Impact of openness in grassroot empowerment

I witnessed this year Murali Krishna winning e-INDIA 2010 Award for best Telecentre initiative for the project AraviKalanjam e-SDI project he implemented. He was the youngest and probably represented smallest entity among award recipients. The goodness of the project is that it involved more than 500 students in a digital local language content competition. Many students who took part had not used ICT before. The project involved training, content creation be students and hosting. As I closely observed the project, Murali Krishna went through many challenges from beginning to end. He addressed his problems creating partnerships. His openness made partnerships work. Last moment he had to fly in business class to receive the award in Hyderabad. In my point of view Murali Represents the success of Sri Lanka Telecentres, a milestone of Sri Lanka ICT4D movement where an actual grass rooter reached helm though ICT4D.

Background
In 2006 I met Murali Krishna of Haldummulla Nenasala, a humble Telecentre operator and an energetic youth. He partnered with us to implement Shilpa Sayura pilot. Our partnership became strong during Regional Impact Team Assignment of Uva Province given by ICTA. We were able to create an open participatory platform called E3, where grass roots Telecentre operators could emerge as local leaders, develop them self, create impact in their communities and achieve heigher goals.

Our capacity building included a special training on project design and implementation. As a result 5 Telecentres were able to win grants from ICTA e-Society Development (e-SDI) initiative. We assisted in developing proposals, advised in implementation issues but they made the efforts for successfull completion and impact. The E3 development initiative we implemented in 60 Telecentres in Uva province helped developing many Telecentre champions finally won e-INDIA 2009 Award. Murali Krishna accepted the award together with me representing multi-stake holder partnership initiative of Uva Province Project E3 (RIT 2008/2009).

E3 - 4: A Lesson from e-India 2009 Awards

The case
The case of Murali Krishna is worthy of further study. What made his inspiration? What were the challenges faced and how they were overcome? It will help us to learn and knowledge we acquire can guide us to replicate and develop other grass root youth in similar way. I believe in this process openness in inclusion, collaboration and partnerships may have played a major part of development leading to this is a measurable Impact.

The significance of Murali Krishna’s award is that it shows how Telecentres can help developing of grass root youth leadership emergence and how they can reach higher goals to create benefits to the community around them and bring fame and recognition to the marginalized societies they represent. In this context our learning will definitely challenge theoretical development models we tend to follow, without knowing actutal possibilities and influencing us to change our approaches making development more open and inclusive reality.

So we can believe!
Telecentres can empower people throgh openness!

My Research Papers 2007- 2010

http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/1_Shilpa_Sayura_2007.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/2_Shilpa_Sayura_else.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/3_srilanka_india_elearning.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/4_e3-e-India.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/5_Knowledge_Through_Cables.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/6_E3_SI_M&E_CSSL_2.1.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/7_ICT4D_Up_scaling_and_Replication-paper4.1.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/8_knowledge-outside-classrooms1-pape4.pdf
http://www.shilpasayura.org/papers/9_openICT4D_IDRC_paper_draft_4.0-1.pdf

Are local languages marginalized in ICT4D?

ICT4D has created a platform for people to be embraced in knowledge. When e Sri Lanka project initiated , it helped creating a community of people who contributed to local language technology development. Due to the differences of local scripts, technologies designed for roman script like languages (English) were not directly usable for local languages. The ICT4D path of local language is not easy. It's not simply a matter of money money. Commitment is important success factor. It took several years to convince Microsoft to include Sinhala Language support in WindowsThe popular databases still not do not index local languages properly. The support for local languages is not guaranteed when someone buys software. Shilpa Sayura a Local Lanaguge e Learning project started in 2005, just getting consolidated. This could be common issue in over thousands of local language used across the world.




It can be thought as "fair enough" to for the technological developments to focus on English language as it is widely spread around the world and has a bigger market. However countries like Sri Lanka 95% of the people are not English users. In numbers 15 million people do not use English. They don't understand the meaning of "Global warming" or "HIV AIDS" or "Women Empowerment". 9 out of 10 have no idea of Millennium Goals. In rural societies it could be 10 out of 10. The messages are not reaching the bottom of the pyramid.

In Sri Lanka we are proud to have 50% of the population is using mobile phones. Unfortunately people only talk and send SMSs in local words written in English characters. It's good for asking "How are you ?" like expressions, But can not be considered as a way of giving, sharing and tranfering of knowledge. 90% of people can't find about weather, bus or train schedules as information is not available in local languages. In the open source world there is no open source mobile browser that supports local languages. It is a major proprietary domain. For Nokia, a Langauge spoken by 15 million people is a tiny market. Someone may consider it as fair enough in a shrinking global economic environment. In a Disney movie a wonderfull character named Horton says "A person is a person no mater how small they are". I belive in it. How small a community is a community what ever language they use. It's belived that over 10,000 languages used in the World, But how many of them are represented in ICT?

If we make an on-line scan for ICT4D projects implemented during fast 5 years, how many of them targeted local languages communities is valuable question to answer. If ICT4D social investments have not benefitted local language users at the bottom of the pyramid; can we consider the our achievements as success of ICT4D? One major barrier in local language technologies development is that, a person who is able to communicate in English, no longer has local language concerns and the people who need it are not able to communicate in English to the global investment decision makers who don't understand local languages. In my opinion at least 90% of the people in bottom of the pyramid are excluded from knowledge revolution enabled by ICT4D due to local language issues. This is also one major drawback of telecentre sustainability efforts too. Local lanaguage technology and content initiatives lacks sustainable support. It's more than one time development. It's a continues process of upgrading as technologies change.

Developing ICT infrastructure will spread hardware and access but not essaintial knowledge needs to make the change. This problem is not visible at higher levels and the details of the ground zero is lost as it moves up in decision ladder and most things important to bottom of the pyramid is dropped or considered unimportant at the summit.

There is a major gap between marginalized societies using local languages and communities in developed world as they are not able to communicate due to language barrier. Therefore knowledge society seems to fade at language barriers and becomes different versions of an illusion from both ends. If development efforts really aimed at grass roots, we are unable to exclude grass root languages. It may not be easy to solve this problem single handed for global development investments work for poor people. If inclusion is the global development agenda, it must begin serving the local needs rather than global wants. This seems a hypothesis in my experiences.



Education, Agriculture, Health, Economy like areas of rural life can be improved by emphasizing on development of local language technologies and knowledge and make them open for sharing across the developing world. It's time to look at ICT4D more openly on cases what doesn't fit in box rather than selecting what fits in pre-designed boxes. It's the only way to use ICT4D to improve rural societies who are not benefited with top ten global languages. Hence new ICT4D ideas should take local language as a multiplying factor for opening the global development in an effective manner.

References on Openness

Thripitaka

http://tipitaka.wikia.com/wiki/Tipitaka


In phylshopcal texts (Nagarjuna, Tripitaka)
http://books.google.ca/books?id=yCH7ueXrJowC&printsec=frontcover&dq=openness+tipitaka&source=bl&ots=_jDBD13SFV&sig=R36Rtn1KOkXxqEh4VoxQVVMkFBo&hl=en&ei=QJsaTMruA4mrcdPZrYcK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CCAQ6AEwBw

"Nagrjuna's more radical purification move renders purity and impurity
along with desires, actions, bodies, producers and products as like
dreams imirages," which are state of minds influencing openness. Nagajuna & Phyloshopy of Openness, Nancy McCagnecy, Rowma &
Liittlefield Publishers Inc., 1997

Openness is historically rooted from belief structures of human life
grounded on scale of values that are relative, personal and subjective.
Hence the task of developing openness requires opening ourselves as
fully as to unfold development issues and to celebrate infinite
possibilities.

The most basic open development requires addressing the bottom of
human suffering while not closing our selves for outside experiences
and locking with established concepts, judgments and norms which
limits the reality of outcome.

The school of openness influesence us to drop our discriminations,
judgments and restraints in order to immerse ourselves in the dynamic
flow of immediate experience, taking openness as an attitude towards
experience that arises from carefully though judgments.
In buddhism Openness is seen as an attitude of one's own mind its
reactions to external affairs, suggests diligent effort and acute
attentiveness with a note of moral caution and care.

Openness can enable new truth to emerge. Understanding others
involves openess towards what it seems rational, true or coherent
which may cover something deeply unfamilier.
Opneness may be discursed when somthing is blindly accepted
without putting the subject at the issue
.procession of thought, imagination and emotion
http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py

ideals of ‘Integration’ and ‘Openness' helps tools produced in open
development to use them in many different areas, including research,
education, and other knowledge-related industries and sciences.
education developmentwhy "education equips individuals with the skills and substantive knowledge that allows them to define and to pursuetheir own goals, and also allows them to participate in the life oftheir community as full-fledged, autonomous citizens." Stanford Encyclopedia of Phyloshopy, 2009

"education as transmission of knowledge versus fostering of inquiry
and reasoning skills that are conducive to the development of
autonomy" (SEP) creates a tension between conservative and
progressive education closely relating to human issues.
can education be used as a tool for social reform and an agent ofsocial change.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/education-philosophy/

About Wiki
Inclusiveness & More User Involvement:
Users get to take an active role in the web space. By the nature of a wiki, it opens up for people to edit, add, or erase any of the texts. This will make users feel as if they were a part of the community and continue using the website. Because of this openness, Wikipedia have more than two billion pages within five years, and we hope to succeed with this policy as well.

Openness : A Platform for rural developmeht through Telecenter Networks?

There are over 600 Telecenters setup in Sri Lanka. In the world although no exact data available, at least 35000 Telecenters are expected to operate. The telecentre.org has over 1000 members world wide. International funding agencies like IDRC, World Bank , UNDP etc. and local NGOs, Government Agencies and private sector have been involved in setting up Telecentre infrastructure. We also see large number of e society projects done targeting telecenter based communities.

I see this whole thing as a development platform. A new methodology to change the world. If we look back last 5 years, we can see that a network of people , processes and infrastructure have been put together to develop Telecenter foundation which aims to change the world, specially the rural societies addressing their day to day issues with ICT. As Richard Heeks suggest, we have been using ICT as a tool for change, now our challenge is use ICT as a platform for development.

This creates a clear question of what is development as development seems to interpreted differently by different societies and people. I think development as concept of "Positive Change"

If we take a rural village as an example. Who and what sets their development vision? Do they decide it or someone external decide it? I think both angles are inevitable. The community has to decide on their needs, what if they lack information or have no idea of positive changes that can improve their lives? This is where external entities and experiences are useful to them. We have seen many NGOs operating in rural societies have not actually emerged from grass roots, most of them are external people who have more knowledge, resources, experiences and a concern. Sometimes we see this two groups work well as well as instances of conflicts.

Telecenters started as ideas of an external entity in most rural villages.The post offices, Libraries are similar. Through a long term value creation they have become day to day life resource for village people. What is the position of Telecenters in this regard ? Will Telecenters become a life resource for rural people or will it continue to be an external entity within village. This is the challenge we have now?

I see Telecentre networks as infrastructure, human and institutions hence If we think Telecenters as a platform for development

1. How such a platform can become a driver for positive change?
2. What changes we will want to make happen?
3. What will be the approaches making a change happen ?
4. How do we use Telecenters/networks to make the positive change happen?
5. What fundamental changes we need to enable 1-5.

These questions are not new, also there can be more questions added based on local, regional, national and global needs. How ever I think it's a good time to research what changes are needed in people, processes and infrastructure to use telecenters and their networks as a "development platform for positive change". As a start-up idea I like to suggest "more openness" at every level of development for increasing participation opportunities by wider social groups and entities. As this opening up definitely challenge already established structures and processes, there is an need of an open dialog on future development of Telecenters so that we are able to mitigate any risks and downsides of change.

What changes can we suggest at local, regional, national and global level ?
My next blog will follow on this topic..


Niranjan Meegammana
Shilpa Sayura Foundation
http://www.shilpasayura.org