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xavier leonard's Blog
 The ICT4D Expo
I had to get some help putting up an IndyMedia article about the Expo from San Diego IndyMedia because I couldn’t publish through my connection at the Golf Royale Hotel.
Here’s a link to the story, and here’s a link to the video (7.1 MB).
You can see proof of my earlier claim about the excitement over the OLPC project in the picture above. It wasn’t really like the Beatles, but if I said it were, I wouldn’t be misleading people who didn’t attend the Expo by much. Some have pointed out the hype factor that fuels attention for the project. Still, the lonely, yawning attendants at the adjacent UNDP booths would agree that OLPC generated more interest than most things. The good thing about that is that it was really a great opportunity share and learn from all of the projects that were being presented, because we were free to have extended conversations when necessary.
And it did feel like EVERYONE was there. In a reflection of Andy Carvin’s earlier comments about the U.S.’s attitude toward ICT4D, our presence was quite small. The only project offered was the USAID, and their focus was on ICT to aid in the response to disasters. That’s right. That’s the “A-game” that the U.S. brought to WSIS: a presentation on cutting-edge, responsive catastrophe communication from the same producers who gave you the “Katrina Follies.” Sad. Very sad. I wouldn’t be surprised if the word “American” was quickly becoming synonymous with the word “arrogant” in about 50 of the world’s languages right now. Maybe it would have been better if USAID had just stayed home.
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November 21st, 2005 @ 3:31AM |
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 My Day 2 activity included listening to comments from the head of Tunisia’s postal service at a session called “Do ICTs Matter to the Poor?” In the official WSIS opening, both the Civil Society speaker Shirin Ebadi, and the Swiss President made references to the dangers of letting states with repression on their agenda influence global policy on ICT rights. So, I’m listening to the Tunisien Poste guy and thinking, “Too late!” Despite the fact that Tunisia would probably make anyone’s Top 5 list of Information Age repressors, by brokering the deal to host this second phase of WSIS, they get to add much legitimacy to their claims of being ICT for Development leaders. What matters worse, the initiatives the Poste guy details about basically turning their offices into telecentres for the poor sound really good to me. Adding insult to injury, I’m recalling the points Andy Carvin made during his Civil Society Best Practices talk, about the U.S.’s growing disinterest in addressing the Digital Divide since 9-11. And I have to wonder if Tunisia’s ICT policy might really be more progressive than ours in some ways. I plan to look into what’s really happening in the Bureaux de Poste before I leave Tunis.
In that same ICTs and the Poor session, Peter Plymptom-Smith, VP, UNESCO made a great analogy to support his call for a more strident deployment of ICT in education. Approximately, he said that if banks used ICT the same way they’re used in education, there would still be 50 tellers in a bank. We would walk up, give a teller our ATM card, they would stick in a machine, enter our code, and then hand our money to us.
At night, I had the good fortune of Heads On Fire being treated to dinner by Telecentre.org and Taking IT Global. TIG celebrated their fifth birthday and the setting of Restaurant Latina at the Palace du Lac was appropriately festive. On the way there I got the full story behind Vibewire’s brilliant, WSIS award-winning project from the Australian org’s national coordinator Tom Dawkins. The project sent people who had just turned voting age to cover the national election using new media tools.
The evening included a live performance of the newly written “Youth Caucus Anthem”, just in time ;-). The refrain is still living in my head and I’m sure that, whatever evolution takes place following WSIS, the Youth Caucus will indeed “rock us.”
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November 21st, 2005 @ 3:16AM |
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 My WSIS disorientation began as soon as I entered the Kram complex and set about attending to my first bit of business. Upon entering the men’s room, I discovered that it was staffed by multiple female attendants. A line of men shaking their members while two young Arab women look on was such an assault on my cultural norms that I splashed into the cold, deep end of that “not in Kansas anymore” feeling. By the time I tumbled from a densely packed throng into the hall where opening remarks were being given by Tunisan president Ben Ali, Kofi Annan and others, and navigated through the use of those simultaneous translation headsets, the disorientation was complete. I settled into it comfortably.
Kofi Annan’s remarks reminded me strongly of a recording I have of Lyndon Johnson’s comments upon signing the Public Broadcasting bill into law in 1962. Yes, 1962. It reinforced from me all the reasons that have led to my being in Tunis. In that 1962 address, LBJ envisioned Public Broadcasting leading to a free and open global information exchange that, in some ways, still hasn’t arrived. In the absence of Civil Society vigilance, Kofi Annan’s promises could likewise go unfulfilled.
Outside of the hall, I used the WSIS wireless network to catch up on email and received further reinforcement. Under the gaze the of the most vigilant sets of eyes possible, Tunisian authorities didn’t hold back on their suppression of Communications rights as they launched a violent attack on the Tunisian group that organized a corresponding Citizens’ Summit on the Information Society. Read more here:
http://www.apc.org/english/wsis/blog/index.shtml?x=2430526
I was surprised an quite pleased to see that the parallel session on Children’s Rights in the Information Age was actually being led by children, barely in their adolescence, if that far. In the main, their comments and the documents produced were carefully considered, intelligent, and thought provoking. It was particularly interesting to me that the majority of the group endorsed some form of Internet Governance would include measures to keep sites containing potentially harmful information away from the eyes of children. Only one girl spoke strongly for the idea of educating children so that they could make their own, informed decisions.
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November 21st, 2005 @ 3:09AM |
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So I guess I'm starting with my most recent experience and at some point I'll blog my way backwards. That actually may be appropriate since the Club of Rome's presentation of the $100 Laptop team really had a tone that I feel was unique among the WSIS events.
There's been a grip of passion in the room for all of the Parallel Events I've popped into and, at WSIS, intensity is even a part of standing in line to buy a sandwich. Even so, the super-charged atmosphere in the room as Nicholas Negroponte and his team spoke was undeniably special. Their work is just soaked with so much hope-inspiring innovation, that the team's enthusiasm is powerfully infectious. I've found this to be a pretty common characteristic of projects that come out of MIT's Media Lab, which is, itself, undeniably special. I find so much value in all of the events here, that it's been my practice to take the first sensible moment to exit one session so that I can squeeze in some of another that's happening simultaneously. I couldn't pull myself away from this presentation and stayed through the last word following the Q and A. Understandable, maybe, guven my background and interests, but the German actress/geo-sociologist whom I'd just met was equally gripped to the very end.
One thing that made it so exciting is that the $100 price tag is just one of many innovations that are a part of this project. The team detailed many more, including built-in mesh networking, but I got the sense that there are more still that didn't even get mentioned.
I think the team refers to the project as "One Laptop per Child" and Negroponte emphasized why this concept was central to their innovative vision. In explaining why they want everone the school to have their own laptop, rather construct a series of laptop labs, Negroponte referenced a parable told by Media Lab co-founder Seymour Papert. The parable invites us to imagine a school and that that is an entire country. In the school, the only form of communication is speech. Then, one day, someone invents writing and everyone thinks it great. Trying find a way for students get the greatest benefit from this new technology, the school administrators first discuss putting a single pencil in each of the classrooms. Then they decide that a better idea is to take 10 pencils and put them all into one room, called a "pencil lab." Each student would be able to access a pencil two hours a day, two days out of the week. |
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November 18th, 2005 @ 9:44AM |
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