 Good evening, and welcome to the Ames courtroom of Austin Hall at Harvard Law School and tonight's discussion on communication and human development, the freedom connection. We have an extraordinary panel of discussants to explore the role of information and communication technologies, ICTs sometimes we'll refer to them as, and human development. Tonight's program is sponsored by Canada's International Development Research Center and hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. My name is Michael Best. I'm a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Samnon School of International Affairs and in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing. I run the technology and international development laboratory there, and I've also been a longtime fellow of the Berkman Center. Before we turn the discussion over to our hosts for a brief welcome, let me please review a few quick housekeeping matters. Tonight's media partner is Global Voices, which you can find at globalvoicesonline.org. We're encouraging worldwide participation by live blogging and webcasting of tonight's event on GV and invite you to examine the material there and add your comments and reflections after this evening. There are a number of other online resources for tonight's event. We have set up a Twitter hashtag. It is IDRC09. There's also a question tool where you can submit in real time, if you're currently online, your questions or vote on other people's questions already submitted. A link to the question tool and the other online resources are available off of the Berkman homepage, which is cyber.law.harvard.edu. I promise that's the last URL that I will be giving you. Tonight's program follows on after a full day of discussions here at Harvard, where we debated the promises and perils of information and communication technologies and human development. Joining our four eminent discussants today, we're an additional 20 superb scholars and practitioners and what is actually the second IDRC Harvard Forum on Communication and Development. The first event was six years ago here at Harvard and also professors Michael Spence and Amartya Sen were in attendance. In preparation for today's forum event, the participants have contributed really an extraordinary collection of provocations and pronouncements. And all of those essays have been collected by the Publius Project of the Berkman Center and are currently linked on their homepage. And now I'm making myself a liar by giving one more URL. The homepage is publiusplius.cc. And you can there have a look at the essays from today's forum programs. All of the organizers and participants I know share the goal that tonight's public event as well as the program from the forum today and as extending through midday tomorrow will stimulate a living and sustained conversation. So please accept this invitation for all of you to participate both here and now in this room but also online and beyond tonight. Finally, do please silence your mobile telephones and our conversation tonight will last for 90 minutes. So we'll go to roughly 8.30 perhaps slightly after 8.30. And with that I'd now like to invite our hosts to offer their brief welcomes. First to Colin McClay. Colin is managing director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Berkman Center he co-founded the information technology group at the Center for International Development. He is also a brand new father. So if he's a little blurry eyed that could be the reason. Colin please. Thank you. Thank you so much Mike. I realize of course that Mike said everything that I thought about saying but most of all what I really wanted to do is to welcome you here to Ames courtroom and to Harvard University. We're absolutely thrilled to have you all in this room just as thrilled to have this great group and the other scholars and activists that Mike referred to. This event is really quite exciting for us because it represents a series of different opportunities which are quite novel. One is the chance to really discuss and dive into and integrate so many lines of the research that Berkman does from the intersections of technology and learning and democracy and civic engagement and cooperation and entrepreneurship and innovation and much, much more all under one rather large umbrella of conversation. Next it represents a chance for us to work very closely with IDRC which is an absolute treat. And I say that not because they're sponsoring this because they're really not putting in too much money but because they are absolutely the best the leading light among donors in this space and they have been for as long as I've been working in it which is the last decade. Really doing a long-term visionary creative work that effectively integrates research and actual action and it's just a great step for us together as organizations and one that I hope we'll be able to build upon. Lastly it's a great opportunity to collaborate with this group both here in the courtroom and the folks online that Mike referred to. There's a time zone challenge of course but hopefully with the miracle of digital technologies and webcasts and so forth we will be able to reach out around the world quite literally and integrate those voices and those questions and ideas into the conversation here so that things are flowing in fact in both directions. And so I hope that the folks will embrace that. So one of the two or I guess two more points to mention one is that facilitating that process curating that those electronic submissions is Josh Goldstein who's around here somewhere who will be acting as sort of their interlocutor for the non-physically present participants. And last to offer my heartfelt thanks to my partners in crime who have helped put this together both on the IDRC side and especially on the Berkman side Dan Jones digital media producer in the back Seth Young our communications are and Amar Asher our events guru. So thanks to all of them, thanks to all of you. I look forward to an energetic and engaging discussion. Thank you very much Colin. As Colin mentioned IDRC really has been the most important bilateral donor organization or research center working in the ICT for development space. And it's my pleasure to introduce David Malone the president of IDRC. David comes to that post after a long time as a Canadian diplomat having served as the high commissioner for India and the ambassador to the United Nations. He is founder of, David has taught at universities in Canada, France and the US and has published numerous books and articles. He's currently working on a book addressing contemporary Indian foreign policy. So please David Malone. Bonsoir bienvenue. We Canadians like to speak in both of our official languages. We're thrilled to be partnering with the Berkman Center and many others at this conference. We've been fortunate over the years to partner with all of the panelists and we've had tremendous encouragement for our work from both Mike Spence and Amar Tia Sen over many years. You're probably wondering what an IDRC is. It was created by another noblest, Mike Pearson, when he created the Canadian International Development Agency. His intuition was that there were many brilliant people in the developing world lacking the resources to refine their ideas and make their ideas happen. So his intention was to set aside a small proportion of Canada's development assistance for support to researchers in the developing world and we've remained true to that vision which he developed with Morris Strong and our first president David Hopper over the years. It's been a tremendous privilege to support the research of most of the conference participants with us today. There's something tremendously exciting about watching ideas develop in countries that are emerging from poverty and local ideas being applied to locally devised policies. So I think you'll get to share in some of the excitement relating to the ideas that'll be discussed tonight. Again to you all for being here to the panelists and to the Berkman Center. Warm thanks. Thank you David and finally to meet our extraordinary set of discussants. To my immediate left the Martia Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1999. He is the Lamont University professor and professor of economics and philosophy here at Harvard University and was until recently the master of Trinity College at Cambridge. He has served as president of the econometric society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. To his left Michael Spence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is a chairman of the Independent Commission on Growth and Development focusing on growth in developing countries. To his left is Clotilde Fonseca, founding director of the Costa Rican program of educational informatics created in 1988 in Costa Rica by the Omar Dango Foundation and the Ministry of Public Education. A program that has reached over one and a half million children and teachers during its more than two decades of work. She has been executive director of the Omar Dango Foundation for all but two years since its founding in 1987. And finally to her left, Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the internet and the emergence of networked economy and society as well as the organization of the infrastructure such as wireless communications. Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks examines the way in which, oh, I'm sorry, this is awkward. I really, Professor San, I'm sorry, I really should take this. Hello? Yes? Mother, I told you I'm on a panel tonight. I really should not be talking on the phone. It's completely, no, I have to go. Mom, let me go. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about that. This technology is liberation. This is tyranny. It's an imposition. It's an interruption. Why do we celebrate the mobile phone as an instrument for human development in the global south? We hear about the explosion of mobile phones in Africa, in Latin America. The UN now tells us that half of the planet are connected to the mobile network. Discussance for my first question to you, please. Has the mobile phone solved the problems of ICT for development by providing essentially access to everyone? Are we done and can we now go home? Do we not need to have another one of these programs? Or does this appliance and the wireless network that connects to it create more development, policy, or design challenges than it solves? And please, Professor San, if I can first direct this general set of questions to you and if we could start with you. Do you believe the specifics of the mobile phone expand real substantive freedoms that people enjoy? And I will come join you here. Yeah. I wasn't told that. I have to start the feeling. Well, I think there's no question that it does do that. That seems to me to be fairly straightforward. It clearly adds to your mother's freedom to call you at this moment. I think the really interesting question is that anyone who is involved in kind of freedom-based studies and a lot of people are in contemporary political and a lot of philosophy as well as economics, sometimes supported by IDRC as it happens, know that one of the downsides of expansion of freedom is that it might reduce the freedom of somebody else at the same time. It comes out very strongly in the context, for example, of gender studies, when you say that this will increase the power of people to do things. You might say that an enhancement, a better nutrition makes you, I would just take the most crudest example, better nutrition makes you physically more able to do things. Now, in a society in which nutrition may not be very fairly divided and where there is, in any case, a naturally between men and women, there's a question, maybe could it have a more negative impact on domestic violence in making people more empowered to take actions which they in a debilitated state or undernourishment would not have been able to take. I think, so you would not, I think, find a case where there is no counter factors involved. The main thing are two, I think, first of all, there will be complicated cases where we have to look at that and see how does it come out. But secondly, there will be in general a presumption in some direction. Just that better nutrition, we have a presumption is a good thing even though we recognize that there are issues sometimes, even pathological issues connected with it. And I think the mobile phone story is the same. I think it's basically an expansion of freedom but we can think of some complicated cases when it sort of makes life difficult. I can't say how much I enjoy. I mean, despite my dislike of having long distance flights, I'm absolutely delighted that no one can call me during that journey. Though I gather that that freedom is very short lived. They're all coming and any moment now, the stewardess will call me to pick up my phone and take a message from the Harvard Economics Department to do something, join a committee or something. So I think that's the way I would answer. Yes, basically, yes, that doesn't mean that there are no complexities involved in it but there is no such issue in the world which doesn't involve that complexity. So yes, but, to you, Professor Spence. I would say yes, yes, and but. Yes, yes, and but, okay. To you, sir, does the mobile phone enhance economic opportunities for the poor? Are there policy implications of the mobile networks that are not essentially already sold? Well, you know, when this group that we just spent the day with met for the first time six years ago, mobile phone penetration in the developing world was very small and we were sort of speculating that maybe the mobile phone would be the answer to the overwhelming challenge of creating very expensive fixed line networks that just weren't present. And by and large, that's come to pass. I mean, the combination of the relatively low capital cost and the fact that the mobile phone industry was able to fly beneath the dead hand of the regulator has produced an explosion. And from a growth and development point of view, this is really certainly not the whole solution but it creates a situation where it solves a lot of problems that in a crucial aspect of inclusiveness in growth and development is obviously freedom from oppression. But the other really important component of it is the supply of things you need to function. In particular, to function as a saver, investor and entrepreneur and so on. And so what I think many people have worked on in microfinance and the finance industry generally is really the law, property rights is a set of economists would call them inputs that allow almost all people in a society to participate in some way. And as I said, my fellow commissioners believe that's crucial. What's that got to do with the cell phone? Well, the cell phone basically allows the delivery of those services, safe savings channels, access to credit and so on to be delivered at dramatically low cost over time with the building of infrastructure and systems that provide it. Is that, it also delivers what I would call information light, information, reasonably efficiency, efficiently weather. Things that are important, things that are communicated, coordination problems, where are we gonna meet? And so on. Is that the whole answer? Well, we spent a fair amount today and I think the consensus is no. I mean, there's a whole set of issues related to knowledge transfer and knowledge acquisition and learning, which is, I wouldn't say it's a part of the development process, it's sort of the heart of it. An economy state of development is really not so much its physical state of being built up, its infrastructure and so on. It's what it knows how to do by individuals, by institutions and so on. And I think we sort of agreed that an important thing we're looking forward to in the future is the impact of information technology on that. I don't think the cell phones are relevant, but I guess I wouldn't wanna bet my family's life savings that it'll be the principal instrument for the delivery of those rather more complicated knowledge intensive and transfer services. Excellent, cause a perfect setup for what I really would like you, Clotilde Fonseca, to focus on, which is, is the mobile phone a powerful technology for learning in Costa Rica or in the global South? Does it create a powerful learning environment? Well, I think that there are lots of expectations about mobiles and cell phones as resources for learning. What we have found out is that it is not yet a powerful device. And I think here the distinction between voice and data is very important. Concerning what you had referred to initially, I think that undoubtedly it allows you to have more freedom, more ability to communicate, to link to other people. There's a social dimension involved, which is very powerful, but most of the mobiles and cell phones in the developing world do not carry data well. So there are important limitations in terms of what can be done. I would say, taking the mother's perspective to what you had mentioned before, that there's a great generational dilemma that parents in general confront. Very frequently parents give small children or adolescents a cell phone hoping to be able to communicate with them better. And kids perceive that as an invasion of privacy. They don't want parents calling them. They are much more interested in the telephone as a resource for messaging or as a watch or as a calendar or as a calculator, as an alarm or a peer-to-peer communication device. So I think that the ways in which young generations are being socialized or socializing themselves to cell phones is very different from what the previous generation did. I think that this child parent or adult parent interactivity is not always as intense as parents would like, but definitely even with a reduced potential of the cell phone, there are lots of things young generations are addressing. I think that as mobile devices, including laptops and net computers become more available and cheaper, then we're going to see more potential for learning in this context. Right now it's still too limited and I think the promise is not there yet. So kids don't want their mother to call, but Yochai Benkler, my mom's in control. So what I wonder is, is there something about the architecture of the mobile phone that biases it towards centralization of control or does the mobile network support open access to knowledge for people decentralized across the globe? Everything is relative. That is to say, by comparison to what? By comparison to a system of broadcast and knowledge acquisition that requires a very high level of capitalization in order to even acquire the information about where the markets are, what the prices might be, or what the government is doing and how to disseminate it. Yes, the mobile phone is an enormously decentralizing creative device. The classic stories of the fishermen calling to shore and finding out where to sell their fish, obviously that's a dimension of human development that is enabled by decentralizing certain kinds of knowledge. If you think of the videos from the Iranian reform movement, and you think of how central mobile phones with video capabilities were to capturing some of those images, then of course, if you think of SMS messaging, pushing payment systems that end up then getting rolled in to MPSA as a model of mobile-based banking for unbanked people, all of these systems relative to the baseline of six years ago are enormously creative and enormously decentralizing of power. However, relative to what? If the relative to what is to say, responding in some senses to your very first question is, can we go home now and talk about something else? The answer is no, because when you compare that architecture to the architecture of the net itself with the genuinely powerful devices at its edges and the degree of flexibility and creativity and computational power and storage at its edges, then you see that there are certain things you can do with mobile phones and there are certain things you can't do with mobile phones. There are levels of creativity and engagement. If you talk about Brazilian software developers competing and participating as equals in the software services market by delivering free software-based billing systems to Pizza Hut in Texas, that's not something you can do over a mobile phone. That's something for which you need a much more powerful machine and a much more powerful and complex set of skills at its edges. If you look at the story Ethan Zuckerman was telling today at the workshop on their efforts with Ushahidi in Kenya to provide a mobile phone-based system for collaboration, the problem was not setting up the net-based system of distributed reporting. That's been done in lots of other places. The problem was interfacing it with the devices that were actually distributed in the population which were the mobile phones and the problem there was getting permission to connect it to the network of the mobile phones, getting the code. That was the critical question. So when you ask about is the architecture systematically centralized or decentralized? Relative to the industrial information economy of the 20th century, decentralized. Relative to a networked society as we've seen it developing in the countries where the population was wealthy enough to get much more powerful devices running on non-proprietary networks with non-proprietary standards, weak. That strikes me as the direction in which we should be going because that's the direction that actually distributes the ability to learn, to innovate, to be creative, to communicate with others in ways that nobody needs to give permission for. Thank you, Discussants. I think an extraordinarily nuanced set of responses that for somebody who works in this field is delightfully refreshing because over the last couple of years in the communications for human development community there's been euphoria about mobile phones and to hear such sophistication, yes, yes, but relative to what responses is extremely important. So let's now go, if we can, to a relatively more decentralized network. As Colin McClain mentioned, we have an intermediary interfacing us to a fairly robust virtual community that is following our deliberations right now. Josh, I don't see you, where are you? There you are, Josh. Can you go to that virtual community and to the question tool and find something that maybe is inquiry regarding mobile telephony or something related? What downward pressures can be placed on the telecoms to allow for greater exploitation of the power of mobile phones and by whom? Open to any of you, please. I think the question is, how to work with the mobile phone operators to create more pressure to what? Basically, is there a way to make mobile phone do more or are we happy with this answer that it's incredibly limited to SMS and other fairly simple interactions? So let's say we're stuck with the mobile network. It's all we're gonna get. What could we do to improve the situation on what is possible with the network? There'll be lots of answers to this. I was gonna say after Yochai made his remarks that we know in the advanced countries that the mobile networks are now being used along with computers and the speed is getting higher and higher. So I would expect to see a different evolution in the developing countries of the use of the wireless part of the network. But I think the straight answer to that question from an economist point of view is really two, has two parts. One, there's nothing better than competition for sort of ensuring that pricing is right and the delivery of services is complete as you can manage given the cost structure. And I would expect that the dynamic competitive process would produce a growing array of services consistent with the technology's capacity. There are remote areas where the density is low and the economics from a private sector point of view don't work. And that is a legitimate area for subsidies, for something that expands access making it universal. So I think I wouldn't write the government out of the script. Today, if you listen to the discussion there's a non-trivial worry that now that the cell phones are sort of the lion's share of the telecommunications network the regulators will re-arrive and sort of screw it up in somewhere or another. That was the principal concern that I heard. Just following that up. I think I'd like to say three things on this. One is that we can generally distinguish with some usefulness between those advancements which will be also conducive to more profit and therefore will have a kind of market-based incentive anyway, as opposed to those which will not. And a lot of the human development research is concerned with those issues where the market gives you misleading signals. And indeed, those are sort of as a kind of way of organizing our thought the distinction between whether it's profit-friendly or not is very important. And there are not many things which may not be that profit-friendly either neutral or even negative. And those may be important from a human development point of view. My second point just as an example that profits of course come in many different ways. Lack of competition is one of them. And of course, the mobile companies often have a great interest in exactly doing that. I mean, this is not an unknown problem today. I mean, when Mike was pointing out the importance of competition, one of the interesting things we are facing right now in the United States about the debate about healthcare is a share of competition from a state health insurance company. It's not being suggested that the private companies will be restricted or eradicated, nothing. Just adding one more competition to it which comes from the state sector. And that terrifies people. And that people who are involved in the health insurance industry. And it's also, you can see why that its impact on the profit will be quite serious. But on the other hand, from a human development point of view, nothing is perhaps as important that's going in America at this moment. That's going on which would cover everybody in an affordable way. In a way that people don't get the medical care that they could have. The third point to recognize is that there's always a little danger is to say how would we regulate it? Because a lot of the advantages that come from mobile phone will not have that predictability feature. Now, this is a much larger group in the morning. I already discussed a few cases, but let me discuss one of them. One of the things that has been very important from a global political point of view is the situation in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and Fort Valley. Now, when did Taliban took over the Fort Valley? And there was a kind of protest but there was a deal made. Generally, the Pakistani public opinion, which is very news friendly, in fact, that produced between the dawn and the news and the nation and the daily times produced some of the finest papers in the world. But somehow there wasn't a great awareness of what was going on. What actually broke that eyes was the fact that someone, and I've now got the full story actually, from the people involved, that the somebody, I mean, I don't know any of the people involved, but people who studied that, somebody actually with a mobile phone, which had a camera, was actually present at the time when that young woman who was found to do something wrong according to the Taliban rule of law was flogged publicly. So pictures were taken out and these pictures were put on the, in the public domain, initially in a few cable television and then in all television and then in all the papers. And of course, it's impact and people often underestimated its impact on Pakistani public opinion was predictably large. It basically is sympathetic population which did not want young woman to be treated like that no matter what their religious beliefs might be in other respects, had that feature of reacting. Now all that was carried out by a mobile phone with one capability named taking photograph and another capability which is very important to hide the fact that you're taking photograph because this chap was all the time pretending he was making a very urgent phone call, I think to his mother. And while he was taking these pictures and that is what allowed him to escape. So there are ways in which predictability of these will defeat us. And to some extent the, I've got nothing against the state, but the idea that everything could be regulationally improved is I think a more ambitious view of the way the world goes than is in fact realistic. So I think this question is very important, but regulation is not the only way of thinking about it. It's a very important part of it, but not the only way. When it comes to monopoly, it's very important when it comes to opening up things that no one really thought of the case of this kind at the time of putting photographic ability in telephone. I mean, there's a whole film on that, I've gotten the name of it, which turns on this telephonic dual quality. But that is an imagined case and this is an absolutely real case with a major impact now that the thought valley is no longer with the Taliban. The role of that one mobile phone in that context is very extraordinarily important to recognize and understand. Anything else on the question of operator reform? I was gonna take the discussion in another direction, but if regulation is the issue, I would rather pass. Then I'd like to push back just a bit on potential with the risk of having a debate that's focused too much on what's happening in wealthier countries, but I think once we think of the cost curves of very sophisticated phones becoming cheaper in five years, I don't think it's implausible to look at what we're going through now. So two days ago, the chairman of the FCC announces a net neutrality policy. One of whose most surprising features is the idea of applying it to wireless networks as well as to wired networks, to internet access generally. The core idea being that the provider cannot discriminate against different, in this particular case, what's most relevant is applications. So if you have a context in which you say, there's competition, but it's not perfect. Will we really have seven carriers, 10 carriers, or will we have two or three, particularly in foreign places? If we'll have two or three, then we can't rely on competition completely. We need something else. One option for that something else is a role that says it's fine for you to sell a phone and it's fine for you to sell carriage. What's not fine for you is then to say, I will carry this application, I won't carry that application. Now, if you do that initially in wealthier economies so that you build devices like the iPhone, connect them to networks in a way that complies with standards that mean that anybody, whether commercial or not commercial, can develop an application. Then you're beginning to look in these mobile broadband networks much more like the net as a result of the fact that you've introduced a certain regulation and therefore standards at the level of the device and the network architecture. Doesn't mean you won't be able to do it otherwise in a country that doesn't have the regulatory regime, but you begin potentially to build the standards and habits and practices and standard manufacturing processes that will get you devices that are open to applications coming from elsewhere which means you can get both commercial and non-commercial applications on which makes you look a lot more like that. And the second thing I would do is I would push back just a little bit on this idea of you simply can't do anything but mobile networks. And here I'd actually focus a little bit more on what's happening in France than what's happening here which is to say that you're beginning to see providers like Iliad and like SFF taking the edges of fixed networks, putting their Wi-Fi devices on the end and then using those to create the equivalent of a public mobile broadband network. So they're essentially if each one of them is over 20% of the French market, taking all of those 20% of their subscribers and turning their edges into parts of a nomadic network. So again, you're beginning to see you don't have to have 100% coverage with everybody fixed, but if you push back a little bit on the idea that all of the solution has to be mobile and you don't need to also begin to roll out fiber closer to the neighborhood and that that doesn't become a model for a more open network, then I think that's the other direction. So one is regulation of the device and carrier level for application neutrality and the other not to completely give up on the idea of rolling high capacity fixed networks closer and closer to where people are. So why is regulation or innovative technologies, we still have some hope to push back against the huge operators of mobile phones in the developing world and in the high income countries of the global North. Depending on the political economy. Right. Clotilde Fonseca, maybe if you'll allow me, I'll throw out one, a new probe, a new question to the entire panel and then go straight to you where you could either respond to that intervention or perhaps return to whatever you were gonna go to before Yokei Benkler came in. So my first probe to you discussence was really tethered on a technology, right? We spoke about mobile phones. But is that really the wrong thing to be talking about? Cause what we care about is human development. We've all heard this trope. Why in the world would you give anyone a personal computer or a mobile phone if they do not have food security or if they do not have true health? Are we talking about an entirely wrong question or are we formulating it in the entirely wrong direction? Is human development really about food security and health and women's empowerment and never about information and communication technologies or is there a way to formulate this where ICTs are indeed in the service of those human development objectives? Clotilda. Yes, I think that having the discussion plays the emphasis on the either or is wrong. I don't think we would lead in a meaningful discussion if we place it like that. I think that we have to overcome the linear view of development that leads some people to believe that their faces or steps that countries or people go through in order to reach development. I think that today we know that the human component, the intellectual component, the capacity to create, to add value is central to contemporary economy and contemporary society and that if we're talking about the knowledge economy, this cannot just be a rhetorical discussion. It has to deal with the capacities that people need to be a part of this economy and improving livelihoods and improving access to better sources of food, improving the capacity to learn, to solve problems. They're all part of the nature of what development is about. Perhaps today, more than in any time in history, the importance of the mind is fundamental. I think that we have to do a tremendous job in terms of education to develop those capacities and in that respect, technology is a fantastic resource. Just as we were discussing before about mobiles and how we see mobiles, mobiles are just a part of a powerful network of devices that link to other devices with higher computing power. So if we see the mobile in isolation, we're just seeing a part of this phenomena and if we're talking about the developing world, well, those mobiles may be useful for communication at a human level or even for work purposes, but at the same time, they can also, if we see them as part of this network of devices, be sources for capturing information, for capturing data, for communicating or connecting with objects as many of the projects of Nokia, for example, in Finland associated with education due today, that you can capture information from there. But I think that from the point of view of development, what is critical is to see this as an integral issue and to be able to address the importance of technology because you either belong to this new society or are left out and the digital divide is, as I frequently say, also a cognitive divide. It's a divide about capacity, about learning and the possibility to solve the problems that are immediate to you and your community. I must say, I very much approve of what Ms. Frantzweig has now said, the way of why this rather than that, I'd go further than that. It's not only something that plagues development, but it's plagues any kind of policy thinking. You know, one of the things, one of the hazards of going old is that whenever I arrive in India or somewhere, somebody asked me questions and I get these journalistic questions and one of them, if there are three things you have to do in India, what will you do? And then I had to answer saying, why do I have to do only three things? He said, no, if you had to do it, a thought experiment. Well, I think that's a deadly thought experiment and it takes us in the direction which has been known in the world that don't try to do too many things. You have to have development first and then democracy later. We have had Brecht and it wasn't entirely without humor that Brecht put it, food for us, freedom later. He didn't put it, one of his characters did. And I think that's it. It's an absolutely wrong way of thinking about it. Now, there may be a connection of it. Whenever there is a choice, you can see what the issue is. But first of all, the choice, you may think that it's all of these cost money, but it isn't quite like that. The money that comes from telecom would not go into food if you did not do telecom. We do from telecom, it's not the case, it will go straight into wheat field and produce green revolution. It wasn't. So I think one needs to think much more carefully about what are the alternatives that we might consider in each alternative that maybe have 1075 different things that's happening in them. And it's that complex story. Now, complexity is a difficulty and sometimes we have to simplify it. But what I'm arguing here, that simplifying it in terms of priority, which first, which later, is just the wrong kind of simplification. It's much simplification would be what the priorities should be in terms of how to think about these questions. For example, and you would not get the same answer. I mean, depending on the circumstance, you get a different answer. It's a bit like asking what is more important, to have a meal or to have a shower. And I would say, well, it would be possible to have both, presumably. But then again, they're the more complex answer. There are some times when I have been running around in a hot day and the shower may have a priority of a meal and another day when I'm very hungry and feeling pretty clean, I might accept a meal immediately. So there are all these questions, but they're all issues and guidelines and guidances and research projects are about that, including the IDRC, Supported Research Project. I should say I'm not involved in one of them, but I know a lot of people who are. And the priorities about how to think about it. As Schwanzsecker said about development, but even more generally about policy. I can't tell you how much I've been impressed by the lack of ability in the public discussion, to bring out in the public discussion what the issues were in the public health care here. I think just to give an example, I think the Canadian system, since IDRC is very Canadian. Let me say, I got for a while a reputation, I had to defend myself in the New York Review, where I would say that in some ways the over-concentration on Canada had a real difficulty in having public discussion about health care in America, because Canada had a special feature, namely that is the private insurance of the limited for certain purposes. Optometry, dentistry, prescription medicine, and private room. You can't have optional surgery and so on. But it's not only the case that the American rich will not accept that. And you get again and again the example, where did this man go? Even in Canada, when he needed the surgery, well, he's a rich man and he came to Boston to have it in the Mass General Hospital. Well, so the rich will be there and it's part of the reality of American politics to accept that. But there's also an issue of liberty, which somebody like John Rawls might well have said, that if you're free to spend your money in buying a yacht and going around in a luxury cruise, why aren't you free to buy a health insurance, which gives you a slight advantage compared to others? No, I think that's, my argument was that Europe in that way provided a much better, much wider system, which would have been much easier to discuss. By the time Europe came in, it was all about debt panels. We gathered the National Health Service in Britain was sending people to debt camps immediately on arrival. Even Hawkins wouldn't have survived, wouldn't have survived worry in England. And they mentioned about Stephen Hawking, happily Stephen Hawking imagines to come out saying he had survived and he own National Health Service. So I think the art of discussion is absolutely important and it should not take the form food or telecom. It should take the form how to get the main issues across. And these issues will differ from country to country. I mean, American situation with every Canada and Europe is very special. Wanting there's no other rich country in the world who doesn't cover everybody in one way or another in healthcare. But you find differences between China and India, between even Pakistan and India and between Bangladesh and India, not to mention Costa Rica and Malaysia. So I think we have to, that's the direction I would like the human development debate to go. So Professor Spence, Bencler, have you flogged this trope enough or is there another beating a swipe or two more that it needs to take? That's a loaded way of asking the question. Well, I basically agree with much of, all of what's been said. Let me, I came somewhat much later than my fellow panelists here to some of this. And I was amazed. I mean, I lived in Silicon Valley for a good chunk of my adult life. And because I'm an economist, I know that the Federal Reserve, which is our central bank, has fairly important function in the economy. I never hear anybody say entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley is a driving, one of the centers of innovation and part of our growth process. And it really doesn't matter what the kind of macroeconomic people do. And I never heard the reverse either. I mean, I think in the developing world, for reasons that I don't completely understand or in the debate that surrounds it, there is this very powerful dysfunctional propensity to look for silver bullets or to think in what I call either or rather than and terms. And so much of the world is, as Amarcha said, the coming together of a bunch of things that make something possible, but they're all kind of important. And so I just wanted to kind of reinforce that. The one thing I will say for the successful developing countries is that they have learned by experience and experimentation to use good conceptual thinking with a dose of skepticism and a huge amount of pragmatism in just a good mix. And so in some ways, I think the Indians and the Chinese and a number of others are in some ways ahead of us in the advanced countries. We at least in America have highly ideological discussions you know, where markets at least until recently were presumed to be innocent until proven guilty and that's not a good mindset. I mean, that was part of what got us in trouble in the current financial crisis which spread to the real economy. There were lots of people worrying. Nobody saw the whole thing, the tsunami coming. But the worrying was dismissed on the ground that there wasn't a definitive argument to pay attention. Contrast that with China, which is a place I know Mark knows, I've spent a lot of time. If the Chinese authorities, after a suitable internal debate, think there's a housing bubble, they simply go to the banks and say and increase the reserve requirements on mortgage loans. And we never do that because we can't prove, you know, the market's supposed to take care of that efficiently. If they think the Shanghai market's kind of out of control and there's a bunch of people betting their life savings on a frothy capital market that's probably a bubble, then they slap a stamp tax on it and increase the margin requirement, do a whole lot of things that, you know, horrify us purists. And I just wanted to put in a plea for two things. One is getting rid of the either or thinking in the second one is this combination of wise analytical thinking and the use of evidence, but not to the exclusion of common sense of pragmatism. Let me try a couple of concrete answers. I've heard tell that democracies don't have famines. And that's one way in which you connect the conversation about the images from the Swat Valley to the question of development. In the June 2009 World Bank report, there's a chapter on surveys of graft and opportunities for delay in Indian government services when they're delivered through electronic systems as opposed to face to face, suggesting that at least people report less being asked less often for graft. So that's one dimension. That is to say governance matters. It is possible to design information and communications technologies in such a way that you improve the quality of democracy and the quality of governance. The second is a story that Ronaldo Lemos from FGV Rio told today at the workshop about the land houses, 90,000 land houses to date, which is to say what we would probably have talked about as cyber cafes or if we were talking about Korea, we would talk about PC banks, something like that. But essentially you're talking about 90,000 small entrepreneurs because it was largely illegal, as he described it in terms of siting. 90,000 entrepreneurs, which means millions of people, he quoted something on the order of 49% of internet users today in Brazil using this, which means a massive influx of potential demand, which means a massive new audience for musicians using ORCUT as their distribution system in a model that's completely outside of the formal economy of recording industry plus musicians plus payola over radio to be able to actually get heard. All of that means in a decentralized system, you get opportunities for entrepreneurship, in an economy that's full of information, embedded goods and tools and information goods themselves, you get massive new opportunities for entrepreneurship in a distributed network, that all of which then sum into economic growth. Wonderful, so I think I'd like to now suggest we turn it over to a few interventions from the audience, both virtual and physical. We'll take four questions, Josh one from cyberspace and a few here from the audience, queue up the four questions and then please discuss and we'll do a round of responses to those questions. So there should be two microphones somewhere, there is one Becca and oh yeah, and Josh has the second there. So Josh, why don't you start by throwing out a question from cyberspace and then we'll move to a few questions from the physical audience. So there's a very strong interest amongst our global audience in indigenous knowledge and protecting it. The question is how do we strike the right balance between protecting indigenous knowledge against exploitation and freeing knowledge up for circulation, sharing, remix, et cetera. Do I see some hands for questions? Okay, right there, and then over here, Amar. This is kind of ancillary to communications. I dabble in small scale solar energy, AA batteries and that kind of thing. Can you get the flavor? And recently I saw on BBC and Afro Gadget, a young man, an engineering student at the University of Nairobi, who had cobbled together a cell phone charger that he could charge his cell phone batteries while riding his bicycle. And I got in contact with him and I actually am working with him now. And I'm interested in that problem, especially since there's another thing that I've been working on. By my count, there are about 700,000 solar hand crank AMFM shortwave radios that US and NATO forces have distributed throughout Afghanistan. USAID is planning over the next five years to distribute solar dynamo radios in Sudan as nation building. The problem with these solar dynamo radios is they only charge the internal, hardwired, dedicated battery. They can't charge AA and other standard size batteries so that you can do battery switching, not only have a radio, but also have another set of batteries for your cell phone or an LED light or things like that. This is very, very small scale. As our colleague John Palfrey likes to put it, can there be a question mark at the end of the question? Can we move to the question? I'm wondering about these kinds of small scale opportunities that we don't see here in the United States because we have a grid. Are they part of this discussion of ICT? Because I think there's something very useful there if they become part of that discussion. Thank you, got it, yes. I think we have one here and then one in the back, Amar, if you wanna do that and then that one, that will be a... Well, my question is very closely related. Basically, it's a question of energy power. I've seen extensively in Africa the use of solar panels which then charge car batteries and then people sell the electricity that you get from a car battery to charge your cell phone. But if you get into computers and broadband and so forth and so on, then the problems are considerably greater because as far as I know, I have not seen anyway the extensive use of energy, sources of energy that are independent of national grids and so forth. And I'm just wondering if you all have any information about the state of the art that can run computers out there economically and reliably without being hooked up with some kind of a national grid or running diesel generators or whatever. Thank you. Question in the back. Yeah, I have a question. It's how can governments and societies in emerging markets go beyond learning how to use the computer and move towards engaging its people in entrepreneurial attitudes towards technology? And can I just have one more question? I'm gonna ask Inika to ask it because we haven't heard anything about women's issues. Can we have a question that relates our discussion to issues of gender? What we have found in our work is that if you apply genderblind policies in a gender imbalanced world, you automatically contribute to gender discrimination, whether you want it or not. So you have been listening to some of the stories today. So do you have any ideas what policy makers can think about, what researchers can think about in the direction? So we have indigenous knowledge, we have environment and energy, we have learning environments and we have genderblind policies. Professor Sen, should we just move? No, you move that way. Okay. Let me try to put in perspective this question of sort of the grid and infrastructure. There are lots of entrepreneurs developing useful technologies for the current circumstances in not only in the area of charging and solar and electricity but lots of other things, pumps and so on. Many of you in this room know that. The word of caution that I would give you is that is not a substitute for investing five to seven percent of GDP in infrastructure and education. And so it is in some sense correctly thought of as a transitory measure. That is if things go well, then you won't need that stuff later on. And there's not an alternative growth model. I mean, if you want to empower people in the rural areas, then you'll build roads for them because they need to get stuff in and out and participate in the nation's economy. And I don't mean I won't be long-winded and go on about that. This would be another example of yes, that's important and innovation in that area, quite conceivably, including your own, are gonna be important in accelerating the process of giving people access to important supporting services. But in the background, I say this for a reason. When I chaired the growth commission, we worked pretty hard at trying to figure out what at least the crucial necessary ingredients to sustain growth at very high rates over a long period of time. And there are lots of things that I saw. I won't bore you with them, but one of them is high levels of investment. And if you go around the world and sort of step past the 13 countries that have grown at 7% a year for 25 years or more, 13 out of what, 165, then what you find is that the country's poor, there's lots of demands on the government and the budget, there's inefficiency, and that investment gets crowded out. And that will stall the process for sure. I completely agree with your comments today and then in the form of a question about gender-neutral things in a world that isn't gender-neutral now. I think the only way you can respond to that is to react by leaning against the non-gender neutrality. And it doesn't just apply to gender. I mean, it's not easy to implement that prescription. I mean, India wrestles with this all the time in the form of preferences and so on. And sometimes they may get it right and sometimes they sort of may get the balance wrong, but I don't think most people think that the notion in a long-standing caste system of having preferences is a bad thing. I mean, some people in America think that affirmative action isn't a good idea, but the majority who worry about it, I think it may go too far as opposed to being appropriate. And so I think it's entirely appropriate. And there's certain things for younger women that you simply have to do that are asymmetric. Safety on the way to and from school, appropriate laboratory facilities, and all those things that you're more aware of than I am that make it difficult to get through the process of sort of education and on to productive adulthood. So I'm on your side on that. Who's next? Let me respond to the question that came over the net that I know has been hanging for hours and many people have voted for it. But because they're not in the room, let me give a little bit more color and voice to what the question I take to be about. One of the things that the ICT4D debate has been about has been distributing a basic set of material capabilities into populations where they can then be integrated with human capabilities to improve the condition of people everywhere. That is one core input for information and knowledge production and therefore information and knowledge production based and goods based human development. The other major resource other than human wisdom, creativity is the existing universe of culture out of which we make new knowledge. We make old knowledge out of, we make new knowledge out of new knowledge, new culture out of old culture. And so as the focus on distributing the open capabilities in material and standards terms to the population has happened on the material communication system side. We've had a parallel debate over open access to the universe of cultural materials out of which we make new cultural materials on the intellectual property patents copyright side. That has been part of the generalization of the trade system and the importance of the trade related aspects of intellectual property to the creation of the WTO and integrating intellectual property into the world trade system. That has created a very strong trading relationship between the IP exporters as they came to understand themselves, the US, the EU and Japan and the IP importers, everyone else, in terms of you will respect our IP rights, we will open our markets to your non-IP based goods. All of that creates tremendous barriers to access to the state of the art so that when you come to innovate on the state of the art, your problem is no longer let's say that you don't have the material means to work on existing culture because the material means are out there. Your problem isn't that you don't have creativity and wisdom and insight to use it in new enterprising ways. Your problem is that you're not allowed to use it because it belongs to someone else. That has been the core of the access to knowledge movement. However, in that context, in a move of intellectual and political jujitsu, indigenous knowledge has been treated as part of the IP system so that just as Hollywood's outputs are protected by a set of rules that the world trade process protects, so too showed indigenous knowledge. And the question is a question of political judgment and political strategy, I think, not of intellectual coherence. Because intellectual coherence, you can come up with reasons for why a patent-based system is unnecessary in whole classes of industries outside of certain small molecule pharmaceuticals and why in all of these others you need free flow of information. While at the same time saying that under certain conditions of trade, having an artificial barrier to using indigenous knowledge is a way of transferring wealth from the wealthy world to the poor world. That's a coherent argument you could make. It's a politically very difficult one to explain. And so the concern I have with using IP to protect indigenous knowledge is the concern that you get a fop. You get a relatively small economic value protected in exchange for giving up enormous access to the wealth of resources in the knowledge economy so that you can actually learn not just by looking, but also then by doing and making your own. I have so many interesting questions that are coming up and very tempting to engage in that, but I want to get back to the gender thing mainly because I keep looking at the clock. I think there's a number of really interesting issues have come up between these two interventions, including Mike, but one of the things in the gender studies is that not only is there no such thing as gender neutral situation where there happened to be gender inequality in every aspect of life and in some ways it's more kind of pervasive than class because people don't opposite classes, don't live together in the same family and so on. So it generates a kind of psychology where the over gender aspect is buried. So it's never, I mean when I first started working on gender in the university in very early sixties, one of the questions was, I mean it was treated to be an eccentricity of mine as the chair of the department kindly explained to me, you recognize they're not unkind, they think it's an amiable eccentricity on your part, but there was no clear understanding why one was doing it because if you ask them, and as many of my famous anthropological anthropologist colleagues who have pointed out to me, that if you go and ask an Indian woman about gender inequality, they don't perceive any. And indeed they would even ask the question, how are you doing? The answer that the family is doing very well and so on. So I think that perceptual thing makes it so difficult to pursue it. I mean one of the, just to give an example, in the first health study I was involved in as connected with my family thing, the first family I studied was the Vengal family of 43, but in 44, the year after that, there were studies of the people who survived and died. And it turned out some people were clearly diagnosively ill, but those of us psychologically asked the question, are you ill in, and the answer is 45% of the men said confessed to being in bad ill health. Whereas the percentage of women who said that they were ill health was exactly zero. Now that didn't indicate that women did play well. I mean there was a theory in the family that women do well rather than men, which I think if I had half a minute, I would even explain. It's the British family studies we began that in India. And it all came from the fact that they would study it on the basis of what is called genealogical method, which take the form of people they could interview, connected with the famine, as to who among your relations have died. And there was a plundering of men in that. Now when you combine it with the fact that there was a distinct preference for women and children to be put in the survival camps, you are actually interviewing an enormously larger group of women than men. And given the fact that marriage tend to take place as standard between man and a woman, that you would find many more men relations who have died rather than women relations. And that generated a whole span of theory as to why biologically women survive better than men, which is really based on this statistical illusion. I mean just then there may be a 2% truth in there's a slight aftercorrects and truth in that, but it was nothing like what we were seeing. And the same thing, and the good thing for me, I mean in Calcutta I have to say that when the Calcutta Metropolitan Organization started surveying, women's health were way below that, way above that of men. Happily women have declined and caught up. And the reason I'm saying happily is that what you're seeing here is a much greater perception and a willingness to grumble, to say that this is not right. So I think when you're looking at gender research, lots of the things you have to put on its head, what looks like discouraging statistics, maybe anything but that, it indicates that, you know, you have to protest because good things happen to you. So I think the complexity in the informational side comes from that. And you know, it's one of the problem that the information subject as Mike knows have suffered for a long time, namely to be able to define what is exactly the amount of information that's being conveyed. I mean, one standard way when I was a student used to be pointed out to me that the informational content of a mathematical puzzle, of course, contains a solution. And that's why it's a puzzle. I mean, on the other hand, if you can't solve the puzzle, that information you don't have. So the standard way of defining it, it's like, can you derive it? Simply defeat it because you may not be able to derive it. And that's a huge problem. But there's on top of that, there's a problem which is, I think you've said raise gender and I think gender is most important. It's extraordinarily important to be able to interpret the input of the information that's coming in. I wish I had more time to discuss but I must stop there. Well, I'd like to make a couple of comments to the different questions that came up. First of all, concerning alternative energy sources, I think that a lot has been done both in the developing world and in new developments. One of the leading groups that has been working on this topic is Nicholas Negroponte and the group of the OLPC. They generated different forms of feeding computers with alternative energy sources. And in this respect, there are two aspects to the discussion. One of them is the alternative sources but the other which is extremely important is a move towards very efficient energy use, especially in computers and in mobile devices of different sorts. So I think that the research there has been moving in very important direction, in both directions in important ways. The other thing that I wanted to refer to is the reference to computer literacy and to how governments are focusing still on what we call this technocentric view of relation to computers and to digital culture in general. And I would say that one of the key aspects, especially for developing countries, is being able to develop in the capacities in young generations because I'm convinced that the investments have to go to the young so that we can have really an uplifting and transformative approach. But the movement is more in the area of technology fluency, meaning by that the capacity to interact with technology in very creative and flexible and natural ways so as to be able to add value to understand the principles in which these new technologies, particularly digital technologies function and to be able to have cohorts of young people that can actually move ahead with the wave and not lag behind tied to applications that are gonna be useless in two or three years' times. So I think that that focus on capacity building on technology fluency and intellectual and symbolic work using technology is fundamental particularly for the developing world because these are the interactions that the children and the young people need. And the other is a reference to the issue of gender. I think that there's a dimension of the discussion that has to do with policy, but there's also another dimension of the discussion that relates rather to the way in which technologies are understood and the ways in which boys and girls or men and women relate to technology. And in this respect, I think there has been research and very interesting developments. I remember a paper by Seymour Papert and Sherry Turkle on epistemological pluralism in the analysis of how students at universities, a male and female relate to computer programming, for example, being able to think and to understand that different people have diverse ways of interacting with programming or with learning and being able to respect this fact and not think that there's a mainstream approach, the only one, and then force people of different, with different perspectives or different skills into this mainstream approach. I think that this idea that at some point Papert called epistemological perestroika is very important in the sense that it allows for diversity and it allows for different individuals to accommodate to different possibilities in the world of technology. This issue of access, policies that allow for access, but also policies that allow for understanding and appropriation, which are respectful of diversity. And the last word to Professor. Just a minute. I think we didn't answer the question the gentleman back there asked. Is that true? You also didn't ask about the power generation question that Tim. No, that was him. Yeah. And this gentleman. I think there was someone from... What was your question? I just... Oh, I see you. Regarding the possibilities of governments and societies, not only giving skills and abilities to learn how to use computers, but more entrepreneurship and innovation. So thank you all so very much. There is no way to really summarize this speech, this great set of discussions. I think we've really dined on a feast of information and ideas. I am very full, but sir, I may actually need a shower at this point if that's my choices. The only thing I might say in a very brief summary is maybe to turn to your chosen conjunction of, your conjunction of choice, Professor Spence, which is and, and to say that our field really is filled with ands. I heard this evening that regulation matters and technology matters and capacity matters and markets matter and innovation matters and openness matters and governance matters and infrastructure matters and investment matters and women matter. So it's clear that we really must keep to our conjunction of and and avoid or, I think it is only left for us to please let me invite you to thank our extraordinary group of discussants and also please thank our sponsors, the IDRC and our hosts, the Berkman Center. Please remember this conversation will continue online and we are very much looking forward to your interventions and contributions there. Otherwise, it's my place to only say goodnight and thank you all very much. Thank you.