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October 7, 2003
Commonwealth ICT Summit: Opening Session, Part 2
Former Costa Rican president Jose Maria Figueres Olsen delivered a speech via video to the summit. He noted that we were only seven weeks away from the Commonwealth meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, and nine weeks away from WSIS. He said that heads of government should work to ensure their ICT initiatives are multi-stakeholder: "I hope we can instill in the heads of government the development of a national position [on ICT policy] that can work with civil society and the private sector." He sees WSIS as an important opportunity to further the use of ICTs for development, and specifically for achieving the Millenium Development Goals, "because we're already running behind.... In fact, it's the only way we'll be able to achieve the Goals."
Peter Armstrong of OneWorld International discussed the progress of OneWorld's innovative Open Knowledge Network (OKN), which he sees as a practical example of digital opportunity in the form of local knowledge. OKN is a reaction to the trend of privatization of knowledge, conceived of at the DOTForce meeting in Cape Town. He uses the story of Pondicherry, India to demonstrate what OKN does in real communities. Local women go online to collect and exchange information on subjects of vital importance to their community: employment information, market prices, weather data for fisherman. OKN creates the capacity for local knowledge sharing in their local language - in this case, Tamil. Women create their content offline, avoiding expenses access charges, but the computers are later synched with the network. They utilize peer-to-peer technology to exchange knowledge directly between the knowledge workers in the community. OKN employs metadata standards for XML and open copyright licenses to allow for open, but accurate content sharing. In sum it makes for sustainable business models acceptable to particular local contexts.
Local communities share data via a common network, which can then be translated and used by other communities that are members of the network. In the case of Pondicherry, the sharing of data is literally life-saving: fisherman rely on the weather data to know when it's no longer safe to fish. At another test site in Kenya, they're utilizing text messaging via mobile phones to improve local AIDS awareness. Villagers with phones sign up for a health information contest in which they're asked in Swahili a particular question related to AIDS awareness. (For example, true or false: can you get AIDS from holding hands with someone who's infected?) Whoever text messages the correct answer first wins a prize. Whether or not you win the prize, you receive another text message with the correct answer.
Posted by acarvin at October 7, 2003 4:04 PM
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