My comparative silence on “…my Heart’s in Accra” has been counterbalanced by a couple of long posts on the Global Voices website. Rebecca and I presented our current thinking about GV to our Berkman colleages and friends on Tuesday, and we wanted a couple of great stories to show off as we “soft-launched” the project. In the past couple of days, I’ve posted an online conversation with Sokari Ekine, the creator of the fantastic Black Looks blog, an essay by Elina Karakulova on her reactions to the “revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, and a quick look at the weblog put together by rights organization Sokwanele in Zimbabwe. I’ll throw something up later today talking about what we accomplished in Tuesday’s brainstorm…

A bit of followup here, talking a bit more about aspects of the Kyrgyz and Zimbabwe stories.

I’m suspicious of folks on both the left and the right who are talking up the Kyrgyz “revolution” as part of the spread of democracy through the world. One of the reasons I think Karakulova’s piece is so important is her observation that the events that just transpired were not a revolution, but a rebellion:

“I personally do not think that Kyrgyzstan witnessed a revolution, but a rebellion with change of political elites. Revolution implies ideological change. I do not see any ideological difference between the current interim government and the former one.”

The Akaev government was so rotten with corruption that no one was willing to stand in the way of the protesters when they seized the “White House”. But it’s a mistake to conclude that this shows support for a revolutionary “movement”, rather than just massive dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Indeed, Kurmanbek Bakiyev has said little that sounds like a recipe for a new direction for the Kyrgyz government.)

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Kyrgyz “revolution” will create some sort of domino-effect in the former Soviet republics. A rally of 1,000 people last week against Lukashenko was quickly dispersed, with the ringleaders being thrown into prison. As Fred Weir observes in the Christian Science Monitor:

the post-Soviet countries that have so far been rocked by revolution have been among the most liberal and relatively democratic in an admittedly tough region. “Akayev, to his credit, allowed a fairly permissive environment for NGO’s to work,” says Stuart Kahn, Kyrgyzstan project director for Freedom House, which is partly financed by the US government. The danger, he says, is that other Central Asian leaders may see Akayev’s concessions to democracy as the Achilles’ heel of his regime. “The lesson they may draw is that the permissive, or semi-repressive environment Akayev created is antithetical to maintaining the status quo.”

In other words, one very real possible outcome of the Kyrgyz revolution is an increasing crackdown on the limited freedoms still available in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus.

On the Zimbabwe side of things, I wanted to look more closely at an article by my main man, Abraham McLaughlin. McLaughlin observes that China is a major player in the Zimbabwean election, an observation consonant with the trend that China is becoming a huge, if not dominant, political force on the continent. It’s widely understood that China’s efforts to prevent UN sanctions against Sudan have had less to do with solidary between oppresive nations, and more to do with ensuring access to a regular oil supply.

McLaughlin reports that the Chinese governments, or Chinese companies, have provided pro-Zanu-PF t-shirts and radio jamming devices to the ruling party, helped build Mugabe’s presidential palace, and sold the government jet fighters and trucks in violation of a Western arms embargo. It’s hard to know whether this is “just business” for the Chinese government, or whether they actively support Mugabe’s repressive regime. But, one way or another, it helps relieve pressure on dictatorial rulers by enabling them to point to the support they see in the east even as they lose support in the west.

Working closely with the WorldChanging team is having an effect on my blogging style: I’m finding it harder to post stories that seem purely like bad news. WorldChanging has a hard and fast rule – no doom, just solutions. Unfortunately, on the issues I focus on, that eliminates many of the stories I most want to talk about. But I’m still resistant to publishing stories that are pure, unmitigated bad news.

Which kept me from posting this story for a few days: a group calling itself the “Minutemen Project” is organizing in southern Arizona, planning on running private border patrols to deter illegal immigration from Mexico. Jim Gilchrist, who is helping organize the vigilantes, claims his patrols are designed to “assist” law enforcement – the US border patrol, on the other hand, has asked Gilchrist and his volunteers not to come to the Arizona border, and now plans on monitoring “Minuteman” activities at the same time as they watch the border. Human rights groups, including the ACLU, are also planning on watching the volunteers – who are expected to be armed – and Salvadorean criminal gang MS-13 has threatened to confront the “Minuteman” volunteers. Should make for an interesting month of April in and around Tombstone, Arizona, at the very least.

Yes, I’m worried that porous land borders are a potential terrorist risk (though, I would argue, much less so that our container ports, for instance.) And I agree that legal immigration is preferable to illegal immigration, at minimum because immigrants take tremendous personal risks crossing the US-Mexico border. But a response to complex immigration issues by massing armed civilians on the Arizona border looks like extremely thinly veiled racism to me, as well as a recipe for violent confrontation. (It’s unsurprising that the “Minuteman Project” has been generating extensive interest on racist sites like Stormfront in the past few weeks. As Stormfront poster “311inAZ” puts it: “This will not be a White racialist project, per se, and all that are concerned with our wide open borders are encouraged to apply.”)

There are two reasons that the Bush administration hasn’t extensively cracked down on illegal overland immigration. One is that it’s really hard – the Mexican border is enormous, largely unfenced and runs through some of the most isolated, barren and hostile environments of the US. But the major reason is that a strong crackdown against illegal immigration would be economically disastrous to the US. Millions of low-paying jobs in the United States are filled by illegal immigrants. Because of this uncomfortable truth, pro-business groups often find themselves supporting immigration reform which lowers immigration barriers… and tend to oppose strict enforcement and border control measures.

Which brings us to the subject of robots. (I love a good segue.)

Joshua Davis has a beautiful story in Wired, “La Vida Robot”, which looks at a team of high school students from Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix who build an underwater robot that takes first prize in a national robotics championship, beating a well-funded team from MIT.

All four students on the team are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. This means that Oscar Vasquez, team capitan and ROTC student, discovered that he’s ineligible for military service and the academic scholarships that come with it. He wants to study engineering at Arizona State University, but because he’s undocumented, he’s ineligible for federal loans, and ASU considers him an “out of state” student, more than doubling the in-state tuition to over $10,000 a year. As a result, he’s installing sheetrock in Phoenix.

If this pisses you off as much as it does me, I encourage you to do two things. One, support the “DREAM Act” – S. 1545 – which would enable states to decide to extend scholarship aid to undocumented students who’ve lived in the US for multiple years. And visit the page Wired has set up for the La Vida Robot Scholarship Fund, designed to support the efforts of these amazing young men to go to college. I just wrote them a check and I’m now marginally less angry.

My comparative silence on “…my Heart’s in Accra” has been counterbalanced by a couple of long posts on the Global Voices website. Rebecca and I presented our current thinking about GV to our Berkman colleages and friends on Tuesday, and we wanted a couple of great stories to show off as we “soft-launched” the project. In the past couple of days, I’ve posted an online conversation with Sokari Ekine, the creator of the fantastic Black Looks blog, an essay by Elina Karakulova on her reactions to the “revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, and a quick look at the weblog put together by rights organization Sokwanele in Zimbabwe. I’ll throw something up later today talking about what we accomplished in Tuesday’s brainstorm…

A bit of followup here, talking a bit more about aspects of the Kyrgyz and Zimbabwe stories.

I’m suspicious of folks on both the left and the right who are talking up the Kyrgyz “revolution” as part of the spread of democracy through the world. One of the reasons I think Karakulova’s piece is so important is her observation that the events that just transpired were not a revolution, but a rebellion:

“I personally do not think that Kyrgyzstan witnessed a revolution, but a rebellion with change of political elites. Revolution implies ideological change. I do not see any ideological difference between the current interim government and the former one.”

The Akaev government was so rotten with corruption that no one was willing to stand in the way of the protesters when they seized the “White House”. But it’s a mistake to conclude that this shows support for a revolutionary “movement”, rather than just massive dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Indeed, Kurmanbek Bakiyev has said little that sounds like a recipe for a new direction for the Kyrgyz government.)

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Kyrgyz “revolution” will create some sort of domino-effect in the former Soviet republics. A rally of 1,000 people last week against Lukashenko was quickly dispersed, with the ringleaders being thrown into prison. As Fred Weir observes in the Christian Science Monitor:

the post-Soviet countries that have so far been rocked by revolution have been among the most liberal and relatively democratic in an admittedly tough region. “Akayev, to his credit, allowed a fairly permissive environment for NGO’s to work,” says Stuart Kahn, Kyrgyzstan project director for Freedom House, which is partly financed by the US government. The danger, he says, is that other Central Asian leaders may see Akayev’s concessions to democracy as the Achilles’ heel of his regime. “The lesson they may draw is that the permissive, or semi-repressive environment Akayev created is antithetical to maintaining the status quo.”

In other words, one very real possible outcome of the Kyrgyz revolution is an increasing crackdown on the limited freedoms still available in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus.

On the Zimbabwe side of things, I wanted to look more closely at an article by my main man, Abraham McLaughlin. McLaughlin observes that China is a major player in the Zimbabwean election, an observation consonant with the trend that China is becoming a huge, if not dominant, political force on the continent. It’s widely understood that China’s efforts to prevent UN sanctions against Sudan have had less to do with solidary between oppresive nations, and more to do with ensuring access to a regular oil supply.

McLaughlin reports that the Chinese governments, or Chinese companies, have provided pro-Zanu-PF t-shirts and radio jamming devices to the ruling party, helped build Mugabe’s presidential palace, and sold the government jet fighters and trucks in violation of a Western arms embargo. It’s hard to know whether this is “just business” for the Chinese government, or whether they actively support Mugabe’s repressive regime. But, one way or another, it helps relieve pressure on dictatorial rulers by enabling them to point to the support they see in the east even as they lose support in the west.

Working closely with the WorldChanging team is having an effect on my blogging style: I’m finding it harder to post stories that seem purely like bad news. WorldChanging has a hard and fast rule – no doom, just solutions. Unfortunately, on the issues I focus on, that eliminates many of the stories I most want to talk about. But I’m still resistant to publishing stories that are pure, unmitigated bad news.

Which kept me from posting this story for a few days: a group calling itself the “Minutemen Project” is organizing in southern Arizona, planning on running private border patrols to deter illegal immigration from Mexico. Jim Gilchrist, who is helping organize the vigilantes, claims his patrols are designed to “assist” law enforcement – the US border patrol, on the other hand, has asked Gilchrist and his volunteers not to come to the Arizona border, and now plans on monitoring “Minuteman” activities at the same time as they watch the border. Human rights groups, including the ACLU, are also planning on watching the volunteers – who are expected to be armed – and Salvadorean criminal gang MS-13 has threatened to confront the “Minuteman” volunteers. Should make for an interesting month of April in and around Tombstone, Arizona, at the very least.

Yes, I’m worried that porous land borders are a potential terrorist risk (though, I would argue, much less so that our container ports, for instance.) And I agree that legal immigration is preferable to illegal immigration, at minimum because immigrants take tremendous personal risks crossing the US-Mexico border. But a response to complex immigration issues by massing armed civilians on the Arizona border looks like extremely thinly veiled racism to me, as well as a recipe for violent confrontation. (It’s unsurprising that the “Minuteman Project” has been generating extensive interest on racist sites like Stormfront in the past few weeks. As Stormfront poster “311inAZ” puts it: “This will not be a White racialist project, per se, and all that are concerned with our wide open borders are encouraged to apply.”)

There are two reasons that the Bush administration hasn’t extensively cracked down on illegal overland immigration. One is that it’s really hard – the Mexican border is enormous, largely unfenced and runs through some of the most isolated, barren and hostile environments of the US. But the major reason is that a strong crackdown against illegal immigration would be economically disastrous to the US. Millions of low-paying jobs in the United States are filled by illegal immigrants. Because of this uncomfortable truth, pro-business groups often find themselves supporting immigration reform which lowers immigration barriers… and tend to oppose strict enforcement and border control measures.

Which brings us to the subject of robots. (I love a good segue.)

Joshua Davis has a beautiful story in Wired, “La Vida Robot”, which looks at a team of high school students from Carl Hayden Community High School in West Phoenix who build an underwater robot that takes first prize in a national robotics championship, beating a well-funded team from MIT.

All four students on the team are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. This means that Oscar Vasquez, team capitan and ROTC student, discovered that he’s ineligible for military service and the academic scholarships that come with it. He wants to study engineering at Arizona State University, but because he’s undocumented, he’s ineligible for federal loans, and ASU considers him an “out of state” student, more than doubling the in-state tuition to over $10,000 a year. As a result, he’s installing sheetrock in Phoenix.

If this pisses you off as much as it does me, I encourage you to do two things. One, support the “DREAM Act” – S. 1545 – which would enable states to decide to extend scholarship aid to undocumented students who’ve lived in the US for multiple years. And visit the page Wired has set up for the La Vida Robot Scholarship Fund, designed to support the efforts of these amazing young men to go to college. I just wrote them a check and I’m now marginally less angry.

Compared to the telegenic, orderly and easily understood “orange” revolution in Ukraine, the ongoing revolution in Kyrgyzstan is pretty baffling. For one thing, no one can decide what to call it. Reuters terms it “a lightning coup”. The London Times has a “lemon revolution”. The Telegraph reports on the “tulip revolution”. And the Observer has it as the “pink revolution”. Wikipedia includes references to a “silk” and “daffodil” revolution as well.

(I’m staying at the house of my friend Nate, who’s travelled extensively in Kyrgyzstan. He points out that no one is calling it the “Kyrgyz Revolution”, because no one can spell it. One of the reasons I’m visiting Nate is that we were planning a trip to Kyrgyzstan this August. We’re rapidly reconsidering that plan.)

The Observer has, at least, a partial explanation for why the marchers in the “tulip revolution” were carrying daffodils: “Daffodils appeared in the marchers’ hands, the opposition claiming the government had cleared the city of the initial symbol – tulips – out of fear.”

One of the problems with the “floral pastel” revolution in Kyrgzstan is the lack of a Yushchenko figure. Poisoned with dioxin by Russian security forces, yet rallying to campaign onward, Yushchenko was the sort of figure Ukrainians – and the global media – could get behind. There’s no obvious, comparable rallying figure in Kyrgyzstan. Kurmanbek Bakiev, the former prime minister under Akayev, attempted to take over as President, but was rebuked by the head of the constitutional court… who complicated matters by declaring the new parliament legitimate. Which seems odd, as the illegitimacy of the new parliament was the main reason for the rebellion, and now there appear to be two rival Kyrgyz parliaments.

Felix Kulov, another possible rallying figure – a activist, imprisoned by Akayev, who was freed in the early stages of the revolution – has stated that he will not challenge Bakiev for the presidency in upcoming elections. And, perhaps to ensure that he doesn’t become the darling of the global media, as acting security chief, he ordered Kyrgyz police to fire on looters.

There were many good reasons to throw out Akayev. After 14 years in power, Kyrgyzstan is far poorer than it was as part of the Soviet Union. While Akayev had initially been hailed as a democratizing force in a decidely undemocratic region, he’s been increasingly authoritarian. The parliamentary elections – which gave only 6 of 72 seats to the opposition and brought Akayev’s son and daughter seats as MPs – were believed to be a setup for a constitutional change that would allow Akayev to continue his rule.

But it’s unclear to what extent the “revolution” was motivated more by ideology, or by alcohol. Many media reports suggest that the group that occupied the Kyrgyz “White House” was a mix of revolutionaries and the vodka-sodden, some of whom went on to loot shops in Bishkek. Nick Paton Walsh, writing for the Observer, found it hard to get interview subjects to talk about their political aims: “‘Give me your watch or I will smash open your head,’ one looter said to The Observer.”

The upside of the revolution? A corrupt, authoritarian sham of a democracy is out of power. The downsides? Possible north-south civil war in Kyrgyzstan (most of the revolutionaries were from the southern cities of Osh and Jalal-abad.) Increased instability in one of the most unstable regions of the world. The possible emergence of Kyrgyzstan as a safe haven for radical Islam. An overreaction by China, which shares a border and has a large Kyrgyz populationk, and a history of trampling on their Muslim Uighir citizens.

Oh yeah, the other downside: the non-refundable tickets from Moscow to Bishkek I bought the other day…

Compared to the telegenic, orderly and easily understood “orange” revolution in Ukraine, the ongoing revolution in Kyrgyzstan is pretty baffling. For one thing, no one can decide what to call it. Reuters terms it “a lightning coup”. The London Times has a “lemon revolution”. The Telegraph reports on the “tulip revolution”. And the Observer has it as the “pink revolution”. Wikipedia includes references to a “silk” and “daffodil” revolution as well.

(I'm staying at the house of my friend Nate, who's travelled extensively in Kyrgyzstan. He points out that no one is calling it the “Kyrgyz Revolution”, because no one can spell it. One of the reasons I'm visiting Nate is that we were planning a trip to Kyrgyzstan this August. We're rapidly reconsidering that plan.)

The Observer has, at least, a partial explanation for why the marchers in the “tulip revolution” were carrying daffodils: “Daffodils appeared in the marchers' hands, the opposition claiming the government had cleared the city of the initial symbol – tulips – out of fear.”

One of the problems with the “floral pastel” revolution in Kyrgzstan is the lack of a Yushchenko figure. Poisoned with dioxin by Russian security forces, yet rallying to campaign onward, Yushchenko was the sort of figure Ukrainians – and the global media – could get behind. There's no obvious, comparable rallying figure in Kyrgyzstan. Kurmanbek Bakiev, the former prime minister under Akayev, attempted to take over as President, but was rebuked by the head of the constitutional court… who complicated matters by declaring the new parliament legitimate. Which seems odd, as the illegitimacy of the new parliament was the main reason for the rebellion, and now there appear to be two rival Kyrgyz parliaments.

Felix Kulov, another possible rallying figure – a activist, imprisoned by Akayev, who was freed in the early stages of the revolution – has stated that he will not challenge Bakiev for the presidency in upcoming elections. And, perhaps to ensure that he doesn't become the darling of the global media, as acting security chief, he ordered Kyrgyz police to fire on looters.

There were many good reasons to throw out Akayev. After 14 years in power, Kyrgyzstan is far poorer than it was as part of the Soviet Union. While Akayev had initially been hailed as a democratizing force in a decidely undemocratic region, he's been increasingly authoritarian. The parliamentary elections – which gave only 6 of 72 seats to the opposition and brought Akayev's son and daughter seats as MPs – were believed to be a setup for a constitutional change that would allow Akayev to continue his rule.

But it's unclear to what extent the “revolution” was motivated more by ideology, or by alcohol. Many media reports suggest that the group that occupied the Kyrgyz “White House” was a mix of revolutionaries and the vodka-sodden, some of whom went on to loot shops in Bishkek. Nick Paton Walsh, writing for the Observer, found it hard to get interview subjects to talk about their political aims: “'Give me your watch or I will smash open your head,' one looter said to The Observer.”

The upside of the revolution? A corrupt, authoritarian sham of a democracy is out of power. The downsides? Possible north-south civil war in Kyrgyzstan (most of the revolutionaries were from the southern cities of Osh and Jalal-abad.) Increased instability in one of the most unstable regions of the world. The possible emergence of Kyrgyzstan as a safe haven for radical Islam. An overreaction by China, which shares a border and has a large Kyrgyz populationk, and a history of trampling on their Muslim Uighir citizens.

Oh yeah, the other downside: the non-refundable tickets from Moscow to Bishkek I bought the other day…

If the bright lights of information and communication technology for development were rock stars, Mike Best would play sell-out shows and be followed by groupies. Instead, he gives great talks at Berkman and only a dozen or so of us are lucky enough to be in the room. (I held up a cigarette lighter for most of his talk.) Co-editor of the leading journal on ICT4D, assistant professor at Georgia Tech and fellow Berkman fellow, Mike has done both great fieldwork and theoretical work, trying to answer the question, “How can information technology improve lives in the developing world?”

Mike opens his talk with a quick overview of ways technology theorists have thought about the impact of ICTs on political development. He cites Cutright, who posited in the 1960s that voice telephony was a better predictor of political development than economic development; Skolnikoff, who postulates that, on balance, ICTs support greater openness in civil society; and Kedzie, who puts forth the “dictator’s dillemma” – that an increase in connectivity neccesarily means a decrease in authoritarian control.

He spends a bit more time on Benjamin Barber’s concept of “strong democracy”. (I got a very rough introduction to Barber two weeks ago, when he lambasted me and my colleages in Madrid.) Barber puts forward three ways technologies might work to strengthen or weaken democracies: the Panglossian, Pandorian and Jeffersonian options.

In the Panglossian scenario, citizens are primarily consumers and they blindly respond to the ideas put forward by stronger actors – most likely corporations, who keep them from political power by keeping them sufficiently entertained. In the Pandorian model, information tools become Orwellian tools for obervation and liberating technologies become tools for repression. Only in the most optimistic, Jeffersonian scenario do information tools reach their potential of allowing open, participatory democracy. (When Barber yelled at us a few weeks back, he seemed to be suggesting that the Internet was following the Panglossian path.)

Mike has decided to test a theory put forth by Kedzie, that “multidirectional, reciprocal communication technology like email” are conducive to democracy. Kedzie argues that a 1% increase in this sort of network connectivity leads to a 4 point rise on a 100-point democratization scale (adapted from Freedom House’s 7/14 point scale.)

Analyzing correlations between changes in the Freedom House scale and other independent factors – connectivity, schooling, per capita GDP, life expectancy – Mike sees a strong correlation between connectivity and high levels of democratization. The correlation is stronger between connectivity and democratization than schooling or life expectancy – only the GDP to democratization correlation is stronger. Controlling for GDP, Mike still sees a meaningful correlation between connectivity and democratization.

Correlation is not causation, as has been famously noted (though, it’s also been noted that correlation’s a good clue about causation…) and Mike is not claiming that increased connectivity increases democratization or that nations that democratize become more connected soon afterwards. Adding an “arrow” to the correlation this way requires doing time series work – as connectivity increases, does democratization? Mike’s work on this so far hasn’t given him convincing data showing causality.

What he has found, by doing analysis of covariance over time, is that there’s a “tipping point” around 1995 where connectivity is more tightly correlated to democratization than it previously was. It’s possible that a number of countries hit a key level of teledensity or data density around 1995 where we start seeing the effects of connectivity on democratization.

Mike offers two data models – one shows a simple relationship between connectivity and political rights: adding 250 internet users per 1000 is correlated to a one-point rise in political freedom on a seven point scale. Alas, getting internet connectivity to the quarter of a nation’s population is a big step… and the correlation Mike sees (R2=0.3) isn’t all that strong. He’s found another (very peculiar) data model that explains almost all his data variation:

y = -.84 + .30(internet Users) – .39(phones)

In other words, high internet usage and low phone usage correlates to increased democratization. This is a bizarre result at first glance, but there are some interesting possible explanations. In low teledensity nations, an introduction of one-to-many connectivity might be closely correlated to democratization, since open societies are less threatened by the Internet. Before concluding that phones somehow “cause” totalitarianism, remember that these models are descriptive, not causal. That effect might well be explained by authoritarian nations with heavy phone use, like China or Singapore.

After giving us hope that there might be a demostrable connection between connectivity and democratization on the macro level, Mike takes us to the micro level – the SARI (Sustainable Access in Rural India) project that he’s been working on for several years. SARI provides internet connections to 50 villages in the Madurai district of Tamil Nadu state in India. The kiosks are set up in villages of 300-1000 households where average per capita income is about $0.60 per day.

The kiosks provide a wide range of internet services, everything from email, online training programs, entertainment (horoscopes, movies and games are especially popular), televeterinary services, telemedical services (notably cataract diagnosis) and e-government services. Mike is most interested in the e-government side of things. The systems allow citizens to apply for birth certificates, old age pensions, community certifications (evidence that someone is part of an “untouchable” caste, which has government benefits associated with it), income certificates (evidence that someone is below the poverty line), as well as voicing grievances about government services.

The numbers of people using the kiosks for e-government services look small, at first glance – a few users per month. Mike points out that most of these certificates are someone one applies for once – there’s not a lot of repeat usage. And, when Mike compares the number of certificates applied for from wired villages to unwired ones of similar size, in the same region, the results are dramatic: citizens in wired villages apply for birth certificates five times more often and for old age pensions three times as often.

The reason for the increased usage is pretty simple. It costs lots less for citizens to apply for these essential documents online than it does to get them in person. To get papers in person, villagers need to spend one or more days in transit, which entails expenses, and often need to pay bribes to get the essential forms. The total expense for getting a birth certificate, including travel and bribes, is often more than a person’s daily income. That becomes a powerful incentive to learn how to use the Internet kiosks.

Mike’s research comes at an interesting time in the debate over ICT for development. There’s a real backlash against the idea that ICT projects in rural areas have a meaningful, positive effect – the Economist dedicated a substantial portion of their last issue to an argument that cellphone penetration was far more important than rural Internet access, and that rural Internet projects had mixed impact, at best.

While I largely agree with the Economist – cellphones are critically important, and most rural ICT projects have been badly thought out and their impact poorly measured – Mike’s offering a great argument that rural ICT can have a meaningful impact IF people are smart enough to build applications that have direct benefit to users in the developing world.

If the bright lights of information and communication technology for development were rock stars, Mike Best would play sell-out shows and be followed by groupies. Instead, he gives great talks at Berkman and only a dozen or so of us are lucky enough to be in the room. (I held up a cigarette lighter for most of his talk.) Co-editor of the leading journal on ICT4D, assistant professor at Georgia Tech and fellow Berkman fellow, Mike has done both great fieldwork and theoretical work, trying to answer the question, “How can information technology improve lives in the developing world?”

Mike opens his talk with a quick overview of ways technology theorists have thought about the impact of ICTs on political development. He cites Cutright, who posited in the 1960s that voice telephony was a better predictor of political development than economic development; Skolnikoff, who postulates that, on balance, ICTs support greater openness in civil society; and Kedzie, who puts forth the “dictator's dillemma” – that an increase in connectivity neccesarily means a decrease in authoritarian control.

He spends a bit more time on Benjamin Barber's concept of “strong democracy”. (I got a very rough introduction to Barber two weeks ago, when he lambasted me and my colleages in Madrid.) Barber puts forward three ways technologies might work to strengthen or weaken democracies: the Panglossian, Pandorian and Jeffersonian options.

In the Panglossian scenario, citizens are primarily consumers and they blindly respond to the ideas put forward by stronger actors – most likely corporations, who keep them from political power by keeping them sufficiently entertained. In the Pandorian model, information tools become Orwellian tools for obervation and liberating technologies become tools for repression. Only in the most optimistic, Jeffersonian scenario do information tools reach their potential of allowing open, participatory democracy. (When Barber yelled at us a few weeks back, he seemed to be suggesting that the Internet was following the Panglossian path.)

Mike has decided to test a theory put forth by Kedzie, that “multidirectional, reciprocal communication technology like email” are conducive to democracy. Kedzie argues that a 1% increase in this sort of network connectivity leads to a 4 point rise on a 100-point democratization scale (adapted from Freedom House's 7/14 point scale.)

Analyzing correlations between changes in the Freedom House scale and other independent factors – connectivity, schooling, per capita GDP, life expectancy – Mike sees a strong correlation between connectivity and high levels of democratization. The correlation is stronger between connectivity and democratization than schooling or life expectancy – only the GDP to democratization correlation is stronger. Controlling for GDP, Mike still sees a meaningful correlation between connectivity and democratization.

Correlation is not causation, as has been famously noted (though, it's also been noted that correlation's a good clue about causation…) and Mike is not claiming that increased connectivity increases democratization or that nations that democratize become more connected soon afterwards. Adding an “arrow” to the correlation this way requires doing time series work – as connectivity increases, does democratization? Mike's work on this so far hasn't given him convincing data showing causality.

What he has found, by doing analysis of covariance over time, is that there's a “tipping point” around 1995 where connectivity is more tightly correlated to democratization than it previously was. It's possible that a number of countries hit a key level of teledensity or data density around 1995 where we start seeing the effects of connectivity on democratization.

Mike offers two data models – one shows a simple relationship between connectivity and political rights: adding 250 internet users per 1000 is correlated to a one-point rise in political freedom on a seven point scale. Alas, getting internet connectivity to the quarter of a nation's population is a big step… and the correlation Mike sees (R2=0.3) isn't all that strong. He's found another (very peculiar) data model that explains almost all his data variation:

y = -.84 + .30(internet Users) – .39(phones)

In other words, high internet usage and low phone usage correlates to increased democratization. This is a bizarre result at first glance, but there are some interesting possible explanations. In low teledensity nations, an introduction of one-to-many connectivity might be closely correlated to democratization, since open societies are less threatened by the Internet. Before concluding that phones somehow “cause” totalitarianism, remember that these models are descriptive, not causal. That effect might well be explained by authoritarian nations with heavy phone use, like China or Singapore.

After giving us hope that there might be a demostrable connection between connectivity and democratization on the macro level, Mike takes us to the micro level – the SARI (Sustainable Access in Rural India) project that he's been working on for several years. SARI provides internet connections to 50 villages in the Madurai district of Tamil Nadu state in India. The kiosks are set up in villages of 300-1000 households where average per capita income is about $0.60 per day.

The kiosks provide a wide range of internet services, everything from email, online training programs, entertainment (horoscopes, movies and games are especially popular), televeterinary services, telemedical services (notably cataract diagnosis) and e-government services. Mike is most interested in the e-government side of things. The systems allow citizens to apply for birth certificates, old age pensions, community certifications (evidence that someone is part of an “untouchable” caste, which has government benefits associated with it), income certificates (evidence that someone is below the poverty line), as well as voicing grievances about government services.

The numbers of people using the kiosks for e-government services look small, at first glance – a few users per month. Mike points out that most of these certificates are someone one applies for once – there's not a lot of repeat usage. And, when Mike compares the number of certificates applied for from wired villages to unwired ones of similar size, in the same region, the results are dramatic: citizens in wired villages apply for birth certificates five times more often and for old age pensions three times as often.

The reason for the increased usage is pretty simple. It costs lots less for citizens to apply for these essential documents online than it does to get them in person. To get papers in person, villagers need to spend one or more days in transit, which entails expenses, and often need to pay bribes to get the essential forms. The total expense for getting a birth certificate, including travel and bribes, is often more than a person's daily income. That becomes a powerful incentive to learn how to use the Internet kiosks.

Mike's research comes at an interesting time in the debate over ICT for development. There's a real backlash against the idea that ICT projects in rural areas have a meaningful, positive effect – the Economist dedicated a substantial portion of their last issue to an argument that cellphone penetration was far more important than rural Internet access, and that rural Internet projects had mixed impact, at best.

While I largely agree with the Economist – cellphones are critically important, and most rural ICT projects have been badly thought out and their impact poorly measured – Mike's offering a great argument that rural ICT can have a meaningful impact IF people are smart enough to build applications that have direct benefit to users in the developing world.

Eric Osiakwan visited the Berkman Center yesterday from Ghana, by way of Stanford University. He’s an old friend from the Ghana ISP scene, one of the founders of GISPA (the Ghana ISP association) and currently is acting as executive secretary of AFRISPA (the African ISP Owners Association), the leading trade group for ISPs on the African continent.

Eric is a Reuters Digital Vision fellow and is focusing on questions of fiber and wireless internet and telecommunications access in Africa. Learning from the successes and failures of internet and telecom projects in Africa over the past decade, Eric is advocating for a model of infrastructure development in Africa that favors small business ISPs and NSPs over formerly state-owned telecom incumbents.

Some of Eric’s key points:

Eric’s a big supporter of Internet exchange points, both nationally and regionally, and points to an IDRC-sonsored study, prepared by Russell Southwood, which suggests possible voice and data savings of $400m a year across Africa if IXPs were properly implemented.

Based on lessons learned, Eric’s recommendation is for a “horizontal layering of communications infrastructure”, which allows SMEs to compete with larger providers on the network. Basically, he’s supportive of a network that’s technology neutral, transparent, interconnected and allows small players to rent infrastructure from larger players to offer services. This said, Eric feels like Africa needs fiber – lots more fiber – to satisfy the demands of consumers at a high quality level. He’s interested in a number of regional and cross-continental cables interconnecting the SAT-3 and EASSy cables which link Africa to the outside world.

Here, I think Eric’s being a bit conservative. One of the great successes of African telecom has been the growth of wireless services, both for voice and data. We spend some time talking about interesting technologies for running data over 50km via terrestrial wireless and about new low-cost phone technologies like CorDect and CDMA 450. That said, Eric also points out that fiber has gotten much cheaper, and that there are a number of situations, like the Volta River Authority situation in Ghana where fiber exists and is unused.

The critical unanswered question in Eric’s proposal is “who’s going to pay for this?” While laying fiber is much cheaper than it used to be, the costs are still substantial and it’s unlikely that most African SMEs will be able to raise capital to lay fiber. Eric suggests a possible model in which the World Bank lends money to SMEs to purchase fiber, requiring companies to take their companies public and repay the loans in shares, which then return to a funding pool. It’s an interesting proposal, but one fraught with possible complications – does SBC or France Telecom get to lean on the World Bank for this sort of financing? Who determines how much money is neccesary to lay cable, and how big the loans should be? I’m looking forward to hearing Eric’s answers to these questions as he develops the idea further.

Eric Osiakwan visited the Berkman Center yesterday from Ghana, by way of Stanford University. He's an old friend from the Ghana ISP scene, one of the founders of GISPA (the Ghana ISP association) and currently is acting as executive secretary of AFRISPA (the African ISP Owners Association), the leading trade group for ISPs on the African continent.

Eric is a Reuters Digital Vision fellow and is focusing on questions of fiber and wireless internet and telecommunications access in Africa. Learning from the successes and failures of internet and telecom projects in Africa over the past decade, Eric is advocating for a model of infrastructure development in Africa that favors small business ISPs and NSPs over formerly state-owned telecom incumbents.

Some of Eric's key points: