The UN Meets Silicon Valley

On Wednesday, February 28, 2007, Intel hosted the "The UN Meets Silicon valley" event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The event was kicked off by Craig Barrett, who used the location to talk about the use of Information and Communication technology for Development (ICTD) as a computer input/output model. What needs to go in are accessibility, connectivity, education and content, and out come economic development, e-health, e-education and other application areas.

Los-cost Devices
Intel also showed off its Classmate PC, which is part of the company's World Ahead Program. The Classmate PC is the counterpart to the $140 computer developed by Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child organization. At this year's WEF, the standoff between Barrett and Negroponte had caused quite a stir. For Negroponte, it's about the difference between market and mission - his being mission of course, but for Taiwanese Quanta Computers, which is building them and for the suppliers of the components - Intel's rival AMD is supplying the chips - this is hard-nosed business too.
Barrett made no secret of his market ambitions, and the no-nonsense style of Silicon Valley that apparently goes with it. When, during the closing session of the event, he spoke about the ten commandments (things necessary for success), he was called on both his language - one participant joked about the IT industry going up against God - and the ideas behind it - there is no one-size-fits-all solution, as much as corporations, and techies, would like to find one. ICTD is as much a local as a global story.

Local Content, and then some
Many participants spoke about appropriateness, local relevance and local content. As Titi Akinsanmi, Program manager of the Global Teenager Project put it, put it - you don't come to my house, and I don't go to your house, with an empty box (meaning just a computer with nothing in it that's for me.) And even local content is still a high-level abstract, as Barbara Waugh, HP's self-styled corporate revolutionary and author of The Soul in the Computer, reminded the audience: What about gender?
(During a break, I stood with Barbara, Priscila Neri, the coordinator of the newly opened New York office of the Committee for the Democracy in Information Technology and Lisa Giaretto of Village Enterprise Fund, a microfinance organization, when the latter reported that at the recent Global Microcredit Summit in Nova Scotia, there were very few women speakers, which is astounding given that women are still the focus of much microfinance activities, even though apparently that's changing as microfinance is going more mainstream). Andrew McLaughlin, Head of Global Public Policy at google, said that there was a lack of meaningful financial incentives to create local content, which google is hoping to change through advertising revenue generated by its adsense program. Minutes later he was banging his head when Titi reported that on a recent trip back home to South Africa, she was surprised to find that everybody and their aunt has a blog there. People click on each other's blogs all the time exactly for this advertising revenue.


Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs)
Given the theme of the meeting, PPPs were at the center of the discussion. However, for the most part they were reduced to collaborations between governments/development organizations and corporations, somewhat neglecting the nonprofit organizations/NGOs and academics who were also present and are part of such multisector partnerships. As Building Common Ground: The UN Connecting with Silicon Valley, a working paper RiOS prepared for the meeting, showed, such partnerships are much in vogue now, as each type of institutions has realized that on their own they are not making much of a dent in bridging the global digital divide. Relatively easy to set up, PPPs are not as easy to keep going however, since they usually bring together groups with different objectives, cultures, ways of doing things, resources and capabilities. It takes a lot of respect for other ways of operating and a genuine commitment to make a difference and be in it for the long run, especially by corporate participants, to make them work. There also need to be clear guiding standards to ensure inclusiveness and democratic control, and to prevent being controlled by the most wealthy and powerful participants.


The next billion
The other hot topic was "the next billion," meaning the next billion people in developing countries whom governments and international development organizations hope to get online, and whom high-tech corporations hope will become the future consumers of their products. This number comes from C.K. Prahalad's writings on the bottom of the (world economic) pyramid, where poverty can be eradicated through profits. (One attendee suggested to change the language to base of the pyramid, asking "would you like to live at the bottom of anything?). Although a popular idea with CEOs and development technocrats alike, research by RiOS Institute has shown that such a marketization of poverty cannot address its political and structural reasons and therefore only provide limited technical solutions. By only regarding the poor as potential customers, their plight gets reduced to a purely economic problem crying out for purely economic solutions. As Sarbuland Khan, the UN's executive coordinator of the GAID argued, "endemic poverty defies the market."

Moving Forward
At the end of the day, after several breakout sessions, the group came up with several next steps forward for how to involve Silicon Valley in the GAID. Foremost among them was the creation of local ecosystem to support local content providers.