Telecenters

Yesterday I attended a meeting entitled "Community Access for Development". It was a discussion among five people on the stage, each with lots of experience in the telecenter movement. I was impressed by the suggestion that there are now 100,000 telecenters in the world, and that number is continuing to grow rapidly. The panelists suggested that there is still a need for joint use of Internet connected computers in poor countries, especially in rural areas. That need should continue for quite a while. The speakers did mention however, the potential importance of stand-alone, unattended terminals (think of ATMs or public telephones). They also suggested that since there may be three billion mobile phones in the world, and those mobile phones offer a great potential for not only voice but also digital communication. As more and more capable hand held devices become affordable, they may change the role of telecenters. The speakers also noted that the social gathering aspect of the telecenter is important and should not be lost. As one would expect, there are lots of problems with sustainability and scale up.

Linda Eddleman of Trust for the Americas who runs the Microsoft supported POETA program brightened my day. The POETA program provides training on computer use and employment services for disabled people through 15 centers in eight countries in Latin America. The speaker mentioned that POETA had benefited from seed funding from the infoDev program. I was the World Program Director of infoDev when we decided to fund POETA, and I recall our high hopes for the program. It was nice to hear how fully our hopes had been realized. Let us hope the idea continues to spread to other regions.

The seminar was facilitated by two recent books published by the participating organizations:

• Making the Connection: Scaling Telecenters for Development
  
• From the Ground UP: The Evolution of the Telecenter Movement
  

I had a few thoughts not covered in the meeting that I might share:

Ratchet Effects

Telecenters are evolving. They are part of a complex technological system which is evolving about them. Some people feel confident that the best practices will bubble up from experience and come to dominate the telecenter movement by an evolutionary selection.

Think about radio and television. In their evolution, the United States decided that broadcasting would be left to the private sector, financed by advertising, while the United Kingdom opted for public sector broadcasting financed by special taxes. The systems have come somewhat together, with privately owned networks in the UK and public broadcasting in the United States, but each system has continuing vestiges of the original decision.

So I ask the quetion:

Are there decisions being made now that are largely irreversible, and will mark the social and economic impact of telecenters in future decades?

If so, of course, we should be doing policy research and analysis on how best to make those decisions.

Could the Resource be Used in a Different Way?

The emphasis of the meeting was the social role of telecenters. I believe most people in the telecenter movement think of telecenters as empowering their users with information, enabling government to reach into the telecenter neighborhoods with online services, and enabling the private sector to achieve commercial purposes via the connected users. All great ideas.

Think however of the existence of several hundred thousand networked computers. Personal computers are in fact quite powerful devices. In the average telecenter every computer is idle a good portion of the day, and even when a user is doing word processing or any of the normal uses, most of the memory and computer power is idle.Thus there is a very significant computer power sitting idle most of the time. How about making that available to university and government laboratories in developing countries which are often underserved with computer power? How about using that power for biomedical research or weather forecasting? Indeed, using the now-idle networked computer power for some productive purpose might generate some resources for support of the telecenter networks.

Similarly, telecenters form a growing network already into 100,000 places that until now have been unwired. Not only that, in each point there are computers and people who can maintain the technology. Could these be used for data collection? Small meteorological or seismic sensors could be connected at these points. Indeed, users could be asked to collect soils samples, samples of insect pests, plant diseases, etc. A really good flow of information into the central analysis points could help those seeking to provide services.

There are some efforts already to combine telecenters with local radio stations, but much more could be done in this line. The local radio transmitters are now affordable and easy to use. Telecenters are already connected to the Internet and thus to news and entertainment resources. All that is needed is to put the two together to start broadcasting. I would think doing so would enable telecenters not only to provide a public service, but also to obtain resources either through advertising, fee for service, or local subsidies.

Leadership from the Middle

Dennis Foote mentioned that uses of telecenters "bubble up" from the users themselves. He likes (and I like) the example of the telecenters in India that were used by families to find marriage partners for their children. This idea came from the users -- none of us in the international donor community would have come up with the idea of telecenters for this purpose. I was equally surprised when the first killer application of personal computers came to be games, when word processors were the first personal computers used in the U.S. government, or when the first killer app of the Internet turned out to be pornography, (Well, everything that bubbles up is not a great idea!)

In the race for innovation, some corporations are looking to their clients for new ideas and new directions. So too, they are looking to their suppliers, accessing innovations through market processes. New institutions are springing up to link innovators in universities and government laboratories to organizations that can put the innovations to commercial use.

In a recent posting I wondered whether the guys talking about leadership in the development of e-government were focusing on the wrong leaders. It is nice to have leadership from chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) in support of innovations. But all too often we don't have that luxury.

On think some more, it seems to me that the real intellectual leadership in the information revolution has very seldom come from the top of organizations, but most commonly from folk in the middle of the organization (or from outside the formal organization itself).

The telecenter movement is a loosely networked horizontal community. It is the prototypical system for distributed innovations virally defused. The problem is to make the viral process work better. We want to empower leaders in innovation wherever they might exist, but also to assure that successful innovations are rapidly communicated to those who can utilize them, while encouraging people to avoid replicating dysfunctional innovations. This is a serious challenge of social engineering. Fortunately, the members of this community are all connected to the Internet and computer literate!

I would note that we want government and industry to tie into the Internet to offer services to the telecenter users, and to enter into partnerships with telecenter networks. Here we need innovators in the middle of organizations to step up and take a leadership role. There is again a need for social engineering to find ways to encourage such innovation and to reward it. Again, fortunately, our target population is wired and literate!