[wsfii-discuss] May 19 DC Community Wireless Panel on Economics of Community Wireless Networks in Developing Countries

Tue May 15 15:13:24 UTC 2007

Dear All,

Following up on the Economics of Community Wireless Discussion that started in March from the Discussion by Lindsey Annison, Ashish Saboo, Ian Howard, me Tracy Lauriault and others, we were able to organize a panel discussion on this issues at the Community Wireless Summit on May 19 in DC (Columbia Maryland Loyola U). The title of the panel is the "Economics of Community Wireless Networks in Developing Countries."

Overview:
The Economic Sustainability of Community Wireless Networks in
Emerging Markets will be a major theme at the WSFII Africa 2007
Summit    www.wirelessafrica2007.org  
in August. As a precursor to this event,  oneVillage
Foundation  
and several other distinguished ICT leaders will hold a panel on this
topic at the upcoming "International Summit for Community Wireless
Networks" on May 18-20 in Washington DC
 http://www.cuwin.net/summit  . 

Participants (More about them in the attached document:    

				econ_of_comm_wireless_nets_051407.doc): Panel
will feature several well known leaders in the ICT field, including
Ian Howard former GeekCorps Mali Director and author of    Wireless
Networking for the Developing World  ,
Jeff Buderer Program Development Manager of    oneVillage
Foundation  ;
Toby Morning of  Accton
Technology Group  ;
Peter Baldwin of the   Digital
Opportunity Trust   
an ex-GeekCorps Mali Volunteer Economics Advisor.   

To further explain this are two documents that I have attached:
 Overview for the Panel in terms of what it is going to discuss ( 

				econ_of_comm_wireless_nets_051407.doc)
 Some of my thoughts on what I would like to discuss ( Panel Prep Discussion.doc). 
 Repesentation From Emerging Markets is Important I would have liked it if we could have gotten someone from a
emerging market to participate in the panel. However since that is not
the case I want to be sure that in our discussions on the panel that we
represent some of the ideas by those who are in emerging markets of which I believe Ashish Saboo's comments are particularly valuable in this process.

Ugo Vallauri of Computer Aid  has been very  helpful in forwarding this discussion and linking me to key people to move this discussion forward.  He introduced me to LinkNet which is aimed at promoting holistic rural
development in Rural Zambia. I have included Adrian and Gerthan in this email. This is along similar lines that we have outlined with our Open
Digital Village concept that we are now trying to implement in Winneba
Ghana. 

Xigi.net Gary Bolles of
Xigi.net  was unable to resolve his scheduling conflict with the other
conference he was participating but we had some good telephone
conversations last week and he is very interested in what is developing. Gary points out the need to breaks thing down
into layers such as the policy layer etc. his organization www.xigi.net
helps to explore power relationships that lead to the development of
emergent economic sectors (such as for example wireless) and make them
transparent, putting capital to work to promote social good. Xigi.net is a collective intelligence tool that can be used to help document the power relationships involved in the development emergent economic sectors (like wireless) and make them more transparent. He sees Muni-Wireless (which he is also involved in) as helping to adapt this process to the development public broadband wireless market in the US. Gary has been involved in developing a framework for the development of a Digital Village Fund, seeing that as a platform to promote entreprenuerialism in the social enterprise sector and focused on the convergence of the wireless and digital village/telecenter sectors. My understanding from the calls was that right now he feels that these events and dialogues are important because they pave the way for developing that fund on a firm foundation.  Finally Good Capital is an investment firm that he is involved with that is designed accelerate "the flow of capital
to innovative ventures and initiatives that harness the power of the
market to create sustainable solutions to some of society's most
challenging problems. Our initiatives and funds address a wide range of
social issues ranging from social enterprise financing, community and
economic development, brownfield development, and healthcare financing."

Grassroots Wireless in India Ashish Saboo of the Association of Public ICT Access Provider (ApiAp)
- I am reading and particularly interested with some of Ashish's
comments. He says the telecenter model needs to be flexible to the
needs of each neighborhood/community. So then possibility organizations
taking rigid of a template approach were not able to see the expected
success because of that rigidity which may have stifled things so that
the local early adopters of ICT did not take ownership of these
projects leading eventually to their failure? So its very important to
have local stakeholders involved and understand the local culture in
developing these programs.

We need better tools to measure and
connect economic value with social value. Ashish feels that we need to
come up with better matrix linking tools - tools helping to link and
model outcomes of programs with consideration to social as well as
economic factors - to measure the social benefits of these project and
also to how that often translates into added economic value for the
community as well as the center itself.

There are many
publications on the launch of telecenters but few offer honest
reporting of the challenges so accountability and transparency is an
issue that needs to be improved. He suggests there is a need to develop
an online resource that could serve as center for such resources. 

Tools for ensuring Accountability I wanted to add Kris Dev to this (Chennai India) has been working on how to develop ICT tools
to improve accountability and transparency

Ashish
I am reading your email about how you see the need to address the
unsophisticated ICT consumer in emerging markets and where you give
Dharamsala as one example of a dysfunctional pattern emerging in
emerging markets where by some of the poorest regions of the world now
spend extremely disproportionate amounts of their very meager funds on
ICT. So this makes me think that this panel should also discuss more
fundamental problems with the launch of ICT in emerging markets and how
community wireless networks can be effectively positioned to address
this problem. I would to see more about this that is more refined that
we could discuss and feature in the panel discussion. 

Juergen
Neumann Founder of Friefunk suggested that this Barcelona event (could not find weblink on this so if anyone could send it that would be great) being organized by Ramon Roca of guifi.net would be a
good venue to continue our work about community compatible
economics. I look forward to hear more from him about this although most likely I will not be able to attend. Possibly some of you can make and keep us updated.

I look forward to further discussion on this and thanks all for the contributions made so far.

Jeff

Jeff Buderer
oneVillage Foundation
www.onevillagefoundation.org

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