Cherlin

2007-01-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

It became clear to me in 2005 that the governments of the world did not believe in the possibilities of the Simputer, and were not going to, and so I left off blogging here for a time. For some time now I have been involved with the MIT $100 Laptop on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Wiki. Now I can see a way to contribute to its success, by creating a non-profit organization to take on parts of the program that OLPC doesn't want to do itself. This includes Internet connections for the schools, and following up on the education aspect of the program with direct initiatives in health, economic opportunity, and much more.

I will announce the new Non-Profit when I get the legalities dealt with. In the meantime, you can read about my ideas for helping the poor here, on the OLPC Wiki, at OLPC News and on the WIRE AFRICA Wiki.

2005-07-31T15:20:00.000-07:00

Computers for Cuba?

A State Department Report to the President: Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba last year said:

A number of regulations govern the export from the United States of equipment, including computers, to Cuba, a state sponsor of terrorism. These export rules are intended to restrict the Cuban government's access to sensitive technology and to prevent the Cuban government from transferring this technology to other hostile states.

At the same time, it is essential that Cuban civil society gain greater access to computers and other basic modern equipment, such as faxes and copiers, in order to help expand distribution of information and facilitate pro-democracy activities. Greater access to these types of equipment will assist Cuba's civil society in its efforts to disseminate information to the Cuban people and counter regime efforts to harass, intimidate, and stifle opposition and dissent through exclusive control over all forms of communication.

I bring this up now because Condoleezza Rice has just appointed veteran Republican Party activist Caleb McCarry as Cuba Transition Coordinator, with the responsibility to oversee just this program. McCarry is also described as a "Republican congressional staffer with 20 years of involvement in hemispheric issues". "McCarry has served for eight years on the House International Relations Committee's Republican staff…In Miami, the Cuban American National Foundation, which speaks for many of the community's more fervent exiles, also lauded the appointment."

We need to get a political movement together to create computer and communication programs for Cuban civil society. I would of course recommend a village-based program in health, education, e-commerce and the rest of what I plug on this blog, along with the ability for Cubans to blog openly to the world and such.

It's going to be hard going to push against the resistance of both Cuba and the U.S. (in spite of this stated policy) but it's essential. It won't be the quick fix that the American Right is looking for. Internet access in China hasn't brought down the Communist regime there. But it will have its effect. Like the Hong Kong Web site on SARS a few years back, which broke through the wall of government obfuscation there. It unquestionably saved lives, and probably was a factor in the dismissal of the high-ranking Chinese health officials who orchestrated the coverup attempt.

2005-06-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

> African countries need at least 30 years to bridge the gap in
> access to the Internet and other information communication
> technologies between their citizens and those of the advanced
> European and North American societies, an expert, Prof. Manny
> Anieb-onam, has said.

This is true in one sense, that equal access will take 30 years. That means a comparable number of telephone lines per capita, and a comparable number of Internet connections at comparable speeds for comparable prices. However, that is more than bridging the gap. It is wiping out the gap.

Just bridging the gap requires much less, and can be done much sooner. The required bridge is at least one shared Internet connection and computer in every village and in every urban neighborhood, with complete wireless coverage of inhabited areas. Given the imminent appearance of WiMax, with a 30 mile service radius, this minimum infrastructure could be deployed in any country that is serious about having it in two to three years from the time that WiMax is established in the market.

We begin with any city or town that has landline telephone service, and set up WiMax there, along with neighborhood 802.11G hotspots. We then install further WiMax towers in a hexagonal grid to cover large metropolitan areas. For areas not reached by this deployment, put satellite Internet connections with WiMax distribution in the middle of towns, and build the grid out to villages outside the immediate WiMax footprint.

This can be done for a few hundred million dollars continentwide, including all of the communications equipment and one low-cost computer per village and neighborhood. We can then count on the appearance of home-grown talent for hardware installation and maintenance, system administration, and other necessary services. You won't be able to beat the children off with a stick.

Almost all of Latin America was connected by mobile phones in just a few years in the 1990s, when governments en masse deregulated and invited the operators in. The same thing would be happening in Africa but for overregulation, corruption, the occasional civil war, and a few other impediments. When African governments permit it, the Internet will spread faster than wildfire. And the faster it spreads, the more the people will be able to demand more.

2005-05-04T14:58:00.000-07:00

In Pakistan, women lead final push to eradicate polio

2005-05-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

Hard times come again no more

Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs has a book called The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time currently at #69 on Amazon's top seller list. Finally! Somebody famous has come out and said it in public, and people are paying a little attention. Other lesser-known people such as this blogger have been saying so for years, with little obvious response.

If you care in the least about the welfare of other people, prospects for developing countries, global health (including its impact on your own health), global politics, the possibility of war or terrorist acts, or indeed much of anything outside your own pocketbook and your local entertainment media, you need to look into this book. If you have been following the discussion, you may not need to read it all the way through for your own edification, but you will need to know what arguments Sachs has made that are now part of the public discourse. You may also need to know what he has missed.

Sachs has defined the problem well, giving the reader a breathless world tour of poverty, misery, inequality and outright oppression, squalor, injustice, and so on, including the scourges of AIDS and other inexcusably global epidemics. He also lays out most of the goals, following the prescription of the UN's Millennium Development Goals. Where Sachs falls down is on methods. There is almost no mention of computers in the book, and the few mentions are not indexed. There is hardly any discussion of communications requirements, and none of the current technologies that are best suited for the villages. Microbanking is discussed, but not given the emphasis I would like to see. And there is no hint of a coordinated plan based on practice, experience, and evidence, for the appropriate ways to deliver health services, education, and economic opportunity. We are left with a "more of the same" sort of program, calling for greater funding of existing UN programs and international assistance, and more investment by the governments of developing countries. We can do better than this.

I don't know why Sachs doesn't mention ICT. He was certainly aware of the UN ICT Task Force and the World Summit on the Information Society even before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan gave him responsibility for the Millennium Development Goals. He has friends in the business, being well-known to someone prominent who is well-known to me. Well, I am not going to pretend to figure out such a thing. Let's get down to cases.

The most important fact about global development is that a functioning economy depends on the flow of information, and a well-functioning free market depends on the freest possible flow of information. In academic economics, freedom of information is not a conclusion; not a theorem derived from more basic axioms; not a policy decision. It is the first fundamental axiom, without which nothing can be done. Without the presupposition of perfect information, economics fails to predict any of the benefits we associate with the theory of the free market. Indeed, in the absence of perfect information, it is clear that they will not happen. In general, the less information the public has, the less efficient the economy, the less effective that economy's employment of resources (especially people), and the more unequal and discriminatory the prices of goods and services. In economies that mandate a fair amount of disclosure, these ills are not as great as they are in highly secretive societies where the public cannot find out what their goverments or any of the local businesses are up to. The most secretive societies, notably North Korea and Burma, are also the worst off economically.

There are several kinds of information essential to a functioning economy. There must be information about the goods and services available, including such matters as price, availability, quality, warranty, and quality of service. More fundamentally, one must be able to tell who is supplying the goods and services, not just by name, but by past economic, political, and even criminal records, and conflicts of interest. There must also be the education that enables the effective use of products and services. In the field of health, there must be published, peer-reviewed, and verified research into the safety and efficacy of drugs, treatments, and surgical procedures, and reliable nutrition information. It should be possible for people to know what the law says, and what that means when you go into court, and it should be correctly known that what the law means will not change capriciously from one court to another ("the rule of law"). And so on.

In practical terms this means that the information and communications infrastructure of a country, including education and provision of health information, should be the prime focus of investment. Few governments and few aid agencies have drawn this conclusion, and fewer have acted on it. Sachs gets some of it, but doesn't seem to understand how much information can be made available to the poor at a cost that they can afford (given that they can make more money by using that information).

I have been laying out various components of such a plan on this blog, and I see that I need to draw them together and make their integration more explicit. Let me give you the short-short version again, and then I will think about how to elaborate on it so you can see the whole picture.

We need programs that integrate social development, health, education, economic opportunity, and so on. There are such programs in the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement and the Fantsuam Foundation, and a particularly good model for health care in Partners in Health. Then we need the hardware and software for village computing and communications, such as the Simputer and the wireless technology put in nationwide by the government of Bhutan. Tying this together should be microfinance to deliver the equipment and fund the programs in the villages. With these elements, we can provide ICT to villages at a profit, we can create the training programs needed, and we can offer the services needed so that villagers can grow their own local economy and tackle the problems of poverty themselves. In addition, they get the chance to talk to each other and find ways of cooperating, and they get to talk to the rest of us. Without the information from them, the global economy cannot be free and open. Not only their part of the economy but ours as well suffers from the resulting inefficiencies, misallocation of resources, and unequal prices.

The limiting factor here is that the microbank projects in village computing have not resulted in suitable products with suitable training. This is a mystery to me, since I know of several successful training projects resulting in economic benefits to the poor. Perhaps the microbanks are suffering from the Not Invented Here syndrome? But I don't want to waste effort on diagnosing them either. I would rather get on with the work. I and my friends are pursuing trade in African Art, with most of the money going to the artists; fair trade purchasing and marketing of coffee, tea, and other commodities; satellite communications; localizing of Free Software by neglected language communities into their own languages; and a number of other facets of the program.

We are creating a new kind of organization, a hybrid of profit and non-profit, commercial and charitable. Our analysis says that we can end poverty at a profit, and our business plan says that we can raise the money to do it without waiting for anybody else to get the message. If we have to, we will start our own microbanks.

2005-04-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

Are Cheap Computers the Answer?

Steve Cisler asks this quesion and gives his own answer. Steve's observations make it clear that if so, you asked the wrong question. Here is my take.

Computers can be part of a solution to poverty, but only if they are designed to meet the specific, stringent requirements of the poor, and only if they are combined with the other elements of a solution.

The defining characteristic of poverty is lack of disposable income. Further constraints that the poor in many areas operate under include

lack of an electric grid

lack of a phone system

lack of knowledge

lack of software in their languages

Lack of knowledge is what the computer is supposed to cure, but first you have to know how to use one. Second, you have to know English, or you have to have a lot of friends translating software and creating content for the Web in your local language.

Any proposal to help the poor without specific measures for circumventing these constraints is a fantasy. In principle it can be done using solar power to recharge batteries, using wireless to connect to the Internet, and using microcredit to finance placement of the equipment plus the training to use the computer to make the money to pay back the loan.

The microbanks have not yet put such a training program together. The Grameen Foundation USA and Grameen Communications both have village computing projects, but I haven't heard of results from either. For now, that means that none of this is happening.

It is not that Simputers, for example, are too expensive. They cost more than the the cell phones that Grameen and other microbanks place successfully in villages all over the world, but not vastly more. (And they use rechargeable batteries and wireless, and support some of the target languages.)

It is not that there is a fundamental difficulty in training people to use computers to make money. The ITC e-choupal program is lifting millions of farmers in India out of extreme poverty by giving them free access to computers and offering to buy their crops at world prices. But you see that it is not enough just to provide the computers.

In fact, it will be necessary to train villagers to service computers, to create local content, and to program computers. Meaning that we have to make the computers operate in their languages.

Given computers in villages, and the initial methods of making money using them, we could obviously design programs in health, education, appropriate technology, sustainable agriculture, and so on and on. But we would still have the obstacle of language. We need to provide software and content in as many languages as possible. This can only be done by speakers of the languages. The rest of us can provide financial, technical, and moral support, and license our content to them at a price they can afford--free.

There are a number of distributions of Linux in languages of Africa and Asia not supported by commercial software, and more being created. The Free Software in use in developing countries is the functional equivalent of billions of dollars of commercial software, although the Free Software movement doesn't get to claim that we have donated billions of dollars worth of software.

What we need to do together (the techies, the NGOs, and the poor, among others) is to create a program that integrates these elements and more, and to test it and make it work for the poor. Then we can begin to talk about taking it around the world and answering some questions in the way that counts, by making it happen. Many of my friends are working on various components and on the way to bring them together. Some have successful development projects in quite poor countries that are ripe for the addition of computers. They could do much of the R&&D for the rest of what we need. You are all welcome to join in.

My own efforts right now, apart from working on the overall vision and plan, are going into e-commerce with Africa and Asia and promoting Linux development in more languages. I have some other ideas, for example telemedicine in the villages once they have computers of some sort. But that is for another time.

2005-02-15T15:17:00.000-08:00

Translations of Federalist Papers headed to Iraqi law students

Students at Sulaymaniyah University, in Kurdish Northern Iraq, have completed the first half of a course in the American legal system, taught by Captain Kevin Curseaden, a lawyer and Army Reservist from Milford, Connecticut and member of Lawyers Without Borders. On active duty in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, he was welcomed by the Dean of the Law School, but needed to find a textbook on American law, in Arabic. Within days, he got what he needed by contacting Lawyers Without Borders (LWOB), the international nonprofit organization based in Hartford.

Captain Cursedean had learned about LWOB three years ago and first made contact with Christina Storm, the founder and Director of Lawyers Without Borders, after his return to Connecticut from Kosovo. From Iraq, Capt. Curseaden emailed her for help. She immediately put LWOB's network into action.

LWOB, with the generous help of Lexisnexis had 25 copies of the English version of Professor Fine's book delivered to Iraq. LWOB also arranged for Arabic translations of the same book to be delivered along with various supplies for the students, provided by LWOB.

The Winter semester of that course is scheduled to begin in January 2004 and a request has been received at LWOB for Arabic translations of the Federalist Papers and US Constitution. Thanks to several NYC based volunteers, area libraries and Attorney Joel Feffer, at Wechsler Harwood, LLP multiple copies of the translations of those documents should arrive in Iraq just in time for the start of the new semester.

Did I mention that Free textbooks in local languages is one of the basic requirements for global development? Now can we get those Federalist Papers and US Constitution out on the net to the whole Arab world? You don't suppose any governments would block them as subversive literature, do you?

2005-02-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

Rwanda getting out ahead

Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the African ICT conference in Accra said that all of the country's secondary schools were to be connected to the internet by 2017. Rwanda has an aggressive Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) policy, aiming at making the poor country a technology centre within the next decades.

President Kagame of Rwanda is the only African state leader to attend to the Africa Regional Conference of the World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS), except the Ghanaian host, President John Agyekum Kufuor. In an interview with David Kezio-Musoke of Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), President Kagame reveals Rwanda's ICT strategies.

Asked on how Rwanda had achieved to become "a role model of a country with an effective ICT policy at national level," President Kagame said that his government had made that choice "in terms of overall objectives." The UN's Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) had helped Rwanda with necessary resources, including the human resource. "It is on that basis that everyone has started using us a model," the Rwandan President said.

- Today we have put in place broadband infrastructure, Mr Kagame explained. "It is possible to have wireless internet access. We have
the fibre optic infrastructure in the city and most of the towns and the provinces. We are working to expand it to other areas of the
countries."

(Rwanda has its own version of Linux localized into its own language, Kinyarwanda, as I reported here last year.)

2005-02-04T20:23:00.000-08:00

Wi-fi web reaches farmers in Peru

A network of community computer centres, linked by wireless technology, is providing a helping hand for poor farmers in Peru. The initiative is being coordinated by APC member in Peru, Cepes. The BBC Online reports following a story picked up in APCNews last month.

CopyLeft. 2004 Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Permission is granted to use this document for personal use, for training and educational publications, and activities by peace, environmental, human rights or development organisations. Please provide an acknowledgment to APC.

2005-01-30T14:15:00.000-08:00

Intel, India, Broadband

Intel made some sort of deal with the Indian government for broadband in November 2004, but there are still no details available.

Here, at any rate, is what Intel says about the general opportunity. More when I know more.

[PDF]WiMAX in India: Opening New Frontiers Through Broadband ...
Technology @ Intel Magazine
WiMAX in India: Opening New Frontiers Through Broadband Connectivity ...
www.intel.com/update/departments/wireless/wi11041.pdf

This document mentions a number of initiatives in several countries. Here are just two.

“India is already testing the e-Governance idea in pilot programs aimed at bringing local government services to people through Internet access. E-seva is one such initiative, created by the Andhra Pradesh government to provide its citizens with online services such as obtaining birth certificates and various licenses, payment of utility bills and taxes, ticket reservations for transportation services, and listings of government orders and policies.”

“Gramdoot is a similar initiative by the Rajasthan government. The states of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala also have several Internet-based services and literacy programs. Broader Internet adoption driven by cost-effective technologies like WiMAX can speed and extend the reach of government services at a reduced cost to both the people and the government.”

We have previously heard that Andhra Pradesh has signed a contract with an industry consortium to bring fiber optics to every one of its villages, with 2Mbps broadband promised at Rs100 per month (about US$2.30). I'm paying a lot more than that for about a fifth of that bandwidth here in Silicon Valley.

2005-01-25T13:05:00.000-08:00

Vote at GlobalGiving

The Internet never ceases to amaze. The people at GlobalGiving have created the first free market exchange for non-profit project funding, offering more efficient allocation of donor resources and better access to funding for those who need it. Any non-profit/NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) can list a project with the amount of money needed, what the money will accomplish, and any further details, plus links to their site, their partners, and even the recipients of their help. This is a far better system than having individual organizations pitch individual projects to individual donors, where nobody can find out what is going on overall. We have seen the same process for buying and selling (Amazon, eBay, Overstock.com, Cars.com,...), for finding jobs (DICE, HotJobs, BAjobs, Craigslist,...) and many other functions for years now, but the non-profit world has lagged behind. In large part this has come from being grossly underfunded and wanting to apply scarce resources directly to recipients' needs, and to some extent from reticence to embrace a market model.

Anyway, GG is testing a new process, where 150 or so organizations have been nominated to put in proposals for the public to vote on. You.

[Disclosure] Now the reason I know this is because I work with one of the nominees, oneVillage Foundation. It goes without saying that I would like you to vote for our project. We are working with Fantsuam Foundation in Nigeria to integrate best practices from around the world into a comprehensive program that we would then offer to every village in the world (with suitable local adaptations). Our program can operate at a profit to us and to the poorest of the poor, by including e-commerce and microbanking in the mix, so we can raise the money to expand around the world without depending on the current inadequate development funding mechanisms.

But I don't just want you to vote for us. Go and look at the breadth of the offerings at GlobalGiving, many of which address the issues of sustainability and replication in one way or another. You can search by theme among Democracy, Economic Development, Education, Environment, Gender, Health, Human Rights, and Technology, or by continent and country. My only complaint is that they would only let us pick one of these categories to list ourselves under, when in fact we address all of them.

Anyway, voting ends on Jan. 27, so go there today. We'll let you know how this works out for us.

2005-01-11T15:13:00.000-08:00

Tsunami editorial in The Lancet

One world, one response--needed, but not yet forthcoming

Introducing a series on complex emergencies in The Lancet less than two months ago, we noted that Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief coordinator on disaster reduction, was frustrated by the lack of attention being given to natural disasters by the international community. Now no longer, one presumes...

Well worth reading in full. It catalogs the responders (countries, NGOs, UN agencies, the public) and the ways in which they are not able to cooperate for lack of communications and of advance planning. Also,

08 January 2005
The Lancet today issues a call for papers describing experiences of health workers in countries affected by the south-Asian tsunami. We want to publish descriptions of the conditions in which medical and public-health interventions are being delivered, the challenges faced by relief workers, and reports of the health predicaments confronting local communities. These papers might range from preliminary evaluations of responses to aid, to descriptive essays; from case reports, to photojournalism.
Please contact: richard.horton@lancet.com

2005-01-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

Broadband to Indian villages

A consortium led by Gurgaon-based Aksh Broadband Limited has been selected to implement the Rs 400-crore [Rs 4 billion; ~US$100 million] Andhra Pradesh broadband project, which aims at extending broadband services to each and every village of the state in the next two years.

The project, once completed, is expected to give a stiff competition to other broadband service providers, including the BSNL, as the promoters have indicated to charge just Rs 100 a month [~US$2.30] for a domestic broadband connection.

The other companies in the consortium include Railtel Corporation India Limited, Tata Indicom, VSNL Limited, INcable Network (Andhra) Limited, Spectranet Limited and Nuziveedu Seeds Limited.

The broadband project will connect the state headquarter with 10 Gbps to each of the district headquarters, one Gbps to each of the 1,127 mandal headquarters and 100 Mbps to each of the villages. The network will have optic fibre connectivity right up to the village level.

2005-01-04T16:37:00.000-08:00

Wireless Industry Responds to Disaster

From Wireless Communications Association International:

In response to the devastating earthquake and corresponding tsunamis in South Asia, the Wireless Communications Association International (WCA) announced organizational efforts within the wireless broadband industry leading to a meeting on Jan. 13 during WCA’s annual International Symposium and Business Expo in San Jose, CA.

The Jan. 13 meeting will foster industry efforts on immediate disaster relief, both monetary and in vitally needed equipment for First Responders. Participants also will help plan for longer-term infrastructure needs especially suited to the emerging capabilities of wireless broadband.

WCA’s meeting will leverage WCA members’ expertise into short-term and long-term relief. Short-term, industry leaders will organize a task force to raise money and to coordinate equipment donations for effective emergency deployment. Also, the task force will pl an longer-term infrastructure advisory services for the region, building upon ongoing work within WCA’s Wireless Broadband Public Safety Task Force. It convenes bi-weekly conference calls, and is preparing a “Best Practices” guide helping First Responders increase their capabilities for challenges ranging from emergency warnings to critical post-event communications.

WCA’s South Asia disaster organizational breakfast on Jan. 13 is at 7 a.m. at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, and is open to any interested potential volunteer and the press. For planning purposes, non-WCA members should RSVP to WCA’s Olga Ranaweera, who can provide also a VIP pass to the convention.

I'll be there.

2005-01-03T08:52:00.000-08:00

.NET for Simputer

Users of Free Software stay away from proprietary vendor initiatives such as Microsoft .NET, unless they can see a way to Free them. Like this. Thanks, guys.

“DotGNU Portable.NET has been ported to the Encore Simputer, a handheld computer based on on Intel's StrongARM CPU (a RISC microprocessor designed for embedded applications), within 72 hours after the release of Encore's port of the GNU/Linux development tools for this platform at the "Linux Bangalore/2004" conference. Conference organiser Atul Chitnis said, ''I threw the challenge as a joke, the bet being a cup of coffee. Gopal borrowed a PC at the conference, and finally an Encore Simputer, and came to me on the third day, saying that I now owed him a cup of coffee. It took a few seconds before the enormity of that statement hit me.'' Here's a video clip.”

“DotGNU Portable.NET, an implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), more commonly known as ".NET", includes everything that you need to compile and run C# and C applications that use the base class libraries, XML, and Systems.Windows.Forms. Currently supported CPUs: x86, ppc, arm, parisc, s390, ia64, alpha, mips, sparc. Supported operating systems: GNU/Linux (on PCs, Sparc, iPAQ, Sharp Zaurus, PlayStation 2, Xbox,...), *BSD, Cygwin/Mingw32, Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX.”

2005-01-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

Mobile phones in tsunami aftermath

From: "Moderator: ICT of Bangladesh Yahoo Group"
Date: Sat Jan 1, 2005 12:14 am
Subject: Mobile phone plays valuable role in wake of tsunami disaster

By making it possible to share information quickly and to quickly raise large sums in relief aid, the mobile telephone has played a valuable role in the Asian seaquake disaster.

By making it possible to share information quickly and to quickly raise large sums in relief aid, the mobile telephone has played a valuable role in the Asian seaquake disaster.

In the immediate aftermath of the towering tsunami waves that have so far known to have taken some 125,000 lives, the phones enabled survivors to let friends and families know they were alive.

The Czech government sought the help of the country's three mobile phone companies to send text messages to the phones of about 90 Czech tourists who remain unaccounted for. The operators were establishing whether the phones were active when the wave struck, and whether they have since been reactivated elsewhere.

The move was "primarily aimed at individual tourists, with whom contact has so far proved impossible," said Deputy Foreign Minister Pavel Svoboda.

Hardly had the news of the catastrophe begun to circulate around the world, than the phones found a new role.

In Italy, which has one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the world, operators made a single number available for donations and sent text or voice messages to their customers appealing to them to send one euro.

"A euro (1.35 dollars) is not very much, that's true, but people are responding enthusiastically," said Anna Fraschetti, a spokeswoman for public Italian radio and television network RAI, which is sponsoring the operation along with the private Mediaset network.

"It also enables young people to participate," she said. "If all the 50 million people who own a portable phone in Italy sent one euro, that would add up to a nice sum."

Quicker, more spontaneous and less costly than a bank transfer, the millions of small cash payments via mobile phones in Italy amounted to 14 million euros in the first five days after the disaster.

Generosity also spread like wildfire in the Netherlands, where any telephone user could transfer 1.5 euros to a special Asia fund simply by tapping out the word "give" on his or her keypad and sending a text message to the number 2020.

Similar operations were under way in Portugal, Switzerland and Turkey.

France Telecom's mobile phone subsidiary Orange said it would put a system in place Monday, enabling customers to send donations to the Red Cross.

In Germany, the organizers of New Year's festivities at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin asked participants to send a text message that automatically transferred 2.65 euros (3.6 dollars) to the account of the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF.

For the benefit of the million people attending the festivities, the number to call was displayed on large TV screens.

Some operators, like Norway's Telenor and Netcom, Britain's Vodaphone and Sweden's TeliaSonera, donated part of their earnings to the aid effort, and Telenor said it would allow customers still in Thailand to call home or receive calls for free.

TeliaSonera said it broadcast a number to enable people to send donations during a special broadcast Saturday, a day of mourning.

With 60 confirmed dead and 3,500 missing, Sweden is one of the European countries most hard hit by the catastrophe.

Source:
AFP

2004-12-15T20:41:00.000-08:00

Amazon Search

You may have heard that Amazon now lets you search for particular words in the full text of many recent books, and view excerpts. This is an amazing service, turning up books I would never have found otherwise. A search for "Simputer" turns up the following items.

• Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development -- Chad Holliday, et al; Hardcover

Excerpt from page 199: "... a battery-powered device called the Simputer, short for 'simple computer', used ..."
See more references to simputer in this book.

• Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution -- Glyn Moody; Hardcover

Excerpt from page 318: "... open source project called the Simputer-from SIMPle compUTER-succeeds. As a ..."

• The Global Information Technology Report 2002-2003: Readiness for the Networked World -- Soumitra Dutta (Editor), et al; Paperback

Excerpt from page 180: "... that inventions such as the Simputer and corDECT offer enormous potential ..."

This service isn't perfect. If you go to the first hit, you get a graphic of the page, often in type too small to read. If you click on the link to see more references, you get short text snippets, which are easier to read but less informative overall.

2004-12-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

Free Unicode Font Listing

My brother is sufficiently fluent in French so that he and his wife were once mistaken for Belgians in Paris. My brother was of course highly gratified, but his wife was incensed, she being Parisian.

My relationship with languages is different. I went for breadth rather than depth, working at one time or another on Hebrew, Latin, Russian, Swahili, French, German, Korean, Japanese, Sanskrit, Chinese, Spanish, Yiddish, and Classical Greek, and noodling around with dozens of others. For example, in the Slavyanka Russian Chorus we sang in Russian, Church Slavonic (old Bulgarian), Ukrainian, Macedonian, Georgian, and Armenian, but we didn't always learn what the words meant. I also worked in mathematics, music, and APL (A Programming Language with its own character set), so I was a natural to get involved with Unicode, the single character set for all languages, and everything else besides.

Of the 31 national writing systems in modern use, the Linux software on my computer supports 25, omitting Tibetan, Sinhala, Ethiopic, Cambodian, Thaana, and Cherokee. Of these, the Yudit Unicode editor supports Tibetan, Ethiopic, and Cherokee. As it happens, I have a need for Sinhala right now, and no obvious way to fill it short of organizing a Linux localization project for Sinhala among my friends in the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka. (Yes, I must go do that. Good idea.) I can view Sinhala in the Firefox browser and in several text editing and word processing programs, but I can't really edit it or practice writing.

Anyway, I have an unusual need for large Unicode fonts covering many writing systems, and small Unicode fonts covering whatever is missing from the big ones. There is a new resource for finding such fonts, the Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems Web page. It lists two Sinhala fonts, so now I just need a keyboard layout.

2004-12-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

Natalie Portman in Village Banking

One of the smartest people in Hollywood, Harvard graduate Natalie Portman is apparently also the most enclued, as in having a clue what's important in the world. For over a year now she has been working as the Ambassador of Hope for the Foundation for International Community Assistance a village banking organization with operations in 23 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. (Bono, the other most enclued celebrity, is not in Hollywood, but is also working with FINCA.)

Here we see her visiting Nayima Umaru, a formerly desperately poor single mother of seven in Uganda. They are in the kitchen of a small restaurant that Umaru was able to start with a loan from a FINCA-organized village bank.

Parade Magazine had an article on Portman and FINCA in their Nov. 28, 2004 issue, and have just put it up on the Web site a week later, as is their usual practice.

Now I have a complaint about all of this. Why didn't I hear about it for a whole year? But the lack of communication among the organizations and people working on global poverty is a topic for another day.

2004-11-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

Solar-Powered Village Computers

From the Digital Dividend Digest

The government of Uttar Pradesh, India, is working with local authorities to bring more than 1,000 computers into village schools across the state. Many of the targeted villages are off the electricity grid or suffer from frequent brownouts. In response, the government is installing solar panels to power the computers which will also power local businesses.

2004-11-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

International Open Source Network

I have just finished a draft of a new version of the Unicode-HOWTO, explaining the procedures for setting up any version of Linux to use Unicode throughout. It's in review by The Linux Documentation Project before being published on the Internet. I was just thinking about writing a Localization-HOWTO, to explain how to set up Linux for new languages and translate everything in all of the applications and so on, but it turns out that the UN is ahead of me.

The International Open Source Network (IOSN) is part of the United Nations Development Program, one of the most important global development agencies. IOSN is promoting Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) for the obvious reasons that it is free of cost (important) and also free of legal encumbrances (more important), so that people in any country have the complete right to rework the software for local requirements, especially local languages.

UNDP has realized that getting thousands of FOSS applications into any local language will give a big boost to the economy of that language group, whether a country, a region within a country, or a global community. I wrote about the projects to do this in various Asian and African languages last March.

The UNDP draft Localisation-HOWTO (British spelling) went online in October, 2004. It still needs a lot of work, so I will be in contact with them to see what I can do to help.

If you are interested in getting Linux into a previously unsupported language, you can join the fun at the GNU Translation Project, which links to the various individual projects. You don't have to be a programmer. We need people who can create computer terminology for a to-be-supported language, translate from some currently-supported language, administer and manage projects, and just try out the new version to see how well it works and how well it meets local needs, including culturally-appropriate language. Publicizing the project among speakers of the language and recruiting for it are also extremely valuable, as is fundraising. If there isn't a project in your language, you can start one, again even if you don't have computer skills. If you start to build it, they will come.

2004-11-17T19:30:00.000-08:00

Grameen Village Computer and Internet Project

Grameen Communications, a member of the Grameen Family, has a Village Computer and Internet Project (VCIP) in Madhupur in Tangail district in Bangladesh, around 160km away from Dhaka.

"The center is keeping data on agriculture, fisheries, livestock, health, education, environment etc into a village database...VCIP is providing important benefits to rural society in Bangladesh. It is providing IT facilities to the villagers, creating jobs in rural areas."

This is separate from the Village Computing Project of the Grameen Foundation USA.

2004-09-24T13:24:00.000-07:00

More Languages!

The Pango (officially , meaning "all languages" in a combination of Greek and Japanese) project has been building software support for displaying and printing in every one of the writing systems of the world in modern use, about 30 in number (depending on how you count). The word from the developers is that Sinhala, Tibetan, and Syriac support have been finished. They will be included in the December 15 release, Pango 1.8, and will make their way into the various distributions in 2005 as part of the GTK library and applications using it.

Pango was created as part of the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a Free equivalent of Adobe Photoshop. There is a Pango-enabled version of Mozilla available, and Pango is being integrated into Open Office. We are still waiting for Mongolian, Khmer (Cambodian), and a few other writing systems.

If you don't speak Tibetan, Syriac, or Sinhalese (or other languages written in the same alphabets, such as Pali, the Buddhist language written in Sinhala in Sri Lanka), do you care about this? Maybe not, but if you don't care about the success of others, why would you be reading this blog?

The reason to care about Sinhalese support is the Sarvodaya Movement, a Gandhian organization which has created a successful development program for the villages of Sri Lanka over the last 50 years. The 15,000+ member villages have their own local councils, have built schools and clinics, and have their own banking system.

An even more remarkable achievement is the breaking down of the local caste system in Sri Lanka without provoking violent opposition. One reason for this is that Sarvodaya regularly organizes meditation meetings of Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, where the topics of the meditation include feeling joy at the successes of others (mudita in Pali).

Similarly, the Tibetan alphabet supports another of the great initiatives in peace and sustainable development, led by the Dalai Lama, while Syriac is the language of one of the oldest Christian churches.

You can find PDFs showing these alphabets, and the others defined in Unicode, on the Unicode Web page for Code Charts. If you are interested, you can download Tibetan Buddhist scriptures in Tibetan (not in Unicode, however) from the Asian Classics Input Project. Similarly, there are CD-ROMS and downloadable versions of the Pali Buddhist scriptures in Sinhala, Thai, Khmer (Cambodian), Burmese (Myanmar), Devanagari, and Latin scripts. The CSCD (Chattha Sangayana CD-ROM), which is available for free redistribution, includes the ability to view the text in Devanagari, Burmese, and Latin. There is a version in Sinhala script on the Web. Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese translations are also available. A similar project for Syriac Christian scriptures and other literature is underway at the Syriac Digital Library.

2004-09-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

Linux in Oriya

A project is going-on for Localisation of Linux Gnome in Oriya, the language of Orissa state in India.

An Oriya OpenType font and keyboard layout are available.

Oriya speakers around the world are invited to join in the development, testing, and documentation of this software, and to try it out for themselves.

2004-08-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

On Thursday 19 August 2004 04:39 pm, James Neusom wrote to the BDPA Africa mailing list:

> Wireless Convergence
> I see the term Wireless as one ubiquitous technology.
> Whether we're talking about Wi-Fi (802.xx), Blue tooth
> (short range transmissions) and/or Cellular, in my
> minds eye they all have the same purpose; To transfer
> data from one device to another. Now depending on
> what world you're living in (Business, Consumer, etc.)
> the hardware device may change but the purpose remains
> the same.

It's official now. IEEE 802.11s is supposed to provide seamless handoffs among the other 802.11x wireless transmission methods, Bluetooth, and others.

The technology is coming along nicely. What we need is the organization and funding to make it all happen. This means a combination of microcredit financing, UN and NGO programs, local training in wireless and computer technologies, starting local businesses to assemble and install equipment and provide services, and more. When we can prove to the big computer companies such as IBM, HP, or Sun that this is a real market, the rest will happen in a rush.

The Grameen Foundation USA is running experiments in its Village Computing Project. You can help them with funds, with expertise, with sites for demonstration projects, and more. As soon as they understand what economic impacts computers and communications can have, and how to train people to use them effectively, they intend to create programs worldwide to place the equipment, initiate the training, and provide the rest of the infrastructure needed. The model for this is the Grameen Phone company, founded when the Grameen Bank couldn't get cooperation from the national phone company in Bangladesh for placing cell phones in villages.

Many African countries have laws restricting the use of computers and communications, and restricting the funding mechanisms to get them into use. This includes government telecommunication monopolies, laws against routing telephone calls over the Internet (Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP), and banking laws that interfere with microcredit. Wherever you are, you can ask your government to change restrictive laws and to provide funding itself.

If getting everybody in Africa into the global conversation, the global information society, and the global information economy is important to you, get involved and tell everybody you know. Whatever your skills and interest, wherever you may be located, you can help. We need techies, translators, organizers, and people to tell the story to everybody else. If you know any African language and you read this list, you can help in translating Linux into your local language. If you have tech skills, you can help install the gear and train more techies. If not, you can ask a Linux User Group to help you try out Linux, and you can spread the word.

2004-07-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

Linux in Lingala

From the Liboke ya Kongo page, with extra links added:

Bino na Biso (BnB) presents the RULE-based "Liboke ya Congo" (LyC) on Fikin, the most important trade show in Kinshasa/DRC. "Liboke ya Congo" translates to something like "Box of Congo". This system is a Red Hat 9 based operating system, installed using "Slinky" from The RULE-Project, and therefore running on even outdated PCs with todays speed and the most up to date applications like Abiword 2, OpenOffice 1.1, the latest Acrobat Reader or Webbrowsers like Opera 7.5 and Firefox. "Liboke ya Congo" includes a set of Lingala-localized applications. Most of the work of translation and research has been done by BnB-staff in Kinshasa.

The "Liboke ya Congo" will help to bring IT-knowledge and better means of communication to many people in DRC and its neighbour-countries. Also it can be seen as an important step in building up a self-sustainable, localized IT-culture.

Contact person Kinshasa: Leon LUEMBA, libokeyacongo@yahoo.fr
Contact person Vienna: Ingo LANTSCHNER, ingo@vum.at

Further Information:

Bino na Biso, the Lingala expression for "You and We" is an intercultural, humanist cooperative based in Kinshasa/DRC.

Lingala (ISO-code ln) is a language spoken alongside the Congo River. It derives from Bobangi and has incooperated parts from Kikongo, Swahili and French. Today it is getting more and more important because of the many famous musicians from Kongo.

DRC is the abbreviation for "Democratic Republic of Congo", the former "Zaire"; ISO-code CD

2004-07-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

Yes!!

Eradicating Poverty Through Profit cenference, San Francisco, Dec. 12-14.

2004-07-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

High High Tech

NASA scientists expect to be able to predict malaria outbreaks from satellite data on rainfall, temperature and vegetation in affected areas. Advance warning would enable governments or the World Health Organization to take steps in advance to prevent and treat malaria in many areas.

Tracking Diseases from Space

Summary - (Mar 15, 2004) More than a million people die from
malaria every year, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Epidemics
happen when environmental conditions, like rainfall, temperature
and vegetation are perfect for the disease carrying insects. By
tracking these changes with satellites, NASA scientists hope to
be able to predict when and where disease outbreaks will happen
to give people some warning. This would help relief agencies
know where conditions are going to be the worst so they can
direct their efforts.

And yet people claim that we shouldn't spend money on the space program when there is so much poverty and need. Of course this is one of the lesser applications of space technology. The greatest contribution of the space program to fighting global poverty has been satellite communications, mainly for satellite TV and telephone calls so far, but soon to be dominated by Internet access. Then the poor can get access to weather satellite data, GPS, and other vital information that the prosperous part of the world relies on routinely.

2004-07-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Cutting AIDS transmission

I have been running around claiming that getting every HIV/AIDS sufferer into treatment would cut the transmission rate and thus the rate of new cases drastically, based on the notion that people with no virus circulating in the blood cannot transmit it. This would mean that treating everyone who is HIV+ today would be the cheapest strategy, starting at about $10 billion annually. The reason is that costs would start to go down once transmission is limited, through normal mortality and further medical advances. Only a cure would cut costs rapidly, of course, but we aren't talking about that here.

Some people have challenged this idea, saying that people on anti-retroviral treatment are still infectious. This is true in part, but even if some people would be somewhat infectious after starting treatment, it doesn't contradict what I have been saying. Any reduction in transmission rate is good. Anyway, we need to understand this as well as we can, so I went and looked for more detailed analyses. We don't have the full answer, largely because it would be unethical for anybody to do controlled experiments on infecting people with HIV, but here is what I have found out so far.

Yes, some patients are still infectious during treatment. No, this is not most patients. It means the sickest patients, those who visibly have AIDS, and are not merely HIV+ (HIV positive).

I have quoted some sources below, and of course there are many more. My conclusions from them are as follows.

People with advanced AIDS, that is T-cell count below 200, can continue to have a high viral load until their immune systems start to recover, but patients who start treatment earlier typically have undetectable levels of virus in their blood. Both have high virus levels in lymph tissue, where it does not make them infectious.

Patients who are HIV+ but have not progressed to AIDS commonly have undetectable viral load in their blood and high levels in lymph tissue, and have been found to be almost always non-infectious in studies of couples where one is HIV+ and the other initially isn't.

Almost all of the transmission appears to occur during the initial infection before immune suppression of the virus, and much less during the later infectious AIDS stage, when health drops off dramatically.

I expect that most patients bedridden with full-blown AIDS will not be having sex before their viral load drops and their immune system kicks in again.

Clearly medication is not sufficient by itself. We need education, condom distribution, and testing as well. But my point about reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS with treatment appears to be valid.

HIV Sexual Transmission Factors
Conclusions.
The viral load is the chief predictor of the risk of heterosexual transmission of HIV-1, and transmission is rare among persons with levels of less than 1500 copies of HIV-1 RNA per milliliter.

HIV, bank accounts, and evolution
The virus infects different tissues, but if one looks at the amount of virus present in the blood, it follows a common pattern (figure 5.A.1). Within a few weeks of being infected, the virus multiplies to high levels and is easily detectable in blood (the "primary infection"). The immune system -- which is ultimately destroyed by the virus -- responds at this time and brings circulating viral levels down to the point that they are undetectable. This immune response includes antibodies against the virus, so at this point, the infected person will test positive by the standard tests (such a person is said to be HIV+ but does not yet have AIDS). The infection persists however, with low levels of virus in the blood (but high levels in lymph nodes). This "asymptomatic" phase lasts several years. Eventually (typically 8 years into the infection), the person develops AIDS, which is fatal unless successfully treated.
...
[To model the known rate of spread of HIV/AIDS in different transmission modes]
Some crude estimates suggest numbers approximately as follows:

if during the primary infection: 1.1 new new transmissions per infection

if during the AIDS stage: 70 new new transmissions per infection

Thus the worldwide spread of HIV can be explained if transmission occurs during the primary phase to infect slightly more than 1 new individual (on average). The alternative, transmission during the late stages of infection, requires that everyone infected must be infecting 50-100 people. The available data implicate early transmission.

So anyway, I'll come back to all this soon. HIV/AIDS is the second biggest single issue facing developing countries in terms of estimated expense to deal with it, after debt service, and by far the biggest in terms of degradation and death.

2004-07-08T14:23:00.000-07:00

Wiki
I have been thinking about how to open up global conferences to wider participation, and so, it turns out, have a lot of others. One of the best new ideas is to open up a Wiki before the conference. The XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, scheduled for August, already has the AIDS 2004 Wiki up and running, and I have made some contributions to it.

A Wiki is a Web site developed in an open collaboration by the public, that is by anybody who knows something about the subject and cares to do the work. Anybody else can come along and edit existing content. People new to the context often wonder how Wikis can be protected from vandalism and hijacking if just anybody can post. It is true that a few people try such things, but Wikis can protect themselves. First, every version of every Wiki page is backed up and can be restored to any previous state at any time. Second, every change is logged, and frequent users watch the changelog in order to be among the first to see any new content. That means that vandalism is corrected within hours, sometimes minutes. Most would-be vandals have given up.

Anyway, the really important fact here is that people who can't attend the Conference can get their input in before the Conference opens. People with laptops can Wiki or blog during the conference sessions, and the rest of the world can read and comment. And we can all continue the discussion afterward.

They say that the best part of any conference is not the formal presentations (which could be mailed out on a CD-ROM, or posted on the Web site) but meeting people, particularly chance encounters in the halls during coffee breaks or at meals. The Wiki makes it much easier to meet people who have ideas of interest to you, to exchange ideas without the arbitrary time limits imposed by the conference schedule, and to maintain contect afterwards.

Another good idea is to put the conference attendee list online, and an even better idea is to let attendees and others sign up for mailing lists on the various conference themes. But a Wiki gives the greatest cross-linking capability and the greatest flexibility. Conversations can take any sort of turn, and whenever a new subject comes up, someone can create a new page for it. That page can link to any other relevant pages, and people can put links on those pages to the new one.

You can also link different Wikis together using external Web links.

The biggest Wiki is undoubtedly the encyclopedic Wikipedia, which I have also contributed to. There are vast, uncounted numbers of wikis on almost any topic.

2004-07-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

SiliCon

I am organizing a panel discussion for the Silicon Valley Science Fiction Convention on computing for the poor around the world. The Con will be held over Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 2-4. Lee Thorn and Lee Felsenstein of the Jhai Foundation will be there, and we are waiting to hear from a few others. I'll let you know more.

The Jhai Foundation creates computer and communication systems for villages in Laos, and a Laotian-language distribution of Linux called Laonux. The villagers' first request was for phone service, which they get now using Voice over IP software. The idea is for farmers to call around for better prices, and increase their income. Then they want to build a school. We'll see what they make of the riches and the wretched excess of the Web and the rest.

2004-07-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

Employment in Afghanistan

Wired News reports that the largest employer in Afghanistan is the Worldstock division of Overstock.com, which employs more than 1,500 Afghan artisans among a worldwide network of craft workers. Overstock.com does the same in 30 other contries, and there are other companies doing much the same thing. Novica, an online venture backed by the National Geographic Society, sells crafts from a network of more than 2,000 artists around the globe. Alpaca Pete's, a retail chain and website that sells rugs and clothes made from the woolly South American alpaca, buys finished products almost exclusively from a group of about 4,000 Peruvians from the island of Amantani, located in the middle of Lake Titicaca, the highest-elevation lake in the world. Rugmark Foundation is a global nonprofit organization working to end child labor in India, Nepal and Pakistan. Delinear Designs, the 18th company to join Rugmark, put out a press release that says it now ensures that no illegal child labor was used in the manufacturing process. A portion of the company’s proceeds will also benefit educational opportunities for children of those countries.

The deal with Overstock and the others is that the person who makes the item, such as a rug, can get 70% of the selling price. You might have heard about little children making rugs in Pakistan for pennies an hour, so this is a big deal. We are talking about people kept in degrading poverty, now able to support themselves and their families, and to look forward to education and opportunity for their children.

Why is this happening now? Why is it happening at all? Largely because we and they have access to the Internet. There are many other factors, but it is the Internet that allows us to make contact with those who would like to sell to us, and allows them to make contact with each other. These enterprises support thousands of sellers each, which is good. Now we have to get the same level of opportunity to several billion more people in more than two million villages. Remember, we can do it at a profit.

2004-07-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

Clinton and Bush on AIDS

Back in April, Bill Clinton's foundation made a deal for inexpensive HIV/AIDS drugs from generic drug makers in India and Africa. The price comes out to US$140 per year per patient, less than half of the previous best.

The Guardian, one of the top UK newspapers, headlined the deal Clinton's Aids deal snubs Bush plan. The Bush Administration's plan would buy HIV/AIDS drugs only from US manufacturers, at much higher prices.

The Coordinator for US Government Activities to Combat HIV/AIDS Globally is Randall L. Tobias, formerly Chairman, President and CEO of Eli Lilly and Company, one of the companies profiting from the Bush plan.

On July 1, 2004, C-SPAN aired a long segment on Tobias's tour of Africa to view the HIV/AIDS situation, back-to-back with a public presentation entitled The Global AIDS Pandemic: Understanding the Threat, organized by the World Affairs Council of Washington, D.C. The principal speaker at this event was Greg Behrman, Author of “The Invisible People: How the US Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic”. (I met him recently in San Jose.)

2004-07-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

Busy, Busy

I have a button with the text "Stop Me Before I Volunteer Again" that I need to wear more often. I'm trying to cut back, in part by recruiting people to do more of this so I can think of more things for more people to do.

Anyway, I apologize for neglecting this blog. There has been a lot going on, which actually means I should have given blogging a higher priority, not slacked off.

So here is a quick roundup of events and of organizations that I encountered at them. I will have more to say about most of these when I can address them individually.

I wrote about the Silicon Valley Roundtable for WSIS earlier this year.

Doug Engelbart's Bootstrap Alliance is working on using computers to make society more intelligent.

Silicon Rally for WSIS met at the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Gapminder, which mines the UN statistical database, showed jaw-dropping animations of the progress or regress of individual countries over 40 years on several measures of development, such as GDP and health. Several of the animations can be viewed and downloaded from their site.

WSIS Online is a social networking site devoted to people, organizations, projects, and events relating to the World Summits on the Information Society.

I went to Baycon, the Bay Area Science Fiction Convention, and talked about spam-fighting and Simputers.

The Planetwork Interactive conference brought together several important initiatives.

Planetwork works closely with the Identity Commons, which is creating a system by which individuals can create persistent online identities, and control their personal information.

ManyOne is a new portal that plans to index pretty much everything. Unlike Yahoo, which uses paid indexers, or Google, which allows almost anybody to sign up as an indexer, ManyOne is recruiting non-profit organizations with expertise in each subject area to pick out the best sites.

Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's talked about the True Majority organization that he founded.

Sustainable World Symposium had fewer solutions but many more questions about how to create a sustainable society. One of the highlights was the Jewish Earth Mother, played by Sherry Glaser.

The Conference on Reform and Revitalization of United Nations last week wrestled with such questions as redefining human rights to include, among other things, health, education, and access to the Internet, creating a representative world parliament, and fully funding programs, such as ICT for the poor, to achieve the UN's Millenium Development Goals. Former UN Undersecretary-General Robert Múller was a hit for his new book 5000 Ideas for a Better World, a new biography called Prophet - the Hatmaker's Son: The Life of Robert Muller, and playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy on the harmonica. Those who knew the words, like me, joined in.

Deine Zauber binden wieder,

Was die Mode streng geteilt;

Alle Menschen werden Brüder,

Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

2004-05-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Microsoft permits localization

A week and a half after I wrote about Linux localization projects around the world (this blog, March 6) Microsoft announced its own plan to let governments localize Windows for it. Microsoft did not do this in response to my article, obviously, but the facts I wrote about are well known to Microsoft. The self-congratulatory press release makes no mention of the competitive threat from Linux, or indeed anything whatever about Linux.

The thing to notice about this program is that Microsoft will disclose its source code only to governments and their contractors, and that Microsoft will own the results. So a country or language community can get Windows in their language, and then Microsoft can sell that version of Windows to the people who developed it.

There is a lot I could say about such a policy, but I think the facts speak loudly enough for themselves.

Press Release Source: Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft Enables Millions More to Experience Personal Computing Through Local Language Program
Tuesday March 16, 4:00 pm ET
Program Empowers Personal Interaction With PCs in Native Languages and Gives Global Governments the Opportunity to Develop, Enhance and Expand Local IT Economies

# REDMOND, Wash., March 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- As part of its long-term commitment to collaborate with local governments to provide them with the tools and technologies needed to realize the societal and economic benefits of the growing IT industry, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - News) today announced the Local Language Program. The Local Language Program is a global initiative that fosters the development and proliferation of regional language groups, enabling them to preserve and promote their language and culture while benefiting from continuing IT advancements. Through this collaboration with local governments to offer citizens the ability to customize leading, value-based Microsoft® software applications with local language capabilities, people around the world will be able to work with PCs -- some for the first time -- in their native languages. Individuals will be able to build skills, open opportunities and realize overall IT progress.(Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO )

Through the Local Language Program, local and regional government participants can localize Windows® XP Home and Professional and Office 2003 to one language interface through a Language Interface Pack (LIP). Language Interface Packs are developed by Microsoft in cooperation with local governments and communities to ensure that the local languages are defined, standardized and agreed on by users of the language, resulting in consistent local terminology across components. With LIPs, users can install one specific language version as a layer on top of an existing installation of Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and the Office Standard Edition 2003 applications, Word, Excel, Outlook® and PowerPoint®. The Local Language Program provides opportunities to people of all cultures, regions, locales and languages by facilitating access and promoting communication and interaction.

In India, the technology behind the Local Language Program was implemented early on as part of Project Bhasha. As a result of collaboration with local governments, academia and the language community, Microsoft already has localized Windows XP and Office in Hindi and has plans to localize the applications in an additional nine languages this coming year. As part of today's announcement of the Local Language Program, India furthers this momentum by announcing that four additional languages will be ready by the end of the year: Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Gujarati.

"The Local Language Program is the long-awaited vehicle to take the benefits of Information Communication and Technology to the common people in India," said Professor N. Balakrishnan, chairman of the Research and Development Working Group for Technology Development for Indian Languages Programs at the Indian Ministry of Information Technology. "For a nation where more than 95 percent of the population is threatened by an information blackout, developments in Indian-language-based computing would give citizens a new lease on life. It would help remove the information asymmetry, positively affect everyone and propel the nation toward prosperity. Project Bhasha, as well as other efforts in India and elsewhere, would help make computers 'language independent.'"

Before today's announcement of the Local Language Program, Microsoft provided desktop language coverage for approximately 40 languages. Through the technology available in the Local Language Program and collaboration with local and regional governments, Microsoft plans to add an additional 40 languages in the near future. In Ethiopia, Microsoft will be working with the local government and universities to develop a Language Interface Pack for Amharic.

"We are excited about Microsoft's Local Language Program, which will enable Ethiopians to use Windows and Office in Amharic. Amharic is spoken by most of the 60 million people in Ethiopia; it is the working language of the nation," said Andreas Eshete, a professor and president of Addis Ababa University, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. "The Local Language Program, we truly believe, will make IT solutions more accessible to the Ethiopian community. It also represents a breakthrough for Ethiopian linguistic and literary studies as well as, more generally, Ethiopian studies. We eagerly look forward to its introduction in our country."

Microsoft has an ongoing commitment to local software development, and the Local Language Program is the next step to broadening Microsoft's outreach and empowering customers. The Local Language Program fosters the important development, growth and proliferation of regional language groups, enabling them to promote their language and culture while benefiting from continuing IT advancements.

"State-of-the-art information technology is developing at a rapid rate in Ukraine," said Andrey Nikolaevich Gurzhiy, first vice minister of Education and Science in Ukraine. "An essential initiative driving this momentum is the alliance between the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and Microsoft to create a Ukrainian-language computer environment. We are well aware how significant it is for users to be able to work with an interface adapted to their native language - a factor that becomes even more important in the sphere of public education and science. We are extremely pleased to expand and improve the localization of Microsoft® software together."

The Local Language Program joins Microsoft's existing initiatives, the Government Security Program and the Partners in Learning program, as part of a significant effort to address the unique requirements of governments around the world.

"At Microsoft, we are committed to working with governments all over the world on programs and initiatives that address their specific challenges and meet the needs of their citizens," said Maggie Wilderotter, senior vice president of World Wide Public Sector at Microsoft. "Empowering communities and individuals around the world to reach their full potential is a top priority for Microsoft. Through the Local Language Program, we hope to provide opportunities to people of all regions, locales and languages, and enable them to realize that potential."

2004-03-29T11:41:00.000-08:00

Peace School in Palestine threatened with demolition

Hope Flowers Peace School is the only school in Israel and the Palestinian Territories where Muslims, Jews, and Christians study Hebrew and Arabic together.

On 29th March 2004, Ibrahim Issa wrote:

URGENT:
RENEWED DEMOLITION THREAT TO HOPE FLOWERS SCHOOL.

Special Newsletter to Friends of the School and of Middle East
Peace.

Dear Friends.
Warm greetings from Bethlehem at this time of continued
uncertainty at the Hope Flowers School.

Once again, we find ourselves faced with yet another demolition
threat, as we did in our last newsletter to you, dated 14th
February 2004. Despite your efforts and the efforts of US
Secretary of State Assistant Mr. William Burns in his
consultation with the Israeli authorities, we have still
received no confirmation from the Israeli authorities that the
demolition threat relating to the school cafeteria will be
rescinded.

Once again, we ask for your assistance.

At this time, the school cafeteria building does not have a
building permit. This is due to two reasons. Firstly, in
reality, the Israeli authorities do not issue building permits
to Palestinians in this area. However, we fully intend to
proceed with the application process as we did in 1999 and we
are currently trying to find out how best to do this. Secondly,
we simply could not afford an Israeli building permit in 1999.
The cost charged to Palestinians for such a permit is
exorbitant. Can you please apply pressure to the contacts below
through letter, fax, e mail or phone. Ask them to do whatever
they can to overturn the demolition order, to provide the
school with documented confirmation of this, and consequently
allow us to proceed with the formal application process.
Emphasize to them the unique operating principles and ethos of
the Hope Flowers School in that we are the only school in the
Palestinian West Bank and Gaza areas to focus on peace and
democracy education, teaching our students to look for a non
violent solution to the ongoing situation.

a) Commander Israeli Civil Administration (Sub Committee for
Supervision of Building Activity in Beth El)
fax (Israel) 2 997 7326

b) Mr. Aril Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister:
e-mail: webmaster@pmo.gov.il
fax (Israel) 2 566 4838 or (Israel) 2 267 5475

c) The Israeli Embassy / Consulate in your home country.

d) Mr. Colin L. Powell, U.S Secretary of State:
address: U.S Department of State, 2210 C Street N.W,
Washington D.C 20520, USA. tel: (USA) 202 647 4000
e mail: go to
http://contact-us.state.gov/ask_form_cat/ask_form_reference.htm
l then type in your message, then “send”.

Also, if you can draw attention to this situation in your local
and wider communities, through various methods, therefore
resulting in greater awareness of our situation, it would
further help the cause.

We are also in need of financial assistance to apply for the
required Israeli building permission (which is several times
more expensive that the Palestinian building permit that we
already have). Again, any assistance in this area would be
greatly appreciated. Donations in the USA can be sent to:
Chase Manhattan Bank - New York (Correspondent Bank), A/C Arab
Jordan Investment Bank, Amman – Jordan (Correspondent Bank),
Chips ID 136008, SWIFT AJIBJOAX, A/C Palestine Investment Bank
(Beneficiary Bank) For Further Credit of "the Hope Flowers
School", A/C NO. 73535, Bethlehem Branch 76-411, Palestine. Or
(tax deductible) to the Orange County Peace Fund at the
following address: Orange County Middle East Peace Fund, P.O.
Box 5891, Orange, California 92863 – 5891, USA Donations in
Europe can be sent to:
Deutsche Bank Ag, Frankfurt – Germany (Correspondent Bank), A/C
Arab Jordan Investment Bank, Amman – Jordan (Correspondent
Bank), Chips ID 136008, SWIFT AJIBJOAX , A/C Palestine
Investment Bank(Beneficiary Bank), For Further Credit of "the
Hope Flowers School", A/C NO. 73535, Bethlehem Branch 76-411,
Palestine Donations can also be sent directly to the school's
address (registered mail) at: The Hope Flowers School,
Bethlehem, P.O. Box 732, West Bank. Via Israel Below, we have
outlined some background information that may help in your
understanding of the overall situation here. If you require any
further details please don’t hesitate to contact us at the
school. We will keep you informed about our progress. In the
meantime, thank you for all of your assistance and support. We
are feeling the connections with you and grateful for them at
this time. All the best wishes to you.

Ibrahim Issa
Co-director

Some background information:

Most of you may well know that the school is in the part of the
West Bank still designated as Area C, where there is exclusive
Israeli control and administration of most aspects of organized
life. The categories of Areas A, B and C, which came into
existence with the Oslo Accords, resulted in Areas A being
designated as areas under full Palestinian control whilst Areas
B came under joint Israeli and Palestinian control. Because the
school area has been traditionally Palestinian for generations,
and because it is within 2 kilometers of portions of Area B and
Area A, it had seemed likely that this area would be
reclassified as an Area A. However, as a result of the latest
Intifada, and other factors, this has not happened, and we
remain fully under the control of the Israeli military and
civil authorities. This directly affects the school buildings
in the following way: Although all of the school buildings have
Palestinian building permits, the permits are not recognized by
the Israeli authorities. As we are in an Area C, we need to be
in possession of an Israeli building permit. In1999, when we
were issued with a demolition notification, the Hope Flowers
School was in the same predicament. After submitting reports,
attending meetings of the Civil Administration (the Israeli
body that administers the Occupied Palestinian Territories),
attending the hearing of our case in an Israeli military court,
and continuous international pressure, the order to demolish
was rescinded. We applied in 1999 for an Israeli building
permit and were successful in our application. However, the fee
that the Israeli Authorities were charging for the issue and
validation of the permit was deliberately beyond the financial
capabilities of the school, hence we were unable to proceed and
obtain the permit.

2004-03-08T21:59:00.000-08:00

Microcredit for all

We like to say that the Simputer was designed to meet the requirements of villages with no electricity, no phones, and no money. The first two problems have technological solutions. Simputer batteries can be recharged from local renewable power, such as solar, and they replace phones using wireless connections and Voice over IP.

The problem of money does not have a solution in technology alone. We can't create a device that makes money out of nothing. (Well, OK, color copiers come close, but governments object strenuously.) So we need an acceptable economic and financial solution that quite conveniently is ready to hand--microcredit.

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh was the first microbank, but the practice has spread to many countries in a great diversity of forms. The Grameen Bank is largely owned by its customers, like a credit union in the U.S., but there are purely commercial microbanks, microbanks run by NGOs, and microbanks run by governments. Sri Lanka has more than 2,000 village banks, funded by members of more than 5,000 communities. Regular commercial banks in India have expanded into microcredit. The Microcredit Summit database lists more than 3,000 Practitioners of microcredit, that is, those that administer lending programs or conduct training for lenders and borrowers. In addition, there is a multitude of NGOs, commercial banks, other commercial companies, UN agencies, and other kinds of partner organization listed.

The World bank has analyzed Grameen Bank programs, and concluded that about 5% of Grameen customers move out of poverty each year, with a greater impact on those in extreme rather than moderate poverty. The Grameen Bank itself has figures showing that 42% of borrowers overall have moved out of poverty over a period of years. Microcredit is particularly beneficial in dealing with natural disasters.

In 1997, the microcredit movemen set a goal of extending microcredit programs worldwide to 100 million families by 2005. More than 50 million families were reached in 2001. This goal means reaching more than 50% of the poorest families in the developing countries. Clearly, then, we need a target of 200 million and a target date to go with it, for the next phase after this. The Millennium Development Goal target date of 2015 might seem like a reasonable starting point for this discussion, but I don't like it.

Actually, just doubling coverage isn't enough. Estimates are that less than a quarter of the poor in Asia have access to microcredit, and less than a tenth in the other developing regions. We need to reach not just the most desperate 200 million families, but somewhere between 500 million and a billion families, and we need to do it in short order. I consider it inexcusable that this process is taking so long.

What do we need in order to achieve the real goal, of microcredit availability to everybody in poverty, or from another angle, credit available to all? Obviously we need money, but that isn't the obstacle. The problems, according to Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, lie in regulations and in people's attitudes. Many countries to not give proper legal status to microbanks. In particular, many are not allowed to take deposits from the public, but only from customers. The most troublesome attitude is the notion that the poor are not creditworthy, even though this has been amply disproved by the repayment rate on Grameen Bank loans and by repayment rates for many other microcredit organizations. Similarly, it is widely believed that microcredit loans do not help people to escape poverty, again contrary to the facts.

Then there is the problem of communication and access. That's where Simputers come in (and also for the bookkeeping, of course.) Villagers have to be able to hear that microcredit exists, is available to them, and can help them, and then they need to be able to apply. Face-to-face contact in the villages is somewhat effective for making these initial contacts, but it will be much more effective to enable villagers to access information on the Web, by e-mail, or by voice phone calls, and then to contact the microbank in the same ways. Not that computers can replace face-to-face contact. Their function should be complementary.

And besides that, there are opportunities for the poor, and even the poorest, to use the Internet to make more money, whether by access to market information, by enabling cooperatives to form, or by putting up a Web site for local products and services.

If all of this is correct, then microcredit can be expanded faster than previously planned, and have greater impact than in the past. I'm looking forward to finding out.

2004-03-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

Linux Your Way

One of the most important features of Free Software in general and Linux in particular is that anybody, including user groups, governments, educational institutions, commercial software companies, or NGOs, can make changes and distribute the new version. This is particularly important for language communities that commercial vendors ignore, on the theory that the market for users of the language is too small to give a good return on the investment needed. The Linux community looks at these things differently. Localizing Linux into a language is profitable for the language community, and doesn't have to be profitable for a vendor to be worthwhile and to attract the needed effort.

The most notorious case was Icelandic. Although the government of Iceland offered to pay the costs for localizing Windows 98 into Icelandic, Microsoft refused.

"Spokeswoman Erin Brewer notes that while the company has translated the popular program into 'at least 30 languages,' including such rarities as Slovenian and Catalan, it won't be doing Icelandic. 'We are not localizing Windows 98 into Icelandic due to the size of the market,' she said."

Of course, it was possible to use a non-Icelandic version of Windows and MS Office to create, view, and print documents in Icelandic and at least 100 other languages, most not supported by Microsoft. With specialized software from the linguists at SIL.org it is possible to work in about 2,000 languages on English Windows. But that only works for those who have learned English or some other language supported in the user interface.

Since then, Microsoft has decided that Iceland, with only 230,000 inhabitants, is big enough, and recent versions of Windows are available in Icelandic. But not in several languages of India with tens of millions of speakers, not in Swahili, the lingua franca of much of Africa, and not in dozens of other languages vital to whole countries and regions.

On the other hand, Ankur, a Linux User Group in Bengal State, India, has released Bengalinux, a Linux distribution entirely localized into Bangla (Bengali). A group in Rwanda is localizing Open Office into their language, Kinyarwanda, while university students in Tanzania are working on a Swahili version, and so on for a number of other languages.

In many cases, only a portion of Linux has been localized in the current release, and more remains to be done. This is the case for a Berber-language distribution from France for populations mainly in several North African countries, on a base of Mandrake Linux.

Mandrake has had significantly better language support than other commercial Linux distributions, with versions in 63 languages in varying degrees, and itself is headquartered in France. Some of the notable localizations of Mandrake Linux are in Albanian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Esperanto, Estonian, Georgian, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Malay, Maltese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Tajik, Uzbek, Walloon French, and Welsh.

Some projects turn the problem around. Instead of localizing all of Linux into one language, they work on localizing a particular function into a number of languages. A notable example is MailAfrica, which plans to make e-mail practical in 257 languages of Africa, out of about out of about 2,000. It currently has: Afrikaans, Dholuo, Hausa, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kisii, Luhya, Oromoo, SiSwati, Swahili, IsiXhosa, Yoruba, and IsiZulu, as well as English, French, and Portuguese.

It is not only small, poor countries and minority groups without Windows language support that are creating their own distributions of Linux. China, Korea, and Japan have gotten together on a plan to create a distribution with good support for all three languages, all of which use Chinese characters in their writing. This goes well beyond existing distributions, such as Chinese 2000 Linux, (中文 2000) which supports only Chinese, and others for Korea or Japan only.

The first obstacle in localizing Linux to a new language is usually creating the computer vocabulary. Once this is done, a few hundred people can translate a major piece of software, such as Open Office, with more than 21,000 text strings, in a few days to produce a version suitable for Beta testing. Some refinement of the translations is usually needed so that they are not only linguistically correct but culturally appropriate, and to deal with ambiguities in the original. Translating a complete Linux distribution takes proportionally longer, but is well within the scope of any university's Computer Science, Engineering, and Linguistics departments.

Complete language support goes far beyond localization. It means not only the ability to create, view, and print data in a language, within localized software. It also should include OCR, text-to-speech conversion, handwriting recognition, speech recognition, a spelling checker, and a grammar checker. There is Free Software for most of these functions, adaptable to any language and writing system, and people are working on the rest. For example, the Dhvani text-to-speech software project is hosted at SourceForge, where anybody can join in the effort, either to work on the software or to apply it to a particular language. The handwriting recognition system used on the Simputer uses text files to define character geometry. The format is public; in fact it is explained in the files. Again anybody can write a file for a particular writing system, or a variant of a writing system for a particular language, adding the extra Cyrillic letters for Ukrainian, or the extra Arabic letters for Urdu, or the extra Latin letters for the Pan-African Alphabet. Speech recognition and grammar checking require specific linguistic expertise, of course, but there is probably adequate information on record to handle the thousand most-used languages in the world, and a good start on the other 5,000 odd.

Language support is essential for helping the poor in general, and in particular for recording the oral traditions of more than 6,000 cultures that have not had much access to printing and publishing in the past.

The Free Software Foundation and UNESCO have put together a directory of Free Software, including a page of language and localization tools.

As far as I can tell, nobody is specifically tracking all of the Linux localization projects, although many of them are listed at DistroWatch. Here are some more.

South Africa, the 11 official national languages Afrikaans, English, Ndebele (isiNdebele), Northern Sotho (Sepedi), Southern Sotho (Sesotho), Swati (siSwati), Tsonga (Xitsonga), Tswana (Setswana), Venda (Tshivena), Xhosa (isiXhosa), Zulu (isiZulu): IMPI Linux
Nigeria, Yoruba: Paradigm Initiative Nigeria
North Africa and Middle East, Arabic: Arabbix
North Africa and Middle East, Arabic: Hancom Linux
North Africa and Middle East, Arabic: Haydar Linux

Turkey, Turkish: Gelecek Linux (site in Turkish)
Israel, Hebrew: GNU/Linux Kinneret
Iran, Farsi: Shabdix GNU/Linux (In Farsi)

India, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Oriya, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu: the Indian Linux Project
India, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Oriya, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu: IndiX II
India, various: Free Software i18n and l10n Projects
India, Punjabi: PunLinux
China, Chinese: Cosix Linux (site in Chinese), Lineox Enterprise Linux, Linpus Linux, Magic Linux (site in Chinese), Red Flag Linux, ThizLinux
Xteam Linux (site in Chinese)
Korea, Korean: Hancom Linux, NuxOne Linux (site in Korean), WOWLinux (site in Korean)
Japan, Japanese: Happy MacLinux for 68000 and PPC Macintosh,
Holon Linux for X86 and PPC (site in Japanese), Linux Media Lab Distribution (site in Japanese), ARMA aka Omoikane GNU/Linux (site in Japanese), Vine Linux, Laos, Laotian: Laonux; Jhai IT
Vietnam, Vietnamese: VietKey Linux (site in Vietnamese), vnlinux (site in Vietnamese)
Thailand, Thai: Burapha Linux, Linux TLE (site in Thai), Phayoune Linux
Malaysia, Malay: PIKOM people's computer
Mongolia, Mongolian: Soyombo Mongolian Linux

Philippines, Tagalog: Bayanihan Linux 3.0
Indonesian, Bahasa Indonesia: WinBi, Bijax (Bina Nusantara Bluejackets Linux), Trustix Merdeka

Russian Federation, Russian: ASP Linux, Linux XP Professional Edition (site in Russian)
Ukraine, Ukrainian:ASP Linux
Bulgaria, Bulgarian: Tilix Linux (site in Bulgarian)
Languages written in Cyrillic: Blin Linux (site in Russian)
Spain, Aragonese: Augustux
Spain, Catalan: Biadix (site in Catalan)
Latvia, Latvian: LIIS Linux (site in Latvian)
Nordic and Baltic languages, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Northern sami, Norwegian bokmål, Norwegian nynorsk, Swedish and US English: NordisKnoppix
Slovenia, Slovenian: Slix (site in Slovenian)
Greece, Greek: Zeus Linux

Multilingual Braille and speech: BrlSpeak
Audio for the blind: Oralux

This list is certainly not complete. It leaves out large numbers of projects to enable text entry, viewing and printing in various languages without localizing the user interface, and many more that aim to localize some subset of Linux or a specific application, but not a complete distribution.

We obviously need a lot more such projects. This ties in with the idea of getting Linux into universities, and getting them and the Linux User Groups to do the work, thus providing their members with employment opportunities and experience.

2004-02-20T11:11:00.000-08:00

Open Letter to the World Bank e-forum on ICT for Rural Development

[My, my. It has been a whole month since I posted here. My apologies.]

Let me first say that nobody should believe my version of ICT for sustainable development just because I say so. You need to learn about what is really going on, and what is really possible. We need to discuss results of real projects, not just theorize.

I will apply this to the very real questions that Dennis and Amitabh raise. You can inform yourself further on any of these matters through organizations working on various aspects of sustainable development. I write about such organizations here on my Weblog, (except in periods when I can't get to it, as has been the case recently).

On Monday 09 February 2004 10:17, Dennis Reinhardt wrote:
> Team,
> Amitabh Sharma provides a wake up call to those of us who
> romantically overstate the opportunities available through ITC

Speaking for yourself, I presume? Certainly not for me.

> in the third world, where chronic illiteracy abounds and where

There are two extremely important initiatives on literacy in India. One is software in Indian languages from Tata Consulting, which has helped more than 80,000 users in areas where computers are available.

The more important initiative is captioning of Bollywood movies in the language of the movie. This allows illiterate people in the audience who sing along to follow the text and gradually pick up basic literacy. This practice is helping several hundred million people in India, and will help many more as it is more widely practiced. Closed-captioning of TV would help even more.

So note that I do not believe computers to be the answer to everything. I maintain that computers and communications are required for many purposes, but I encourage people to find other solutions where appropriate.

> the vast majority of the rural villagers have no exposure to
> computers, let alone telephones, television, and radios.

It was my understanding that India had placed satellite dishes in most villages many years ago. Is this not correct?

> He also points out that development of technology access must
> be initiated from the inside and not from a top down
> perspective.

See the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka for an example of how this can be done. They have accomplished a great deal without computers, building community, schools, clinics, and village banks in 15,000 villages. Last summer they decided to bring Simputers into their village banking system, and to develop training programs to introduce computers into health, education, government, and so on, so that all of their villagers would be able to use computers effectively in the information economy, and to use Voice over IP to make telephone calls on the Internet wherever there is no regular phone system. This in turn will enable the creation of agricultural cooperatives and other programs for economic advancement, and this in turn well enable them to expand further in all directions.

> This post is worth reading, if for no other reason than to
> take us back to reality and practical expectations, and
> further to provide us with some lessons in communication.
> Dennis

I don't agree that this brings us back to reality, because I don't agree that we ever left reality. But the questions raised certainly deserve answers.

> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: "Amitabh K. Sharma"
> To: "An Electronic Discussion on The Role Of Communication in
> Rural Development Projects"
> Date: Mon, 09 Feb 2004 19:49:52 +0530
> Subject: [rural-comm] THEY don't need the voice, just the
> medium! (From India)
>
> Good Morning from New Delhi, India!
> I am a Lawyer (Attorney) by profession, and apart from
> attending the regular courtroom brawls, I have close to a
> decade long multi-disciplinary experience of working in the
> development sector, both in the rural and urban context.
> I must admit, every posting on this e-discussion gives me
> further stimuli to REACH OUT to 750 million inhabitants of
> rural India; most of whom are poor and impoverished, and for
> most of whom the words "development" and "communication" are
> as alien as UFOs from Moon and Mars! So, I am trying to learn
> how best we can make the "Communication in the Rural
> Development Projects" work.

Thank you, and welcome.

> So, when I read Rachna
> Vardararajan talk about communication being a two-way process,
> and ICT not being necessarily related to access to computers
> and internet alone, I SIT-UP and notice. Because, otherwise
> communication will have no meaning for almost 2/3rd people of
> the world people who haven't ever made a phone call, forget
> about using computer and internet!

The key word there is ALONE.

Yes, access alone is not the answer to anything. ICT is not a solution, but an enabler of solutions. People who cannot talk to each other cannot cooperate together. Voices that are not heard have no political or economic effect. People who cannot access information cannot act on it. The biggest consequence of ICT for the poor is adding several billion voices to the conversation about our future.

Of course it has to be two-way. We must ask the villagers what they need, and not presume to create solutions for them on our own. We must ask the villagers what obstacles they face, and not build fairy-tale castles with no foundation.

Of course we need to create training programs, and programs to make many kinds of information available in many languages, and allow the poor to create their own Web sites, and so on and on.

> And then on the extreme
> swing,

I think, rather, that both Rachna Vardararajan and I are making different parts of the same point, like describing different parts of the same elephant (as in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain parable) to people who have never seen one. Sustainable development based on ICT has not been seen in the world, and is quite difficult to imagine without assistance.

> I hear Edward Cherlin refer to someone's suggestion of
> "making certain bandwidth a fundamental right?!" I slump in my
> chair and simply get confused because here in this country,
> India, basic amenities like housing/shelter and food does not
> even figure in the list of "Fundamental Rights" as enumerated
> in the Constitution of India, and we are talking about
> Computers, internet and bandwidth!

My point is that the rights of the poor will not get into the Constitution of india unless the poor can be heard, and they cannot be heard without ICT enabling every one of them to get on the phone system and the Internet.

Mritak Sangh (the Association of Dead People) in India is an excellent example of the problem and the potential. In the more backward regions of India, people have discovered that corrupt officials can be bribed to declare a relative legally dead, so that they can seize the "dead" person's property. The members of Mritak Sangh, all victims of this practice, have been unable to maintain regular contact with each other and with the news media, because they live in areas with quite bad communications, where such shenanigans by officials can continue nearly unchecked. I would like to see whether money can be raised to get the members computer systems and bring the problem completely into the light of day.

I assume that due process guarantees that should prevent such things are in the Indian Constitution. In US law, where we certainly have such a guarantee, the Supreme Court has declared in a number of cases that denying people the means to exercise a particular right is a violation of that right.

> There is a great need for
> reality check here, context and location specific. For the
> information of people on this list: For every Apple Orchard in
> Himachal Pradesh, (INDIA) having phone lines from as early as
> early 90's, there are thousand of villages across the country
> which still have don't have telephone connections!

You may not have heard about new technology, developed in 2003, that brings the cost of broadband wireless connections down under US$1,000 per village, with links of up to 8 km. US$1,000 is well within the means of microcredit institutions and village banks in many countries.

This connection includes a WiFi (IEEE 802.11b) hotspot in the village, with a range of several hundred feet, and 11 megabits per second bandwidth. Within this range multiple access points can be set up with one or more computers each--say at a school, a clinic, a government office, a religious site of one kind or another--each serving different needs. Those computers can include Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone connections, providing telephone service far outside the range of conventional land line or cell phone systems.

New technology coming out in 2004 (IEEE 802.16 WiMax) and recent advances in hotspot technology (IEEE 802.11g) will provide a service radius of 30 km, and bandwidth of 54 megabits per second. The system cost will be greater, but the cost per user will be less very quickly.

These links can be daisy-chained out into the countryside from any location that has either a reliable digital telephone switch or a high-capacity satellite Internet dish. Such satellite systems cost about US$20,000, a fraction of the cost of a telephone switch or a cell-phone tower (both requiring fiber optic connections to the rest of the phone system). The cost of a satellite systemt can be shared among a significant number of villages. An alternative is a smaller-capacity dish, with a cost of US$2,000, that can serve one very isolated village.

Of course, this depends also on getting lower-cost satellite Internet services. We know of several ways to accomplish that. The most obvious is that India has in the past paid to have its own TV satellite put into geosynchronous orbit, and it could buy or rent capacity on digital satellites, or have its own put up in much the same way. Building and launching a completely new satellite would cost something like US$200,000,000, which is thus the upper limit on the setup cost of such a program.

Encore is cooperating with the Grameen Foundation USA in its Village Computing Project. We have proposed to Grameen the systems described above, as an addition to their very successful cell phone systems. They and other microcredit organizations have placed many phones in villages in many countries. With wireless and VoIP this can be extended to any location where we can get legal permission to operate. This means almost everywhere outside Burma and North Korea, whose governments are scared to death of the impact of telephones and the Internet.

> Without
> sounding like a critic of modern technologies and without
> undermining the great reach and impact of computers and
> internet - as a matter of abundant caution, there are certain
> pre-requisites which should be noted before attempting the
> introduction of the more advanced ICT tools, in places such as
> rural India where almost 60 percent of population are not
> familiar with the joys of letters and numerals!

Computers can make a significant dent in the problem, and as I noted above, there are other even cheaper programs having significant effects.

> I remember a
> former Minister of Communication in India a few years back,
> rhetorically thundered at a public rally in Rural India that
> he will ensure that Internet reaches every village of India!
> In all probability, he had no clue that to make his dream come
> true, he needs to have the provision of electricity and some
> sort of "telephony" in place, and not to forget, making the
> masses in rural India literate!!!

You point to three lacks: electricity, telephony, and literacy.

We have dealt with literacy in part above. The long-term solution is of course basic education, which I understand India is doing reasonably well on. (If someone has statistics on village school availability and enrollment, I would be glad to see them.) The UN reports that about 110 million children are not in school worldwide, so there is certainly more to be done. At any rate, we are no longer in the situation of a century ago, when there was reportedly a flourishing trade for professional village letter-writers in India, who might be the only literate people in their villages. Wherever there are schools, there are literate children, and wherever there are literate children, we can introduce them to the Internet and to ICT training (since part of our program is to create ICT jobs in the villages--hardware technicians, system administrators, Web designers, programmers)--in support of the equipment we propose to install, and the multitude of programs we propose to run over that equipment.

But note that we are talking about using computers as cell phone replacements. Thus the illiterate can immediately benefit, even if they have to get somebody else to punch in the phone numbers. We can provide a complete telephony solution to rural India and anywhere else, including voice phone calls, voice mail, directory services, and much more, at no additional cost beyond the equipment and the monthly Internet service fee.

Electricity is one of the places where the Simputer stands out. The handheld model runs on two rechargeable AA batteries. Solar power systems with chargers for a few pairs of batteries are available off the shelf in developing countries, even in the rural areas. Systems using automobile batteries are also readily available. A monochrome Simputer can run for about 5 hours on a pair of batteries, or longer if the backlight is not needed. Color Simputers last about a third as long. Future Simputer models will give various options for screen and battery size, but they will all be well within the capabilities of solar rechargers.

This is the point of the Simputer, its original design goal: to be viable in areas without power, without phones, and without money (using microcredit), providing Free Software in local languages.

> So my humble request in all
> right earnest: Let us point out and exhaust all
> modes/sources/interventions of communications for rural
> development, without harping too much and over-emphasizing on
> one single type of interventional mode!

I agree wholeheartedly. Whatever technology meets the constraints of a particular application should be considered carefully for use. I heartily recommend ThizLinux desktop computers and similar products where there is adequate power, and flat-screen monitors (which save their initial cost in electricity over several years) where there is enough money. I have nothing against cell phones except the cost of setting up service.

> The problem with ICT in development field is that (I know
> little about the "Use of Communication technologies in rural
> development" process) is that it is top-driven, supply driven
> and never based on a "democratic" needs assessment/market
> study.

That is a major problem, indeed, and that is why I recommend a close look at the Sarvodaya model, which is driven by the villagers, and is only implemented in a village if the village asks for it.

> One of the local government controlled FM radio
> channels here in New Delhi, gives much relevant and
> thought-provoking insights on agriculture and other
> development issues, however, it is a different thing that the
> same time slot competes with the popular film music programmes
> on 3 other privately owned channels!! No wonder I have never
> come across anyone, in the peripheral villages of New Delhi
> who is aware of such a programme!!!

Another timely issue that must be addressed in the training programs for ICT, and in the content made available to villagers in their own languages. I would be happy to discuss with the operators of that station how to get their Web site in front of the villagers.

> Let us strive to be the "facilitator" rather than the
> provider/impose(r) of ICT tools; one of the basic tenets of
> Participatory Rapid Appraisal /Participatory Learning and
> Action technique for development process, suggests: It is
> THEIR problem, so only THEY know the solutions. It is for the
> rural communities to decide and practice the communication
> channels, so let us facilitate in their empowerment by
> providing them the choices. The NEED should emanate from them.

Exactly.

> Otherwise, there is a potential risk of any attempt of
> introducing/strengthening communication in rural development
> project going down as another wasteful IMPOSED exercise.

Again, exactly.

> A very important issue which I think needs much attention: is
> the need to focus the discussion not only on a micro-level but
> also on the macro-level. (Fabio Santucci succinctly raised
> this issue in his EXCELLENT write-up. Kudos to him!)

Is there a link available for that?

Encore has partners, including oneVillage Foundation, working on that issue.

We are considering the requirements for national ICT systems to tie the village computers together for various purposes, including health, education, economic opportunity, access to government, and so on. Encore is working with the Indian postal service on a SmartCard replacement for paper money orders, to save time and money for the service and for customers, and to reduce error, theft, and fraud. We are working with the Agriculture Ministry on a comprehensive land survey (the first since independence, I am told) using GPS-equipped Simputers to acquire mapping data (in trials in Karnataka State). We are talking to major computer companies and software companies about the design and implementation of other such systems.

We are working on economic models for sustainable development, based on the idea that affordable ICT can put villages on a permanent growth track, and get whole countries off dependence on aid and charity. The plan includes the identification of obstacles that will arise, and ways to deal with them. If we are successful, it will change the macroeconomic environment for all of the developed countries. We know that successful growth throughout the developing world will be seen as a threat by some and a market opportunity by others.

> I don't
> think that the governments have any white paper on this
> important yet highly neglected component of any development
> projects, at least it is not here in my country.

The UN has quite a number. Look at the UN ICT Task Force site, starting with Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Challenge to Silicon Valley, and at the WSIS and ICT4D Platform Web sites. Much of it is available from the Task Force site, and you can Google for more.

> In India, we
> have the Right to Information, as legislated by various
> States, however, I do not recall whether any of those
> legislation make it mandatory for the government
> departments/officials to make the information available on
> their own. These vital information are there, somewhere locked
> in some files, but not available to communities which it
> affects the most!!!

Something like the U.S. Freedom of Information Act? U.S. citizens sometimes have to go to court to enforce it. Many government agencies find it to their advantage to put huge amounts of information out on the Internet, in order to save the cost of manual handling. It took more than a decade for that idea to take hold, so don't get too impatient.

> While I was part of team conducting
> "Community Appraisal of Integrated Water Resource Management
> Strategy" in Sindh Basin area of the State of MP, India, I
> learnt about the havocs which lack of communication channels
> can create for the "intended" beneficiaries. In the State of
> MP, despite making extensive investments in field of
> irrigation, (on loans/grants from World Bank and other
> development agencies) majority of the projects has failed to
> make impact as intended. The locals do not recognize the
> extensive canal systems projects as a revolutionary or at
> least condition enhancing efforts. One of the most crippling
> factor (which came out from the study) was the lack of
> communication between the beneficiaries and the
> decision-makers. The study area was studded with
> capital-intensive projects, which have failed in most of the
> aspects according to persons at the receiving end. Lack of
> communication channels (read No Communication!) between the
> government and villagers was clearly evident on many
> occasions. Feedback system for these projects were never
> established. Nor the government employees were initiated to
> interact with the people they were supposed to serve.

Exactly.

> On the
> contrary, less capital intensive programs like Rajiv Gandhi
> Watershed Mission was found more successful. The mission
> concentrated on public/ local participation (what is
> participation without communication?) at every stage. This
> again accentuates the need for dialogue between implementation
> agency and beneficiaries.

Or Sarvodaya, which begins in each member village with the creation of a village council, including seats for women and children.

> "THEY don't need a VOICE, just the
> MEDIUM".

You mean they have their voices already, but are not heard? I think most people think of "voice" as meaning "voice at the table" or "voice in the conversation". That's what I mean. I like to talk about "giving each of billions of people a voice in the global conversation".

> There is a great need of advocacy and lobbying with the
> government/multi-bilateral agencies to make "creation,
> development and strengthening of multi-stakeholder multi-level
> two way communication channel at all stages of (rural)
> development projects" part and parcel of every development
> initiative.

I prefer to say it in English rather than government-speak. Talk to the people, listen to what they tell you, and make sure that what you hear gets passed on to all of the decision-makers, including people in government and the population at large.

> My country India will soon witness another great
> battle on the electoral front, after the GLORIOUS (pun
> intended!) rule of close to five years of the current
> government. As I write this, I hear another local radio FM
> channel belting out another capsule of "India Shines"
> advertisement blitzkrieg COMMUNICATING the high points of its
> "class" governance! So, you have the advertising gurus sleekly
> package all that the government had done for the farmers and
> rural India including the social security measures, Kisaan
> (Farmer) Credit Cards, blah-blah at the staggering cost of an
> estimated Rupees 276 Crores (61.3 Million US Dollars) not from
> their Political Party funds but from public exchequer!!! So,
> they are well aware of the reach and impact of communication,
> it is just that their focus is quite myopic and motivated by
> petty electoral gains and self-interest.

The established practice of Sarvodaya is to ignore the central government as much as possible, and take the whole program straight to the people. The point of our plan is that villages can afford to jumpstart their own development, with some assistance in understanding how they can go about it, including the creation of their own microcredit support.

> Sincerely,
> Amitabh Sharma

2004-01-19T19:14:00.000-08:00

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech Dr. King said, "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land."

To me, anyway, it doesn't seem that audacious any more.

2004-01-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

WSIS and Beyond: Silicon Valley Roundtable

I attended a very good meeting yesterday, with a small but high-powered audience. Everybody there was working on some important initiative that will contribute significantly to the eventual integrated effort for sustainable development.

> ...round table discussion of an important
> initiative - the World Summit on the Information Society
> (WSIS) by two attendees at the December Geneva event. This
> forum is being sponsored by AcrossWorld Communications,
> Inc., Center for New Futures, and International Business
> Incubator to foster the participation of Silicon Valley in
> a meaningful way in the WSIS session to be held in Tunis in
>2005. Join us --

I will discuss with IBI whether their services would help Encore. We are exactly their target market, that is, a foreign company getting established in the US.

> 3:10 PM Opening comments and introduction of the
> keynote speakers by Linda Alepin, Center for New Futures

I didn't find out anything about the Center for New Futures at the meeting except that they do this sort of thing. Linda asked us to introduce ourselves briefly, and to tell the meeting the one question that we hoped to get an answer to.

I asked how to get the attention of those who need to hear our message, and I got several good clues. Part of the answer, of course, is that a lot of the people there actually know the people we are trying to talk to, and can introduce us and point people to our Web sites and other publications.

> 3:20 PM KEYNOTE I: Gender, Technology and WSIS
> by Nancy Hafkin

The WSIS, as is usual for UN events, consisted mainly of prepared speeches by heads of state from developing countries and low-level representatives of developed countries. The statements of principles and planned actions had to be approved in advance, and were heavily watered down by opposition to almost everything from one side or another. However, there were several very useful documents produced,

The real work had been done in preliminary meetings and in informal work outside the UN. For example, thousands of hours of work resulted in three paragraphs on women's rights in the official documents. No support could be expressed for Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) beyond the acknowledgment that it was worth looking at. Some countries seem to be confused about FOSS, thinking that it means doing away with copyright protections for software.

Alongside the heads-of-state Summit the ICT4D (ICT for Development) trade show drew 13,000 people to look at examples of ICT in development. The exhibits were not simply of products, but of active programs. This was the most encouraging part of the entire WSIS.

> 3:45 PM KEYNOTE II: Engaging Entrepreneurs and
> Enterprises in ICT and Development: Akhtar Badshah, Digital
>Partners

Akhtar Badshah wrote a book for the WSIS on information kiosks for development. He also had great praise for the ICT4D, and made an impassioned plea for getting down to the real work of rolling out ICT and all of the beneficial programs that they can support to villages worldwide, but warned of the inevitable unintended consequences.

> 4:10 PM Roundtable discussions: WSIS 2005 in
> Tunis and Silicon Valley chaired by Anil Srivastava,
> AcrossWorld Communications

We all pitched into the discussion with the projects we are working on, and talked a bit about how those projects could fit together. The most interesting to me is a program on methods of replicating successful programs worldwide.

> 4:45 PM Closing remarks by Doug Engelbart,
> Bootstrap Alliance

Doug is one of the great innovators and thinkers in the digital world. He has been thinking about how to deal with the exponential growth of information and of computer and communications technology. Could we organize ourserves to make progress in keeping up with progress?

> 5:00 PM Next Steps by Linda Alepin and Barbara
> Harley

The meeting was far too short to create any real plan. None of us had time to explain our own initiatives or our understanding of the overall process of ICT4D. We did collect questions to be answered from everybody, and agreed to share the questions and other information,. We will see about creating a mailing list for the participants, bringing in other people, and following up with future meetings.

> The first phase of the World Summit on the Information
> Society (WSIS) sponsored by the United Nations was held in
> Geneva from 10-12 December 2003 and the next summit--WSIS
> 2005--will be in Tunis.

Some people are complaining about the location, because Tunisia has quite backward policies in some areas. I think it's perfect, because it also has quite forward-looking policies in other areas, and will allow participants to see the real-world process, warts and all.

> Several Silicon Valley participants joined in a
> videoconference organized by the World Bank during the
> Geneva summit to discuss our future involvement in the WSIS
> 2005 in Tunis.
>
> WSIS is an expression of "...our common desire and
> commitment to build a people-centered, inclusive and
> development-oriented Information Society, where everyone
> can create, access, utilize and share information and
> knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to
> achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable
> development and improving their quality of life, premised
> on the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United
> Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal
> Declaration of Human Rights."

High-sounding bafflegab. What is most important is what's missing--commitments to specifics, particularly to figuring out what it will cost and where the money will come from.

We don't have a common desire and commitment. Politicians are deathly afraid of empowering their constituencies. Those who benefit from corruption don't want competition and openness. There is little or no commitment to freedom of speech in many countries, or to the rights of women, children, minorities, foreigners, opposition parties, or anybody else who is from the wrong side of the Us vs. Them tracks.

> The roundtable has been organized to hear from Nancy
> Hafkin and Akhtar Badshah, who not only participated in the
> Geneva summit, but are key leaders in the preparation for
> the Tunis summit in 2005.

This is a real opportunity for us to affect the process. We (that's the global We) have to turn the conversation to specifics, on the basis that we have the appropriate technologies and we have all the elements for a coordinated attack on the problem, in the form of programs that have been shown to work on the ground, plus proven methods for replication with adaptation to local conditions. So now we need to coordinate, organize, budget, and get down to business.

> Dr. Nancy Hafkin --Dr. Hafkin has been a true pioneer of
> networking, and development information and communications
> in Africa, over the course of a twenty-three year career.
> Nancy was among the first to enter the field of electronic
> communications in Africa. Her advocacy around this issue
> has drawn attention to the growing potential of ICT's in
> Africa, and the cost to Africa of remaining outside the
> process of social and economic change broughtabout by the
> development of the global information society.
>
> Dr. Akhtar Badshah --Akhtar Badshah is the Executive
> Director of Digital Partners (www.digitalpartners.com) and
> brings to the organization extensive experience as an
> educator, researcher, and development expert. He has served
> as a consultant for such organization as The Asia Society,
> Rockefeller Foundation, UNDP, USAID, World Resources
> Institute, World Bank-EDI, and others in the US, Asia, and
> the Middle East and is an internationally recognized
> author, particularly in the field of urban planning and
> development.

Wonderful people. Someone suggested we clone them. :)

2004-01-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Six Billion Connected Voices

openDemocracy has published an article I wrote on the consequences of giving all of the Earth's billions a voice in the conversation about their future. Some of them would like to have a word with you, you know.

2004-01-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

E-choupals: Indian farmers on the Net

One of the promises of the Simputer and other computers for the poor has been the ability to access market information, so that the farmers can decide better when and where to buy and sell. Some people with no experience of farming or poverty, and with a great lack of imagination, doubt that this is of any consequence. I hope the doubters will read this article from the New York Times and understand that the impact of access to market information for farmers is becoming as important as we said it would.

This story is not only about soybeans, as the headline suggests, but also coffee, tea, cotton, shrimp, and many other products. Sixty companies have already taken part in a pilot project to sell services and goods, from insurance to seeds to motorbikes to biscuits, through ITC. Eventually the company expects to sell everything from microcredit to tractors via e-choupals.

Indian Soybean Farmers Join the Global Village
January 1, 2004
By AMY WALDMAN

The story describes a farmer with a middle-school education who gets on a computer to check soybean prices on the Chicago Board of Trade Web site. Prices in India generally follow Chicago by several days, so this is quite valuable information, which has allowed him to multiply his income by ten times or more, from about $300 in 2002 to that much a month since the program started in 2003. He earns on increased commissions from local farmers' transactions, so his increased income comes from increasing their incomes.

The computer is provided by ICT-IBD through its e-choupal program. Choupal means "village square" in Hindi. The program increases company profits as well, allowing it to expand across the countryside. This is in sharp contrast with earlier NGO programs that could not be replicated due to dependence on donations rather than economic growth.

As described in the article, this is an excellent program. ICT-IBD is credited by some with doing as much as anybody to break down the Digital Divide. There are now 1,700 e-chopals in Madhya Pradesh, and 3,000 total in India. They are serving 18,000 villages, reaching up to 1.8 million farmers.

Unfortunately, ITC is placing its systems with high-caste villagers, in order to gain respect for the program. I believe that this is a long-term strategic error. Even in the short term, it restricts ITC's market share, and it also reinforce the caste system. If they were available only to low-caste villagers, the blow to the caste system would be severe, and ITC would end up with more customers. I base this notion on the experience of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, which started among outcastes and has successfully broken down many caste barriers.

The story also says that 72% of India's population of 1.2 billion or so live in its 600,000 villages, which implies an average size of about 2,000 people. This is consistent with the estimate that about 4 billion people worldwide live in about 2 million villages, but it sounds implausible to me. I get the impression that really small villages are systematically undercounted everywhere. That doesn't affect the importance of ITC-IBD, though. Still, if anybody knows anything factual about how villages are counted, I would be glad of the information.

2004-01-01T21:29:00.000-08:00

Social Entrepreneurs

The NPR program Talk of the Nation just did a show on social entrepreneurship. They didn't mention Simputers, but they were certainly talking about what we are doing. Richard Stallman called in with a mention of Free Software and a point about things that can be fixed without fixating on market solutions.

You can listen on the Web.

Social Entrepreneurs

An engineer took on Brazil's urban sprawl by giving rural farmers cheap electricity. In India, a teacher tailored schools to satisfy young people set on emigration. Ideas, passion, a head for business and a desire for change describe these people, known as "social entrepreneurs." Neal Conan and guests discuss the philosophy behind social entrepreneurship.

Guest:

J.B. Schram
Founder and CEO of College Summit

David Bornstein
Journalist
Author, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2004)

David Green
Founder, Project Impact

Cheryl Dahle
Contributing Writer, Fast Company Magazine
Project Coordinator for this month's special issue on Social Capitalist Awards

2003-12-30T08:42:00.000-08:00

Microcredit Conference

Existing microcredit programs cover more than 100 million people. To get to full coverage of 4 billion poor people requires a 40-fold expansion. Microcredit is vital to getting ICT into villages. Several billion dollars will be needed as seed capital. Then as the initial loans are repaid with interest, programs will be able to expand and fund further development.

"The Asia/Pacific Regional Microcredit Summit Meeting of Councils will be held February 16-19, 2004 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The regional summit will be preceded on February 14 and 15 by optional two-day field visits to either ASA, BRAC, Grameen Bank, PKSF, or Padakhep (an institution serving street children). Submission of a 2003 Institutional Action Plan will be a prerequisite for attending. Additional details including hotel and registration information will be forwarded when they become available."

2003-12-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

American Jewish World Service

The only hope for eventual peace in Israel and Palestine is for people to come together and build trust. However, powerful forces on both sides go to great lengths to prevent contact between Israelis and Palestinians. Nevertheless, there are Jewish charities operating in Palestine as well as many other trouble spots around the world.

The American Jewish World Service, for example, has a program in cooeration with other NGOs to provide loans to women in the Gaza Strip to provide economic opportunity. More than a million dollars has been loaned out, under very difficult circumstances. Not least of the difficulties is finding economic opportunities to take advantage of, when most business between Israel and the Palestinian territories has been cut off, and neither side can visit the other.

Now I wonder whether AJWS would be interested in a program to put Simputers into Palestinian schools and refugee camps...

2003-12-05T11:43:00.000-08:00

AIDS Day

World AIDS Day was held on December 1, 2003, with events in many countries focused on how to expand treatment and prevention around the world.

The odds for AIDS sufferers are slowly getting better, after unconscionable delays. About three million people died of AIDS in 2002, and there were about five million new cases. In 2003, AIDS medication started to become available to many developing countries at about $300 per person per year. For the estimated 30-40 million sufferers worldwide, that means we need about $10 billion annually for the medicines, and something more for health workers and the rest of the delivery system. Several governments, notably including the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa, have pledged substantial amounts, so that we are about halfway there. There seems to be a chance of reaching the needed llevel of funding in 2004, but more effort is needed to see that it happes as quickly as possible.

The Simputer's part in helping with AIDS is enabling improved health services in villages and other poor communities through information and communications technology. Getting the medicine is the big step, but unless we can get it to the right people at the right time, we will still lose many of them.

For an excellent statement of the nature of the problem of delivering health services to the poor and what can be done about it, I recommend Tracy Kidder's recent book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, which details Dr. Paul Farmer's work on similar problems in tuberculosis treatment. This should be the model for every AIDS program worldwide, and for tackling many other health problems.

2003-12-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

More Languages

In order to use Simputers everywhere in the world, we need good support for many languages and writing systems. Support for a writing system consists of the following.

Unicode fonts

Rendering software for correct display and printing

Keyboard layouts and Input Method Editors (IMEs) for specific languages

For simple writing systems the minimum is just a font containing a glyph (visible form) for each Unicode character, so that information can be displayed as plain text.

Arabic and the alphabets of India and other Asian countries require special rendering software, because the shapes of letters change in combination with others (multiple glyphs for each character), and some combinations have shapes that are not made from the shapes of the separate letters (ligature glyphs). Every writing system requires rendering software to go beyond minimal text display. Among the functions of rendering software are placing accents on letters, letter spacing, word spacing, line breaking, and justification. Mathematics also has special rendering requirements including two-dimensional layout.

Fonts and rendering take care of the output. Keyboards and IMEs handle input. There are two kinds of keys in a keyboard layout, character keys and modifier keys. Pressing a character key inserts a character into the text stream. Modifier keys (shift, alt, ctrl, and possibly others) temporarily change the assignment of characters to keys. Standard keyboards have 47 keys for visible characters, plus Space, Tab, Back Space, and Enter. IMEs are used for languages with character sets too large for a keyboard layout, mainly Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The Korean Hangul alphabet and the Japanese kana syllabaries map easily to keyboards. However, entering the thousands of Chinese characters used in each language requires other techniques, including phonetic conversion, code-based systems, and shape-based systems. In phonetic conversion the user types the words in the appropriate alphabet or syllabary, and the IME software looks up the words in a dicitionary to find the right characters. Code-based systems require the user to memorize or look up the character codes and type them numerically. Shape-based systems have rules for dividing characters into pieces, and assign the various pieces to a regular keyboard layout. One key typically represents several related shapes, as in the Cangjie IME for Chinese.

Support for a language requires support for one or more writing systems used to write that language. Many languages are written in more than one writing system. Croats write their language in the Latin alphabet, and Serbs write the same language in Cyrillic. Turkish was written in the Arabic alphabet for centuries, but is now written in the Latin alphabet. The Soviet Union mandated Cyrillic for almost all languages. The newly independent republics have in many cases gone back to their traditiional writing system, as in Mongolia (Mongolian) and Azerbaijan (Alrabic), or to the Latin alphabet. In each writing system, there are further requirements.

Locale support for time, date, number, and currency formats

Dictionaries

Grammar and style checkers

Text-to-speech conversion

Voice recognition

Several languages are used in more than one country. Typically, they require separate locale support, dictionaries, and style checkers for each country.

Although these needs have been obvious for many years, commercial software platform vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Sun) have been slow to provide support for the writing systems and languages of developing countries. We are in sight of the goal of complete support, however, through several Free Software projects.

Pango (Greeki παν, pan, all; Japanese 語 go, language) comes from the Linux world, where it has been integrated into The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), and the gedit text editor. Graphite began on Windows, but a Linux version is well under way. The SILA browser is a version of Mozilla for Windows with Graphite built in. There is some discussion going on about merging the Pango and Graphite projects, but no definite plans. Linux User Groups in several countries are working on Unicode fonts for their writing systems, and there are other Unicode font projects.

Mandrake Linux, the version I use on the desktop, comes with some support for the following writing systems. I have supplied a few random characters for each. You will need appropriate fonts and a browser that can display them in order to see them correctly. Mozilla, SILA, Opera, and MS Internet Explorer all have moderately good Unicode support, but none is complete.

Arabic يبلاتنمك

Armenian ջվգե

Bengali রকতচ

Burmese ဗဟဂဒဇဍ

Chinese 日人水山

Cyrillic фыва

Georgian სდფგ

Greek σδφγ

Gujarati બહગદ

Gurmukhi ੀੂਬਹ

Hebrew יחלך

Hindi हरकत

Inuktitut ᓱᒧᓄᓗ

Japanese トシハキ

Kannada ಪರಕತ

Korean 가니두애

Latin veni

Lao ເາຣະ

Malayalam ുപരക

Mongolian േിുപരക

Ogham (Old Irish) ᚃᚇᚄᚍ

Oriya ପରକତ

Syriac ܠܐܬܢ

Tamil ுபரக

Telugu ుపరక

Thai พหกด

The writing systems in the current version of Unicode still missing from Mandrake Linux are

Thaana ދލޑޕ

Ethiopic ሒሴቴዴ

Cherokee ᎲᎶᏌᏩ

Sinhala കഗശര

Tibetan པཕནཏ

Cambodian ឈឋឮែ

Thaana, Ethiopic, and Cherokee present no rendering problems and could be added quickly. Linguists at SIL and Evertype are working on the others. There are also lots of historical Chinese characters in Unicode that are not provided in readily available Unicode fonts.

You can take a look at the full set of characters for each writing system and find out where it is used in Unicode in PDFs at the Code Charts page of the Unicode site. One of the best browser tests, also available in PDF format, is the Compelling Unicode Examples page, which gives names of famous people from around the world, both in Latin alphabet versions, and also the way they write them at home.

2003-12-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Son of Gutenberg Rides Again

The first Information Age, the Age of Oral Tradition, began with gesture, speech, painting, dancing, and song in a time from which no record survives, long before the few cave paintings and bits of jewelry that we know about.

The second Information Age, the Age of Writing, began with clay tokens pressed into clay balls and tablets, perhaps 6000 years ago. Dozens of manual writing technologies developed over the millenia without changing the basic economics of writing. They include carving in stone, scratching on bark, writing with brush on silk or quill pen on parchment and later paper, and so on.

In 1450 Johannes Gutenberg started setting type for what we now call the Gutenberg Bible, and Aldus Manutius was born. The beginning of the Renaissance in Europe is often dated to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks. Greeks fled in all directions, and those who could took their books with them. A multitude of these Greeks landed in Italy, where Aldus Manutius created the first font for printing Greek in the 1490s. The rest, as they say, is history.

With printing, nothing could stop the spread of new ideas, such as the Protestant Reformation. A century and a half later we got Shakespeare and Galileo, born in the same year. Printing was a key element in Luther's Reformation in the fifteenth century, and in the American Revolution in the eighteenth, and in just about everything else.

Printing with movable metal type has turned out to be the most important invention of the last millenium, and the last 500 years or so can rightly be called the third Information Age..

The fourth age of information begins with radio and movies, and continues on through TV, CDs, and DVDs, in overlap with the rise of the computer.

Now we have in the Internet another technology of comparable importance. Gutenberg's invention resulted in the production of many more copies of millions of books and other publications, but the Web already has billions of pages.

In particular, Project Gutenberg has made more than six thousand public-domain works of literature in English available to the world at essentially no cost. Similar collections are appearing in many other ancient and modern languages. Here are just a few.

Iran Virtual Library
The Digital Mirror, Welsh
South Asia Literary Resource Access on the Internet
The Buddhist scriptures in Pali
The Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative in Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and more.
The Unbound Bible in English, Greek, Hebrew, and other languages.
The Internet Classics Archive in Latin, Greek, and Chinese
The Perseus Digital Library in Greek and Latin

As in the Renaissance, much effort has gone into republishing existing works with the new technology, even as a flood of new publishing is enabled. The consequences for education and public discourse cannot now be fairly estimated. We can imagine some of them, such as a radical decrease in the cost of education, particularly in developing countries, or the gradual shift, visible even today, to online publishing of scientific and technical journals at no cost to the reader, and to Open Source textbooks, built by a public collaborative process and again free to the reader. Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius could not have imagined Shakespeare or Galileo, much less the New Yorker or E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: Economics as though People Mattered.

The Simputer can give many more people access to these free collections of literature either on-line or on CD-ROM. We really don't know what the impact will be, but we are talking about a lot more material than the Greeks brought from Constantinople to Italy being made available to many times more people than lived in all of Europe. If the Renaissance was big, this could be bigger than big.

2003-11-24T14:14:00.000-08:00

Give a Man a Chance

In Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered E. F. Schumacher extended the saying

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

His version was

Give a man fishing tackle, and you feed him until it breaks.
Teach a man to make fishing tackle, and you feed him for a lifetime.

If the fisherman is not part of a larger economy, this is the right plan. But if the fisherman can sell some of the fish and buy new tackle, he doesn't have to know how to make it all himself.

It is not possible to build billion dollar semiconductor fabs in the villages, so villagers will not be able to make Simputers from scratch. However, they will be able to do the hardware and software design, the assembly, the programming, the system administration, and the Web design and marketing, all of which will pay for the semiconductors, displays, boards, connectors, and cases. Villages cannot be totally self-sufficient in ICT hardware, but they can make a place for themselves in an integrated economy that brings them all the hardware they need to maintain and extend that place.

For villagers to take on the assembly work assumes a suitable level of education, suitable infrastructure such as roads, and suitable laws on commerce in general and import/export in particular, all of which is doable. At some point, villagers will be able to design their own chips and hire a fab to make them. Presumably it won't be people who grew up and got their education in the villages who do that first, but rather some design engineers who are tired of Silicon Valley or some other high-pressure high-tech center, who decide to move to the villages for quality of life. Then thay can train up new village engineers in a distributed village education system.

2003-11-22T23:41:00.000-08:00

World Summit on the Information Society

The announcement of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) says that the Summit will be held from 10 to 12 December in Geneva, with more than 6,000 delegates from government, intergovernmental organizations, civil society, the private sector and the media. The second phase will be held in Tunisia in 2005.

The Summit is being held under the patronage of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and is being organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN's specialized agency for telecommunications.

The draft action plan of the Summit proposes a commitment to connect all of the world's villages with information and communication technologies by 2015, and to connect at least half the world's inhabitants by that date.

I think that we should be able to do a lot better than that, but I admit that it is a challenge to organize and train enough people to make it happen. It is obviously not enough to install the hardware. We must at least create health, education, and other programs, and train the villagers to install, maintain, and administer their own equipment. Actually, we want to do much more than that. We want to tap the talent and special knowledge in the villages so that the villagers can deslign and roll out programs better suited to their needs than those designed by outsiders.

2003-11-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

Schools Online

Fortunately, when we go out to create Simputer projects we are not starting from scratch. For example, Schools Online has placed thousands of computers and trained teachers to use them in schools in underserved parts of the U.S. since 1996, and has turned its attention to placing computers and training teachers in the underserved parts of the rest of the world. I recommend them to the attention of any reader, and we in the Simputer movement look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with them.

Although this program has done substantial good, it has suffered in the past from the problem of all programs to help the poor with technology, since it depends on continuing gifts from the well-off. In a word, it is not sustainable.

The key aim of the Simputer is sustainable programs for the poor, where the first few computers produce enough economic benefits to allow a village, or individuals in the village, to buy more, and to create further growth, and so on in a virtuous circle. We don't have data yet on precisely what it takes to create such a virtuous circle for computers, but we do have data on how it can be done without our latest technology.

An excellent case study is America's Founding Secret: What the Scottish Enlightenment Taught Our Founding Fathers, by by Robert W. Galvin. The essential point is that, starting from the Protestant program to allow every Christian to read the Bible, Scotland was the first country to attempt universal public education, and that Scots moving to the American colonies brought this policy with them. Not only did Scotland lead the way in public schooling, but it promoted home schooling as well. In the United States, this led to nearly universal literacy in the Free states. Nearly every home had a Bible, and nearly every child learned to read it. A secondary result was that Scotland, and then America, attained record levels of higher education and high-level employment. Scotland produced so many doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals that it had to export most of them. These expatriates spread the ideas that produced them all around the world.

The Scottish Enlightenment depended on the Protestant Reformation for its drive and its aims, and the Renaissance for much of its content. The Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance in turn depended on the printing press and movable type, the ultimate high information technology of the 15th century.

High tech has enormous value, but without users and goals it accomplishes nothing, or sometimes worse than nothing. We need low-cost high tech, such as the Simputer, to create sustainable development for the poor today. We also need a culture that supports development. Not the culture of the developed world, which takes its past for granted, and not a mythical static traditional culture, but a culture created by its members to achieve worthy goals and to make the best use of the available tools, as many cultures have striven to do.

What might a worthy goal be? How about this: to enable the poor of the world to take part in the discussion about their future, and decide for themselves what other worthy goals to pursue. After all, they know better than anybody else what problems they face, and what they would like to accomplish. Clearly, in order to have a fruitful conversation, the poor need access to the ideas and the information of the world at large. As E. F. Schumacher said in Small is Beautiful, you need ideas to think with. The ability to pass ideas and accumulated experience from one generation to another, or from one country to another, is the foundation of anything that could possibly be called progress.

So a large part of the program is to get the literature of the world into forms that the poor can access, and this means using the current high-tech replacements for the printing press—CD-ROM presses and burners, and the Internet. The Internet is not a problem. Google counts 3 billion pages and growing. What we need is a way to get literature on CD-ROMs to the poor, and let them create their own libraries on rewritable media. This means religious literature, philosophy, poetry, novels, science, politics—whatever, in whatever languages. We have made a good start on this in our Information Age, with Project Gutenberg leading the way. It offers thousands of works in English and some in other languages. There are similar collections in a number of languages, more than I could list here. Many scientific journals are converting to online publication, and some even allow free public access. The Web was actually invented by a physicist, Tim Bernerns-Lee, for sharing preprint versions of scientific papers.

So now we have riches that users of the ancient libraries of Alexandria, Abbasid Baghdad, or the Chinese empire could never have dreamed of.

And that brings us back to Schools Online. Now we can give schools not just a computer, but immediate access to huge chunks of the literature of the world, and let people make their own collections. Not just one culture, but all recorded cultures, and all the ideas for new ones. As the Constitutional Convention in the United States considered republics and constitutions from Greece, Rome, medieval Italian city-states, and Native Americans, now the world can consider those and the experience of China, India, Africa, and everywhere else in deciding where they want to go next.

2003-11-19T09:21:00.000-08:00

You Can Help

Everybody involved in aiding the poor, whether in developing countries or even in the US, needs to understand the battle between Micro$oft and Free Software, and why the Free Software movement creates better quality products.

Go to a Linux User Group meeting or a Linux install fest. You can put Linux on your computer without removing Windows.

Mac OS X users already have FreeBSD Unix and just need to install X Windows. FreeBSD is just as good as Linux, and some say better.

Try out Open Office (on Windows, if that's what you use), and see whether you really need Microsoft Office or Windows at all, and in particular whether you need to go on paying for Windows every few years.

Get your neighborhood school to try Linux and free Open Source textbooks. The User Groups would be delighted to install Linux in any school and provide basic Linux training for teachers.

We are going to set up sister-school relationships between the developed and developing parts of the world. We also plan to link to orphanages, refugee camps, and other suitable places.

Talk to your employer about Free Software. Talk to your church, mosque, synagogue, temple... Talk to any non-profit organizations you belong to.

Talk to me.

2003-11-18T11:16:00.000-08:00

The Great Conversation

There are many important uses of Simputers, but the greatest impact will come from bringing four billion more people into the global conversation on their future.

After all, who knows better what the poor of this world need than the poor themselves? I guarantee that the poor aren't the ones asking for aid to build a bigger military, or for big foreign aid projects that do not provide education and jobs for local inhabitants. I have heard (though I don't have a link for this) that the poor, when you ask them, say that they want basic survival needs met first, meaning no war or oppression, and enough food. Then they want education and opportunity for their children. Health and everything else comes after that.

I must say that I'm glad somebody asked some poor people their opinion, but I would feel better if I could hear it from the poor themselves.

Just to get a hint of what I mean about people being able to talk to each other and to the rest of us, have a look at Vis a vis: Native Tongues from Native American Public Telecommunications, with Ningali Lawford, Australian Aborigine playwright and actress and James Luna, Native American performance artist. It is being shown on PBS television stations at various times throughout November, is being shown at several film festivals, and will be available as a recording soon, we are promised.

Here we have people from two traditional cultures who have been taking their messages to the wider world, and now to each other. Before this documentary was made, these two had not met and had not seen each others' work.

Then we have the villages that have not been able to form agricultural cooperatives because they have no way to communicate with each other, and the people in villages without telephones whose children have gone away to get jobs in the city or even in other countries, or the would-be village entrepreneurs who have no place to put up a Web site.

2003-11-17T12:35:00.000-08:00

Good Source of information

The best place I know of to find out what's going on in global development is the Development Gateway. You can find out what is happening in poverty, human rights, malnutrition, and the other essential issues, and on the whole development process in various countries, especially Afghanistan and iraq. You can sign up for e-mail alerts whenever something is posted on your favorite topic. I found 24 hits today in their search engine on Simputers.

2003-10-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

Bengali Linux distribution

Ankur Bangla Live! is a LiveCD running GNOME 2.4 localized to Bengali.
The ISO can be downloaded from sourceforge.net

Release notes are also available.

This is a Beta release. Don't expect everything to work quite right, or at all, and back up your hard drive before you try it out.

Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and northeast India. It has its own alphabet.

2003-10-28T13:11:00.000-08:00

Open Voting Consortium

I have been on a mailing list for the Open Voting Consortium, where we are working on a design for Open Source software for touch-screen electronic voting machines. In the trade, these products are known as DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines, or jut DREs. The plan is to produce an auditable system in which the machines cannot be fiddled to count votes differently from what the voter told the machine to do. This means, among other things, producing a paper audit trail, and a printed ballot that the voter would have to verify before depositing it in the ballot box. In case of discrepancies between the electronic tally and the paper, the entire process could be checked over step by step.

Alan Dechert, the leader of the Consortium, handed out sample printouts from the demo version of the system at the UC Santa Cruz Forum on Electronic Voting.

Defects in current voting technology, law, and procedures became painfully evident in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, where there were vehement allegations of misconduct from both the Democratic and Republican sides, and equally vehement rebuttals. For example, the Republicans complained vociferously that the Democrats wanted to disenfranchise troops overseas by throwing out illegal absentee ballots.

There was no doubt whatsoever that tens of thousands of voters did not have their votes counted in the way they intended, because of problems with ballot design, and the fact that punched card ballots could not be verified before being placed in the ballot box. Problems included unintentionally voting for the wrong candidate (Pat Buchanan, in allmost every case), double voting (for Buchanan and then Gore, in almost every case), and failure of the cards to punch cleanly, resulting in "hanging", "dimpled", and "pregnant" chads. Without these problems, Gore would have won Florida convincingly. As it was, the election was in doubt for several weeks, with the parties and the media variously estimating changing margins of victory for either Bush or Gore, and various Florida courts and the U. S. Supreme court contradicting each other on the proper procedures for resolving the matter, amid further partisan bickering.

Elections have been stolen or subverted for nearly as long as there have been elections, going back at least to the Athenian and Roman Senates. In modern times, no major party has shown itself to be better or worse than any other. Nixon's dirty tricksters were certainly no worse in intent than the way "Landslide" Lyndon Johnson won election to the U. S. Senate in 1948 by having 200 extra ballots mysteriously turn up several days after the polls had closed. The Democratic machine in Chicago used to go by the motto "Vote early and often", and relied heavily on the cemetery vote.

At any rate, after the Florida debacle, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which provided Federal funds for upgrading voting systems, and mandated certain improvements in technology, including electronic touch-screen voting for the disabled, with auditory assistance and feedback for the blind and visually impaired. However, HAVA did not go far enough, in the opinion of election experts, in mandating security features and procedures to protect the integrity of elections.

We all knowr from experience that a computer can take your instructions and then do something completely different. Program bugs can cause incorrect computation, incorrect writing of files, loss and corruption of data, or outright crashes. Malicious code, whether inserted by trusted insiders or external attackers, could deliberately change votes as they are cast, and in the absence of hardware security measures, even fake an audit trail.

The record of the companies making voting machines is dismal, in every technology more complicated than marking a paper ballot, and particularly bad in DREs. One of the leading manufacturers, Diebold, inadventenly left a copy of much of its source code out on the Internet, where researchers downloaded and examined it. Although Diebold disputes the conclusions drawn in this research, the researchers stand by their analysis.

Paper ballots have their own problems. They are difficult or impossible for some disabled people to use without assistance, and they can be lost, stolen, replaced, or forged. Ballot boxes can be stuffed. A manual count takes too long and is too error-prone. Machines to count the ballots can shred them or crumple them up and jam. It is possible to design procedures to deal with all of these issues and with many other security hazards, but procedures are not always followed. Any good stage magician could game any of the obvious solutions, making ballot boxes disappear and reappear, and changing the contents of locked boxes under the noses of observers. Protections against these hazards are harder to design, but it can be done. Whether there will be the political will to follow the procedures is another question.

So use of DREs in at least some part of the election process is necessary, and the question is how to fix the security holes and still maintain accessibility for the disabled. Congress is considering legislation to correct some of these flaws in the earlier legislation, and will need to take up the matter again as further threats to elections are identified in the future. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE, read I-triple-E) has a project to create a standard for voting machines in general and DREs in particular, to address design, security, testing, and voting procedures). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. government plans to consider making the IEEE work a government standard, once it is finished, if it stands up to public scrutiny.

In addition to improving the quality of voting machine software, another goal of the Open Voting Consortium is to make the machines much less expensive than they are at present. Proprietary systems cost thousands of dollars per unit. However, the voting functions could easily be performed on commodity PCs with commodity printers, and verified by commodity scanners. We could build such systems around Simputers. Of course, it is necessary to create reliable systems of high quality and ease of use, for election officials and poll workers as well as for voters. Governments have procurement procedures that often require them to buy extra-cost proprietary solutions rather than off-the-shelf products. But this is a billion dollar market, just in the U.S., and many times bigger worldwide.There is no question that it could be done right and at the same time achieve economies of scale comparable to secure office computing systems. I can't predict what the price will be, but I know that it can be less than governments spend now.

This is not the whole story. We still need secure procedures, partisan and impartial observers, and the rooting out of corrupt politics in general in order to achieve clean, fair elections. These are even more pressing issues than technology in many of the contries where the new machines will be used, sooner or later.

2003-10-27T14:08:00.000-08:00

The Great Conversation

There are many important uses of Simputers, but the greatest impact will come from bringing four billion more people into the global conversation on their future.

2003-09-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Value of Free Software

Microsoft frequently gives away software for education in $20-30 million dollar lots, and sometimes as much as $100 million.

Of course, the price of the giveaway is quoted in if-sold value, which is not what it costs Microsoft to make the donations. A software package that costs $399 at retail, say the standard version of Office XP, costs about $1 to manufacture, including CD-ROM, box, and printed material (bot no manual any more).

Linux vendors also give away software, but their if-sold value is pretty much $0. You can pay for Red Hat or any of the other distributions if you want to, but you can also download them for free. At best, a Linux vendor giving away on operating system and a thousand applications can claim something like $29 a copy as the selling price, or somewhat more for the enterprise version.

This is one of the reasons why Microsoft's donations are treated as big news in the media, while Linux donations are ignored. On the other hand, Microsoft is slashing prices for countries where the governments are thinking seriously about switching to Linux for education and other programs. Thailand has a deal for Microsoft Windows XP and office for $36 a set, combined. So what would happen if Microsoft donations were reported at those prices?

Let's also take a look at the value of a Microsoft or a Linux donation. With Microsoft, if you want to go on using later versions of the software, you have to pay. Maybe you have to pay first-world prices, and maybe you have to pay the new third-world prices, but you have to pay each time, for each program or suite. With Linux, you pay the same price for the OS and the thousand applications each time, whether that is $29 or $0.

What will it take to bring developing countries across the Digital Divide? Well, if you want to go the whole way, you need to provide a computer and software for each of four billion poor people. Why one per person, and not, say, one per family, or even less? First, because we are talking about doing away with the Digital Divide, not building a few narrow bridges here and there across it. So that means that everybody needs easy access. So let's say one in each home, a sufficiont number in every school and library, one for each worker on the job, a bunch of laptops and palmtops--actually we're going to end up at some point with more than one computing device per person.

Now you can spend $500 and up per computer and maybe $36 for Windows and Office. In round numbers, about $2 trillion at one unit per poor person, without talking about all the other software needed, which very quickly exceeds the cost of the hardware, amounting to trillions of dollars more. And that is only the first time. In a few years, you will have to buy the software all over again.

What if you do it with Linux? Well, you can run Linux on a $300 desktop or a $200 handheld, and the software is free. Let us arbitrarily say $250 per unit. Again in round numbers, $1 trillion.

That's the cost. What is the value? The return on investment (ROI) for education is quite astonishing (as Ireland and india have been demonstrating), as is the ROI for health. The ROI for the economic opportunities enabled by computers and communications is inculculable. Once the process gets under way, it creates a wonderful period of exponential growth, where new prosperity leads to further improvements in education, health, opportunity, and so on.

The developing countries will generate wealth enough to pay for the new ICT, whether they do it through commercial software or Free Software. But they will do it much sooner if they can save a few trillion dollars early in the process, when it will make the biggest difference.

Now there is more to the equation than this. I haven't discussed communications equipment and costs, for a start. But that doesn't change the principle.

So forget debt forgiveness for developing countries, which would be worth a few hundred billion dollars. Forget low-cost medicine (only a few billion, so far) and agricultural sibsidies (maybe a hundred billion annually). We're talking about real money here.

2003-09-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

Puttin' on the Dog

Back in the mid-19th century the hot new communications technology was the telegraph. Jean was explaining to his friend Vaclav that the telegraph was like a dog with its head in Paris and its tail in Prague. When you pull on the dog's tail in Prague, it barks in Paris.

"Oh, yes, I see," said Vaclav, "But then how does it work the other way? Wait, don't tell me...You pat the dog on the head in Paris, and it wags its tail in Prague?"

Many years later, the wireless telegraph (radio) came in, and Ivan asked Vaclav about it. "Oh, that's easy," said Ivan. "You know how you explained the old telegraph to me, with the dog connecting Paris and Prague? Well, this wireless telegraph works exactly the same way, but without the dog."

So why do I bring this up? Because there was a question on the Simputer Development mailing list at Yahoo! Groups about Fidonet for developing countries. Fidonet was a way to do e-mail and file transfers before there was an Internet. People would set up their home computers to answer the phone and accept data transfers from other Fidonet computers, then call up another Fidonet computer and pass the data along. Almost all of the calls could be made for free as local calls, since local calling areas overlap.

Now if you have been following along here, you know that wireless communications technology for villages is the Next Big Thing in global development. See links at the right for more. In some areas, networking will start in the towns where electric power and telephone lines are available. Set up a wireless transceiver in a high place in the town, and another in a village within line-of-sight range. Then you can do it again from that village to villages further from the town, and so on. For villages too far from any other, put in satellite dishes. Mostly this will cost less than $1,000 per village for the wireless equipment and the first Simputer, and that one wireless link will support dozens of Simputers.

Now we have free wireless links in local languages from village to village, to towns, to other towns (over regular Internet connections), to other villages, and we can pass information from any point in the network to any other. So there you are. Free Fidonet, but without the dog.

2003-09-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

Efficiency of e-government

E-government initiative moves forward

It takes a citizen an average of 3.5 visits – about nine hours – to a government office to complete any given transaction, like obtaining a driver’s license or applying for a building permit.

Do the same thing via the Internet, though, and the time and money saved are enormous, according to Ahmed Darwish, program director for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (MCIT)’s electronic government, or “E-government,” initiative. For every 100,000 government transactions performed on line, explained Darwish, the country saves £E 1 million.

Source: e-Government & Technology Middle East blog

2003-09-01T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Burning Man

If you light a fire for your children, you keep them warm for an evening.

If you set fire to your children, you keep them warm for the rest of their lives.

What'll it be, folks? The fires of passion, aversion, and delusion, or the fires of compassion, inclusion, and truth?

(with thanks to Shakyamuni Buddha, Alfred Bester and Terry Pratchett)

2003-08-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

Wiping Out the Digital Divide

You hear a lot about bridging the Digital Divide, which still means leaving all the have-nots at the wrong end of a narrow bridge most of the time. We need to obliterate the Digital Divide, and just bring everybody in together.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Challenge to Silicon Valley identified the key issues. It called on the tech industry to provide computers and wireless communications capabilities that will be affordable for villages that presently lack electric power and telephone connections. That means using solar and other renewable power, and providing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to connect to the global telephone network. This whole blog is about the effects of such systems on health, education, microbanking, e-governance, and communications. Getting the poor of the world into the global conversation, with each other and with the rest of us, will have the biggest long-term consequences. It will allow the poor into their own regional and national political discussion, and also provide a new voice in the globalization debates. After all, the poor know better than anyone else what their real problems are, and what is most likely to help in dealing with them.

Besides the Simputer makers, here are the leading players and some of the supporting cast in the ongoing drama.

The UN ICT Task Force is following up on the Secretary-General's challenge.

The Grameen Technology Center's Village Computing Project, blogged here on July 19, is conducting trials in Tamil Nadu.

The Hewlett-Packard e-inclusion project is wiring East Palo Alto and conducting trials in North India.

That's a good start. We have the leading international organization, the non-profit arm of the leader of the microbanking movement, and one of the top high-tech companies, together with numerous small tech companies, all working toward a common goal.

The Jhai Foundation is placing solar-powered computers with wireless communications in Laotian villages.

The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement has organized 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka, mostly without the use of computers, and has started placing computers and wireless communications systems throughout its organization.

The Black Data Processing Association is working on projects in Africa, particularly in Linux training.

The government of Sierra Leone held a conference earlier this year on the contributions that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) could make to reconstruction after their disastrous civil war. Issues included rehabilitation of child soldiers, medical care for amputees, reuniting refugee families, recovery of stolen land, and data gathering on war crimes.

These are just a few of the important initiatives. There are already more than I can keep up with.

2003-07-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

Simputer FAQ

1. What is the Simputer?
2. What features make Simputers suited to use by poor and illiterate people?
3. What are Simputers for?
4. Where can I get a Simputer?
5. What software runs on Simputers?
6. What products for Simputers are in development?
7. Where can I find out more about the Simputer?
8. How does the Simputer differ from a PDA?

1. What is the Simputer?

Although the Simputer (Simple, Inexpensive, Multilingual Computer) looks a lot like a PDA, it was designed primarily for use by poor and even illiterate people to provide access to health, education, information, and other services. As a Linux handheld with unequalled connectivity at an unheard-of low price, the Simputer turns out to be a platform well-suited to Free Software, commercial applications, and embedded systems of many kinds. The basic model starts at US$206.00.

The Simputer has the following connections built in.

Infrared (IrDA)
SmartCard reader/writer
USB master
USB slave
Sound I/O
56K modem
Serial port
Compact Flash connector (CF II)
External power

Simputers can be connected to anything supported by infrared, USB, or Compact Flash interfaces, a serial port, or a modem. This includes wired and wireless LANs, the Internet, data acquisition systems, GPS, Flash storage devices, hard drives, CD-ROM and DVD drives, mouse, keyboard, external monitor, wired and IrDA printers, and most other computer peripherals and communications systems.

2. What features make Simputers suited to use by poor and illiterate people?

The Simputer is designed with multilingual capability, including Text-to-Speech conversion for several languages of India. Voice recognition will be added later, and voice capabilities will be expanded to other languages.

A very large pool of no-cost software can be put on the Simputer.

Free Software and Open Source software provide access to source code. This means that such programs can be adapted to new needs without waiting on the good will of a vendor. The commercial operating system vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and other commercial Unix vendors, do not see a business case for support of all of the languages of India, nor do they see a business case for suporting other languages of poor countries in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.

Simputers can be shared using inexpensive SmartCards for private storage. This reduces the cost per person greatly.

Simputers use 2 AA batteries for power, or an external transformer. Lithium ion AA batteries can be recharged using solar or human power in areas where there is no electric supply.

3. What is the Simputer for?

Applications of the Simputer are in development in many areas. Applications directed especially at the needs of the poor include health, education, government services, microbanking, access to information, and general communication. Other applications include inventory management, agriculture, scientific and government data acquisition, financial services, construction, and many more.

4. Where can I get a Simputer?

Simputer development systems are currently available. This includes a monochrome Simputer, a color Simputer, the Simputer SDK on CD-ROM, and two days' training, all for US$1500.00. The Simputer SDK includes all of the tools needed to compile applications for the Simputer on any supported Linux system, or on Windows.

Simputers are not in retail distribution. Some potential development partners are in discussions with Encore Technologies, the principal manufacturer, about retail versions. FCC approval is being sought in the U.S., and similar efforts are under way for other markets.

5. What software runs on Simputers?

The Simputer comes with standard Unix utilities, a hardware "control panel" set of utilities, and the following applications and demonstrations.

E-mail
Notepad
Address book (Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, English)
Calculator
Web browser
File browser
Unix terminal running sh shell command interpreter
MP3 music player
Image file viewer
IrDA printing utility

Banking demo
Billing demo
Land survey demo (English and Kannada)
Meter reader demo
SmartCard reader/writer demo
Text-to-Speech demo

There are thousands of Unix/Linux applications that will run on Simputers. Many have been compiled for the StrongARM processor in the Simputer, and are available for download. Others can be cross-compiled from source code on any system running the Simputer SDK, and then downloaded to the Simputer.

A Java system and several APL systems are being ported to the Simputer. Programming languages currently available for Simputer development include C, C++, Perl, Python, and LISP. There are Integrated Development Environments supporting all of these languages together with GUI development tools and numerous libraries.

6. What products for Simputers are in development?

The Showcase section of simputerland.com has information on a number of applications and tools in development by the following partner companies.

Africa Digital Bridges
Regional Distributor of Encore's Simputer in Africa and the Middle East

Analytix Systems
Mobile solutions, analysis and data-mining

ANT Labs
Wireless and broadband networking

Appear Networks
Wireless solutions for WISPs (wireless internet service providers)

Arguz
Supply chain solutions

Deltra Software
Multi-lingual Text-to-Speech

E&I / DigicircleEuropean Community Market distributor
Developer's network
ERP application

ekgaon technologies
Information Systems
Knowledge Management
E-governance
Rural Networking
Micro-Enterprise Management Systems
Multi-lingual Computing

Eutech Cybernetics
Intelligent building management
Property and facility management
Energy asset management
Network management
Comprehensive solution for hospitals and networked healthcare organizations
Turnkey contract programming services

F I T
client-server life insurance and pensions products

G4 Software
Scalable enterprise solutions

IBIZ Consulting
Enterprise business solutions

INitiate
IT awareness and literacy in a developing countries

Knowledge Systems
Bluetooth Protocol Stack for Linux

Maringo Tree
Linux consulting
Wireless LANs
Internet Security
GRID/Cluster-based high performance computing
Kernel hardening
Embedded systems

Maruthi-IT.com
Enterprise application suite
Financial management
Trade documentation
Order processing
Procurement
Supply chain management
Customer relationship management

Pyxis Technology Sol
Pyxis Civic Management System

SathSoft
Micro-Banking and Micro-Credit
Land Records
Meter reading
Billing

Spider Systems
ERP Software Implementation
Web-enabled business solutions
Embedded systems development
Database administration support
Sales Force Automation
Training

Web-Dunia
Indian language support

7. Where can I find out more about the Simputer?

The following sites have information on the history of the Simputer, its detailed hardware and software design, the people and companies involved, press accounts, and much more.

The Simputer Trust (originators of the design)
Encore Technologies (manufacturer)
Picopeta (manufacturer)
Sourceforge Free and Open Source software development
Simputer
Dhvani Text-to-Speech

Mailing lists
Yahoo Groups
simputer@yahoogroups.com
simpdev@yahoogroups.com

8. How does the Simputer differ from a PDA?

The Simputer has greater connectivity (FAQ 1), much lower cost per user through sharing (FAQ 2), and much greater support for languages of India (FAQ 5). Of course, a PDA version of the Simputer could be created.

2003-07-19T23:24:00.000-07:00

The Grameen Foundation Village Computing Project

The Grameen Bank in Bangla Desh was the beginning of the microbanking movement, which has loaned money to tens of millions of poor people, either to get out of debt to local loan sharks, or to start or improve some small-scale business. Loans might go to buy sewing machines, farm equiipment, or cell phones.

Placing cell phones in villages has turned out to be one of the most fruitful microbanking programs, since each phone provides a modest living to the owner, who rents it out to others in the area, and also provides economic opportunity, improved access to health care, and communications between villagers and their relatives who have gone to the city or to some other country to find work.

The obvious potential for low-cost computers in villages has led the Grameen Foundation USA Technology Center to create a Village Computing Project, pursuing many of the same ideas as Simputer partners.

The first stage of the Grameen project is the creation of information kiosks to present information in the Tamil language. Field trials in Tamil Nadu in the south of India are scheduled to begin in August with units made by Drishtee. Encore plans to get into a later round of these trials, and will work with the Grameen Technology Center on plans for future projects in telemedicine, wireless Internet, education, and so on.

Microbanking institutions have helped tens of millions of people out of dire poverty. We need only to multiply that effect by a factor of a hundred in coverage, and perhaps another hundred in income levels (since poverty in many places is defined as an income of $1 a day or less, and some developed countries have economic production in the region of $100 a day per person). The task is huge, but not impossible. Our most important tool is the law of compound interest, which produces large multiples out of modest annual percentage gains, now that we have started. We also know that a period of extremely rapid growth is possible at some point in the future, although we do not know when it will begin in any particular country.

2003-07-12T03:49:00.000-07:00

Elevator Speech

I have been practicing this, and I thoulght that others might find it helpful in case somebody wants a quick verson of the Simputer story. It takes less than 30 seconds to say, so you really can get the essential points in if somebody asks you on an elevator.

Hi, I'm Ed Cherlin, the Evangelist for the Simputer from Encore Technologies. We offer handheld computers that poor and illiterate people can afford and can use to get on the Internet even without access to power lines and telephone service. The technologies to support this include text-to-speech software for languages of India and elsewhere, solar-powered battery chargers, and wireless communications. Although poor people can't afford Simputers for their individual use, a village can buy one to share. We also sell Simputers for enterprise applications, and plan to offer other Simputer products including low-cost, low-power servers, wearable computers, tablet computers, and controller boards for embedded systems. You can find out more at Simputerland.com.

2003-07-04T14:42:00.000-07:00

Not in My Territory

We want to place Simputers in villages and enterprises all over the world, and we are getting a lot of interest from almost everywhere in the world, but there are a few places where we are legally barred from doing business. There are export controls and sanctions imposed by the US and other countries, but that isn't what I am talking about. I mean countries that won't let us in.

The top place on the list goes to North Korea. The population is allowed no contact with foreigners. especially with anybody who speaks Korean, like me. (I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Seoul in the 1960s.) South Korean tourists aren't allowed to talk to any North Koreans other than their minders. With rare exceptions, you can't make phone calls into or out of North Korea. Aid workers are not permitted in to see what happens to the aid they provide.

Burma (Myanmar) makes it almost as hard for the public to get on the Internet. The government has a big official Information and Communication Technology Park, but no communications technology for the people. Burma has tight laws regulating modems, requiring explicit government permission for any individual to own one, and they don't give permission to anybody who wants to empower the poor. Since Simputers have modems built in, that rather limits the possibilities.

Libya used to be a problem, but recently Internet service has been offered to anybody with a telephone connection and enough money. That still isn't a lot of people, but it is a big improvement.

The rest of the legal restrictions we face on deployment are in the few countries that deny Internet service to minorities. This mainly concerns severe restrictions and outright repression of Kurds in Syria and Turkey. Iran regards the Kurds as Persians who talk funny, since Kurdish and Persion (Farsi) are about as closely related as Spanish and Portuguese or Catalan (another language banned in its own country for decades). So Kurdish access to the Internet is restricted in Iran, but not more so than everybody else's.

Turkey is different, because of Turkish fears that the Kurdish part of the country, containing about a fifth of the population, will secede. The Turkish government, under the impetus of that fear and of the previous humiliation of the loss of the former Turkish Empire, for fifteen years implemented almost every counter-productive policy toward the Kurds that one could well think of, including arrests, paramilitary actions, forcible drafting of Kurds to fight Kurds, extra-judicial executions, torture, banning the Kurdish language, putting Kurdish children into Turkish-only "boarding schools", and imprisoning a duly elected Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament for violating Article 81 of the Law on Political Parties, which forbids mention of racial or religious minorities. "Leyla Zana, a HEP deputy, appeared wearing the 'Kurdish colours' (red, yellow and green) in her hair and announced in Kurdish that she was taking her parliamentary oath in Turkish under protest." Kurds in Turkey were not allowed to watch satellite TV shows in Kurdish. And after all of that, the Turkish government was surprised that Kurds wanted to secede even more.

Under EU pressure Turkey began lightening up on the Kurds in 2002, legalizing the language and lifting some other repressive laws. The EU has stated that Turkey cannot move to the next stage in the process of joining the EU until these laws are seen to be implemented fully. With the prospect of enforceable civil rights, the Kurds have given up armed conflict and entered a purely political struggle. Who would have thought? Not the Turks, anyway.

Syria is in some ways worse for the Kurds. The Syrian government treats about 200,000 of their Kurds as stateless non-persons. These people have no citizenship, cannot get birth certificates or passports, cannot send their children to school, cannot get government jobs, and face denial of many other human rights.

In stark contrast the Kurds in Iraq have been self-governing for more than a decade, and had Internet cafes in cities and many towns while Arab Iraqis could get Internet access only in Baghdad and only under heavy security surveillance and numerous restrictions. For example, e-mail was not permitted, and many sites were blocked. There is currently one public Internet access point in Baghdad, and no others in Arab Iraq at all. The Occupation forces don't forbid access, but neither are they doing anything to make access available.

The Indian government cut off Internet service in Jammu and Kashmir in January 2002 as an "anti-terrorist" measure, but restored it in June 2002.

It wouldn't surprise me to hear of other instances of laws depriving minorities of access to the Internet. If you know of any, please send me the information and if possible a Web link to sources.

Intentional deprivation of access to information is a clear violation of the UN Declaration on Human Rights (See my post of yesterday), so it is time that somebody got organized to protest against it.

There are also countries that jail citizens for posting political messages on the Internet, notably China, Tunisia, and Vietnam.

We can't very well deploy Internet service in combat zones, such as Congo, Liberia, or Sudan, although the contending militaries could if they wanted to. But that is a topic for another day.

2003-07-03T21:17:00.000-07:00

Divisio Digitalis delenda est

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 26.

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

The Bangalore Declaration

Impact of Information Technology

...

I.T. [Information Technology] holds a unique promise for women in developing countries to empower them to move beyond their traditionally assigned roles, and to help them to take their rightful place in society by active participation in all areas of the economy.

Timely access to appropriate information and knowledge is the key to development, for both the individual and society.

I.T. must be used to strengthen the role of the media in making democratic structures more participatory and transparent.

The priority application of I.T. should be in the following three broad areas, namely, information access, communication and economic transactions, a few examples of which are given below:

agriculture on a priority basis,

improved access to primary and reproductive health care,

access to reliable data for effective planning and administration at all levels, and

low-cost communication to enable cooperation between people everywhere.

Among these rights, a lot has been done on education and free speech, but not as much on seeking and receiving information. This is what we have called the Digital Divide. You hear a lot about bridging the Digital Divide, but I don't like to think in those terms. We can't fulill the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Bangalore Declaration unless we obliterate the Digital Divide from the landscape and from our minds. If you have followed my drift in earlier postings, you will see that the economics of the Simputer allow us to do just that.

Certainly we can't do it all at once. Nobody could pay out a trillion dollars to give everybody on Earth a computer and net access, and even if we could raise the money, it would take a decade to build and install the equipment. Even then, we wouldn't have enough trained people to manage it all.

What can we do then? We can talk about putting one public-access computer into each of 100,000 villages at something under $1,000 each, including wireless connections, solar power, and some other necessary equipment. A program that costs $100,000,000 worldwide is well within the reach of many governments, several UN agencies, and a number of foundations. We know that it would be possible for microbanking organizations to do something similar, and in fact the Grameen Foundation's Village Computing Project is experimenting on this line. Expanding to the rest of the villages, however many of them there are, would then be straightforward. Those that couldn't get a land or local wireless connection could get satellite Internet for about $2,000 for a two-way, high-bandwidth dish and receiver.

Given a wireless network connecting most of the villages in the world, we can look at how to expand from there into the schools, the health system, government services, barking, and much more. We don't know how fast economic opportunities would grow to the point where people could buy their own computers, but we know that in many places it would happen, and that we would see a period of exponential growth in usage powered by expanding opportunities in education and jobs. How far forward that would carry the world economy, nobody can say. But we can foresee a point at which everybody who wants access to computers and the Internet can have it.

There will not be a day when we can hold the celebration for the demise of the Digital Divide around the world, any more than we have had such a day in any of the developed countries. In the US, for example, it just crept up on us, as a combination of increasing computer ownership, increasing geographic coverage by Internet services, and increasing public access to computers at libraries, employment offices, and other government services. Except for the most impoverished Indian reservations and the remotest rural communities, anybody in the US who wants to get on a computer can. It would be helpful to let people more people get on more of the time, especially in schools. With desktop Linux systems going for as little as $200, there is really no excuse any more for not providing them to all schoolchildren. So the remains of the Digital Divide, in the US at least, come down to politics rather than economics.

This political problem may well recur in other countries. But I'm not going to let that stop me. We know what to do now, so I've already started the celebration, and I'm just going to keep right on going. Care to join me?

2003-07-02T14:44:00.000-07:00

Humor in disaster

I have been hearing lately about several Middle-Eastern comedians and comedy troupes such as the Arabian Knights taking on some quite serious issues. Among them are Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi, and Iranian comedians who make fun of the excesses post-9/11, or the vagaries of the current Peace Process, or Roadmap, or Both of You Sit in the Corner until You Are Willing to Play Nice Together program that somebody or other puts forward.

I greatly favor this development, especially in cases where supposed adversaries get together on the same bill or in the same sketch. We have had many examples in the past in the US, and it is one of the more promising cultural exports of our age. I think of Chevy Chase, as an interviewer, giving Richard Pryor, as a job applicant, a word association test.

Chase: Spear chucker.
Pryor: Honky.
Chase: Jungle bunny.
Pryor: Dead honky.

and so on.This approach works (for me, anyway) for 9/11, the total failure so far of reconstruction in Iraq, the Palestinian question, the former Yugoslavia, Burma, North Korea, Liberia, the Congo, Chechnya...well, maybe not Chechn

This is nothing new. See, for example, On the Damned Human Race, by Mark Twain, published posthumously

"...untimely laughter to stave off far more untimely tears."--James Branch Cabell, in Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, 1919

In the 1930s, they say, the Gestapo in Berlin, Germany, hired a Jew to carry a sign reading "Jews, get out! Make room for Germans." The Jew was so poor he took the job, but when he came back next week, the Gestapo refused to pay him, saying that none of them had seen him carrying the sign. "Oh, you just looked in the wrong place," explained the Jew. "I was carrying it around the Jewish cemetery."

Actually, in some places we are still recycling the same jokes.

"They're rioting in Africa,
There's strife in Iran.
What nature doesn't do to us
Will be done by our fellow man."
Merry Minuet
The Kingston Trio
Live from the Hungry i
1959

"I got fired from the Post Office [beat] for putting mail for Alabama in the Foreign slot." Dick Gregory, in the 1960s

This next is one of mine.

In England they tell jokes about frog-eating Frenchman. In France they tell Belgian jokes. The Belgians have put-downs about the Dutch, the Dutch about the Germans, and the Germans about the Poles. Poland has a long line of black humor about Russian Communism, and a new line of putdowns about the current Russian economy. In Russia, they tell Armenian Radio jokes, and the Armenians have their own line of black humor about Turks, Azeris, and Persians, who in turn all put down the Arabs.

To Arabs, however, Jews are no laughing matter. We have to do something about that.

Now the Jews tell jokes on everybody, including themselves. Jews say that when you tell a joke to a Jew, he says, "Oh, that's an old one," and he can tell it better.

I wonder what the first Simputer joke will be. Suggestions?

2003-06-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Nice shirt

has a generic humanoid carbon unit t-shirt that makes a great anti-racist statement. We're getting a lot of nonsense from some quarters about people taking jobs and other opportunities away from already-privileged people. Let's get the real program out. We can work on many ways to make the pie large enough for everybody. The Simputer is just one of the tools we can use.

2003-06-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

Simputer economics

The purpose of today's screed is to point out that the Simputer makes it possible to run a comprehensive global anti-poverty project at a profit, so that we don't have to fool around with thousands of little tiny non-profit organizations tackling inadequate slices of the whole problem. A corollary is that we have a new bottom-up model for globalization, quite different from the multinational corporate model. This new model is based on the poor having the opportunity to state their preferences for what happens next.

The design goals of the Simputer were

Usability by illiterate people through the use of text-to-speech and voice recognition

No dependence on wired communications through the use of WiFi, BlueTooth, and other wireless technologies

No dependence on wired electricity through the use of rechargeable batteries and renewable power

Minimal cost per user through the use of SmartCards

The last point requires a bit of explanation. SmartCards cost $1 or so in quantities of a few hundred or more. If one Simputer were to be placed in a village, users would have to pay $1 for the SmartCard, plus a share of the Simputer, plus a share of the communications cost.

Suppose that the Simputer, solar power, batteries, wireless Internet link, and everything else needed cost $700, and suppose that a microbanking institution loaned a villager the money, to be repaid over two years at 12% interest. The loan payments would come to about $1 a day. Simputers have built-in 56K modems. Let us suppose that a 56K wireless connection could be made available for $60 a month, or $2 a day. Let us further suppose that the owner could rent out the Simputer 10 hours a day, six days a week. What then is the pricing plan for users, so that the service provider could cover her costs and make a profit?

Well, we have the $1 SmartCard as a one-time cost. Then we have $3.50 per business day for the Simputer and the modem line, which comes to 35 cents an hour. Charge double that, and the service provider is making $3 a day, or about $900 annually, a very decent income in villages where the official poverty is defined to be $1 a day, as in India, or even 50 cents a day, as in some parts of Africa. So now our village entrepreneur is charging 70 cents an hour.

If poverty is an income of $1 a day, then poor people can't casually get on line with this service and surf the Web. But poor people can get on when it saves them money or brings them other significant benefit. What might do that?

In India, the government provides food aid to the poor, distributed through local merchants. It is reported that the merchants frequently claim that food shipments have not arrived when in fact the merchants have sold them off and kept all of the money. A SmartCard service could verify deliveries and also verify which individuals have received their allotments

Farmers would be able to check prices for supplies in several neighboring towns, and also check prices offered for their crops. Again, it is not necessary for each farmer to spend money in order for all of the farmers in a village to get the best prices available.

Teachers and students would be able to get educational materials from the Net and share them. A one-hour download at 56K bps is about 18 megabytes.

With telemedicine, a health worker could bring a portable instrument kit that plugs into a Simputer. The kit would contain a blood pessure cuff and meter (which would also measure pulse rate), a digital thermometer, a digital stethescope for heart and lung sounds, and a digital video camera suitable for viewing the back of the eye and the interior of the ear, nose, and throat. All of this equipment is available off the shelf today. In addition, there are digital meters for various blood tests, including glucose levels for diabetes.

The data would be sent via wireless communications to a doctor in a clinic somewhere (since doctors cannot afford to travel to villages). The doctor could also ask questions and hear the answers. The result is the equivalent of a standard office visit. If further tests, emergency services, or urgent care are needed, patients could be told what to do on the spot. Villagers would again need SmartCards, to carry their medical information with them. The government might provide the SmartCards.

I could go on like this, but the other possibilities I would cite share the same essential characteristics. None of them involve charity. Some would be funded by governments, as in public schools or a National Health insurance system (or, in the US, Medicaid), and others would be valuable enough and inexpensive enough for the users to pay for them themselves. The villagers could afford to buy the computers and to pay for services, at the same time creating jobs.

In the longer term, access to the Internet would allow village businesses (crafts, for example, or clothing or shoes) to access markets outside the villages, and other businesses to access new markets in the villages. We could expect to see the digital equivalent of the old Sears and Monkey Wards catalogs springing up with merchandise suited to local needs and local cultures. At this point, the combination of schools, economic opportunity, and access to consumer goods would put many areas on the path of accelerated development.

Of course none of this will make people happy, but as Ogden Nash pointed out,
"Certainly there are things in life that money can't buy, but it's really funny.
Have you ever tried to buy them without money?"

2003-06-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

ISPaidkit a la mode de Baghdad

Suitable for any emergency occasion, such as earthquake, fire, flood, storm, or recently ended war, where power and telephone systems are down.
Preparation time: one to two weeks
Serves several million.

Ingredients

1 satellite Internet dish
2 Simputer servers
1 omnidirectional wireless receiver/transmitter
3 desktop computers
1 diesel UPS
100 wireless receiver/transmitters
100 WiFi HotSpots
100 solar power supplies
2000 Simputers with WiFi
200,000 SmartCards
Sysadmins
Local liaison
Installation crew
Web designer
Content creators fluent in local languages

Preparation

Rent space in tallest available centrally-located building.
Get permission from 100 local sites to install wireless gear and 20 Simputers each. These can be schools, libraries, government offices, churches, mosques, or any other location offering public access.
Deal with legal permissions (import permits, visas, licenses, etc.)
Send people and equipment to site of emergency
Hire locals as security guards.
Install.
Set up information Web site for emergency information, and emergency mailing lists.
Open Internet service to public, NGOs, government, and press, offering Web browsing, e-mail accounts, file transfer, Web hosting, blogging, and other services.

2003-06-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

Say what?

RE: No ORHA Web ste
From: "Harley, Harriet" <HHarley@usaid.gov>
To: "'cherlin@pacbell.net'"< cherlin@pacbell.net>

Dear Mr. Cherlin,

Thank you for your e-mail concerning Iraq. Between January 31 and March 4,
2003, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) issued nine
procurement actions for reconstruction work in war-torn Iraq. Three grants
have also been awarded to specialized agencies of the United Nations.

Each award is detailed on our web site -- http://www.usaid.gov/iraq. These
reconstruction awards include an initial incremental funding amount to start
activities and a total estimated amount for the full duration of the
contract. This total estimated amount is based on an estimated level of
effort that could be needed for full performance of the contract. However,
it is currently unknown whether this amount will actually be needed. The
final amount could be less.

Each of the 8 prime contracts awarded may require subcontract work or the
hiring of addition employees. USAID prime contractors select their own
subcontractors or employees. For information concerning employment or
subcontracting opportunities, you should contact the prime contractor
directly.

Information concerning any future prime contract solicitations will be
posted to the Iraq section of our web site (see web address above.) in a
timely manner. You may also wish to subscribe to our Iraq e-mail list to
receive rapid e-mail notifications of significant USAID/Iraq news. You may
subscribe to this e-mail list via our web site as well. For more information
on the USAID procurements that will support the reconstruction of Iraq
please see the "USAID Reconstruction Contracting Questions and Answers Fact
Sheet" on our web site at
http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2003/fs030411.html.

Thank you for your interest in USAID's work in Iraq and your willingness to
help in our efforts.

Sincerely,

Harriet Harley
USAID Information Center

-----Original Message-----
From: cherlin@pacbell.net [mailto:cherlin@pacbell.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 4:27 PM
To: pinquiries@usaid.gov
Subject: No ORHA Web ste

This form was filled out at:
http://www.usaid.gov/public_inquiries.html

User's name: Edward Cherlin

Country: United States
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Contact? Please Contact Me

I find it appalling that there is no ORHA Web site, and no contact
information for ORHA on the Web anywhere.

I further find it appalling that USAID, its prime contractor Bechtel, ORHA,
and the Coalition military make no provision for Internet access by Iraqis.
There is no mention of any plans for Internet service anywhere on any of
their Web sites.

2003-06-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

First Mobile Systems Conference Report

Although the first round of Simputers is barely present in the market, it isn't too soon to think about the next generation models. What would you like to see? We know that much wider language support is coming, including text-to-speech and voice recognition. More applications will come pre-installed on future models. An e-mail client and a new browser are on the current list for sure, and Encore is exploring many other packages. Many more Linux applications will become available in forms that can be downloaded and installed easily. Various people on the Simputer list and elsewhere have suggested built-in wireless capability, larger screens, an Ethernet connection, Windows CE, full PDA functionality, and other features, most of which are in development somewhere at Encore or one of its partner companies. This is great stuff, of course, but I'm getting excited about even more remarkable capabilities that we can foresee.

I recently spent two days at the ACM/Usenix Mobile Systems Conference in San Francisco, and I have several new items on my own wish list as a result. One is a computer that I can wear, another is a computer that can automatically join the network when I arrive in a new town or a new office and automatically find the resources that I might like to use, and a third is a computer that can seamlessly move between different communications modes as I move around, or plug and unplug, the way my cell phone can hand of from one cell to another. Of course handing off between a direct wired, IrDA, or wireless connection between two units, a wired or wireless LAN, and the Internet as I move in or out of range is a lot harder than a cell phone handoff, but at the conference I heard how it could be done. More about ideas two and three another time, after I get a chance to talk to more of the people involved. They need not just technology, but a set of international standards, a lot of money, and some way to organize the whole process to keep from falling over each other's feet as we get started.

Anyway, the hot idea for me right now is the wearable Simputer, which is possible right now for the bleeding-edge early adopter with nothing more than technology and cash. To make this a product, we need to replace the screen on the Simputer with a heads-up display, and include a one-hand keyboard. To fool around with the idea, we need a pluggable display (available off the rack), the keyboard, and some of those children's shoes with built-in lights, rewired to the power connector. These shoes are powered by the wearer walking, and I'm told that walking generates enough power to keep a handheld computer's batteries charged.

Think about that. If you work sitting down in an office, you can keep your Simputer plugged in all the time, even if your office isn't on the electrical grid. You can just set up a solar cell on the roof or the windowsill. And if you work standing up and walking around, then you generate the power you need yourself.

So what's the big deal about wearable computing, you might be asking yourself, for someone who doesn't walk around all day? Well, maybe it won't be a big deal to you. But think about how people are going to use handheld computers. The way things are now, they have to hold the computer in one hand and the stylus in the other, and they have to look at the screen much of the time. This is what we call heads-down computing, especially if the user is doing it most of the day. It is how you program, and write, and study, and enter data, but it is not how you want to conduct an interview, or an inventory, or talk to a customer or client. If you can look at another person, or at some object you want to deal with, and have a hand free besides, you can be much more effective and efficient.

A lot of people have been talking about wearable computers for ten years and more, and a few of them have been doing something about it, but it is only now becoming practical in products, and nobody has put the pieces of the puzzle together yet. The Simputer part would be easy for the design team. We can design and build a model without the tiny screen of current Simputers, and with a socket to plug in a head-mounted or glasses-mounted display. That display would have a tiny LCD or LED chip, perhaps a backlight, and some lenses so that the screen would appear to the user to be full size and at a comfortable viewing distance. The computer would need a display controller chip matched to the display chip's resolution, color palette, memory architecture, and control signals. The low-power Geode 9211 display controller chip that I once documented for National Semiconductor would do, and there are others like it.)

Previous heads-up displays have been too expensive, limited in viewing angle, and otherwise unsatisfactory. Recent products have switched from glass to plastic lenses, which saves money, with improved optical design. The tiny display chip we need is much less expensive than a flat-panel display, and draws far less power. The main problem that remains is that current volume is far too low. We need a market of 10,000 units to get the manufacturing economies of scale to kick in.

Thad Starner of Georgia Tech, who was at the Mobile Systems Conference, was wearing a $1,000 display, but he assures me that there is a design availaible of acceptable visual quality that could be made for $60 each in quantity.

You can't get a touch screen on a heads-up display, so we would need some other device for typing and pointing. There is currently a one-hand keyboard with a USB connection, the Twiddler2, for $220, and that price also would come down sharply with quantity production. You have to touch type, of course, and you have to learn more key combinations (chords) than on a two-hand keyboard, but I hear that it doesn't take any longer to learn than a regular keyboard.

Now, let us come back to reality. This system would cost about US$1500.00 today. If the estimates I have been given are correct, then at the 10,000 unit production level, the price would be about $400. And a wearable is not a shareable. So this is not the Simputer we know, love, and wish we could get our hands on. It is what I call Gee-Whiz technology. It would be a terrific draw in a trade show booth, but nobody other than a gadget freak like me would plunk down cash, certainly not company cash, without seeing a specific benefit in a real application that would overcome the resistance to the idea from managent, finance, and above all the users. That means that it has a quite restricted set of applications to start out with, and it will take quite a while to grow past them.

So, then...so what? Well, I certainly want one. If you, too, would like a computer that you can walk around in, or you know of a compelling application for one, definitely let me know. If there is a way to make it happen, I'll push for it. Look for me to turn up sometime wearing my homebrew version.

2003-06-12T00:07:00.000-07:00

The Simputer is intended to be a disruptive technology. Unfortunately, marketers trying to make every new gadget acronym-complete and fully buzzword compliant have taken over the term, so we need to dump the hype and look at some real examples first.

A true disruptive technology changes the nature of the economy and of prevailing political systems. Swords and chariots are good examples, as are gunpowder, ships capable of sailing into the wind, steam power and the telegraph. PCs and the Internet qualify, as do cell phones in developing countries.

HDTV doesn't change things that much, nor do PDAs. They are important developments, but they continue in the same line as the products they replace. Digital video recorders have a lot of economic potential, so far unrealized, but definitely enough so that media companies are taking defensive action. Nevertheless, there doesn't seem to be much potential political impact.

Chariots brought about the empires of India, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Gunpowder enabled the Kings of France to gain real authority over their nobles. Ship technology created the Age of Empire and airplanes ended it. Cell phones have allowed the public in many countries to bypass their state telephone monopolies, resulting in accelerated economic and political growth within those countries, and between them and the rest of the world.

The Simputer supports new economic options for computing and communications, disrupting existing models for the computer and communications businesses. The starting point is that Simputers are designed for poor people by incorporating shareability. The built-in SmartCard reader enables a variety of applications for which the individual user needs only a SmartCard, while the service provider pays for the computer. Furthermore, Simputers can operate without power and telephone lines. Solar and other renewable power sources are quite adequate for keeping a spare pair of AA batteries charged. In fact, those shoes with lights in them, powered by walking or running, can put out enough power to run a Simputer or an external battery charger.

All of this means that Simputers can be targeted at enterprise and government applications serving two or three billion people who are beyond the reach of previous computer systems. Trials are going on in banking, postal money transfer, agricultural surveys, and billing systems. The government of India is seriously considering buying over a billion SmartCards to hand out to all of their citizens. Many other countries are looking into similar projects, as are NGOs and international organizations.

The economic impact in terms of development is unknown but clearly huge. The impact on the computer industry is also unknown but huge, starting from the fact that revolutionary designs can come from India and many other countries around the world outside the established tech centers. Another major factor is the use of Linux and of Free Software and Open Source software on Simputers. The movement away from proprietary software has been gathering momentum for many years, and has now emerged at the level of official government policy in a number of countries. It is obvious that schools where the teacher makes less than $1 a day cannot acquire and teach commercial software. In the last year, Linux applications have matured to the point where schools do not need to use commercial software. In many of the Simputer's target countries, we can expect Linux to become dominant before it happens in the US and other developed countries.

The political results will be even greater, when people in every village will be able to download free software, contact each other by e-mail, and join in the global conversation. It is not only local and national politics that will change. Simputers offer a bottom-up road to a global economy and a new global legal and political order that is entirely different from the current corporate model for globalization. We do not know what the results of these competing forces will be, but we do know that they will be interesting.