A couple of articles from The Economist Tech Quarterly

New ways of breaking tasks into smaller pieces and sharing the work offer interesting opportunities for developing nations!

"More than just digital quilting"

Technology and society: The “maker” movement could change how science is taught and boost innovation. It may even herald a new industrial revolution.

This article describes the development of open source approaches to allow small devices to be easily built. Arduino  makes circuit boards which can accept inputs from sensors and provide outputs to devices under the control of open source software. There are devices on the market to mate with the Arduino boards. SparkFun has developed Lilypad, a flexible micro-controller that can be sewn into clothing. MakerBot Industries now sells 3D printers for $1,300. Around the devices made by these and other firms, Maker Fairs are developing which provide face to face markets (in addition to online sales), and online social networking sites provide for virtual communities.

"Return of the human computers"

Technology and society: The old idea of human computers, who work together to perform tricky tasks, is making a comeback.

Before the age of computers, large numbers of "human computers" were sometimes organized to perform large scale computations that were required for tasks such as the creation of the tables used by artillery officers to aim their canons. Mathematicians developed approaches to break these problems into pieces that could be calculated by an individual as well as means of checking the work and combining the results; there was a journal for the sharing of these programming techniques. Now social outsourcing approaches in some ways comparable to this older approach. Humans can easily do some information processing activities that are very hard for us to program, and large scale problems are being broken down into small pieces of such activities and allocated to social networks. Encyclopedia entry preparations are being broken down into smaller pieces such as initial research, writing and editing; CrowdForge manages the process handing out tasks to online workers, which it contacts via Mechanical Turk, and collecting and collating their finished work. CastingWords uses crowd sourcing to create good transcripts of audio tapes. CloudCrowd is used to co-ordinate teams of human translators and editors, each doing bite size pieces of the job.  oMoby can identify objects in images snapped by iPhone users

The way human computers used to work: Image Source

The maker movement seems to me to make the development of new things a collaborative effort. I can imagine it having a major application in the development of appropriate technology by small groups in developing nations.

The availability of these systems to social networks to help computers carry out large complex tasks seems to offer huge opportunities to developing countries where there is so much under employed labor that works cheep. Think how may people from the British Commonwealth would be available to do English language work and would find such work remunerative. How many Chinese would be available to do image recognition and would find such work remunerative.