commonspace

The value of being scared

San Francisco, USA

Marnie Webb looked me right in the eye and said: "If we aren't a little bit scared, we aren't sharing enough. We aren't doing our job."

Compumentor, the San Francisco organization where Marnie works, provides technology consulting and discount software to non-profits. Everyday, they produce all kinds of useful info – software comparisons, implementation guidelines, project management spreadsheets, funding proposals. This information is the lifeblood of their consulting practice, and represents almost 20 years of accrued knowledge.

Most organizations keep this kind of information under lock and key, on intranets and in filing cabinets far from the prying eyes of outsiders. Compumentor used to be one of these lock and key types, until Marnie decided to take away the password ... and turn everything inside out.

The result is the Consultant Commons web site, which is essentially Compumentor's internal consulting intranet transformed into an open online community. "We figured that very little of what we were producing was actually proprietary, so why not let everyone else in. Our materials can certainly help others and, if we can get people to contribute back with their own stuff, we'll have an amazing pool of useful tech tools."

Only a few hours later, I heard a similar story from the Omidyar Network (formerly the Omidyar Foundation). They'd been using wikis and other tools to coordinate their internal work since the beginning, and had built up their own unique platform to support this. As the organization got to the point that it wanted to enter into a conversation (well, many conversations) with its community, it simply opened up a new branch of this intranet for public use. Much vetting and evolving of ideas that Omidyar may eventually invest in goes on in this new space, a space to that encourages sharing and synergy amongst the kind of folks Omidyar supports.

I don't know what it is about the San Francisco air that encourages this kind of inside-out-sharing mentality, but it sure is inspiring. Definitely something to emulate.

Emergent

Redmond, USA

I am really liking the 'emerging markets' folks I am running into on my travels. Last week in Delhi, I met Joydeep Bose from Intel and Anirban Mukerji from HP. Today I hooked up with Kentaro Toyama from Microsoft.

Kentaro's group at Microsoft Research in Bangalore is charged with early phase experiments on things like computing for rural, poor and disconnected contexts ... exactly the kinds of places that need telecentres. A few of the things their working on include: 'featherweight computing' (low cost / low power / easy to use); machine translation integrated with chat (Sean: "A machine translation of a web page is a dead end street. You get what you get. With chat, you can negotiate meaning."); and community created maps (satellite data + blogs + user created contextual data ... and who knows what else). Very cool to see what they are all playing with.

Even cooler, though, is the degree to which they get the long term game of telecentres and rural computing. Kentaro and his team have worked a lot with NGOs and entrepreneurial village kiosk groups in India, because they know this is where the learning is happening. They also know that patience is one of the key ingredients in this kind of learning. You can't (and, of course, shouldn't) turn a rural village into a market to your products. But you can help people in villages learn how to use connected technologies, and then see what those people want to do next.

Of course, 'what they want do next' – they ways people adapt technology to their own needs – is likely to be both unpredictable .... and the future of computing. Kentaro and his group get this. It will be interesting to learn with them along the way.

Phones, and then what?

Seattle, USA

Yesterday's meeting with the Grameen Technology Centre in Seattle provided a good chance to ask the question: phones, and then what?

There's been lots of talk from places like the Economist about how the real communication revolution in developing countries will come from the mobile phone, and not from places like telecentres. The problem with this argument is, simply put, that the world is a lot more complex than this. Sure, mobile phone phones are a cheap, scalable and important part of the communication revolution – we see that all over the world. But what else needs to be in the picture? What devices / systems / content / services / connections / etc need to be in place to feed into the simple, voice-based mobile economy, and evolve beyond it?

As a man committed to propagating the world's most successful mobile-phone-meets-development effort (the Grameen Village Phone), you'd think Grameen Tech Centre director Peter Bladin would fall into the Economist camp. He doesn't. Instead, Peter and his team are asking: what's next? Where do we go from the mobile + voice + economic + empowerment model?

This provided a lot of juice for conversations about the connections between telecentres and mobile. There is huge potential with things like Asterisk voicemail, SMS broadcast, telecentre-based-local-content-to-mobile services, walking telecentres and so on. And, likely, there is an opportunity for the telecentre movement to learn from parts of the village phone economic model.

At dinner, I also had a chance to meet with Grameen tech board chair (and former Microsoft executive techie) Paul Maritz. We had a great conversation about the importance of global, field-level research in the rural and community technology space. In particular, there is an interest from Paul (and Grameen?) in looking at the nexus of what's working now / where the impact is / where the future can take us. Right now, the picture we have is very local. We also need global, and contextual.

We're going to collaborate with Grameen and the University of Washington on a small research project asking for 'expert' opinion at this field level. But clearly, we need to know more than an expert panel can provide (and, of course, there's always reason to be suspect of experts in the first place :-)). My (possibly naive) hope is that the knowledge ecosystem telecentre.org catalyzes helps here, constantly connecting, synthesizing and aggregating little bits of knowledge about this space into a bigger picture. It will be interesting to see what the seeds we plant will grow into.

Community-business-minded-ness

Vancouver, Canada

The community-business-minded-ness of the Bryght team was a refreshing surprise. They get community, they get business ... and they know open source can be both.

Boris, Kris and some friends run Bryght, a Vancouver company that offers quick and dirty (plus almost-as-quick and very pretty) web sites based on the Drupal online community platform. Most small open source companies live off customization, set up or support fees. Not Bryght. They just set up your Drupal site in a flash, and then charge you for hosting by the month. In less than a year, they have 800+ sites and a rock-solid 'beta' product.

Now, Drupal hosting may not excite you. But, I would argue, open source application service providers (companies that offer hosted applications) should raise your eyebrow. In my opinion, the ASP model offers companies a way to provide real value to customers (simple, fast, always updated) AND participate in the collective production process of open source (the Bryght guys are from the community and submit tons of code back to Drupal) at the same time. Despite the value, and obviousness, of this model, there are only a handful good open source ASPs on the planet.

For me, Bryght's ASP model points to a future where open source businesses survive through innovative business processes and good customer service, not through technical superiority. Boris, Kris, et al have rolled up much of their business process knowledge into the (proprietary) Bright Provisioning Platform. This is what they use to set up Drupal sites fast, and is also something they will license to others who want to do the same thing. All the while, they keep innovating Drupal, contributing code back to the community and creating happy customers.

Also worth noting, the Bryght guys instantly got the telecentre.org online vision. They've seen what a bunch of small pieces loosely joined (many small sites + RSS + common passion) can do. In fact, much of the Drupal innovation they are playing with – collective translation of content, large scale implementations of interconnected sites, content aggregation, etc. – is really hooked into the idea of distributed, community-driven approaches. Which, of course, is perfect: we need allies who get this vision.

PS. Thanks to Kris Krug and hist photostream for the pic above.

lights. cameras. ACTION!

Delhi, India

Okay, enough of praising Mission 2007. I'll keep saying that it is astonishing effort backed by an impressive and diverse cast of characters. It is these things. But talk is cheap. It's time for action!

Yesterday, I stood on stage beside India's Minister of Finance to announce telecentre.org's commitment to support the capacity building efforts of Mission 2007. I said something like:

Through the telecentre.org initiative, IDRC, Microsoft and our other social investors plan to provide significant support for the work of the Mission 2007 Capacity Building Task Force. In particular, we would like to invest the in development of the body of knowledge and curriculum that will be needed to meet the goal of one million master trainers.

… and also …

Of course, there is also a need for materials like these in many other countries. We believe that, as a standard setter, India will create a series of village knowledge worker training programs that could be useful to people working in telecentres in many countries. We would also like to help Mission 2007 share the curriculum it develops with these countries. We hope that we can help the good ideas – and good spirit – of Mission 2007 to travel far and wide.

Sidenote: Some may think it is lazy to cut and paste from your own speech. I think it adds realism, and offers a salute to the long blogging tradition of quoting people, including oneself.

So, now the action begins. Working hand in hand with many of the people I met on my last trip to India – people from M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, NASSCOM Foundation, One World South Asia, N-logue, TaraHaat, Datamation Foundation – we must take on the serious task of figuring out what exactly what the 'curriculum needed to meet the goal of one million master trainers' looks like.

As of today, the plan is to hold a workshop of people who train telecentre managers in India in September. This workshop will give folks who are already doing this kind of training work a chance to share experiences, offer up training materials they already have and identify the generic curriculum building blocks that Mission 2007 needs. It may produce some new friendships amongst people who train telecentre managers for leading Mission 2007 projects (hmm, new friendships amongst people who all have similar jobs ... my more academic friends might call this a community of practice).

If all goes well, the people who meet at this workshop and the building blocks they create will provide acts as seeds that eventually grow into 'one million master trainers' across India.

You say you want a revolution ...

Delhi, India

Over the weekend, the opinion page of The Hindu featured a bold roadmap for India's knowledge revolution. 600,000 rural knowledge centres run by 1,000,000 grassroots trainers ... and created over just two years. A knowledge revolution indeed!

This road map has been laid down by Professor M.S. Swaminathan and other members of the National Alliance for Mission 2007.  The Alliance pulls together an almost mind boggling set of partners from across India: government (at all levels!); the private sector (everyone from big players like Microsoft and Tata to start-ups like n-Logue and Drishtee); and leading knowledge centre champions (Sewa, Nasscom Foundation, Tara Haat, One World South Asia and, of course, MSSRF).

Sitting at the Second Mission 2007 Convention today, it's (again) clear to me that the rural knowledge revolution is part of a national dream here in India. The village knowledge centres are not seen as charity. Quite the opposite. They are looked upon as an essential part of connecting the people of rural India into the global economy on their own terms. There is consensus that this is good for the country, and for its economy!

One of the striking things about this national dream is its real connections to the grassroots. Yes, the Mission 2007 Convention included a whole lot of speechifying from podiums (including from me). But it also included a whole parallel process of consultation and networking amongst 140 new National Virtual Academy 'fellows'. Coming from across India these people have committed to being barefoot technologists spreading the knowledge revolution in the (mostly poor) rural communities they come from.

There is no question in my mind that, if Professor Swaminathan can recruit and train the one million grassroots fellows that he has called for, these people will bring the tide of the knowledge revolution with them. It will be an amazing sight to behold.

Exporting hubs and spokes

Delhi, India

Over the weekend, I had a chance to watch good ideas travel. The ideas in question were travelling from Pondicherry, India. Destination: all across Afghanistan.

I'd snuck into a meeting between ICRISAT and the Afghanistan Ministry of Agriculture in IDRC's Delhi office. The meeting was focused on getting better technical and market information into the hands of Afghani farmers – people who have been cut off from up to date information by 30 years of war.

In order to reach this goal, Ministry of Agriculture (plus the Ministry of Communication) is going to borrow and extend the village knowledge centre hub and spoke model created by MSSRF. This model has proven its power as a tool for rural development in India, and now its being adapted to Afghanistan by ICRISAT's Dr. V. Balaji  (who used to work for MSSRF).

This individual transfer of knowledge is interesting in it's own right. But what is even more impressive to me is that India is essentially 'exporting' telecentre models. It is sharing what it has learned. My guess is that, with the growth of Mission 2007 and other telecentre networks around the world, the sharing of telecentre ideas (and maybe even exporting of telecentre technologies) from country to country will become more commonplace.

Sustainability? Have your say!

Delhi, India

I finally had time to catch up with the Ugabytes online conference about telecentre sustainability. This multi-week event gathers African community technology champions to dig into one of the toughest questions facing telecentres.

After cruising through 10 days of discussion, I have to say this is one of the most impressive conversations on this issue I've seen. People have touched on:

• The importance of social mission and community buy in as the first step towards sustainability ... with this, people are driven to come up with inventive ways to keep a telecentre alive.
• The diversity of approaches the people are actually employing to resource telecentres, including multi-stakholder partnerships, embedding in existing social orgs and volunteerism.
• They very definition of the word 'telecentre' and the role telecentres play beyond simple access to computers and the Internet.

Truly, an amazing discussion that all of us can learn from ... and contribute to. It's on for a couple more weeks. You can join by going here and read the archives here.

Community media peeps

Delhi, India

It turns out Ian Pringle is a fellow traveller, another veteran of the Canadian community media scene. He worked at Co-op Radio in Vancouver for years, and knows folks I've worked with like Peter Royce from Vancouver Community Networks and Catherine Ludgate from IMPACS. And, he now lives in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood, the place where I did community television for over five years.

It's always invigorating to meet people who come from the community media world. There's a shared passion for helping people find the tools, skills and self-confidence to express themselves ... which is certainly a big part of why telecentres matter.

Ian gave me a quick verbal tour of the UNESCO Community Multimedia Centre (CMC) program in Asia. It was interesting to learn that the first CMC ever was in Sri Lanka (I didn't know that!), and that there are now eight Sri Lankan CMCs. Probably a good group to include in our Sri Lanka telecentre managers workshop tentatively planned for the fall. There is also interesting CMC work happening in India, Nepal, Bhutan and (just now) the Philippines. Definitely worth reaching out to these groups once telecentre.org is rolling.

We also had a chance to talk about a pet idea that keeps rolling around in my head: integrating Asterisk into telecentres. Asterisk is an open source PBX that provides interactive voice messaging and mass SMS delivery capability. SMS + Asterisk could be used to localize, synthesize and send out Internet information collected in a telecentre, just as the CMCs are doing with radio. In fact, it could be the best of both worlds, combining the targeted, demand driven nature of telecentre-based Internet access (SMS messages) with the access-anywhere, ubiquitous technology nature of community radio (mobile phones). Ian suggested the Philippines might be a good place to try this out as it’s a place where even farmers use SMS. Hmmm.