FOLLOWING UP SOME POSTINGS

The hurricane: Washington is still recovering from the hurricane last week. Living in an information society, we are flooded by information on the event. Knowing that 39 people died, hundreds of thousand of people were without electrical power for days, that houses burned down when their power was restored, and that the damages are measured in the billions of dollars probably makes the situation psychologically worse. I personally in fact suffered no disruption.

In terms of K4D, it is interesting to note how widely disseminated the information gathering and processing was. The infrastructure repair was based on rapid assessment of the damage, and a plan to start up-net and work out with the repairs. Similarly cleanup of the fallen trees was based on a rapid assessment and a prioritized plan. Traffic lights were out, and seemed to be repaired according to priorities, with police stepping in to direct traffic in key intersections.

Cancun: The Economist has a review of the disaster at Cancun. It seems to believe there is enough blame for all – posturing leaders from developing nations, poor negotiators with rigid protectionist positions from Europe, U.S. politicians who could not overcome local interests to achieve an agreement for the greater good, NGOs that complicated the process, and an ineffective WTO structure and process. Really a sad event, given that “a successful Doha round could raise global income by more than $500 billion a year by 2015. Over 60% of that gain would go to poor countries, helping to pull 144m people out of poverty.”

Incidentally, another article, “Who guards the guardians?” gives international NGOs in the environmental field a poor report card.

Software: Sun has announced new, very low prices for server software, a PC operating system, and an office suite. The idea is to disrupt the “commodity” software business in a way analogous to Dell’s disruption of the PC business. We have seen stories of Microsoft dropping prices on PC software, and of increasing interest in free and open software. And of course in developing countries, a lot of people just pirate the stuff. I suspect that this is the beginning of a process that will see the cost of the basic software for the developing country PC go very low.