The “laptop for every child” initiative - Nicholas Negroponte’s MIT-based $100 laptop project - has obviously received a lot of publicity, mainly because it’s a great tagline.
But really, why? It seems a little quixotic, in light of repeated research showing that, in the developing world, the usual model is for communal access to computing facilities. Negroponte has also been quoted that “the best education may not come from sitting in a traditional classroom, but rather through independent interaction and exploration,” which also seems to fly in the face of findings that traditional teaching methods actually work quite well.
By the way, these laptops don’t actually exist yet. (sarcasm) A small detail, but one I hope they’ll address at some point (/sarcasm).)
Finally, a decent wireless connection at WSIS. This means I can take my first steps in the wonderful world of blogging live, from the ICT4Peace session. I’ve just descended from the stage, having presented the ICT4Peace report, in order to allow our range of guest speakers to take their seats. From left to right, we have Chamindra de Silva (Lanka Software Foundation), Dag Nielsen (Ericsson Response Team), Linton Wells (US Department of Defense), President Marti Ahtisaari of Finland (who’s speaking as I type), Jose Antonio Ocampo (Under-Secretary General of the UN), Raymond Johansen (Secretary of State of Norway) and Ambassador Daniel Stauffacher of Switzerland.
To be honest, I can’t believe that we managed to put this panel together. If we’re not careful, they’ll reach critical mass and form a diplomatic black hole. (Except for Chamindra and Dag, who we’ll have to rescue, otherwise I won’t be able to continue working with them on Sahana and NGO communications.) All of them are interesting speakers, with very different perspectives - the only thing standing between us and that diplomatic black hole is our moderator, Hilary Bowker.
So, here we are! It’s the World Summit on the Information Society! I’m so excited! That’s the only possible explanation for all these exclamation marks! 15,000 people, lots of government speakers, a huge expo hall, not much bandwidth!
This afternoon we’ll be presenting the ICT4Peace report, with an all-star line-up on the panel. That’s why I’m here. I missed the first phase of WSIS, which was happening in Geneva while I was happening in Liberia, so it’s also a great chance to see what this whole information society thing is all about.
So far, I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about. Andy Carvin has noted the lightly-clad lovely ladies that seem to be milling about various booths, as if it was a Vegas car show (not that I’m complaining as much as he is). There’s a lot of stuff here that I can’t work out - a strange mix of the hard core technology (online encrypted e-commerce solutions 4 all), the fuzzy feelgood (empowerment through sms 4 all) and the downright deranged (a laptop for every child 4 all).
From the humanitarian point of view, there isn’t much here. I had a good meeting with Rene Francis of the Ericsson Response Team, about extending ERT support to the NGO community - currently they work predominantly with the UN, on standby arrangement, but there’s no reason that couldn’t be applied to NGOs under a similar arrangement. Today I’m on a mission to find out some exciting new technologies, which I will promptly steal. Sadly, I think the most exciting thing here is WiMax - broadband wireless access for remote areas during humanitarian response is a bit of a no-brainer.
I’ll write more later, unless the wireless access here at WSIS goes down, which it seems to do every time anybody enters the building.
Thanks to the efforts of Chamindra during his recent trip to Canada, the concept of Humanitarian Free and Open Source software has made another step forward. This time, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation has announced a new award for projects in the service of humanitarian, directly inspired by Sahana. You can read about the award in this article - TECTONIC: Tsunami-inspired FSF award focuses on humanity.
For the last year, I’ve been working with the Swiss Executive Secretariat on their contribution to a little thing called the World Summit on the Information Society. The fruits of that labour are in the Report on Information and Communications Technology for Peace [PDF] (ICT4Peace), which you can find on the ICT4Peace website. The subtitle of the report is “The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict”, which is a big clue as to what the report covers. It offers an overview of some of the major initiatives and organisations that have been using technology on the international stage to work on humanitarian and peace interventions. The Report will be officially launched at WSIS in Tunisia, with all the bells and whistles - see you there!
It’s embarrassing, but in my youth I could often be heard telling people “Information just wants to be free!” I can’t even remember what I meant now. I was probably crazed with power at the time. But I was on a phone conference with Microsoft earlier today, and at one point somebody started to talk about how we would have to discuss how to deal with proprietary data collected during a humanitarian response. Suddenly, the years rolled back and information just wanted to be free again…
One of the problems that I’ve faced repeatedly is that UN or NGOs in the field just aren’t very good at sharing their information, either with their peers or with the beneficiaries. Most often, the objection is raised that, if we share information (particularly from assessments), our “competitors” might take that information, use it to develop a project proposal, and take all the cash from our donors’ pockets.
Please. Donors don’t give us money because our assessments are amazing, or because our project proposals are dazzling. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of assessments and proposals in my time, and generally they’re crap (especially in a sudden-onset emergency, when everybody’s losing their marbles). The donors give us money because we already have a contract with them, or we know them from that bar in Kabul, or because we happened to drive past their office and they desperately need to spend a $500,000 budget by lunchtime.
If we’re talking about a public entity (a non-governmental organisation) using public funds (either from a government or from the general public) to carry out public service (providing relief to communities) in a foreign country where the government has a clear stake in responding to and recovering from a disaster?
All the data collected by that NGO should be made freely available as quickly as possible, with the only possible exceptions made for privacy or security issues.
Discuss.
The NTEN conference went very well - tremendous interest in the idea of Humanitarian Open Source, particularly the Sahana experience. I delivered a short panel address (I’ll post the notes as soon as I have time to type them up) and participated in a workshop with some really interesting people who’d been involved in the Hurricane Katrina response. The keynote speech was delivered by Mike Hess of USAID, who provided an interesting overview of his involvement in humanitarian and reconstruction work over the last 15 years. He’s one of the people inside the US administration who gets it, from a humanitarian perspective, and it was interesting to hear him link the US experience in civilian and military response in a way that made sense.
As always, the offline discussions were just as illuminating as the main events - it was good to catch up with Ted Okada from Groove (now Microsoft/Groove, of course, or possibly Groove/Microsoft), as well as sharing the platform with casual visionary Paul Meyer of Voxiva. Conference details are on N-TEN’s website, agenda and workshops and so forth, here. You can find a nice article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy Relief Groups Say 2005 Disasters Point Out Vital Technology Needs.