More than a billion personal computers are connected to the Internet. More than three billion mobile phones are in use around the world. Many of the world's poor people can access the global information infrastructure via their phones or indeed via community telecenters. For many more, people seeking to help them escape poverty can access the Internet as proxies for the poor themselves. Moreover, connectivity continues to improve with historically unprecedented rapidity.
In the not too distant past, it was assumed that economic progress resulted from the accumulation of capital, increasing the capital per worker. In recent decades, however, it has become clear that increases in productivity from better ways of doing things can exceed those from capital accumulation. Indeed, the combined improvements from capital accumulation and improved ways of doing things provide the rapid growth needed to overcome poverty reasonably quickly.
The question then is can we find ways to utilize the global information infrastructure to provide the poor with knowledge that they can use to work their own way out of poverty. One way to do so might be the development of a portal that would attract, organize and make that knowledge available to the poor and their agents.
Certainly a part of this knowledge would concern technologies appropriate for poor people to use in their productive activities, such as agricultural techniques appropriate for small farms in tropical areas, manufacturing techniques appropriate for cottage and micro-industries, and techniques appropriate for artisanal mining, forestry or small scale fishing. However, a "knowledge for poverty alliviation portal" would also include information on health and hygiene practices, construction practices, education and learning, communications, as well as on organization and means of achieving political expression. In short, the scope of the portal could be as broad as the needs of the poor for knowledge to improve their lot in life.
There already exist portals illustrating the kinds of tools that could be combined to create such a portal.
- Wikipedia has enrolled a huge community willing and able to provide information and has institutionalized means for quality assurancce, attracting huge numbers of information seekers.
- YouTube provides a platform on which people can post or view video clips, a facility that would be important for often iliterate poor people.
- LinkedIn provides a platform for social networking, helping people to find others with the expertise that they need for a specific purpose.
- Babelfish provides pretty good translation among many language pairs, and illustrates the potential to provide information to poor people all over the world in languages that they can understand.
- Google is based on webcrawlers that can find useful information all over the World Wide Web, and algorithms to organize that information, to interpret inquiries and to rank responses in order of potential utility.
I would suggest that the design of the platform requires not only technological expertise, but that of educators, psychologists, artists, social scientists, and others to figure out how best to communicate knowledge from those who hold it now, to those who need it to better the lives of the poor and to the poor themselves. Indeed, I suspect that often the best sources of knowledge needed by poor people are other poor people who have already successfully faced the problem.
An Example
Let us take as an example to explore how this portal would differ from others such as the Development Gateways, Eldis, Dev-Zone, or the Global Development Commons. One of the best ways to get information is to ask the right questions of the right people. The FAQs sections on many popular websites suggest how powerful the technique is.
Formulating the question: It is not easy to formulate a good question. Google illustrates a portal that has proven very effective in figuring out what someone really want to know from the the "lame" question he in fact poses. The problem would be likely to be more extreme for a portal intended to help poor people in developing nations to obtain knowledge that would help them to overcome their own poverty and that of their families and neighbors. One could provide help desks to assist users in posing questions, or develop algorithms that could infer the likely needs of the user and help interpret the information demands from the questions actually posed.
Finding the right person to answer the question: One might use a combination of crowd sourcing and social networking to track down the right person to answer a well posed question. The system might learn by including quality tracking and user satisfaction indices, and use that information to better guide respondent selection.
Helping the respondent answer well: One can imagine tools that would assist the respondent to understand the culture and educational level of the questioner, and to tailor the response to the questioner. Availability of tools to provide video or audio as well as text and images in the response would no doubt help in communication. Obvious tools would include translators to allow questioner and respondent to operate in different languages.
Interactive capabilities: Clearly communication is facilitated by a process that allows both clarification of questions and clarification of answers. Moreover, a considerable portion of communication among humans is by body language, tone of voice, and other tacit means. A great portal would allow these means of communication.
Storage and Organization of Q&As in knowledge bases. VITA (Volunteers in Technical Assistance) for years ran a program in which volunteer experts responded to technical questions from developing nations. The organization saved the responses, and eventually had extensive files that could be used to respond to a significant portion of the questions without calling on a volunteer. The manual system eventually failed, I suppose because of its cost and the difficulties of keeping the information timely. The new portal should clearly save the Q&As and organize them in such a way that a new user could access relevant information from the stored records. It should be possible to develop technological solutions that would reduce the problems of cost and obsolescence of the information.
Independent validation of information and Feedback: Scientific knowledge systems are especially valuable because they subject assertions to peer review, because observations are subject to replication, and because (ideally) negative results as well as positive results are included. At a simpler level, Amazon has developed procedures to tap professional reviews of books with reader comments and reviews to help evaluate the quality of the books it sells. So too, the proposed portal should include systems to validate the questions and their responses and record feedback from users.
How Do We Get There?
Such a portal could not come into existence magically.
- Financing would have to be obtained for its development and maintenance. How could that be found?
- There would have to be a core team to take charge of the conceptualization and development of the platform. How would that team be recruited and housed?
- A broader team of experts on knowledge for development would have to be recruited to advise and consult on the portal, and means would have to be found to effectively consult their expertise and incorporate it in the thinking about the portal.
- Permission to use existing tools in the portal would have to be obtained, and new tools would have to be developed. How would this be done?
- A community of contributors would have to be recruited and prepared to make their contributions. Who would do so, and how would it be done?
- The target population of seekers and users of knowledge would have to be further identified, and then a process would have to be developed to connect the knowledge recipients to the portal. How would that be done?
- The development community would best be consulted about the plans for the portal, involved in the portal's development, and encouraged to incorporate the portal in development programs.
7 comments:
I like the idea....I think a study should be done on what kind of demand you could expect. I don't think people were beating down the doors for someone to create Wikipedia - but it worked. What would be the possibility that something like this could work?
David Foster and I founded Design Earth to design for sustainability, including to create the knowledgebase John is talking about. We have some definite ideas about how to do it, and a growing network of wanna-be contributors.
You can reach me at marklroest@gmail.com -- and please do reach me if you are interested in mapping out the solutions (that's a hint!).
see http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/povertymapping/
http://www.gsdi.org/
http://www.agcommons.com/
Thank you for the comments.
The geographic information efforts that Glenn identified in his second comment look really good. I am going to be sure they are included in the Development Gateway Resource base.
Mark, the list of categories on Design Earth shows a lot of thought. You might look at something like the UNESCO Thesaurus and do a comparison and/or use it to back up the categories. There is also an online thesaurus available on UNESCO's WEBLIS software.
I see the importance of an estimate of the use of such a portal, and indeed of the willingness of a community to help build it. However, it seems to me that there would need to be some idea of who would sponsor it and how much they would be willing to spend on it before any real study could be done.
I am still waiting for the Development Gateway ICT for Development community portal to highlight this suggestion, and hoping that that will result in some interest and discussion. However that website only gets about 1000 visits a week, or about what this receives.
When I wrote this idea I was not aware of the Wikipedia Portal on Sustainable Development. It appears to be a very useful portal, and illustrates what can be done with a Wiki format.
I am not fixed on any specific design for the Knowledge for Poverty Alleviation Portal. However, I was thinking more of a "how to" approach, perhaps with elements of eHow or wikiHow, but with content that would be useful for people in developing nations. For that purpose I would think videos would be an important medium for communication.
Perhaps "Where There Is No Doctor" might be another model. There are, as I understand it a couple of million copies in print, it has been translated into 75 languages, and is available online. It provides instructions for people to deal with health problems in effective ways, and is useful in that it helps poor people in developing nations to find better ways of dealing with these problems.
This looks like a great bunch of links; I plan to check some out tomorrow. I think that enough of a KBase to show how it works and what the basic benefits are can be put together in some people's spare time; then I've been working with colleagues to sort out who to invite to sponsor it, and how. Not there yet, though.
It's really important to be able to change the portal around for specific cultural needs as well as ecosystems.
Idea is good & there is definite need for a portal.
We from ISLE (Indian Society Of Lighting Engineers) are working on disseminating information on lighting with focus on far flung areas, which have no access to electic light.
One is to collect & compile authentic a nd relevent information and the other step will be to make the same easily accessible. Making it accessible is a difficult job for the millions, who do not even have light.
We have to work for both aspects.
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