth developing further: - that open source and open content ideas should be the basis of knowledge sharing; (the alternative is described by Russell Southwood in his report on Bamako: by moving information and knowledge into the private domain through an Intellectual Property Rights regime protected by copyrights laws, Africa may become locked out from its own information.) - that a semantic element needs to be added to the web (as Berners-Lee is advocating) which could be implemented with something like XHTML. This is turn implies some agreement about metadata standards, in the same way that IDML has been evolving; - the approach should be bottom up and de-centralised; - that it's worth looking at p2p filesharing as potentially a more powerful system than simple web-publishing, which is dependent on costly internet access, as our partners in Africa keep reminding us. In this connection, we are following the line of thought of many people, like John Gage, Chief Scientist at Sun, who wrote recently: Peer-to-peer networks turn today's networks on their head. Instead of centralized portals bringing data from big servers to users, the devices at the edges of the network share resources with each other, form self-organized groups, and migrate data and programs among themselves as needed. The aggregate of resources at the edge of the network is much greater than that of the resources in central servers, and the disparity will grow larger forever. This inevitable change means that today's centers of information and resources become ever less important. Cheers, Peter ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
Dear GKD Members, I must say I benefited a lot reading all your comments on the proposed Open Knowledge Network (OKN) Project which is one of the outcomes of the G8 Dotforce Working Groups. As someone who follows most of the ongoing ICT-related research, I must first of all congratulate the G8 Working Group 8 for this wonderful initiative. I must also mention here that I assisted Oneworld, MS Swaminathan Foundation, and their associates as a volunteer during their pilot study. It so happened that my proposed visit to Pondicheery villages to evaluate the role of new media in enhancing people's livelihood opportunities coincided with the OKN experiment. Hence, I spent sometime working with Peter Armstrong, James Jeaynes of Accenture and the team at MSSRF. I must again reiterate that this was a wonderful experience for me for the project was well appreciated by the villagers themselves. What the proposal suggests are mainly some five key points: 1. Connect to the Internet without going online: The OKN experimented the use of Worldspace radio during the pilot and found out that remote villages can benefit from downloading valuable data using this technology. I should think that not many people would contest this idea as the costs for connecting to the Internet using telecommunication equipment in many places are prohibitantly high. I am aware of such experiments elsewhere too. And strongly believe that the use of radio can indeed facilitate information exchange. An intelligent software can distil data received through the World Space radio receiver and generate content in local languages appropriate to the local audiences in a format people are quite used to. This exactly was the purpose of the experiment in Kalitheerthalkuppam, a village in Pondicherry where a volunteer called, Vijayakumar was able to download data and produce daily news sheets for his people. Our meeting with the village volunteers some ten days ago in Chennai was reassuring that such technical solutions work. 2. Incentivising local content creation: I read a few cynical views and arguments against this idea. If an idea failed in the past, we strongly believe that the very same idea can never work in our lifetime. Seldom we look at the reasons for the failure. But, here at Pondicherry we tried finding out why people would wish to generate local content at all. People do want to share their knowledge. Life in villages are around the culture of sharing and learning from each other. Quite often they do not think in terms of earning any incentives for sharing their expertise. But, this experiment brought up a number of ideas to incentivise local content creation. I do not have an answer to the critics, but suggest you all to consider people as clients to the governments and local authorities rather than their customers. People have the potential to supply information to authorities about their welfare, their surroundings, their environment, their needs, their life, their natural resources, their physical resources, their health conditions, the eating habits, their drinking habits!, their social life, and above all their local knowledge. Every government wants to listen to its people. Some governments have civil servants ranging from development commissioners to extension workers who are supposed to listen to the people during their 9 to 5 job. And often they fail. But, here through the use of ICTs, people in remote villages have the potential to become the clients to their so-called authorities in processing all sorts of crucial local information that are needed to make their world a better place. I came back with a sense that through such models the roles can be reversed. 3. Agreeing on standards for exchanging information world-wide: The OKN workshop ten days ago tried exploring this. If the container idea sounds very sophisticated to some of us, let us consider the Internet as a tool that enables us to search information. Every search brings back some relevant results, but most often throws nonsense. That is the beauty of the Internet. You do not need to follow any standards, yet you are able to access information. But, when it comes to accessing crucial and most relevant information, we do find difficulties whether we like it or not. But, how do these search engines make it possible for anyone with no special skills to search. It is simply because there are very many programmers behind the scene working hard to make the search engines that extra intelligent everyday. There is whole body of research around the area of ontology, artificial intelligence, usability studies, relevance rating, and so on. Well, what the OKN tries to do is by standardising the content capture in order to yield some results. If I feed information to a system, I would wish to say who I am, what information I am feeding, in which language, written by whom, relevant to what type of audience, and so on. This is exactly the OKN tries to do. Information
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
In response to Peter Armstrong's call for feedback and in response to the critique from Warren Feek (in quotes) 1. Local content creation: I am not sure you need to incentivise this - support it and commincate it, yes, but not incentivise. Why not incentivise local content creation? Just because we are dealing with something as abstract as knowledge, does not mean we should treat it only as free and not invest in it. I really don't think there is an excess of local level voice on development issues relative to what you see when you survey the huge mass of comment coming from high level sources. 2. The desirability of spending this amount of human and financial resources on this plan at this time: See above. I do not agree that a project by project approach is necessarily the best, when we are talking about a very long term problem that requires both planning and infrastructure, and for that matter the setting of standards. 3. The wrapping of information [your containers analogy]: Maybe I just do not understand this concept but it seems to be redundant and inadvisable. Standards I understand - but those are being created across the internet as this is an issue much broader than just the development field and it is those broad standards we will all need to adopt; just as we would not think of a special high definition TV standard just for international development. It is the container analogy that has me struggling. As I understand the key to effective positoning of information on the internet it is to develop, and place as separate items, small pieces of information. Again this is an interesting point. I think the issue is more about integrating a new standard with existing standards. The Reports provided on the OKN site make it clear that specialised techniques are required to make time efficient use of connectivity. It is not unreasonable to want to include a set of standards with such a new set of techniques. The container analogy exists within standard HTML and internet useage, in the form of Meta Tag information. I disagree with Warren in that this infomation is not sufficient to produce a classification. It actually takes human editors to compare information and produce a classification, as a classification is a set of relationships between things, and not something based purely and absolutely on the nature of the building blocks it is made up of. This problem has been encountered already with standard internet technologies, and one response has been collective categorisation projects such as the Open Directory Project (ODP). www.dmoz.org Perhaps Oneworld should contact the ODP staff with two objectives in mind. Firstly to look at the way they have organised a collective voluntary classification process. Secondly to see if they can produce an approach to classification that will allow easy integration of their data into the general collection already amassed by the ODP. Since the ODP provides source data for most of the major search engines, this would be a means of publicising the ins and outs of our field to a more general audience. After all, the fact that very few people understand what we are up to is a major problem, wouldn't you agree? Best regards, Daniel Taghioff permanent email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] homepage: http://www.geocities.com/danieltaghioff/homepage.htm ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
As one of the early players in the ICT for Development efforts of the 1980's and 1990's, for several years I have deliberately gone quiet in these global discussion forums. The time has gone into some rewarding ICT and Development work and into considerable intellectual soul searching, trying to understand why the willfull failure to learn remains an integral part of much of we do in the development community. Bad ideas have the persistance of malaria and successful activities have almost no knowledge diffusion and no spread effects. Warren Feek's and Peter Armstrong's recent postings have coaxed me out from the solitude of our small ICT Development skunk works to make a small point. Part of it the paradox of our failure to learn from our concrete successes (a kernel within Warren Feek's posting). Why don't these successes spread? Another part of it is captured in the well meaning wording of Peter Armstrong's posting which falls prey to the meta-language of the Dotforce process. Citing the proposed: facilitating the exchange of local content on developmental themes. The idea is to link up existing initiatives in the South in a p2p network, using agreed standards for metadata and 'open content' IPR licenses. The development community is not asked to assess what this means. The Dotforce consortium does not really ask to assess, existing initiatives in the South. Unfortunately, theprocess whereby initiatives register on the radar at this level is not bottom up evidence driven, it is top down priorities driven. This is followed by: We are hoping that this proposal will attract significant support at the forthcoming G8 Summit, and the groups working on it (IDRC, Swaminathan Foundation, OneWorld, IICD, Accenture, IDRC, Harvard and others) would very much like feedback on how to improve the model. No matter what words are used to describe the process, the model, and the objectives, there is something very closed loop about this. There is no way to move beyond the meta-language and the key funding player assumption that the model is basically correct. That the only acceptable form of criticism is suggestions for making it better. The idea that the ambitious model may be flawed at its core is unacceptable. Any extent to which that is true is also a challenge to the role of the currently constituted key players, the legitimacy of their claims to resources and their rights to voice with regard to ICT Development, Knowledge Networking, whatever [select your current buzz word]. When evidence is counter to, or supports, the ideas of the poor, the ideas of the poor are marginalized. On the other hand, the ideas of the rich stay front and centre, not because evidence is on their side, but because the rich have the resources to claim voice. Open Knowledge Networking, how so defined, is not a way out of this dilemma so long as the resources for voice and action are power based. The only way forward is a more transparent and democratic process at each and every layer in the process. It is an old remedy but none the less a wise starting point. Alas, it is unlikely however to find a doorway into the closed loop thinking atthe G8, Dotforce level, no matter how well meaing are the individual participants, and no matter how much a closed system attempts open consultation. Sam Lanfranco, Black Creek Research Foundation South Bay, Ontario, CANADA ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
Peter - thanks for sharing the Open Knowledge Network proposal. You asked for feedback through this forum. Here are some personal observations - they do not and are not intended to represent the views of The Communication Initiative partners. Any initiative to strengthen the use of the new technologies in support of advancing international development goals is to be applauded and I congratulate you and your team on putting together such a visionary proposal. However, there are aspects to the proposal that are troubling, perhaps because I am insufficently informed about how this will work in practice. These issues include: 1. Local content creation: I am not sure you need to incentivise this - support it and commincate it, yes, but not incentivise. From where we sit there is a large and growing body of local knowledge on the net. People from many walks of life are finding ways to get their information up. Are we missing a lot - sure - but there is a huge and growing body of information and ideas. And, at the moment demand exceeds opportunity. The major issue is the opportunity to get you information up. Present web processes are excellent for sharing. 2. The desirability of spending this amount of human and financial resources on this plan at this time: 25 million dollars is a lot of money, particularly when one looks at the opportunity cost - USD 25,000 for each of 1,000 Southern Based local knowledge gathering points or USD 50,000 for each of 500 such sites [5 per country for the 100 economically poorest countries]. And, that to me is where the issue lies at present - for those with resources to spend. If the plan you outline is to work it will require good raw material from southern based local knowledge gathering points - I resist calling them portals. Unfortunately, we understand that many of the southern based/originating local knowledge sites are struggling to get the financial resources required to both continue and expand their work. It may be advisable to support the brick creation before we try to construct the building that is made from those bricks. It is these virtual gathering points that will get the info up. 3. The wrapping of information [your containers analogy]: Maybe I just do not understand this concept but it seems to be redundant and inadvisable. Standards I understand - but those are being created across the internet as this is an issue much broader than just the development field and it is those broad standards we will all need to adopt; just as we would not think of a special high definition TV standard just for international development. It is the container analogy that has me struggling. As I understand the key to effective positoning of information on the internet it is to develop, and place as separate items, small pieces of information. Because it is the end-user who does the bundling of the information they require into the 'containers' they need. Whilst I search for gender violence programmes in Colombia and package together the information I gather into the container I need, my colleague might be doing the same with critical anlayses of The Treaty of Waitangi. We all build our own containers. So, why do we need the formula containers you propose? After all, it is impossible to predict target groups - and inadvisable to do so. And, even if we could, those would change. Therefore is it not inappropriate to bundle things together in 'metaphoric contaners'. A similar critique could be applied to the regional hubs. Which leaves those hubs as translation points - a cost which would chew up considerably more than USD 25 million dollars per annum! 4. Implicit in your proposal is the development of new technology - but for almost everything described - eg file sharing - does the technology not exist already? Or is it not in the works? 5. And, a personal bias - I have an in-built scepticism about large scale ideas that hint at seismic shifts. Change, I would argue is a lot more gradual and incremental and dynaic than that. Finally, I think we need an ICT investment that is very different to what you propose - but that is a separate discussion. Sorry if I completely misunderstood the whole concept. Warren Warren Feek Director - The Communication Initiative [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.comminit.com ph 1-250-658-6372 fx 1-250-658-1728 Communication for Development News http://www.comminit.com/commfordevnews.html Base Line http://www.comminit.com/base_line.html Materials http://www.comminit.com/materials.html Programme Descriptions http://www.comminit.com/programmes.html Evaluation Summaries http://www.comminit.com/evaluation-results.html Communication Trends http://www.comminit.com/communication-trends.html Strategic Thinking http://www.comminit.com/strategic.html Planning Models http://www.comminit.com/planning_models.html Events Calendar http://www.comminit.com/2002-events.html Training http://www.comminit.com/training02.html Consultants
Re: [GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
A live example of what faciliating open content can do to promoting rural community development has been pioneered by the Swaminathan Reaserch Foundation and One World in Pondicherry, India. The project has community ownership and leadership at its core and provides a strong evidence of the availabiltiy of local content, and what promoting its visibility and access can do to a people's sense of ownership,preservation of heritage, community pride and facilitating socio-economic development. These are the challenges the Chennai workshop (hosted by One World and Swaminathan Research Foundation) has thrown up to sceptics of the possibility, necessity and viability of the exchange of open content as a vehicle for sustainable development. John Dada Fantsuam Foundation Kafanchan. NIGERIA ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
[GKD] Proposed Open Knowledge Network
Dear GKD Members, One of the proposals to come out of the Dotforce process is focused on facilitating the exchange of local content on developmental themes. The idea is to link up existing initiatives in the South in a p2p network, using agreed standards for metadata and 'open content' IPR licenses. We are hoping that this proposal will attract significant support at the forthcoming G8 Summit, and the groups working on it (IDRC, Swaminathan Foundation, OneWorld, IICD, Accenture, IDRC, Harvard and others) would very much like feedback on how to improve the model. The background papers and a chance to respond are at: www.dgroups.org/groups/okn Please let us know what you think. There is also to be a workshop on the OKN in Chennai 29th-31st May. Details are on the dgroups site above. If you'd like to take part in an online chat with the participants on Thursday 30th at 5.30 pm Indian time, please email in advance to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Thanks for your interest, Peter - Peter Armstrong, Director, OneWorld International www.oneworld.net ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** 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.edc.org/GLG/gkd/
