commonspace

A real team

Delhi, May 2007. This past week I had the pleasure to be at a telecentre.org Training Commons meeting in Delhi. The Training Commons started about 18 months ago as an effort to encourage telecentre organizations in India to share the material they use to train new managers and coordinators at the village level. In the end, it evolved to become a much simpler attempt to create Telecentre Management Training Materials in five areas: grassroots marketing; entrepreneurship; infomediary skills; grassroots communication; and community development. These materials are being developed by a consortium that include NASSCOM Foundation, TaraHaat, World Corps, MSSRF and Plan International.

It was great to be back in the conversation and to see the partners really working as a team. I found out that the first text versions of these materials are almost done (the meeting was a feedback and planning session). Once this is done, it looks like the partners themselves will use these materials and like the Indira Gandhi National Open University may build a program with these modules as a foundation. Also, the process itself has been notable: you really see a collective effort from organizations with very different ideas about telecentres. This is the kind of networking for concrete outcomes that telecentre.org needs to be doing more of.

Fusing

Colombo, Sri Lanka, April 2007. While I was in Sri Lanka, Sarvodaya launched it's new Fusion program at HQ in Moratuwa. Watching the Fusion powerpoint, it was tempting to ask: what is this? In some ways it comes across as a mishmash of telecentres, e-agriculture activities and everything else under the sun. While can be confusing at first, it makes sense. Much of Fusion's basic logic is built around the idea of rationalizing and accelerating all of Sarvodaya's existing ICT4D efforts (telecentres, community outreach, training, wireless, content). Over the years,these things have all spread apart with different teams, managers and offices all over the Colombo area. It was time to rope them all in and then head off in a single direction. At the most simple level, this is what Fusion is doing.

However, it is clear than Fusion is – or at least can be – much more when you take the time to sit with the whole team, as I did last Saturday. It really is a 'fusion' of ideas, programs and vision that is quite rare. You have people on the team who come from accounting and sales, technologists and tinkerers and community development activists who have worked in Sarvodaya for almost 20 years. Together, these people have the chance to mix together the wisdom from Sarvodaya's history with the creativity, the power of new information technologies and opportunity of social enterprise ideas. In the immediate term, these folks may only merge Sarvodaya's existing ICT programs (useful but not visionary). However, In the long run, I expect these people are going to create a current that will make people around the world pay attention.

It's worth saying that Fusion's business plan (like the powerpoint) doesn't yet tell the story of the people, networks and ground presence that sit behind Fusion. I have offered to help Harsha with this, helping to better describe these existing assets and looking at future products ... and generally to make the plan less NGOish.

Social enterprise, or sustainability

Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, April 2007. “You should be talking about sustainability, not social enterprise.” Those were Rich Fuchs' words very early on in our discussion about the telecentre.org SustainabilityFirst! report, a plan invest in social enterprises that offer revenue generating services via telecentres (giving the telecentres a cut).

The aim of the discussion was to finalize how telecentre.org would roll out this global fund. In the end, we (Floro, Harsha, Loic, Eva and Rich) decided to tear up the document and start over. It's not that the analysis in the document was wrong. There is in fact a huge opportunity for both sustainability and public good in the telecentre services space. Think of what telecentres could do if they had access to a menu of health, education and government services that they could easily offer to their communities for a small fee? Rather, the insight we came to was that a new 'fund' targeting a dozen or so social enterprises would not likely be enough to really build momentum in the services space. Also, we felt the fund represented a 'grow' (distraction) approach. We need to 'deepen' (our new mantra of nurturing and strengthening our existing network partners).

So, we asked ourselves: how can we push the sustainability and services envelopes through our existing networks? At least part of the answer was right in front of us at Sarvodaya. Harsha's team had recently been approached by a number of local companies with services to offer through telecentres. And, as the lead for the Sri Lanka Telecentre Family, this team was also working with NESST to develop a new set of digital skills courses to be offered for a fee through both Nenasalas and telecentres. This mashup of opportunistic partnership development, rigorous business planning and business coaching for key team members looks like it will allow Fusion / Sarvodaya / SLTF not only to help its partners become sustainable but also to become sustainable itself.

Based on this observation, we resurrected the SustainabilityFirst! moniker and came up with a new collection of activities aimed at helping our network partners become 'sustainability channels'. This will include a mix of capacity building and mentoring for key 'sustainability activists' in our partner networks as well very small as needed grant funds and a community of practice connecting these activists together. We will start developing a concrete plan on this in the coming weeks.

Question-ware in rural Sri Lanka

Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, April 2007. Our main goal in going up to the Anuradhapura region of Sri Lanka was to visit a Village Information Centre (VIC). These Centres offer basic access to information through a collection of printed articles and brochures posted on a wall. Information focuses on health, education, government and, especially, agriculture. If a local person cannot find the information they need, the volunteers who staff the Centre can go into the telecentre 20 kilometres away (or make a mobile call?) to get additional information to be posted on the wall. The Centres themselves are built and financed by the local members of the Sarvodaya Society.

In the village we visited, it was clear that farmers and others did make some use of the Centre. It also looked like there was a great deal of untapped potential. When I asked the volunteers: when was the last time you actually had to seek out information in response to a request from a villager? They pointed to a handwritten sign with information about identity cards that people had been asking for (and that there were no government brochures on). This was an interesting example of the human interface to the information society in action. However,  when I asked for more examples, there weren't any. The villagers were not doing much to take advantage of this resource that they had collectively created.

After seeing the Centre, we sat with the local farmers for lunch and asked them some questions. They understood the basic information supports they could now access, especially from more skilled Sarvodaya staff who visit the Centre to offer specific agricultural advice from time to time. However, it was clear that they could find way more kinds of helpful information if they could just ask. What are the crop prices? Can we find any other people to sell to than the local middle man? What about finding a tractor to share? This wasn't something that came naturally, so they we're asking the volunteers questions like this.

These farmers are used to knowing what they can ask of the person beside them, and not of the broader Google-society. Clearly, Centres like this will become more valuable for the communities they serve on the volunteers are better at helping the local people ask questions that will solve their problems. The D.Net Pallitathya Kendra program with roaming information activists may offer a model here.

Accidental (telecentre) tourist

Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, April 2007. There was a big orange blob way ahead. It got bigger, and bigger. And then we stopped the van. The orange blob was actually a small building housing a Nenasala, an entrepreneurial rural telecentre created with financing and infrastructure from the eSriLanka program.

While the owner was surprised to see two van loads of people walking towards his telecentre, he was happy to talk. Turns out that his Nenasala has been up and running only six months, and that he also has a job working at a local Ministry of Agriculture extension telecentre (it seems these kinds of centres should be more tightly linked!). While the place was filled with kids using the computers, he said the biggest problem was getting customers. He also had trouble splitting his time with his other centre.

It was a nice treat to accidentally stumble across a working Nenasala with a passionate owner. But clearly, there was a need for more than connectivity (which they had) and computers. There seemed to be demand (or at least operator interest) in more formal agricultural service.  Hopefully, the The Telecentre Family can serve as a way for ICTA, Sarvodaya and others to come up with many innovative services to fill this kind of need. There was no question that the owner was happy to hear of this initiative. He said he'd like to get involved when it comes to his part of the country.

Getting ready for GK3

Singapore, April 2007. On a quick stop through Singapore last week, we held a number of meetings to get ready for this December's GK3 event. In the room: Marcia from IDRC; Florencio from telecentre.org; and Dash from Warisan Global in Kuala Lumpur.

The up shot of the meeting was this: the telecentre.org team has agreed to use GK3 as a major gathering point for our partners this year. At the very least we will be doing two things:

• telecentre.org Leaders Forum that will gather all of our networks and ambassadors in one place. The idea is to get these folks in deep learning and deep collaboration planning modes. It will happen on the two days before GK3.
• Telecentre Track at GK3 that mixes our grassrootss partners up with corporates and thinkers from the broader ICT4D space. The aim here will be to give our partners both a stage and a feedback from smart people working in different contexts.

We also explored the idea of a Telecentre Village, which would be a trade show for telecentre models. Talking this through helped us understand that this may me a bigger and more complicated task than we thought. We need to dig into this at the GKP meetings in Europe next week to see if there really is the demand for doing something like this. If we do go with the Village idea, Dash from Warisan will help to roll it out.