commonspace

Social enterprise goes viral ...

Somewhere around Smith Falls, Ontario

Looking out the snowy train window, I realize that there was another thing that impressed me at last week's village computing event ... something that snuck up on me so quietly that I forgot to blog it.

At the event, there was an unassuming book placed at each seat around the table -- the Grameen USA Village Phone Replication Manual. Based on Grameen USA's experience transporting the village phone model from Bangladesh to Uganda and Rawanda, this book is literally a detailed how-to guide on setting up a self-sustaining-grassroots-technology-spreading-social-enterprise. The guide shows the network of partners, the technology, the supply chain, the 'what's in it for who' money flows. 150+ pages of gruelling social / tech / business strategy detail.

As a man on a bender for replicable grassroots technology models, I was super impressed by this effort. Here is a group (Grameen USA) who not only had the smarts and gumption to bring the village phone from Asia to Africa, but they also had the courage to write down and share their experience. And, they did it in the spirit of growing, spreading and evolving the model. The book download site says:

Check here to acknowledge that you agree to the following terms for downloading this publication: This information is shared in the spirit of international cooperation and is in the public domain. We ask that all users of this manual similarly share any modifications, variants, and/or lessons learned from experience so new information can be incorporated into the broader learning of the global Village Phone movement. Thank you.

Stepping up to the plate with an attitude like this takes alot of vision -- one of the key ingredients needed to make the grassroots technology revolution real. Of course, there is also a need for more Sicily + business + service models with the simplicity and power of the village phone ... and more people with the courage to help them spread like wildfire.

Anyways, kudos to Grameen USA for this publication. They are clearly doing good work.

The care and feeding of living curriculum

Redmond WA, USA

Curriculum is a big deal for telecentre.org. Curriculum on basic IT skills. Entrepreneurship and management. Community development and grassroots marketing. Curriculum for people who come into telecentres, and curriculum to train people who run telecentres. These are all things that telecentre.org needs to either develop or distribute.

The problem with curriculum in areas like these is that it gets stale fast. Big training guidebooks like the Telecentre Cookbook are great when they are written, but new practices and technologies quickly emerge that make them outdated. More importantly, trainers immediately start to adapt and innovate on top of these materials as soon as they get them – yet these innovations rarely make it back into the original guidebook.

This problem is, of course, also a huge opportunity. What if telecentre trainers had way to easily share their adaptations? What if there was a good way to integrate those adaptations back into the 'big guidebook? What if we had a way to encourage the care and feeding of living curriculum? The result would certainly be something richer and more useful than what we have now.

I had a fun meeting at Microsoft yesterday where we dug into these questions. The meeting was with a number of people involved in managing the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Curriculum, which is one of many curriculum collections that will be available on the telecentre.org web site. The Microsoft folks are asking the same questions I am: how do we capture and share the innovation that happens on top of this curriculum? It's not clear what they want to do yet on this front (nor is it clear what telecentre.org will do). However, there was enough energy in our spirited conversation that we've agreed to dig deeper into this 'care and feeding' question.

I should say, there are a number of people I've been talking to recently about this issue – people working on both telecentres and schools. It may be time to convene a small meeting to talk about concrete ways we could experiment with some sort of training commons.

What is the internet for?

Seattle, USA

After a nice brisk walk, Matayas Gaspar sat me down to look at a website. At the top of the page was a very basic question: what is the Internet for?

The site was developed by Matayas and his colleagues to provide resources for a new class of knowledge worker that is emerging in Hungary – the IT Mentor. IT Mentors help people use the Internet as a part of their daily lives. To navigate government better. To find jobs. To help with cooking and domestic tasks. These may seem like easy things to do for the Internet savvy, but they're foreign (and unknown) options for people who are just learning that the web exists.

Starting next year, IT Mentors will become an official employment category in Hungary. That means that public agencies can hire and fund them. So, the Ministry of Health might hire a cadre of IT Mentors to help people coming into telecottages effectively access online health information. In order to fill the expected demand, there will be a university run certification program for IT Mentors. It will train 300 people in the first year.

This approach to getting the grassroots online is a fascinating one. Part of the fascination is in the idea of IT Mentor as 'human interface' to the Internet (of course, we see similar ideas in telecentres around the world). But the interest also flows from the level of rigour and organization that has gone into making the IT Mentor real. Impressive.

It'll be interesting to get to know the Hungarian approach more, and also to hook up with Mataya's colleagues in EUTA. It looks like we'll have a chance to do this in March or April next year.

Villages gone global

Seattle, USA

The Grameen USA village computing consultation certainly brought a lot of talent into one room. We had grassroots communications champions like Matayas Gaspar (founder of Hungarian telecottage movement), Dorthy Okelo (working on women's networking projects in Uganda) and Peter Bladin (helped replicate Grameen Village Phone in Africa). Also, we had people from the corporate emerging markets world like Microsoft's Karishma Kiri (working on village level research with the likes of Drishtee and Nlogue) and Intel's John Sherry (co-author, Less Cyber, More Café). And, of course, we had some smart cookies with a big picture of ICT4D issues like Bellanet's Kemly Camacho (evaluation and facilitation guru) and APC's Chat Garcia (GEM guru). A diverse and talented group, without doubt.

What do you get a diverse and talented group like this together? Crisp new ideas? ... replays of old disagreements? ... creative sparks? ... magic? ... confusion? It turns out that the answers is: all of the above.

On the crisp new ideas side, there was a chance to talk about telecentre service and financing issues. In particular, we hit on the importance developing concrete, well packaged services that telecentres quickly adopt to both generate revenue and deliver social value (e.g. a simple end-to-end process for delivering computer certification or remote healthcare). We also touched on the idea of developing more flexible and nimble funding pools for from line telecentre implementation – something between microcredit and traditional bank loans. There is a need to get specific on ideas like these, but they are definitely useful seeds that we can grow something from. And, definitely seeds to be thinking about as we design the innovation funding stream in the new telecentre.org business plan.

On flip side, some parts of the conversation disappointingly slipped into old, unhelpful patterns. In particular, there was a tendency to frame things as a debate between two 'diametrically opposed' approaches – entrepreneurship and social value. Given the people in the room, I'd really hoped we'd be able to transcend this ... to dig into innovative ideas that play in the messy middle where entrepreneurship and social value overlap. In my opinion, we didn't get there. This was a bit of a missed opportunity.

In the end: great people, some useful and concrete discussions ... but it's a shame that we didn't get to more concrete out-of-the-box ideas. Maybe it was the square round table. I always did like circles better.

Suburbia at night

Seattle, USA

On a crisp, clear night, even suburbia looks beautiful. And that is exactly where I found myself as I arrived in Seattle for the Grameen Foundation USA's village computing consultation (ironic, huh?). Packed between a McDonald's and a shopping mall fancier than you ever see north of the border, I checked into the Silver Cloud Inn about a mile from the University of Washington.

The aim of Grameen's village computing research project is to take a 'snapshot of the field and where it is headed'. The field, as conceived for this project, contains a combination of people working on entrepreneurial kiosks and more socially oriented telecentres. An interesting mix if you can actually get people seeing the commonality in the middle of these two models, and bring them together to generate so really innovative (and feasible) new social enterprise ideas.