 Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for Shorts. Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2014 webinar series. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Laura Hoffman of California Polytechnic State University and Ruth Beike of Invinio. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'll be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where I'm a Senior Program Manager in our Engineering for Global Development Department. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, Emerging Markets, Top Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Hardware Challenges. Hardware-based social ventures are proliferating in global development, and programs such as One Laptop for Childs have thrust the ICT4D sector into the spotlight. E4C were particularly interested in the challenges and solutions emerging in the hardware space. So, we've invited today's presenters, Laura Hoffman, who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at California Polytechnic State University, and Bruce Beike, the Executive Director of Invinio, to share key lessons learned from a macro-level study, comprising insights from hundreds of experts, academics, practitioners, and users on how devices and hardware can be better designed and built to function in the difficult conditions of the developing world. We thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series, generally. Along with myself, we have Holly Schneider-Brown, Michael Mater, and Steve Welch. As you can see, there's a mixture of affiliations there from IEEE and AFME. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on this slide. Webinars at EngineeringforChange.org. Before we move on to our presenters, we thought it would be a great idea to remind you about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of over 250,000 people, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges faced by underserved communities around the world today, such as access to potable water, off-grid energy, effective healthcare, agriculture, sanitation, and other issues. Along with our social media community, we have a reach of nearly 700,000. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional engineering societies such as ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, just to name a few, as well as academic supporters such as MIT D-Labs, international development agencies like USAID, UW-USA, and Practical Action, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, EngineeringforChange.org to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the EngineeringforChange webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices on thinking of leaders in the field who bring innovative ideas and technology to bear on global development challenges. Information on upcoming installments in this series, as well as archived videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinar page, the URL is listed right there. Additionally, we have an archive on YouTube, so feel free to check that out as well. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag. You see there the hashtag E4C webinar. Our next webinar will be on October 28th at 11 a.m. Eastern Center time with that Daniel Lang-Tang, who is the Usen Family Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University. Our topic will be water sanitation and hygiene or wash in emergency. Lessons learned and a way forward. It's an incredibly interesting topic and we invite you to join us. Visit the E4C webinars page for registration details, or if you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation to this webinar directly. Another reason to join us. So a few housekeeping items before we get rolling. On the screen you are now seeing, there are a number of different widgets on the dashboard at the bottom. The group chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. The Q&A widget allows you to submit any questions for the presenter. The health widget is for inquiries about any technical difficulties with resources on how to use software and FAQs. Share this allows you to share the link of this webcast with your friends and colleagues through 13 popular social media sites. And the Twitter icon allows you to post directly to Twitter from here. And lastly, the survey icon allows you to take our survey at any time. Now I know this is a lot of information, so always feel free to hover over an icon for an explanation. We have quite a few folks attending this webinar today. So we'd love to see where you're from. Using the group chat, please type in your location. All right. I'm actually not able to see everybody, but I generally know that we have folks that call in from all over the United States and around the world. So welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. And we are so excited that you can make it from all parts of the globe. In the webinar, you can use the group chat to type in any remarks you may have and interact with your fellow attendees. But don't forget to use the Q&A window to type in your questions to the presenter. That way we'll be able to keep track of those questions. I see some folks are already using Q&A to tell me their locations as well. Welcome from Peru, Florida, Seattle. Thank you. If you encounter any troubles viewing or hearing the webinar, you may want to try opening webcast delete up in a different browser. Also, feel free to access the help widget for technical help. Following the webinar to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour or PDH for this session, please follow the instructions at the top of our web page, engineeringforchange-labanars.org. Also, please make sure to take a moment to fill out our short survey. Your opinions are invaluable to the webinar series. Without your comments and suggestions, it wouldn't be what it is today. So I'd like to take a moment now to give you a better intro to today's presenters. We have Laura Hoffman, the assistant professor of political science at California Polytech State University. Professor Hoffman has helped prior academic positions at Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of California Berkeley and the University of Southern California or USC. She graduated with a PhD in political economy and public policy from USC. Her current research focuses on the role of information and communications technology, or ICT, in developing countries, particularly in terms of its potential effects on social-cultural factors, human development, and economic growth. Her blog, giving insights on her fieldwork experiences, is listed on the slide that you are seeing. Our second presenter is Bruce Vakey, the executive director at Indignio, a social enterprise delivering the tools of technology to those needed most in the developing world. He's leveraging his extensive experience in the renewable energy industry as well as 16 years at Sun Microsystems as a telecom industry expert to drive and renew those initiatives, which are centered on sustainable commuting, wireless broadband networks, and targeted capacity building through partnerships with local ICT entrepreneurs. His areas of expertise include wireless networking, eco data centers, DC Power, and Solar Power. Mr. Vakey has published numerous white papers and articles on green data center operations and Solar Power and ICT4D. His background includes a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and Advanced Studies in International Business from the University of Wisconsin. Welcome you both, and I'm going to hand it over to Bruce to get us kicked off. Thank you. Well, today's topic is interesting from my view only because the last ten years in Vignio has been quite active in deploying all types of computer technology in developing regions and have been involved in the design and implementation and deployment of over 2,000 computer labs in schools, healthcare clinics, and refugee camps in Sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, and in the Pacific Island. And we've learned a lot along that path over the last ten years of doing this, but in our discussions with both ARM and USAID, we wanted to find out if everyone else was having the similar experiences with hardware failures, what works and doesn't work when deploying these type of projects in the emerging world. And so with that, we decided to embark on a study of what other practitioners, experts, and academics had been seeing in the field. Because, of course, what we have been finding is the most of the hardware coming out of Silicon Valley and the developed world was really not designed for going into very harsh conditions. And when we look at equipment that was such as military spec, it was just not affordable or usable in the environments that we were going into. However, there is a huge demand for ICT and computing and in the developing world for education, healthcare, e-government, and so the demand is there. But if we look back in history, the results and the failures on projects of the wrong equipment being put in place and project failures, we really needed to take a hard look at what's working and what's not working. And so there's been a technology mishmash, so to speak, that what works here in our world doesn't necessarily work in the developing world. So the purpose of the study that we wanted to undertake was to take our Invinio experience and really uncover what everyone else was also seeing as a deployed project. So really uncover what are the major challenges that other organizations, NGOs, government, and ICT experts were seeing. Take these findings and actually educate the technology world that with a few product changes, they can offer their products to a larger base, meaning not just to the developed world but also in these emerging markets. And the hope for the study was to promote design and development for these regions that there is a market there, that there is a growing ICT industry and with the right products of that industry and the market can be very successful. So with that we started working, as I said, with USAID and ARM to really understand what other people were seeing in the market as far as failures and successes, document those, and then present those out to the industry, the hardware industry, to improve their product sets for these markets. So what we started looking at is not only our own industry, but also the people that we work with and some technology salons that Envinio hosted, but also how do we go out and interview ICD practitioners, experts, and academics and take that information and both from in-person interviews and online surveys and get those into a white paper. And that's where we opened up our discussions with Professor Hodman who is an ICT for the academic expert on the methodology and approach for going out and surveying the industry, both in-the-field practitioners, ICT experts, and academics working in the field and properly putting a survey together that really can look at these challenges, document those, and put them in a format, a white paper, that can be presented out to the industry. Laura, I'm going to hand Bill over to you to talk about the findings as you launched into this project. Okay, thank you, Bruce, and thank you, Iana, for the introduction. So yes, it's my opportunity here to talk about not just the project, but also what we found from it. And just a few words more about the methodology. We use each stage that you see listed here on this slide to inform the next stage, so the industry-based tech salons where we sequestered some experts from industry together and asked them specific questions to cogitate over for a few hours, informed the interview questions that I conducted with these 36 experts from around the world, and by the way, most of these people wore two hats. So if they were academics, they were also practitioners, for example. And then we use the responses from the interviews to come up with the survey questions. And I just want to say before I flip it to the next slide that both the interviews and the surveys, after we had explained what this project was all about and asked the requisite demographic questions, I asked a completely blank slate, open-ended question to both the interviewees and those responding to the survey, and it was the following. In your own words, what are the top ICT for D challenges? So we did not want to prejudice any of our responders with our own priorities, and actually the following questions we had broken down into categories, so we didn't reveal any of those categories first. But I think what we see on this slide is we have a winner. Both the interviewees and the responders overwhelmingly, the top ICT for D challenge was identified as being energy related, related to electricity, related to powering the hardware devices. Coming in second, and I actually wouldn't even say a close second, was cost, and we'll talk about cost next. And as you can see, so durability and ruggedness tied with connectivity for third if we're going to rank them. And environmental issues followed that. Now, having said that, and you can read the rest of the categories here or the responses here, none of these are unimportant. These are just, you know, we wanted to know what was on the top of the mind of the people responding to these surveys, and definitely energy came out on top without question. But it was put to me to come up with the top five hardware challenges. So if we are to come up with the top five, here they are. And pretty much in descending order, but again I need to point out that none of these actually work without all of the others being in place. So we have electricity coming in first, cost affordability being second, connectivity and environment related issues being third and maintenance and support. Actually you saw on the previous slide that environment was fifth. But even though they're very close to the order that we saw on the previous slide, these were actually the categories that we had predetermined. And we hewed very closely to what we actually found with our respondents. So what comes next? But okay, before I get to the categories actually, I want to point out something that I actually found a bit surprising in that we thought for sure we were going to find a couple of responses that were more important. For example, if you were working in the realm of ICT4D for 20 years versus someone who had just started, whether you were located in Africa versus Southeast Asia, in fact we cross tabulated all of our responses against all of these demographic characteristics and none of them were significant. Meaning that these were the priorities across the globe, no matter your gender, age, location or experience or even length of experience. So our findings were very robust and quite uniform. But on to the categories. So as I mentioned before, among our top category, the electricity power energy question, perhaps not surprising, everyone wanted to see low power and prioritize that in long battery life. And since the batteries that we use are really mostly rechargeable these days in your phone or in your tablet, many, many people pointed out that they want renewable energy to be considered. And in terms of the devices themselves, that means that they're ready to be used with solar. So perhaps on a 12 volt basis. People wanted us to avoid using inverters when possible. So your solar panels, for example, produce DC power and the devices charge on it. So many people pointed out, well, if we can come up with a great charge controller regulating that current, we should avoid using AC power and inverting it and re-inverting it just to be able to charge the devices. But that's for devices that, sorry, the solar is interestingly enough was mentioned by a lot of people. On the next slide, you'll see something that wasn't actually mentioned by a lot of people until we came up with the categories, which was, again, on this slide, you can see that even within this category, the most important spasset of the power energy electricity question became that people wanted devices to be resistant to voltage spikes, dips, swings, brownouts, blackouts, et cetera. Things that happen if you're connected to a grid, but the grid is unreliable or unpredictable, and that happens very frequently. So just once again, underscoring the importance of having open-ended questions and closed-ended questions because you get a little bit different responses, although in the main, our responses were quite uniform. But I just wanted to point out that once we actually asked the closed-ended question, yes, we were able to capture the resistance to voltage spike importance that people had. Otherwise, you can see on this chart that little power, the 12-volt DC issue and having long battery life was important. However, this also was able to capture the idea of using passive cooling and not having fans be needed to cool off equipment. So there's our power energy electricity category. Moving on to our next category of importance, we have cost affordability. And one other thing that I found interesting here was almost no one insisted on having things that were the lowest cost as the highest priority. Nearly everyone recognized that there needs to be a balance between finding that lowest cost or finding a lower cost and having a device that's solid, reliable, and isn't going to break down. So apparently there's enough experience out there with people having devices that do break down and might be the cheapest thing out there. And maybe in the Western market, you know, if you buy the lowest cost tablet, but you're okay with it breaking down after six months because you know the next tablet is coming out within the next six months, that might work for you. But in a developing world location where you're not able to invest in a new tablet every six months, people want something that's going to last. So there was really widespread recognition between the lower cost challenge but also the challenge that things need to keep working. So Laura, if I could just add a comment on cost and affordability. I know that a lot of the projects that Envinio does, you know, the funders look at, oh, what's the hardware cost of this laptop or desktop? And when we look at all the components of doing an ICT4D project with the hardware cost, the infrastructure for energy and internet, training, long-term support and maintenance that the hardware cost is normally only about 8% of the whole project cost. So everybody wants affordability, but when you look at the bigger picture, it's actually a small part of the overall pie. And in a similar way, people pointed out that it's actually quite difficult to calculate the real true cost of buying a device since it is so difficult to predict whether that device is going to last and how long it will be before the device breaks down or how much training we'll need to understand how to use it or how much electricity it's going to use. So that was also pointed out quite frequently how do we know what the true cost is of a device and that makes things more difficult. So onto our next category, which was environment-related issues. And one thing I found very interesting in this particular category was when I was asking people from the developing world, or I should say interviewing people who were located in the developing world, and that was approximately half of my interviewees, maybe a little more. The topic of what I would call mother nature-related environmental issues, so more e-waste or rare earth mineral issues didn't come up in the interviews unless I actually prompted them about it. Whereas when I was speaking with those who were located in the wealthier countries, I would say, they had a pretty equal half-and-half perspective on the mother nature issues versus all of the other bullet points that I've got listed here of reliability, durability, waterproof, water-resistant, humidity-resistant, salt-water-resistant, extreme heat, dust, et cetera. So not to say that there isn't an appreciation of the mother nature-related issues in the developing world, I think it's coming though, I think that that's more of an emergent issue and the more urgent concerns are basically, will the devices work in these more harsh conditions? So these were some of the issues that were raised and I would also point out that I found it interesting that for those who are working in, let's say, remote villages, it was frequently pointed out, you know, we have to work outside and the sun is pretty bright, so it's extremely difficult to read tablet screens or phone screens in the direct sunlight, but also in my village the people put oil on their hair because it's a desert climate and then they put it on their face and their body and guess what, it's on their hands and it gets all over the screens when they go to use their devices. But we heard similar things from people who are working in schools because multiple children are using tablets and that means that the screens get scratched or smudged or cracked when 10 different hands are grabbing for them. So we heard pleas for reliability, ruggedness and just better design screens from those types of people. And here's a more visual way of putting the environmental category responses. Bruce, did you have any examples to add here? Well, I think from our experience, having passively cooled equipment from an environmental standpoint from a long-term reliability is a key factor, meaning can we choose devices that are passively cooled, meaning there's no fan and of course when you have a fan it does suck in all the dust, dirt and humidity and a lot of the early hardware failures that we've come across were just because of that that the system becomes clogged with bugs, geckos, dust, etc. and the equipment fails after 6 to 12 months where passively cooled equipment doesn't have that issue. So these are key things to look at when selecting equipment because they do have an effect. Okay, moving on to the next issue of connectivity and I know that I've got this listed third but it's actually essential. So as I said before, none of these issues can be ignored. They're actually all useful if you're missing any of them. You can question whether the device is ever going to be useful. So many people pointed out that the connectivity is actually itself what's creating the value for the device because the more of us who are connected, be it through a mobile phone where we can speak or text or otherwise chat with others the more people that are connected the more valuable the network. It's the same with being online if you're on a social network. The more people that you know who are contributing to it, adding information the more you want to be connected yourself. But there's more to it than that actually. If we skip down to the bottom point here most software, most operating system updates, most apps are only available online. So the things that people want on the devices that are going out these days people realize that you have to be connected for there to be value. And in fact the only caveat to that was that in the area of education people believe and I guess it would also be in the case of libraries or community centers that house information. Information can be cached offline and curated and in that way it can become useful for schools and libraries etc. But these were truly the only examples that were given to me in all of this research where devices were deemed useful without connectivity. So going on to a more visual representation we also heard that Wi-Fi is the most popular way to get online according to our respondents. That's what they wanted to see and they also wanted to see multiple ways to connect. But not to be outdone in essential things to consider maintenance and support. So I heard over and over again the best technology needs no support. People want things to just work. This is not just because of all of the other bullet points we have down here that you know there's a lack of local technology experts to be found in many rural or far-flung locations. But also spare part sourcing is really a challenge. It's tough to get parts that are going to be needed on a consistent and regular basis. It's difficult to predict which parts are going to be needed and it takes a long time for them to get there once that's the case. So if technology is not locally sustainable, not locally repairable it's not going to be useful for people living there because it's not going to be repairable. So truly I'm underscoring that with all the other bullet points the best technology needs no support. If people need to get on unreliable dirt roads and travel long distances in expensive vehicles that use expensive gasoline that adds a level, a layer of cost that's just truly unsustainable for a lot of businesses and a lot of people in the developing world. I can't underscore enough this is actually our final category but it's no less important than any of the others. It's absolutely essential. So the next slide has a lot of words on it but we actually asked two questions about hardware in the survey and this is the condensed version of what was deemed the most important among the two questions. So interesting to me that touch screen doesn't necessarily rate as important as readable in sunlight for example or easily repairable but some of the highest ranking ones were actually going back to environmentally and electricity. So perhaps not surprising to see right in the middle of this graph electricity or robustness to electricity with standing heat and humidity the price. So all of these important features coming right back up I'm going to ask about the general hardware features. So just to kind of sum up all of these graphs I've summarized the top categories or the top responses I should say within all five of the categories that we determined so no surprises here. We've already gone over this. So among electricity we want the long battery life, we want it robust to the swings and spikes and outages and the 12 volt power. Within cost sure we're looking for a low upfront price but we also want to know that the long run prices is affordable as well. In the environment category we want devices that withstand heat, dust, humidity, sand, etc. and have a long lifespan. Our demands are high. Yes they are. We want devices that will connect in multiple ways and especially with Wi-Fi. Finally devices need to be easy to repair so that they're locally sustainable. So Laura if I can comment on a couple of these. One of the challenges that we always come across are a lot of good meaning donors that have a school in a rural area and say we'd like to donate a computer lab but haven't thought through the challenges of infrastructure meaning the power and connectivity and a lot of the projects that we see fail are because of those infrastructure issues and the issue is not to buy a gas generator and fuel every day for running a computer lab that if we design the equipment properly that's low power but still has the horsepower to run the applications needed for that school lab we can cost effectively solar power that. If we look at the inexpensive Chinese made generators that are being sold in the developing world now there's a recent statistic that the environmental output of those meaning the pollution is equivalent to a hundred of our modern cars. That's really not the answer anymore and we have to as people working in the ICT for D field need to take a hard look at how do we environmentally power this equipment so that it isn't having an impact and that gasoline and diesel generators are not the answer to solve the energy issues that are occurring in these markets. On the cost as I mentioned earlier 8% of the project cost that we see is only attributed to hardware so I know a lot of people focus on getting the lowest cost equipment but in reality it doesn't hurt to as you said look at equipment that's proper and just cost a fraction more and it's the right equipment to go in there because it is such a low part of the entire project cost and the environment, you know the schools, healthcare clinics, refugee camps are not air conditioned they're not environmentally controlled and we have to deal with the environmental issues of dust, heat, humidity, et cetera and this equipment has to withstand that and then the area of connectivity that's a big challenge and there's a lot of efforts underway for affordable internet in the developing world and bringing more bandwidth but while we're in major cities that's becoming more accessible and cost affordable we still have major challenges in the rural areas in the developing world to have affordable internet connectivity if you can find connectivity at all and that's a challenge that the industry is taking up but it's still years away before we see internet access as we have it here in the west and then the last area in maintenance one of the things that we've been promoting is buying all equipment in country and finding local suppliers the big thing that we have seen change over the last ten years of course is that a lot of this equipment is available in the market or if you request it it can be brought in and supported locally and that's the key thing is if you can buy and support the ICT equipment that you if you can obtain it locally then you have local skilled people that can support and maintain it on the long term and that's critical in any of these projects to see that they're still operational in two to three years that they didn't fail because a small part wasn't available or no one knew how to repair something and it's just left like that so the long-term support and maintenance is critical and we believe by sourcing locally the equipment that you want and buying what's available in country and adopting it to your project that's a way to address that Laura would you like to conclude what you saw in the paper? The point honestly of this project was to launch a discussion to get people talking to have people understand what the true challenges are according to a great mass of people who have expertise in this area and we believe that personally I believe that the hardware itself has been understudied by those who are doing research in this area so there are in fact my area of expertise I consider the socio-political economic realm of ICT4D there just aren't that many people out there who focus on the hardware itself so for me this was a welcome challenge but also it's an important addition to our understanding of the challenges facing ICT4D it's often overlooked and these were essential findings particularly what is important and once again just underscoring wow electricity carried the day I'll hand it back to you Bruce for concluding remarks So what's going to happen next with this white paper that's now been published and available for these challenges is in fact this webinar is the first kickoff of going out to the industry talking about what is needed better in hardware design so that the equipment can survive in these environments and it becomes more locally available and in fact next week is the ARM developer conference that I'll be attending to discuss with developers from Silicon Valley on how a few minor changes such as the voltage that the equipment is designed to run on the passive cooling etc that can make a huge difference in these marketplaces and open up their products to a bigger market segment and what these key features are that are needed in the next generation of hardware so that it truly becomes world-class hardware just not hardware for our western world and so we're quite excited that we're kicking this off today and giving this message out to the hardware industry especially here in Silicon Valley that there's another part of the world that's out there and they need to start considering that in their designs that they're putting into products today. And we are continuing to as Bruce said we're excited to launch this today this is actually the first time that the results of this report are being disseminated in addition to presenting this to the technology community that Bruce is doing in Silicon Valley in the coming weeks the subsequent week after he's doing that I'll be presenting this information as well at the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference also in Silicon Valley we'll both be presenting it there so this is just the start so we're very happy to have the opportunity to launch it here. And if you'd like more details the paper is available publicly and you can download that paper from the Invinio website and here's the look for that. It's also moved to the front of the Invinio homepage for this week so you can get access to that. If you have any questions or issues here's my contact detail at Invinio it's quite simple bruce.invinio.org if you have any further questions after this seminar as Professor Hosman said we're quite excited about launching this and getting this information out to the industry because there are a lot of good lessons learned over the last 10 years and recently of experts in the field that are seeing these difficulties and challenges and if we can work with the hardware and the hardware design industry to make some simple but effective changes we can and this equipment can really be effective as the developing world implements more ICT in schools, government, health care clinics, etc. This is absolutely fantastic and we are so honored here at E4 Speed to be the first to share the findings of this study. At this point I'm going to open up and invite our attendees to share any questions. We already have a number of questions that have come in so we're going to go ahead and get started by just a reminder to folks to use the Q&A window in order to enter your questions. Professor Hosman has already shared actually somebody else has shared the link to the white paper so feel free to look at that as well. The first question we're going to tackle here is for both of you and as a request for you to comment on the idea of having continuous hardware reviews based on these identified challenges. So something similar to PCMAG etc. testing. Bruce if you'd like to field that one I'm not sure I understand. Oh yes sir. And that is a challenge because there are a lot of areas that have become less of its own segment but now embedded into e-government, into education, healthcare, agriculture and the cost of a lot of equipment has come down dramatically especially in this sensor and now how do we gather that sensor data in rural areas and bring that back and make useful information of it. So ICT is embedded in all of these but as people in those environments go out and implement they don't necessarily know what's the right equipment to go in to a rural healthcare clinic or school or government office and so there is no as we have here in the United States a consumers report on hardware that's going to withstand the environment of the developing world. So there is a need for industry to start which equipment they are manufacturing that will survive in that and have an independent body testing and putting those results out. Nothing like that exists currently but I think there is as ICT becomes more embedded into these vertical segments it's going to be needed information for the industry. I would actually mention that Invinio has begun testing certain equipment for and reporting back about that equipment for the harsh conditions it found in the developing world. So I don't know whether Bruce didn't want to advertise too much about Invinio. We've had our own testing lab here at Invinio since we've started because we needed to find which equipment would work on our projects and so we've done our own internal testing as we know other people have done for their own projects. Now we have done some testing for other organizations to assure that the equipment that they're sending out will survive in these environments but we've done that for our own internal use mainly to date. Well we're very excited to hear that because in fact E4C's team has been working on exactly a platform that would capture and disseminate that information. So for all of you listening the future is looking pretty bright and hopefully we can work with Invinio to pull some of those findings out into the public realm. So moving on to additional questions. We have a question that we'll also have to tackle by text but just for everybody's benefit this is a question from a telecommunications engineer who is based in Africa and he wanted to know that he does a lot of ICT maintenance work and his question is regarding challenges in the area of software compatibility it's difficult apparently to get a he called genuine software to remote parts of Africa so perhaps you can speak to that particular issue a little bit also related to that just in general although ideally the best technology needs no support as you mentioned Laura frankly that's often not the case and maybe you can speak a little bit too what is being done as far as you being to build capacity especially locally for providing support. Again I don't want to toot Invinio's horn too much here but I actually started volunteering with them nearly a decade ago because I so much so strongly believed in their model of partnering with the folks on the ground where they work and building those local capacities there and you know bringing them up to speed but then empowering them to run their own ICT enterprises and that model I've advocated in my research and I've advocated it in my action oriented on the ground research it's so important to have the local people trained. I know Invinio is continuing to espouse this model and I think that it's catching on that is my impression but not everywhere and not at all times we still face challenges around the globe perhaps we can speak to that more well I think that you know the key challenges especially around software compatibility and the whole other study in itself this one we really focused on the hardware specific challenges and if we look at these projects you know there's four five key factors that are involved in making a successful ICT project and you know and that's one as we've talked here today you know making sure that we have the right hardware that's appropriate for the environment that it's going into. Second we're using the right operating system instead of applications that are going into these environments that those have been properly chosen for the need. Third that we that there is proper training of the users, teachers healthcare workers etc. so that they can use the applications and the tools that you know this was supposed to be bringing to them. Fourth we do have long term support and maintenance and then the last one that the issues of the infrastructure have been properly addressed meaning energy and connectivity. So why today we focused on what the hardware side of it needs you know the second key area has the right software been chosen has the right operating system been chosen for that particular project needs and a lot of times we see a lot of people just default to what we're using here in the west when it really isn't the right application set. You know it's just like taking one of our big desktop computers and trying to power that and use it in a rural school it's not going to work it's just like taking the same set of applications we're using here and trying to apply them there. That is an issue with software compatibility and I'll say more from is it the right software for that project. I would actually like to add something on that not just about the software but about all non-hardware related issues as the researcher here and that is that no matter that I set up all of the interviews and all of the surveys by pointing out that this is about the hardware challenges I would estimate that at least 30 to 40% of the responses were about non-hardware challenges because people those are still real right and people recognize that they are and when you read the report and I obviously encourage everyone to go online and download the report and read it those issues get more space. Even though we were asked to focus on the hardware we did we out of necessity we had to talk about the non-hardware issue challenges because they were so pervasive and so important to people and so those do get more airtime if you will in the report itself. I cut them out of this particular presentation for lack of time and just to focus on message about the hardware so but they were really important to people. Thank you for setting aside that note so that we can all take a look and get a little bit better acquainted with the additional research on that topic. So Bruce you start to speak to the power challenges and that's a great segue to the next question here that came in regarding or referencing the one laptop for child project and their work is developing a hand cranked power powering option for their laptops. Can you share a little bit more about some of these kinds of approaches alternative powering schemes if you will and now maybe some experiences with those. So well specifically on the one laptop for child project while there was a prototype with a hand crank it really wasn't feasible and it never went to production like that. One credit I'll give them is that in their charging two things they did well with that one there was no fans second that it ran at 12 volts and they actually put in some software into the charging so that you could actually connect a solar panel to it directly without going through the traditional charge controller that a solar system needs so there's some interesting things that the OLPC project did with their hardware but on energy specifically the big challenge in the developing world is that the economies have outstripped the grid systems that were built back in the 60's and 70's in most of these countries and it hasn't kept up with generation capacity as well as build out of the grid network so while we look at major cities second tier cities may have grid power the reliability that system is not there with the problems with power spikes, dips brownouts and blackouts plays a heavy toll on any type of computing equipment but what we're seeing now emerging of course is the whole set of microgrids and having those powered with renewable energy mostly solar and so most of the projects that we've worked on especially in sub-Saharan Africa have had a solar element to that because of the either unreliable power grid or lack of a power grid completely and so we've had to address that so the real advances that we've seen in the solar side is that the cost has come down from an industry standpoint that more local expertise has emerged in these regions and the systems have become affordable and using the right ICT equipment that uses low power and it can be directly solar powered really plays into that infrastructure energy equation because what we don't want to see as I mentioned earlier is having energy as an afterthought and oh we'll just buy electric generator is cheap but unfortunately still uses fossil fuels and in most of these places that is an imported commodity that's very expensive absolutely I could also share a little personal vignette about the hand crank if time allows absolutely go for it okay so I actually had to stifle a giggle when you read that question because almost every time we make a big present to a larger audience we get a question related to the OLPC hand crank and even though as Bruce mentioned it was a prototype somehow that image has stayed it's got staying power and resonates with people and so we're always asked about it so Bruce and I a number of years ago were actually working on a laptop per child project with students of mine and every semester the folks at OLPC were kind enough to give us one of those hand cranks that had been a prototype and so every semester I got to demonstrate to my students who also had that question what about the hand crank and honestly after five minutes of cranking they were exhausted and done and these are college students and it hadn't even charged for a few minutes so at least having something in your hand it was able to show them why this didn't actually go beyond prototype stage but somehow that image is truly enduring and it seems to resonate with people but once you've seen that it's exhausting even for brawny college students after five minutes that's one of the reasons why it didn't actually catch on there's something to be said for capturing experiences like that and really getting them out there beside the marketing so I have a question that came in here and I think this is incredibly valuable we're talking about the fact that we're going to be sharing this information in Silicon Valley and there's obviously quite a bit of work that you guys are planning to do to really kind of get folks to understand these challenges and what can be done I think this question is probably around the inclusion and dissemination of the information amongst Indian and Chinese ITT4D hardware production organizations and manufacturers and designers obviously there are devices that are proliferating out of those countries so would you mind speaking a little bit about both how you integrated those points of view as well as how you intend to share the finding well and so that's one of the reasons we're for example attending the ARM developer conference next week because it is made up of the industry people that are designing around ARM processors and those processors are going into the majority of tablets cell phones etc that are being made in Southeast Asia so there's a good representation of the industry that attends these conferences that are based here there are some other development developer conferences for hardware that are held in Singapore and in China and so we're also looking at how to get included into those conferences also but we're starting in our backyard here in Silicon Valley but yes the Southeast Asia markets and developers are on our target list fantastic and we have a very we're going to swing right to a very specific question obviously from a technical standpoint this particular attendee has been practicing ITT for 45 years now all over the globe and it's really curious about your advocacy for 12 volt DC power supply making notes that the telecom industry runs 12 volt DC and 48 volt DC so maybe you could speak to that a little bit he's worked with renewables and it's just curious so from that standpoint we're using 12 volts DCs I'll say more generically as one of the outputs from a solar design system and it is correct there's also 24 volts DC and 48 and so minus 48 for example is a telecom industry standard so the whole point of that conversation is that we can look at using DC systems more than doing power inversion using an inverter to go from DC to AC and then converting it back to DC to power the device so that as we've seen in most of these environments especially in rural solar the inverter is the first thing that goes because it's been overstressed and overused or undersized and so if we can eliminate that DC to AC inverter we end up with a more reliable system so if we have computer systems that are designed to run at 12 volts 24 volts or 48 volts DC then they can be powered directly off a solar system so we're using 12 volts DC is more of a generic term that it can be powered directly off a solar system fantastic so we are at time so perhaps really quickly we can wrap up with one kind of fun question that you guys can take us out on which is what technology do you travel with when you travel that's both of you I've got my laptop and my smartphone and I I don't use a tablet myself because I don't the form factor isn't the right one for me so I still carry but but my laptop has a solid state drive in it so there's no moving parts in the high humid and dusty all their environments and obviously same with a phone no moving parts cool well mine's a little bit different only because I do a lot of demonstration so I've got a lot of technology that I carry with me to show examples of how people are using tablets laptops travel with the small raspberry pie Rachel server to show how that can be used for offline content server and so so I've got quite a bag full of equipment only because it's more demonstration and showing what's possible but as Laura said my laptop for example does have a solid state drive after having too many laptops dropped accidentally while traveling and having hard drive failure so but and as well as I travel with quite a bit of Wi-Fi gear once again to show what's possible with point to point Wi-Fi and low cost kind of setting up low cost broadband networks using that technology so most of mine is for demonstration purposes not for supporting me while I travel sounds like a heavy load not the best thank you for sharing that I love this what's in your bag question I think we might have to recycle it for our future webinars perhaps you guys can take a picture of everything you're looking with you for us part of this webinar and we're going to be sharing the recording of this webinar so if some of you have to drop off well you would know this now but if you want to share this with colleagues who weren't able to join please do a look out for the webinar recording we'd like to thank you all for attending for those of you who are interested in receiving a professional development hour the code is listed on the slide visible right now if your question didn't get answered or you have additional questions feel free to email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and with that we'd like to thank Bruce and Laura for taking the time out of their busy days to launch the findings of the study on our webinar we're very excited and we invite all of you to join us as we first see members to get information about upcoming webinars and to get those photos of what's in their bags so have a great day, evening, hour or morning wherever you may be and thank you again.