JonCamfieldBlog

The video archive of last Thursday's discussion at the World Bank on the total cost of ICT4E projects is now online at the Bank's eDevelopment thematic group blog

Posted by Jon at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Come by for a lively discussion on TCO (that I get to start out!)

From the world bank:

EVENT REMINDER
A World Bank ICT and Education Community of Interest Discussion, in coordination
with
the e-Development Thematic Group, infoDev and the DC-based Technology Salon

How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): A Study of Models of Affordable Computing for
Schools in Developing Countries

The event will be webcast live via http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live and archived for later viewing online.

Speakers: Karen Coppock, PhD., VP of Consulting Services, and Brendan Smith, Senior Consultant, Vital Wave Consulting
Discussant: Jon Camfield, Director of ICT, Youth Service America

11am - 12:30pm EST (GMT- 5 hours)
6 November 2008
Location: The World Bank "J" Building, 701 18th Street, NW, room J-B1-075

"Total cost of ownership" (TCO) is often underestimated, sometimes grossly, when calculating costs of ICT in education initiatives in developing countries. Estimates of initial costs to purchase equipment to overall costs over time vary widely; typically they lie between 10-25% of total cost. That said, there is a dearth of reliable data, and useful tools, to help guide education decisionmakers in their assessments of the true costs of educational technology initiatives.

A recent whitepaper from Vital Wave Consulting, "Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials", and accompanying case study of ICT in education initiatives in India, provide further insight and perspective on this important and often controversial issue. The white paper discusses key issues related to technology use in education and presents several major findings, including:

• Academic research and private-sector investment decisions indicate that computers in schools contribute to improved academic outcomes, boost a nation's economic competitiveness, and attract job-creating economic investments.Governments need to consider the entire cost of school computing solutions, rather than merely the initial expenses. A total cost of ownership model takes into account recurrent and hidden costs such as teacher training, support and maintenance, and the cost of replacing
  hardware over a five-year period.
• Support and training are recurrent costs that constitute two of the three largest costs in the total cost of ownership model. They are greater than hardware costs and much higher than software fees.
• Ultra-low cost computers and Linux-based solutions are relatively equal in cost to traditional hardware and proprietary software solutions because they require higher labor and replacement costs over a five-year period., The total cost of ownership for different computer types and software platforms is relatively consistent.

Please note that this independent study was commissioned by Microsoft.

Come join what we hope to be a lively presentation and discussion of the findings of this study, their potential implications, and the underlying methodologies and assumptions underpinning the models explored in this work.

We will kick off the discussion with comments from Jon Camfield, Director of Information and Communication Technologies at YSA (Youth Service America), who has co-authored an update to the TCO Tool for schools developed by the Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative (GeSCI). This tool, "Deploying 1:1 educational models in large scale: a practical budgeting tool based on TCO", is
available for free use under a Creative Commons License and is currently being utilized as part of planning processes in Rwanda, drawing on lessons learned from its earlier use elsewhere in Africa, most notably in Namibia.

For more information:

Affordable Computing for Schools in Developing Countries: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Model for Education Officials
Affordable Computing for Schools in India: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Case Study
http://www.vitalwaveconsulting.com/insights/articles-presentations.htm

infoDev Knowledge Map: ICTs in Education: Costs
http://infodev.org/en/Publication.159.html

GeSCI TCO Tool
http://www.gesci.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=43

Logistics for participation in Washington DC:
Registration is required for outside participants / non-World Bank staff.
Please leave sufficient time (~ 15 minutes) to be processed through World Bank security.
The J building is located 1/2 block off Pennsylvania Ave., entrance on 18th Street, NW..

Posted by Jon at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you see irregularities, call 1-866-our-vote for help and to report problems, and follow the current reports at OurVoteLive. Text your zip to Twitter Vote Report to send in polling problems.

Now - let's see some change!

Posted by Jon at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'll be leading the discussion at the World Bank this Thursday with a presentation by Vital Wave Consulting on their recent TCO calculations for low-cost computing models (both lab- and 1:1 computing approaches).

Come by or watch the event live online! (rsvp below).

A World Bank ICT and Education Community of Interest Discussion (EduTech), in collaboration with the World Bank e-Development Thematic Group, infoDev and the Technology Salon invite you to a seminar/live webcast:

How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): A Study of Models of Affordable Computing for
Schools in Developing Countries

11am - 12:30pm (Washington DC time)
6 November 2008

The seminar will be streamed live and recorded for on demand viewing.

LIVE WEBCAST: http://www.worldbank.org/edevelopment/live

Some more information about the background of TCO calculations on the OLPC at OLPCNews.com, as well as a discussion on different models.

Continue reading "World Bank webcast: How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?" »

Posted by Jon at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Drupal by itself is pretty powerful, but where it really shines is when you start plugging in the modules which have been developed for it. There are hundreds (if not thousands), and the first mistake I made on my first Drupal install was to just start clicking away before I'd learned the ropes. Luckily, this is what sandbox installs are made from, so a few database drops and folder deletions later I could start from scratch (again).

To get this all working, I now present you with the modules I activated or installed for the map project:

Core Optional modules enabled

• Blog/BlogAPI (if you want blog entries, and to enable usage of third party tools like the Flock Browser as blog-writing clients)
• Taxonomy (This may or may not be actually "optional"
• Profile (If you want user profiles)
• Menu (Handy for working with your menus / user experience)

Modules downloaded and installed

• Location - (Location, Gmap, Gmap location, Gmap Views Integration -- you can't have a map without locations and a map provider)
• Event (if you want the Map points to also have start/end dates or (separately?) provide calendar info)

Advanced modules (do these later!)

• Node Import (if you have CSVs of events to batch-import)
• Views (Views, Views RSS, Views Theme Wizard, Views UI -- more about views and panels later)
• Location Views -- you can't have a map without this stuff!)
• Image (if you want users to attach photos)
• Panels (panel pages, mini panels, panel nodes, views panels)
• CCK (Fieldgroup, Text, Option Widgets; only if you want to add and filter on custom fields outside of what the above modules provide - try it without first; K.I.S.S.)

Some General Drupal Modules (Which I just think are useful)

• Adsense (basic) (make money through Google Ads)
• Google analytics (track pageviews)
• Share (easy javascript applet that makes it easy for visitors to copy content to their Facebook / social bookmarking / etc. sites)
• Spam (Great tool for detecting and managing spam)
• Captcha (Used to be the best tool to filter out spammers, still helps, but annoys many users
• Community Tags; Tagadelic (Fun tagging tools)

After installing all those, you'll have to do a bit of initial work - setting up your domain's Gmap API Key and Analytics settings, default GMap preferences (autozoom, and open the info window when a marker is clicked, in my case). Make sure you click through the administration-by-module page and at least peek into the settings for all these modules to give you an idea of what can and can't be tweaked from the module settings page. Captcha requires you to upload some fonts to work well, and needs access to a decent image library (usually not a problem). Spam needs some tweaking.

This is a good time to take a short jaunt through all of Drupal, post some content, play and learn about URL shortcuts, menus, and blocks, and how they work together on your pages. You might also check out a few of the different Drupal themes (many good themes are available for free), and generally get your feet wet in Drupal. I for example added the Google Translate applet (as a block) so that any page could be translated through Google's Translation tool.

Posted by Jon at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is my "journal" of work in creating a user-modifiable map of the Global Youth Service Day events taking place around the world. The goal was to create a map that staff non-techies could manage, non-techie youth and organizations from around the world could add to, and still (a) work and (b) be friendly to the techies managing it, allowing for mass import and so on.

The GYSD Map in progress!

This is the first part of a series of entries (four or five probably). This first one covers the overview and core software I'm using, and some discussion of why I've chosen what I have. The next entry will cover modules and initial configuration work.

This guide is going to be a bit on the techie side, and I presume at least a bit of Drupal and webhosting experience when going through it, but nothing you can't google for help on from the community. As a caveat, I'm also relatively new to drupal, this is only my third foray into the more complex worlds it offers.

I'm writing it down all in one place because almost every step I took fulfilled my 5 minute documentation rule (http://www.joncamfield.com/blog/2008/08/my_5_minute_rule_for_documenta.html), and because mapping is just darned useful as a visualization tool. I don't think it's totally unreasonable for any nonprofit to reproduce my steps and get their own map, but having a techie on hand would certainly help.

Continue reading "How I made a map for Global Youth Service Day 2009" »

Posted by Jon at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OLPC Upgrading - like an old defrag!

The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly, and it even included a good chunk of activities, which saved a big post-upgrade time sink in Update.1

As for the new Sugar itself - first and foremost - amazing job. Great improvements on the UX/UI, suspend is fantabulous, the wifi connection system is much, much improved ... alt-tabbing, even copy/paste is better. This is a usable interface in ways that the previous stable builds were not, and it's hard to explain all of the polish that's been added -- the best I can explain is like moving from Microsoft to Mac or Linux/KDE -- things are different and a bit confusing at first, but then you realize that what's new is simply all the things you used to wish Microsoft did, and eventually gave up wishing. The interface provides a much more natural response to your actions.

OK, with the fanboy dedication out of the way, some things that annoy me:

Hidden/non-broadcast ESSIDs (wireless networks) are still a royal pain to connect to. Would it really be that hard to list the networks that are available but without ESSID and allow us to try to connect by entering the ESSID manually (in the GUI) -- even better, it could then "remember" the network association and ESSID going forward and have the discovered networks show up "starred" like encrypted networks do.

Speaking of starred encrypted networks, somewhere in the transition from Update.1 (When access to encrypted networks worked great) to 8.2.0, my XO stopped remembering the passwords. It stars "trusted" networks, but forces me to re-authenticate every time I connect, even when it's just coming back from a short suspend. It could at least remember the encryption type (ascii/hex/passkey, open/shared)??

...And so far, that's all my griping. The whole OS feels faster and more responsive, and just overall more put-together. It's a great relief to see such strong work being put forth even after the XP-on-XO hubub and the fallout at 1CC.

Update: it's remembering my work's hidden network so far!

Posted by Jon at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm currently using the laptop as the interim solution / testbed for the LAS idea. It's struggling to run amarok, but works nicely with qiv running a slideshow on top of it, usually.

I think I fixed it, but it had a habit of randomly creating a playlist after it was done playing whatever we'd asked it to - i.e. selecting songs at random from our libraries. It's cute, until it pulls up an audiobook chapter, or Chainsaws and Children (a metal/rave CD I won at Defcon many years ago for knowing that the Battle of Hastings did not occur on a power-of-two year (like 1024). And they all said that a liberal education was a worthless pursuit!)

Posted by Jon at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CropScience.org has a great paper on the potential use of social media and Internet access for rural farmers. What sets it apart from most Social Media for Development writings is that is takes a serious look at what must be in place for a project of this scope to work.

It compares farmers in Uganda and Australia, which is less ridiculous than it sounds. The Australian farmers - with training and a significantly higher support network (from government regulations all the way to average numbers of computers/100 people;

There are many technical links in the chain needed to connect a rural person to the Internet, and no-one takes responsibility for all of them. A lack of access may be caused by problems with the national or local telecommunications infrastructure, the ISP, the computer or the software being used (Easdown 1999). In rural Australia this is enough to put farmers off using the Internet, but it can be a major headache for Internet project managers in Africa. [...] A promising alternative for some rural communities in Africa is the use of mobile telephony to access the Internet (Gerster and Zimmerman 2003). In Uganda the mobile phone services of MTN are widespread even in remote rural areas, and in many African countries the number of mobile subscribers exceeds those linked to the fixed network. Innovative African projects such as Foodnet in Uganda have made use of this to develop an online system using mobile telephony for farmers to access price information via messages (SMS) and information on commodity prices can easily be sent via teletext.

The authors hit on key elements of ICT-for-ag (and, really, any ICT4D/Poverty alleviation project), suggesting the costs and complications of Internet access, the time and skills needed, gender roles, and the need for social support networks, and naturally the lower level infrastructural needs:

For the Internet to be an effective means for farmers to access useful information three complementary things need to be in place. Government policies are needed to support and develop physical Internet access in rural areas. Farmers need to be skilled and supported in learning how to use the Internet and contextualizing its information, and institutions need to produce information in forms that are compatible with the way that farmers learn.

With all this hassle - why even bother?

The nature of social media and online tools provide a great match with the context-specific, experiential learning needs of farmers in ways that traditional 1-way media and Training&Visits/T&V ag extension efforts fall short of. If created in a social space and as part of a larger ag info ecosystem, it can provide a great tool:

The Internet will be of most use to cropping farmers when providers of agricultural information use it less like a library and more like an interactive field day. It is not its scarcity but the local contextualization of information that makes it valuable for farmers. The huge volume of information available on the Internet is of less value to farmers than the opportunities for interactivity with others that it provides to help make local sense of that information.

...But it's not going to be as easy as setting up a ning or drupal site and calling it a day.

Posted by Jon at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I admit it. I have a Windows laptop at home. For a very long time, it was my primary system.

For the past year or so, I've been using a Linux laptop as my daily system, reverting to the Windows system for reliable video and HD audio -- basically, it was my media system, which just happened to also have all my email, files, and whatnot.

Since moving in with my girlfriend (who's an ardent Mac user), we've been trying to find a neutral solution to our media needs. I refuse to use iTunes, but am so far not very happy with XMMS / AmaroK on Linux. Frankly, I like Winamp. It has amazing capabilities, a good Media Library with search/filtering (and complex boolean logic) for automatic playlists, it's fully supoprted by my remote control, and with WAWI I can control it over the Internets too. Plus, it's easy to set it up to stream to one or more ice/shoutcast servers and rebroadcast that over the LAN or the Internet.

It shouldn't be ... that hard to recreate this on a Linux box. Right?

I have two pretty low-power boxes available - an AMD PIC that I'm in the process of putting a DamnSmallLinux on, and my workhorse Dell Latitude that I bought at a dot-com assets auction. It's been with me to Venezuela and Jamaica, and is celebrating it's 10th birthday this year. It has Ubuntu on it with a clean gnome desktop, but KDE extentions installed to support amaroK. I'd reinstall the whole thing, but the sound config is a dark art that took me weeks and lots of luck last time I got it working (and I'm all out of candles).

So the laptop system is currently "working," but it's pretty painfully slow and has some odd problems - the playlist likes to randomize itself from my library after a while, the audio volume (in the system) likes to lower itself, and remote connections to the GUI have been, thus far, unsuccessful. I haven't even tried getting the interactive Amarok web interface to work decently or LIRC to talk to my USB/IR/remote.

I'm sure it's all possible. I'd just occasionally like it to also be easy (without my gf constantly trying to pull me over to the Dark Side.

Posted by Jon at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is pure brilliance, courtesy BoingBoing:

This giant billboard, posing hard questions for Sarah Palin, was lit up across the road from her LA rally site on Saturday: you could send your own Palin questions to it via SMS. Nice technology use from the California Dems.

Posted by Jon at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thin Clients - a.k.a. "dumb terminals" have a long history in computing, and tend to come up every few years (seems to be a ten year cycle) as the Grand Solution to Desktop Computing, promising mind-numbingly easy centralized configuration and software maintenance, simplified licensing, and low-cost, low-profile desktop terminals that provide enough power for almost all users without wasting resources.

With the current interest in low-cost computing devices like the OLPC XO among many others, the World Bank's InfoDev group have put out a short thought piece on thin client computing and the developing world, with a new twist - OS virtualization:

The Macedonian Government’s “Computer for every student” initiative chose a solution based on “desktop virtualization” where the computer power of each PC is shared by seven students, each of whom has their own screen, keyboard, mouse and virtual desktop. The solution, provided by nComputing, a US company, works out at US$70 per student “seat” (excluding monitor etc) and runs open source software using LINUX. The advantages for the schools include the low initial capital costs, but also a reduced budget for electricity, air conditioning, maintenance and training. When the system needs upgrading, the costs are less than 15 per cent of what would have accrued if a PC had been supplied to every student.

Virtualization provides a much richer experience than most thin client interfaces, so it's possible that this trend will finally catch on as a longer-term approach to lowering the cost of 1:1 computing programs, especially when using open source, per-seat-license-cost-free solutions like Linux-based desktops.

For a fascinating look into the potential power of virtualization as a tool (in this case, as a web and database server component, paired with cloud computing) check out Codepad.org's Steven Hazel discussing some server-ninja working with scaling Codepad through virtual servers.

A parting thought - remote desktop works surprisingly well from OLPC XOs. Their high resolution makes up for their small screen size (if you have good close-up vision, at least!); so it's not impossible to see them as a thin client low-cost hardware solution; where you can enjoy many benefits of the OLPC's rugged design but also leverage a centrally managed desktop + software solution, with an "offline" mode of Sugar (or Ubuntu/XFCE...)

Posted by Jon at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Chavez likes Intel -- but not Windows? (BBC)

Venezuela is buying the portable computers as part of a $3bn (£1.66bn) bilateral trade deal with Portugal that also covers housing and utilities. Portugal is manufacturing the blue and white laptops under licence from Intel and are broadly based on the chip maker's design of its Classmate computer. [...]

The deal with Venezuela follows an agreement between Intel and Portugal, signed in August for Classmate machines.

Under that deal Portugal agreed to buy 500,000 machines to enable every six-to-10-year-old in the country to get one.

It sounds like this is an extension of Portugal's original tender for 500,000 laptops, but whether the hardware changed discussed are merely the same ones already mentioned or not is uncertain, but the article does hint that it will be further hardware-customized for Venezuela. The BBC article describes the modified Classmate as:

Dubbed Magalhaes (Magellan), the laptops will have on board low-power Intel Atom chips designed for laptops. They will also sport digital cameras and a broadband net connection.

It is somewhaimplied in the article that the Magellan won't have wifi on-board, but I can hardly imagine that is true. As for the software, the original Portugal deal made it clear that there would be a choice between Windows or Ubuntu Linux, and Sugar has been ported for the very similar Classmate 2. Venezuela is going to go their own way: "The machines will run a version of Linux developed in Venezuela."

It seems like they're going to an awfully lot of work to create an XO without buying them from OLPC.

Posted by Jon at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That's three grand, not third generation. A (possibly biased) report by Vital Wave pegs the 5 year TCO of the OLPC at $2,700. That's even more than my estimate of $972/laptop from back in 2006, which got me in NewsForge and called a racist child-hater in Slashdot.

More discussion over at OLPCNews.com

Posted by Jon at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week's Technology Salon was on information sharing and ways to use social media and peer-generated content in international development. Less of a lecture and more of a roundtable discussion, lots of interesting ideas were floated, from using Peace Corps volunteers as on-the-ground information resources to running contests for ways to use technology in development scenarios.

The most interesting part however was hearing back from veterans in the field on their views of the challenges faced in information sharing among contractors competing for RFPs based on their internal expertise and knowledge, and limiting effects that might have on their participation as well as potentially increased participation by smaller contract organizations looking to get a foot in the door.

I believe the biggest challenge (beyond access and literacy) in social media and development is connecting the entrepreneurs doing exciting work on the ground - generating innovative approaches and best practices that could be scaled or re-applied in other situations - with the large development agencies and contracting organizations. The large players have the capacity to build the sharing sites and to connect people to them, but will inevitably focus on their employees and partners, and not the most valuable sources of information - the NGOs and beneficiaries on the ground.

Posted by Jon at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)