JonCamfieldBlog

Via the Info Policy blog, I found the news story and EIU/IBM e-readiness report that's just come out, with the great news that the digital divide is narrowing and/or gone:

"This is particularly evident in basic connectivity: Emerging markets are providing the vast majority of the world's new phone and Internet connections

"This is the first time we see a level playing field between developed and developing nations, in terms of connectivity. It's up to governments to take advantage with education and other initiatives" - Peter Korsten, European director at IBM's Institute for Business Value.

But there are also constant factors, many of them non-technical, such as a country’s innovation levels and its legal and business environment. For example, Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s voracious technology adoption has earned them both high e-readiness marks. The two markets, however, lack the intellectual property creation of North America and Western Europe, and this acts as a drag on their broader digital progress.

Well, I'm certainly happy that we can stop worrying about this silly digital divide and move on to intellectual property concerns.

Wait....

Why are there only 72 countries listed? Why is the entirity of Sub-Saharan Africa left off of this report? And only 8 Latin American countries? Oh, I'm sorry -- these countries all fall in the lowest categories, and might skew your data. The International Telecomm Union (which is in the business of selling phones, not good news, so definitely wants to portray that there are still new markets on the horizon, perhaps) has a substantial "low" category which has been effectively excluded from the EIU/IBM study.

The digital divide's still there. We're just trying to ignore it now.

Posted by Jon at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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So, more as an elaborate bookmarking system than a full wiki (for now), I have installed the latest and greatest MediaWiki server here at JonCamfield.com and am populating it with some of my favorite resources. Check wiki4dev out! Heck, it's a wiki -- contribute!

Also, in my LAMP insanity, I've also added a Moodle (open source course management) system. Probably won't have time to do much with it for a while, but ideally I'd like to put some short self-paced IT/Dev focused courses in it.

Posted by Jon at 02:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The OLPC laptop is fading for me. Not only is it being a bit vaporware-y, they've dropped the hand-crank, and are planning on running it on WinCE, because Linux is "too bloated".

Excuse me?

Sure, the latest Ubuntu comes with lots of bells and whistles that you don't need. Heck. Even Knoppix, the grand master of a full OS on a CD, came with a lot of random junk -- even on the level that a not-particularly experience Linux user could see and get rid of (my favorite was that it came with a command line program made to rip MP3s (ok, OGGs) from your vinyl records (with gap detection for track splitting). There's a LOT of room to cut it down just at the package level -- find a desktop for example that suits your needs but isn't KDE or Gnome.

Then, you can start getting fancy. For known hardware, you can do a lot of kernel module manipulation, recompiling, and so on. I really find it hard to believe that WinCE provides a technically better solution; and even if it did... what percent of the $100 is going to be paying for licensing fees? Oh, or do you have a special deal with MS? ....How long does it last? What are the terms? What's the lock-in?

Though not built for portability, there is a Chinese designed, sourced and soon to be in production $150 miniPC that is running on a Linux variant.

Should be fun. I'm just waiting for ANYONE to come out with a sub-$200 full PC. Preferably closer to the design spec of the OLPC. But me, I want the crank. Having been a Dell laptop user for many years, I want a laptop that with sunlight or some handpower, has no need for a battery.

Posted by Jon at 11:03 PM | Permalink

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Sterling (who's iron is in this fire, preferring his own neologism, "spime"), has linked to a compiled list of all the synonyms for "blogjects" -- objects which collect data and spew it out into the Internet that this guy put together (I'm betting his vote is for "Designed Objects" myself). I wrote about blogjects a while back when Bruce'd focused on them in his SIGGRAPH and SXSW speeches.

Beyond needing an agreed-upon name (I obviously favor blogject), this is technology searching for a problem. To the extent that they're remote Net-connected sensors, they're nothing new, manufacturing --and scientiific research (see that story for a description of why there's a pink dinosaur on this post) -- has been doing this for quite some time. Hell, webcams (remember when they weren't for pr0n on IM?) were set up for this. Most of the Big Geek campuses had soda machines that would respond with their stock on "finger" requests from the Internet.

The democratization of net-connected objects has happened (for the geeks). Arguably, this is the parallel: Printing->Big Publishers->Small Publishers->Internet sites for geeks->blogs for Joe Q. Public || Remote Sensing for Mfgs. -> Net-connected doodads for geeks -> blogjects for everyone. I don't see it. Blogjects are still firmly in the geek domain. Sure, there are a slow increasing number of more consumer-oriented items, and I definitely see this coming eventually, but we're not there.

What has to happen to enable these:

*WiFi access -- whether more standardized cell modem access (and much, much cheaper cellmodems and service fees!) or WiMax muni networks or pirate mesh networks, blogjects are useless and stuck at home without some way to connect to the Internet

*Batteries -- they're similarly tethered to a plug or require lots and lots of maintenance/batter replacement/charging unless a better battery or lower-power network connection is enabled, again, for cheap.

*A NEED -- OK, so, the biggest current potential use that I see (from my own warped perspective) are to chronicle rights abuses. Scatter some videostreaming blogjects around a demonstration site and suddenly you're watching the watchers. Capturing the enforcement of "Free Speech Zones" and the like. This means that you're going to lose a lot of these through confiscation, theft, destruction and so on. The history of blogjects has been hands that wave, webcams you can move, and coke or coffee machines whose status you can check. Oh, and toasters that download the weather forecast and burn it into your bread This is great. Yay for ubiquitous info. But this is not consumer-ready, it is and will be for some time in the geek domain. I seem to recall LG doing some consumery level blogjects, but mostly in EU, and not really blogjects as much as smart appliances that pinged each other to see what was pulling down the most current, so as to stay below peak current levels and avoid big charges (the dryer would see if the freezer was on, request it to go off, then turn itself on, for example).

*Overall cheapness -- the "blog revolution" is because anyone with Internet access can start - for free - a blog, and if they have something to say/fill a niche, they can get popular, make some cash off of ads, and sell books (there's something amusing about that, I might add). Blogjects will never be as free, unless they hijack onto existing technologies (like, if cell phones ever became open sourced, there you have a blogject just ready for action!). (...my real suspicion is that everyone else expects their pricepoint to drop in the next few years and are wrangling for naming privileges...) To some extent, RFID tags will move this along. Sure, they're passive, but they are potentially very enabling. Imagine this scenario, which I posted in Slashdot in (weep) 2003:

Everyone freaks out about RFIDs, but I remain in the camp that these could be really cool, as long as consumers (ok, geeks) figure out how to control them (by burning them out or just finding the darned things and removing them from unwanted places, like the back of a Yugo [1])

Ever lose your cell phone and have someone call it so you could find it? Imagin being able to do that with any random item? superglue a RFID onto it, and walk around with a semi-portable RFID scanner. OK, not as great due to the limited range of the things, but you could pretty easily determine if the keys were under the couch or not.

Now, the sucky thing will be if (when) manufacturers build RFIDs into places that you can't get to without destroying the item or voiding the warranty.

So, we need an opt-out method for RFIDs, which may be as simple as a way to find the lil' bastards and plier them flat, but beyond the scare, there's promise:

telnet homenetwork : fridgeport
Brr! it's cold in here [45F]! Can I have your username?
> JoeBachelor
And your password?
> gotb33r?
Welcome to your Refridgerator/Freezer system!
>cd fridge
>ls
Directory of /fridge:

Beer/
Beer/Shiner Bock (1)
Beer/MGD (5)

Condiments/
Condiments/ketchup package (13)
Condiments/mustard package (2.5)
Condiments/SoySauce package (1)
Condiments/Unidentifiable (5)
Condiments/mayonnaise (1) (warning: use-by-date 5 months expired!)

Vegetables/

Soda/
Coke (.5)
Mountain Dew (4)
non-caffeinated/
ActualFood/
lunchmeat_ham (1) (warning: use-by-date 1 week expired!)
cheese_cheddar (2) (warning: use-by-date is tommorow!)
End of directory. No healthy food available.
>man healthy
Sorry, you need to install the Mother or Health-Conscious-Girlfriend modules for these extensions
>make food
Unable to make food. Stop.
>exit.
Goodbye.

see?!!!!! see! this is my vision!

[1] That's a "Mall Rats" reference, for the rest of you.

So, to continue in a /. vein -- I, for one, welcome our new blogject leaders... if they ever actually get here and are affordable and available to the average jane or joe -- and once that happens, then let's talk about their implications for development/human rights work, because I guarantee you that pit traps are more effective at defending your rights than a webcam with a tenuous slow dialup speed to the Internet that will report the abuses, but not prevent them on an immediate basis.

Posted by Jon at 04:33 PM | Permalink

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Computers aren't green. The article covers the market in computer scrap smuggling into China, for labor-intensive, environmentally-unfriendly scrapping and partial recycling.

Not to mention corporations sending their effectively remaindered PCs to LDCs as an act of charity -- because the manpower and skill to bring junky old, mismatched and undocumented 486s and Pentium Is to working functional order is just everywhere, twiddling their collective thumbs waiting for a shipment.

In the insanely rapid adoption of computers into modern life, and the high rate of turnover of old computers, combined with the push to get LDCs online, some thought needs to be put into the environmental externalities, both for the industrialized and the developing worlds, beyond cell phones that pop apart at high temperatures.

We need to find ways to internalize the costs of rapid hardware obsoletion -- through forcing companies to offer some form of buyback/recycling program (which may not work well for computers sold overseas in different jurisdictions/enforcement mechanisms). It's not like there's been lots of success with global environmental regulation thus far, but with this possibly leading to a definite negative impact for China, and US corporations being swayable through the name-and-shame methods, there you have two of the major computer manufacturing players dealt with already. If there's some tie to add in Taiwan, Japan and S. Korea through the APEC forum or a new FTA agreement with environmental policies tied in...

Posted by Jon at 01:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Kevin Kelly provides an excellent analysis of the rust beneath the chrome of leapfrogging:

The most commonly cited evidence for leapfrogging is the pattern of cell phone adoption in China and other parts of the world. For hundred of millions of people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, their first telephone is a cell phone. But second examples of skipping the industrial revolution are scarcer. I am aware of a small island in the Ganges delta of India and one village in Thailand that installed solar power. Beyond that, the examples of skipping the industrial revolution evaporate on inspection. A few pilot programs here and there, but no real adoption. In fact the closer one looks at the evidence, the more unlikely it seems to me that leapfrogging actually happens.

He goes on to point out that leapfrogging is really just an overlapping boom -- the cell phone boom overtook -- but did not destroy -- landline growth, which continues apace, just not as fast as cell (he argues that cell phones in fact encourage reliance on telephone communication, essentially spurring continued landline growth).

Kelly also underlines the liberal and environmentalist bias of leapfrogging -- why don't we consider the jump straight to landrovers and trucks from donkeys and handcarts, skipping large horse-drawn carriages and rail infrastructures (and sometimes preceeding paved roads)? Is it not green enough? Not high-tech enough? Not an elegant solution?

I feel that these are valid objections. Particularly in ICT, it is far too easy to get caught up in creating the best solution than to make an inelegant first step, and get something started, whether or not it's the perfect solution.

Beyond the humanitarian need to do something quickly more than perfectly, there's also the benefit that step-by-step methods allow those you're working with to have a better feel for the process, instead of being presented with just the final project.

Posted by Jon at 04:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The Digital Divide Simulator lets you select the website you want to test, then select the bandwidth you want to simulate, and click "simulate". You will be presented with two pages: one at full speed and one at the limited speed. You can then compare the two.", which options ranging from 0.3 Kbps ['Deep field' HF radio] to 128 Kbps[ISDN Connection; VSAT Downstream], 256 Kbps[ADSL Connection], and full speed.

This is missing the point entirely. Sure, a .3Kbps connection is... uh... slow, and does not enable even most IM clients (they're surprisingly bandwidth hogs for text transfer), and most websites are image-laden beheamoths, BUT... we're arguing degrees of access; this is the digital ditch. The divide is beyond te .3Kbps, it's where there is no Internet access or telecom infrastructure available (or affordable to anyone but the very rich).

Now, there is an excellent map on this website that shows the world and relative Internet access:

Jamaica is listed in the "Upper" category of countries, with 17.2 subscribers per 100, but from personal experience I know that there are many places in the deep rural parts that have no landline service, and have only recently gotten cell coverage. There are schools without electricity, without even the option for telephones or computers with Internet access.

These cheery categorizations and statistics, and the ability to "try out" Internet access through a slow connection are masking the realities of the situation. 17.2 per 100? That means 82.8 per 100 without home access; what percentage of those don't have Internet at work? At school? Available in their community? Those numbers begin to reveal the true divide.

Posted by Jon at 04:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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So, between getting back from Peace Corps and coming to DC for grad school, I lived in a rather unique house, which fuels stories from cross-border under-the-wire monetary transactions using Final Fantasy XII codes, to City Council politics and communal living. Bram Cohen stayed there (he and my roommate were good friends from the p2p scene) during SXSW-05 (So, when I joke about having a third of the Internet traffic in my living room at one point, I'm only partially kidding.

Anyhow. That's a very longwinded way to plug this former roommate's current project, which can be thought about as streaming bittorrent-like downloading for video. That's a gross simplification I'm sure (he once showed me a three-dimensional model of his p2p networking algorithm, my brain has yet to quite recover):

ActLab TV, a project of the Foundation for Decentralization Research, is hosting their Launch Party (if you're lucky enough to be in Austin) and a Video Festival for the rest of us to watch online through their snazzy technology.

The cool part of this technology is that is can potentially put video broadcasting on a level where amateurs can successfully create and distribute content without killing their bandwidth. This has important consequences for NGOs and non-profits interested in making video documentary (of human rights abuses, labor law violations, etc) widely available. The same technology could be used at a demonstration to record and broadcase the event live using a high-speed cell-phone connection or a wifi mesh network with someone on it providing and uplink -- which means that the videographer could be arrested and his/her gear confiscated -- but the video would already be in distribution and potentially cached remotely.

Of course, it's still a beta technology, and even at full production power, it would require some technological know-how to implement, but at least it provides a distribution channel.

Posted by Jon at 02:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

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I think I'm pretty much obligated to talk about the World Bank's ICT data and report about "Investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) in developing countries will reach 100 billion dollars annually over the next five years."

Beyond validating my career path choice, it will hopefully get the mass statistical engines of the Bank brining in more data on ICT projects and success.

It remains my fear (which this report only increases) that ICT is going to be a big, money-draining fad in development, and pull money away from more basic humanitarian, health, social, and educational needs. Yes, computers are important in trying to prevent a truly massive division between the "North" and the "South," but we can't put our blinders on.

Posted by Jon at 02:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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John Daly wins the award for insanely detailed blog entries with his blogel (my neologism for novel-length blogs, spread it!) on K4D, which is its own neologism for "Knowledge for Development" -- the "new" area of ICT and knowledge-economic stuffs and their role in development projects.

If you don't have a few hours to digest that blogel, it provides a decent, straightforward summary of a mostly pragmatic approach to ICTs in development. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's unique in not really trying to be groundbreaking, but realistic:

ome enthusiasts portray e-development as sure path to social and economic development. ICT expenditures constitute only a few percent of GDP in even the most advanced nations. Thus it asks a lot for an e-Development strategy to lead overall economic and social development.

Ideally, e-Development would take place in the context of an overall policy and institutional environment conducive to rapid national economic growth and development and in the context of strong pro-poor policies. Unfortunately, such environments are seldom found in developing nations. (Where they are, of course, a truly holistic e-Development strategy is possible.)

It is possible, however, to produce enclaves of development -- where the resources, policies, and institutions permit –- even in the absence of a policy and institutional environment optimally conducive to overall development

It continues with a definitely rosy-tinted view of the value of ICTs as their own development projects, and encourages risk-taking among donor agencies. I have to come down with a more cautious summary note[1], but overall agree with his hedges and warnings; ICT has to be planned and cheaperl, limited pilot projects should be used to test the waters and feasibility (Though these, too, have problems -- Jamaica was caught in an endless cycle of pilot projects, with very few island-wide rollouts, so the same few schools always got the best technology).

[1] There are many things more grounding (cynicism-inducing?) than walking by the World Bank ("Working to end world povery") every day, with the little park across the street where DC's homeless hang out, but this does get extra points for irony.

Posted by Jon at 02:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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