Presentation given by Stuart Macdonald at the International Workshop on ICT and e-Knowledge for the Developing World in Shanghai International Convention Center, Pudong, Shanghai.
2. PC powered by car battery
charged by solar panels
The application of computing within the
field of socioeconomic or international
development.
• ICT4D 0.0: 1950s to late-1990s. Main-
frame computing / data processing.
• ICT4D 1.0: late-1990s to 2010.
Millennium Development Goals and
Internet
• ICT4D 2.0: 2010 onwards –
emergence of mobile technologies and
the focus on the poor as producers and
innovators with ICTs (as opposed to just
consumers of information).
ICT4D – Information & Communication Technologies for Development
3. Harnessing Collective
Intelligence
One of Tim O'Reilly's seven principles in
the noteworthy 2005 article, What Is Web
2.0.
“the synergistic and cumulative channelling
of the vast human and technical resources
now available over the internet to address
systemic problems” *
Collaboration of people’s knowledge, web
technologies and information for the
common good!
* Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Global Climate Change (2007), Malone, T.W. & Klein, M.,Innovations: Technology, Governance and Globalization,
Summer 2007, Vol. 2, No. 3, Pages 15-26. URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.15
4. Socio-technical concepts
Web 2.0 (or participatory web) – tools and
services that enable user interaction and
collaboration, information sharing,
interoperation between applications using the
web as a platform
Social media / social networking –
Channels and technologies include: blogs,
picture-sharing, vlogs,email, SMS, music-
sharing, social networking sites, data
visualisation tools, virtual communities, and
voice over IP etc.
Crowdfunding – the collective cooperation of
people who pool their money together via the
Internet to support efforts initiated by other
people or organisations.
See Smarter Money - http://www.smartermoney.nl/
for a list of crowdfunding platforms
5. Crowdsourcing - a large group of people or volunteers
(‘the crowd’) who individually do a small amount of work to
complete a larger task
Citizen science - individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of
whom may have no specific scientific training, who perform research-related
tasks such as observation, measurement or computation.
Mashups / APIs - the combining (“mashing”) of two or more pieces of
complementary data or functionality to create a new web application or
service. This is usually achieved through the use of an Application
Programming Interface (API).
Open Access – a ‘technological ideology’ whereby access to scholarly
output via the Internet is free for all to read and use
Socio-technical concepts
6. Social Media
Kabissa – http://www.kabissa.org/
a volunteer-led NGO that promotes ICT to
connect people and organisations for
positive change in Africa using a social
media platform.
• 1500+ organisations in the Kabissa network each with their own profile
• Kabissa members can set up their own groups to suit their own needs
(private or open collaboration spaces, community blog, announcements, etc)
• Public posts to all Kabissa groups can be browsed via common tags
• Public groups – ICT Peer learning, ICT Trainers complete with discussion forums and
blogs to discover relevant technologies, tools and training manuals, workshops
• Kabissa Internet Relay Chat Room
• Twitter Dashboard, RSS feeds, recent public posts to discussion lists
7. Crownfunding Initiatives
Kiva – http://www.kiva.org/ - combines microfinance with the internet to
create a global network of people connected through lending:
1. Kiva partners with microfinance organisations (Field partners - FP)
2. FPs know the local area & distribute loans to entrepreneurs from their own
pocket
3. FPs collect entrepreneur stories, pictures, loan details and post to Kiva.org.
4. Lenders browse loan requests and select those they’d like to fund.
5. Kiva aggregates funds from lenders & gives them to the FPs replenishing the
loan they made to the entrepreneur.
6. FPs also collects repayments from entrepreneurs as well as interest due. Interest
rates are set by the FP.
7. Kiva doesn’t charge interest to FPs & doesn’t provide interest to lenders.
8. Kiva repay lenders from FP accounts. Lenders can re-lend, donate to Kiva or
withdraw funds via PayPal.
8. Kopernik – http://www.thekopernik.org – an on-line store of innovative technologies
(e.g. solar powered products, water purification devices)
Samasource – http://samasource.org - aims to bring small
amounts of computer-based tasks (‘microwork’) to women, youths and refugees
living in poverty. Services include data entry, book digitisation, audio transcription,
video captioning. Samasource forms partnerships with local organisations that
provide computers and basic training.
Grameen Foundation – http://grameenfoundation.org –
provides micro-lenders in poor communities access to the
capital they need to make micro-loans to women who want
to start a business.
The GF Application Laboratory provides services using
mobile technologies which allow people to access
information on topics such e.g. through text messages a
farmer can receive tips on treating crop diseases, learn local
market prices, get advice on preventing malaria.
9. Africa@home –
http://africa-at-home.web.cern.ch
- a website for volunteer computing projects which
contribute to African humanitarian causes
Volunteer computing utilises the spare capacity of
home PCs when idle to solve scientific or resource
intensive problems
Volunteers download Berkeley Open Infrastructure
for Networking Computing (BOINC) software from
the web.
The Malaria Control Project is a grid computing
project run by Africa@home – harnessing
computing power from 1000s of PCs around the
world to improve the ability of researchers to predict
(through simulations) the spread of malaria in Africa
Citizen Science
10. Mashups and APIs
Ushahidi – http://www.ushahidi.com – provides a free
and open source platform for aggregating information from the public for use
in a crisis response.
Any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and
visualize information.
Core platform will allow for plug-in and extensions so that it can be
customized for different locales and needs
The Ushahidi platform allows anyone
to gather distributed data e.g. SMS,
RSS, email, digital photograph,
microblog entry and visualise it on a
map or timeline.
12. Open Access
HINARI (World Health Organisation) –
http://www.who.int/hinari/en/
HINARI provides free or very-low cost online
access to more than 7000 major journals in
Biomedical and related social sciences to local,
Non-profit institutions in developing countries.
Institutions in countries with GNI per capita below $1250 are eligible
for free
Institutions with GNI per capita between $1250 - $3500 pay $1000 p.a.
Eligible categories of institutions include: universities, research
institutes, teaching hospitals, government offices, national medical
libraries
13. Examples of enterprising technologies
Delay (or Disruption) Tolerant Networking (DTN) - technical solution to create
continuous connectivity across networks operating in mobile or extreme terrestrial
environments.
Multiple Mice – In developing countries children often don’t have access to individual
computers. Research in rural India showed that with shared computers there are clear
patterns of inequality for children based on who controls the input. UC Berkeley and Microsoft
Research India have developed multiple mice. They found that children learned more in
shared modes with multiple devices than they did even when each child had a dedicated
computer.
Ruggedized computers - specifically designed
with robust and simple components to operate in
harsh environments, such as extreme temperatures,
and wet or dusty conditions.
Audio Wiki – a repository of spoken content that
can be accessed and modified via low-cost
telephone and is accessible to illiterate
Users create, edit and listen to content without
having to read any text using a hybrid of keypad
navigation and speech recognition
14. Steps in the right direction but….
• ICT policy from local/national
government
• Infrastructure such as roads, health
services, power
• Corruption/exploitation
• Illiteracy
• Lack of exposure to basic technology
and subsequent training
• Socio-cultural aspects such as religion
specific to indigenous communities
Improve quality of life for people on their own cultural terms!!
External issues which impact on ICT4D include:
15. Thank You
stuart.macdonald@ed.ac.uk
EDINA National Data Centre:
http://edina.ac.uk
Credits: All images are CC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic or
Attribution 2.0 Generic:
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Editor's Notes
EDINA is one of the two JISC-funded National Data Centres in the UK based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland
This is a particularly large and emotive topic to discuss in 20 minutes.
There are many initiatives, utilities and emerging technologies that I’ll not have time to cover. I will however try to be representative in terms of the types of utilities and web services available.
So what I’ll endeavour to do introduce some socio-technical or Web 2.0 concepts
provide examples of organisations that are facilitating this process through innovative approaches
ICT4D is an interdisciplinary research area in its own right
web models moved from informational to interactional to transactional
In a web 2.0 realm
Or as some people say it should be about unharnessing collective intelligence
As a facilitator or enabling technology on a large scale using the web as platform
e.g. blogs, wikis, social networking sites, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups, numeric and spatial visualisation utilities
Microfinance and peer-to-peer lending, Crowdfunding 2.0 – tribefunding (with hundreds of would-be lenders)
Steering clear of the semantic web which expresses relationships between web objects using ontologies and fixed or standard vocabularies
Extends the analogy of outsourcing work for economic gain using cheaper labour
There are over 1500 organisations in the Kabissa network from all areas of Africa
Ethnos Project - Site for scholars, activists, government agencies, NGOs, indigenous groups
Resource database containing items related to ICT for social change, open developments, mobile innovations, technologies & publications
improve quality of life for people on their own cultural terms
Zunia.org
Microfinance orgs across the globe whose mission it is to alleviate poverty
Field partners must adhere to Kiva’s regulations and terms and conditions
Microfinance - financial services to low-income clients who traditionally lack access to banking and related services.
Those who promote microfinance generally believe that such access will help poor people out of poverty
StormPay, Clickbank, Paymate – micropayment sites
Fairly typical microfinance workflow
Kopernik - The public fund the most promising proposals in order to make them a reality
Applications can also be used to collect information e.g. surveys conducted by mobile phones can be used to collect information on access to health services or types of crop grown in a specific region.
Volunteer computing also known as public resource computing, cycle scavenging or @home computing – many volunteer computing projects in existence
One of the main sponsors is CERN, Software without Borders)
Software acts as a screensaver which periodically uploads results (during an idle time) and downloads output to
User Generated Content
Channel information from various online sources into one ‘portal’ for use in a crisis situation
Necessity is the mother of invention
Other Cultural and social contexts including religion, roles within the family or within the community, family history and life expectations
So what I’ve just been describing is encouraging and full of altruistic intent however lets put things into perspective to an extent – there’s still a lot to do, technology will take us part of the way but the rest is down to us, the individuals who can contribute and particiapte.