[wsfii-discuss] Economic Sustainability of Community Wireless + honest assessment
Ian Howard
ihoward at netdotworking.com
Sat Apr 28 18:53:59 UTC 2007
Ashish, Tomas, et al.,
YES! I completely agree, on a few of your points. In particular, "honest
assessment" is certainly lacking. I noticed that recently a telecentre
book was published. It, unfortunately does lack some of what I would
call best practices. Moreover, as you allude there is a significant
drought in the amount of honest assessments, or what I might call
critical review and development of these best practices. I have begun to
solicit funding for such case studies, though I have found that no donor
is interested. In part I see why. Such studies would in part be airing
laundry, both good and some bad. So, no one is interested in this. I am
very keen to have some rigorous studies, with best practices done. For
it to be meaningful there needs to be a significant number of
practitioners on board. That momentum is something that I am hoping that
we can build, perhaps WSFII and Ghana will be the right forum to do so.
I am hoping that eventually that we find funding from some bipartisan
organization (one that is less interested in politics and more
interested in good development), to help support this initiative.
Eventually, what I truly think will be good, is not only to have a body
of continually developing best practices, but also, to have a group of
ICT auditors who have bipartisan funding and who will review projects
critically and report them to the development community. These auditors
will serve that function that auditors and journalists serve in other
communities, that is to keep projects honest and also to make sure that
people are following best-practices. This is something that I hope to
help coalesce. I presume that there are already a few efforts to do
similar things. What I am particularly keen to do is to develop a few
assessment standards and to lead a few of these assessments so to
develop such best practices. If others are interested in that, please do
let me know.
Ian
Assoc of Public ICT Tools Access Prov wrote:
> Thomas, Ian,
> Thanks for sharing this wonderful dialogue. Telecentre models are
> too fluid. To be successful each centre has to adopt to its
> neighbourhood demand . Hence the Template approach just does not
> works. As you have rightly mentioned short term capital is easily
> available & by the time you approach the real test of survival , all
> the external actors just vanish. & left to the locals to grapple the
> situation for which they are not yet prepared.
>
> Unfortunately this has also lead to Telecentres movement
> worldwide often blamed as an unsustainable venture.
>
> So it is very important to get the local stake holders involved in
> operating the project, make him a true partner in progress. They are
> the best judge to what works for them. Help them with training &
> help them access to honest resource of various past projects across
> the world.
> We will find several publication about the launch of Telecentres but
> few offer a honest post mortem reports. Thus you need a online
> resource of collection of independent assessment of all such projects
> as to what made them succeed or fail. Not sure if any one will ever
> come forward to fund such resource.
>
> On the debate that Economic value may or may not be connected with
> Social value , well it make be because of lack of acceptable matrix. I
> hope one day we will get an equivalent jargon like Carbon credits /
> footprints etc . to measure the social benefits which such
> Telecentres/ community networks can deliver.
>
> I hope those attending WSFII GHANA will help set the thought process
>
> best wishes
>
> Ashish
>
>
>
> On 4/27/07, *Thomas Maketa* <tmaketa at gmail.com
> <mailto:tmaketa at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Mbote Ian,
>
> You are right you used the right word, in that context it is
> economical value.
> And you are also right in your analysis, in lesser developed
> country project should be self-financing, in the project we are
> setting up, the non free available services will have a price, but
> the least economically possible.
> The infrastructure chosen is the mesh network, so someone with his
> material can enter the network without paying anything, the cost
> intervene only if he wants to have access to Internet (a bandwidth
> must be paid). We would give access to voip functionality which
> will be available for free inside the network.
> The goal is to use the resource available within community and to
> initiate an endogenous growth of the network. We think that it is
> the model minimizing at maximum cost.
> So far did not launched anything yet spending time in all the
> offices of administration getting authorization and defending the
> project (private ISP dont see us with good eyes) hope we will be
> done soon.
>
> Cheers
> TM
>
>
> On 4/27/07, *Ian Howard* < ihoward at netdotworking.com
> <mailto:ihoward at netdotworking.com>> wrote:
>
> Mbote Thomas!
>
> Indeed.
>
> Regarding my use of the term "economic value" here. In the
> design of
> networks in countries like yours, I have found that cash flow
> is the
> greatest challenge. Local governments are not able to
> subsidize. Foreign
> governments wish only to provide short-term capital
> investment. Thus,
> ultimately, most often in the developing world (lesser developed
> countries) the model for supporting a wireless network must be
> self-financing, and thus we must find the economic value, or
> there is no
> hope to find social value. In Canada, it is much easier for me
> to build
> a network that is first focused on social value. Many of the
> community
> networks here use such a model. They provide a social value,
> more than
> an economic value. That can be done because the costs are
> negligible in
> terms of the economic output of the community, whereas a
> network in
> Congo, for example, can be a significant cost in terms of the
> community's economic output, because costs are factors more
> and revenues
> are much more constrained. So, my use of the term "economic
> value", I
> propose, is perhaps appropriate here as my point is that the
> network
> will only survive if its economic value is greater than its
> costs.
>
> Ian
>
>
> Maketa wrote:
> > Hi Ian,
> > Very pertinent what you said below, maybe we should accept
> that some
> > project will have as only purpose to show a possibility, and
> it is
> > people themselves who must embrace it or not according to
> their needs.
> >
> > Fundamentally what I draw from your reaction is that a model is
> > adopted only if it suits a community needs, and as there are so
> > different communities with so different needs , because of the
> > difference in environments and mindset in which they live,
> than an
> > universal business model is utopia. (So difficult to take the
> freifunk
> > or the server host based, or the FON , or the exotic model and
> > transpose it at it is in a different context, I know that nobody
> > proposed it !!!!!!).
> >
> > So we should look at model where all the same opportunities
> are given
> > to everybody and anyone according to his background,
> availability ,
> > willingness could grab it or not.
> >
> >
> > Just a quick pique to a previous direction that the
> discussion took, I
> > noticed the way you used "economical value" for you "if the
> network
> > fulfill a need the community will keep it alive", shouldnt
> you say
> > however "Social value"??? Why do we always associate
> something that
> > has a social value to money?
> >
> > >>>>
> > >:leaning to, such as in the phrase,
> > >"Demonstrate the economic viability of sustainable development,
> > promoting a variety of appropriate >sustainable technologies and
> > approaches suitable to local conditions and preferences." We
> believe
> > >that some models should be simply that, to demonstrate
> something, for
> > the purpose of testing it and >showing people(training) them.
> Then,
> > you later close the doors and if local peopl ewant that
> network, >they
> > will build it, as they will know how (if the project was done
> > right).To get back to your mention of >FM, I might simply
> redirect
> > your reference to state what is most important is that the
> network
> > fulfil >ssome crucial need of the community, such as an FM
> radio is
> > hungry for information, or that farmers >need to know market
> info. If
> > the network then fulfils a real need, than the network will
> be kept
> > alive by >the community. It will then have economic value.Cheers!
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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