UN Meets Silicon Valley - Results

Results from the UN Meets Silicon Valley event is slowly migrating to the web. Intel posted the pictures taken by its official photographer and also sent a summary of the panel discussions to all participants.

Here they are, interspersed with some of our thoughts. (For panel participants, see the event agenda).

Innovation Panel

• Commitment and Coordination in Private Sector: Not enough major private companies committed to developing ICT for Emerging Markets and the ones that are committed aren’t coordinated

RiOS: It seems hard to believe that the emerging markets area is not soliciting more commitment, and shows the difficulty for large corporations to work in this disruptive area, as Clayton Christensen calls it. The lack of coordination among corporations also exists because for many this is a highly strategic area, and work here is not shared with potential competitors. It will be interesting to see how the GAID can work around this.

• Identifying local resources to support local content and delivery of devices – taking a bottoms up approach

RiOS: It’s good that people are coming around to the bottom-up approach, although it only goes half way if initiatives are still developed in corporate labs, even if they are located in India or China. What is necessary is finding truly local initiatives that grow out of local needs and then putting resources (financial, human, technical) behind them to scale them.

• Enabling access to simple devices with easy user interfaces via financing and education

RiOS: This implies that such simple devices exist already. Do they? How simple is the $100 computer or Intel Classmate? Cell phones are leading the way here.

• Lack of affordable and simple broadband connectivity

Venture Capitalist Panel

• Need to create a cohesive ecosystem to drive and incubate innovation in developing countries (requires analysis of funding gaps)
• Need a phased approach toward growing businesses (e.g. need mentors to help smallest enterprises grow to be VC ready)
• Need to share best practice in measuring blended ROI; create a feedback loop to learn from failures and wins

RiOS: This last point is crucial. It is difficult enough to measure the social return on ICTD programs, in a way that goes beyond the quantitative indicators of how many users, how many hours of usage, program retention etc, which on their own are not saying much of the difference ICT really makes. If on top of that this social return has to be translated into metrics that make business sense, ie. mainly financial, this proves even more tricky. When HP tried to do it with its e-Inclusion program, the company was not all that successful, as the demise of the program in 2005 showed. Are there any good examples out there?

Content Panel

• Local production of content – Incentive, Tools, Understand why important
• Overcoming barriers to consumption of content – Accessibility, Language, Literacy
• Lack of capacity building to creating local content – Training, Teaching, Tools

For RiOS, this whole question of local content is of primary importance, because this is what ultimately results in a meaningful difference for the people using ICT. Women and children in developing countried being able to go to the UN charters that give them rights is good, but can they read them, understand them, translate them to benefit their own situations? This kind of empowerment can only happen through local organizations producing content that makes these charters relevant. This is where the work of the Committee for the Democratization of Information Technology in Brazil is so powerful, because it starts with a local situation that people want to improve. Only then comes the application of ICT for solving this problem. The other way around would be putting the cart before th horse.