Just a quick note on the conferences we will attend in the near future:
mLife 2009 Barcelona - “A Platform for Socially Responsible Organizations in the Mobile Value Chain”, taking place September 2-4 in Barcelona. Confirmed speakers here are
Mr. Serge Ferre, NOKIA, Vice President Corporate and Head of EU Representation
Ms. Evelyn Rys, CISCO, Sales and Business Development Manager, EMEA Public Sector Vertical, Cisco Systems
Dr. Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, Deutsche Telekom - Board Member of T-Mobile Germany and T-Home.
Mr. Ken Banks, Kiwanja Net
Africa Gathering - taking place October 10-11 in London. After the first Africa Gathering this April we decided to attend the upcoming second instance of this event this October as well. So far only one speaker has been confirmed - Ken Banks (kiwanja.net & FrontlineSMS) - but more are to come and judging from April it will be a great event again.
Today was the first day of e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action. I arrived yesterday here in Malaga and was picked up from the airport and brought to the hotel where all the speakers are staying. In the evening we started socializing and I was introduced (in the real world) to Ken Banks, Christian Kreutz, Jack Dorsey just to name a few of all the interesting people. We had kind of an informal dinner and discussed the actions and topics for day 1 of e-STAS. Today we got up quite early and a bus took us to the venue. We got our name tags and the publication where a saw our article “ICTs for the empowerment of citizens” printed on paper. Very nice.
As Adrian Mangin promised, the event is highly interactive and everybodies voice is heard. As usual, Ismael Peña-López started taking notes and publish them in real time. It was very fascinating sitting next to him and watching him “power-blogging”. Here is his outcome chonologically:
The only missing piece was a workshop, where all the people split into groups and were trying to find a definition for the term “Empowerment”. I was apointed to be the moderator of the bunch of all English speaking guys and we brought up a lot of issues. This will be covered by a separate blog post ASAP.
I was also participating in a round table on Empowerment (see Ismaels link above and the picture) with Bárbara Navarro, Google.es, Luis Millán Vázquez, FUNDECYT and expert at UN-GAID and Fernando Bothelo, Literacy Bridge which was moderated by Idelfonso Mayorgas. Everybody was introduced and had a 2 minutes pitch before we got into medias res. I was the only one speaking English, so I had to stick to my headset with the transation. We brought up our visions and sights on empowerment and I tried to put the focus on the developing world and proposed that we have to educate the people there and let them empower themself. A second topic was cloud computing, where I brought up the lack of computing power and storage capability of mobile devices which are so much growing and cloud computing as a natural result of this. I said that there is open source software for building a cloud system and everybody is able to build it’s own cloud and sticking to e.g. Google is in the long run just a matter of cost (big clouds shoud be cheaper). Another argument we had was on the “information / knowledge / innovation society” which was put into the spotlight by Luis. I said: The problem with this is, that all the information and knowledge is mostly available in written form and in English, so all the illiterate people are not part of it, so it is matter of accessibility. But I insisted later, that this is just a matter of time and the problem should be solved sooner or later.
I will get the video of the round table tomorrow and will push it on youtube.
A quick note on two events that were announced recently: The 1st International Conference on Mobile Development (mDEVELOPMENT 2009) will take place in Barcelona 2-4 September 2009. It seems that the conference has emerged from last years mLife event , where they held a session on mobile development.
The other event is a workshop organized by Matt Jones and Gary Marsden on the theme “Taking Ubicomp Beyond Developed Worlds” (Globi-Comp 2009). The workshop will be held at the Ubicomp 2009 conference, which I find really exciting, since I’ve previously published at this conference myself. It’s really about time that ICT4D establishes its place in this community.
Here comes our contribution to e-STAS - Symposium on Technologies for Social Action - next month in Malaga, Spain. I will attend the symposium and will meet great people and make new friends, all of them ruling ICT4D. Adrien Mangin which is co-organizing the event invited us to attend, so we just said yes and we spontaneously made up this article. It is only the first draft but kind of stable. Enjoy:
How do Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) influence society in Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs)? In our opinion, ICTs are the most promising tools that can shift the power balance between the rich, the poor, the institutions and the people to be offered in decades. In areas such as democracy, journalism or the business/financial sector, new and innovative movements are emerging, empowering the poorest of the poor. The first part of this article attempts to express our views on how this is being accomplished and provide examples demonstrating the enormous power of Information and Communication Technologies for Development, known as ICT4D. The second part of this article suggests a research approach and methodology that we use to evaluate how people in LDCs interact with ICTs using a User Centered Design approach, which what we also call UCD4D.
Now that Cooperation 2.0 in Gijon is over for already a week, we would like to share some thoughts and impressions from the event.
The overall guiding theme of Coop 2.0 was “Innovation on ICT for Development Cooperation” and this theme was present in almost every talk and round table. Already in the entry speech of Nadjat Rochdi from UNDP, the need for innovation was accentuated. And adverse to invention (having new ideas) she defindes innovation as “appyling ideas in a new way“. Furthermore she called for collective action of all stakeholders - governments, NGOs, private sector.
The projects and organizations presented in the following days mostly conformed to these ideas, showing interessting concepts on how to use existing technology for social and economic improvement, or how to reshape development cooperation to let everybody contribute.
What these three presentations showed was that the right technology in the right situation has huge potential. But, as Kentaro Toayama pointed out - not for every problem, there is a technological solution which makes sense. Stéphane Boyera presented mobile phones as the most powerful device in ICT4D currently - changing lifestyles of people all around the world and empowering the poor to act as contibutors instead only as consumers. But he also mentioned the shortcomings of mobile phones and the need for an inclusive approach, integrating other technology already in place.
On the “reshaping development cooperation” side there were for example
The statements in these presentations were supporting an increased integration of the southern countries in the process of bridging the digital divide. Furthermore the need for urgent cooperative actions was underlined. As Vikas Nath put it - networked cooperation is a must - institutions have to learn to integrate themselves in bigger networks.
In the discussion panels it was often claimed that in ICT4D, development needs to be in focus, not technology - but in my opinion most contributors at Coop 2.0 seemed to have understood that. What they shared was the enthusiasm about ICTs - as Oleg Petrov put it - one of the most powerful tools in human history.
Coop 2.0 was therefore in my understanding a highly valuable event for the international ICT4D and general development cooperation community to meet, network and share experiences and best practices. It was inspiring to hear of innovative projects using ICTs on the one hand, but also of attempts to achieve increased networking in development cooperation - where ICTs naturally can contribute substantially.
Here’s a list of the interesting people we did interviews with, on location at the Coop 2.0 conference that took place between 10-12 of February in Laboral University in Gijón, Spain. We will publish all or most of the videos, continuously in the coming days on our ICT4D.at YouTube channel.
We met Yael Schwartzman from Mexico at the MobileActive08 conference in Johannesburg last year, where she shared her on-going ICT4D project with us.
Yael currently works as a researcher at the University of California. As computer scientist she is involved in the development of a mobile phone application for coffee farmers in Mexico. The application, which is designed for fill in surveys, supports internal monitoring. This is important for the farmers to achieve better accountability, higher quality and improved efficiency, which in turn allows them to get access to a premium market.
To learn more about the application and the situation of coffee farmers in Mexico watch the full interview below. Muchas Gracias Yael!
This is the 11th interview from our MobileActive08 video podcast series, shot at the conference in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet).
Just a short point to our wiki - after getting the latest newsletter from IPID (btw - they have a neat new folder), we updated our Conferences & Events sections.
Just a short notice - ICT4D.at will be present at the SIG GlobDev workshop on December 13th.
The event is affiliated with the International conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and takes place in Paris, France.
I will present my paper “Fighting Hunger with Information - Mashups in ICT4D Increase
Accessibility of Vital Services” and try to talk to (and interview) as many people as possible.
Logo from the SIG GlogDev page
Regrettably on the almost same date there is the conference Mobile Communication Technology For Development (M4D) which looks also quite tempting. Well, can’t do both.
We had the opportunity to interview Gary Marsden at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg (organized by MobileActive and sangonet). Gary is associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town.
In the interview he talks about internationalization of user interfaces. While working in Africa he made the experience that translating text into local language and changing icons is not sufficient. There are other issues that people from non-western cultures have with computing interfaces. For example many of them have difficulties understanding hierarchies. Gary describes his approach to address these issues, which he calls Empowered Design. The idea of this approach is to create technology that allows people in Africa to create their own applications, rather than having researchers dictating which applications people in Africa should have.
Gary also introduces briefly some projects to illustrate his approach to mobile interaction design in Africa. One of the applications he mentions is Big Board - a public display that allows people to download media for free - which he also presented at the MobileActive08 conference.
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mLife 2009 Barcelona - “A Platform for Socially Responsible Organizations in the Mobile Value Chain”, taking place September 2-4 in Barcelona. Confirmed speakers here are
Africa Gathering - taking place October 10-11 in London. After the first Africa Gathering this April we decided to attend the upcoming second instance of this event this October as well. So far only one speaker has been confirmed - Ken Banks (kiwanja.net & FrontlineSMS) - but more are to come and judging from April it will be a great event again.
