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Transcript from the Boston debateOn September 12, 2007, the second Principal Voices round-table event of 2007 took place in Boston on Technology and Innovation. In front of an invited audience, the panelists discussed how information, knowledge and innovation were developing and radically transforming lives. An essay about the discussion can be read here, plus watch videos and read key quotes from the debate. Participants
Moderators: Michael Holmes (CNN) Adi Ignatius (TIME Magazine). For ease of navigation, the discussion is separated into the following parts:
Introduction by Jose Bravo, chief scientist, innovation & technology, for Shell, leading in to the discussion by asking how to break the barrier between innovation and implementation.
Jimmy Wales: So the current state of the Wikipedia project in the languages of the developed world is amazing. We're big in Europe and Japan, but I'm turning my attention these days to the languages of India and Africa, to see what's going on there right now. In several languages of India we're seeing ten percent monthly growth in the article growth of Wikipedia, presumably because India has an increasingly strong IT sector. Kannada is not nearly as widely spoken as other languages, but it is spoken in Bangalore which is the hi-tech center so its doing well in Wikipedia. Even with all of this, we have two languages in Africa: Swahili and Afrikaans, and those are the only two that are moderately successful so far. The next largest is Zulu, which has only 90 articles, which means only a couple of people have done a little bit of work. The way we've always viewed our work in the developing world is it's not about "here's something nice that some rich, white people have made for you." They have to build their own language Wikipedias; we can't do it for them. So it's about how do we build awareness, build capacity so that people there can share their knowledge and build resources that are valuable to them. Really it's about delivering the tools they need to build their own encyclopedia. It also follows from what Kristin said in her video, even if we had a fully formed encyclopedia in their language, they'd have no way of looking at it. Michael Holmes: Which brings us to Kristin Peterson of Inveneo. What she's trying to do is to take these tools, particularly in Africa, to bring telecommunication and innovation in technology to grassroots levels. We'll talk about the challenges that brings. Maybe you have a few words to say about that. Kristin Peterson: It's Inveneo's position that access to technology can truly change lives. We're a not-for-profit so we operate as a business but with a social mission to get the tools of technology out to the people in rural areas. Our own innovation is to take the technology of today and make it available and useful so organizations that provide micro-finance loans, healthcare, education, can operate better and more effectively in rural places. Many of the key challenges are access to power, so all of out systems are very low powered and can operate effectively on solar. Another challenge is the punishing environment we often face, so our systems address those challenges. Also there's the access to computers, so we've tried to incorporate simplicity in the designs of the systems, both in the hardware and software of what we supply. Finally and perhaps most importantly we focus on they human infrastructure. So we partner with local organizations that are professionals in IT and retrain them so they can take their skills in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) out to rural areas where it doesn't exist today. Adi Ignatius: Fabio is an agronomical engineer by training and founder and executive director of IDEAA that aims to bring electrical energy and community development to impoverished rural areas. He's won many international awards for entrepreneurship based on technology. Fabio Rosa: Thanks, it's great to be invited here today. All our projects' principal aims are to bring electricity and promote sustainable energy to impact income generation and local development. After years of study we designed models for energy access that was the first step. At this moment, 33 percent of the world's population don't have access to electricity. It's like living in the 19th century. Then we thought to promote peace we should include these isolated people in the modern way of life. Then we brought energy access in a sustainable way. Michael Holmes: Neil Gershenfeld probably has the most interesting CV of anyone I've ever met; Director of MIT's Center for Bits & Atoms. He's a real world thinker and we're going to hear a lot about Fab Labs. He's also done interesting things like develop a computerized cello for Yoyo Ma, and named one of the top 100 public intellectuals. Give us a sense of how you see the topic. Neil Gershenfeld: We're winning the digital revolution, providing computation and communication, but we're reaching a point where we can begin to see success and the next digital revolution is in fabrication. Exactly like the transition from analogue to digital computing, today manufacturing is fundamentally analogue, but work by pioneers are doing digital molecular programming, doing all the things you think of as digital, but in the real world. In turn that means anybody can make anything once you have personal fabrication and in turn that means you have technology that can be bottom-up not top-down.
A few examples from these inner city Fab Labs we set up in Boston and expanded all around the world. Developed in these labs is a thin client computer, made for about $10 and uses about 10 milliamps, with the TV as the display and then a network protocol. So you can produce and develop computers locally, cheaper and using lower power but they can be different according to the skills and the economic activity. I was teaching my daughter how to use a computer controlled laser, shown earlier on in the film. She thought the laser was cool, but the project was dumb. So she invented a 3D construction kit out of recycled cardboard. But the interesting thing is that a student doing a PhD thesis looked at my daughter shapes and decided they were more interesting and ended up doing a thesis on the work of an 8-year old girl. The only problem is it breaks everybody's organizational boundaries. It just doesn't fit the divisions between aid, research, education and outreach. They really have to reinvent them in this world. Ultimately the Fab Labs are trying the obsolete themselves technically. But we're building a non-profit Fab Foundation and a for-profit Fab Fund an accredited Fab Academy for the classes building the social, education and business systems that anyone can make anywhere. On the last point, the biggest surprise for me was we had more students going to school in the Fab Labs than teachers teaching in them and so there is a movement to create a whole graduate degree program. So I thought this is going too far. But really the assumptions of scarcity that go into how we've built advanced education and research make less and less sense. MIT isn't completely obsolete, there are still some things that it or Harvard can do, but the boundary is moving very, very quickly and that's one of the most surprising things. Michael Holmes: How tough has it been to translate what you're doing into everyday uses that will benefit all of us in terms of innovation? Neil Gershenfeld: The story, you couldn't even think of it. The whole innovation is bottom-up and it's eye-opening. A microcosm is in India. Anil Gupta is the guru of grassroots inventors, and we're just starting to set up these Fab Labs and every time somebody wanted another one. He had a little workshop with grassroots inventors and Indian academics and we were talking about projects with a possible Fab Lab. One of the inventors had a problem with a grain tiller and asked if the lab could help. I told him the right thing to do would be to grow a surface ceramic oxide. He just looked at me blankly for a moment and I thought, "Uh-oh, I've gone too far." And he said, "Well of course you grow a surface ceramic oxide, I was hoping you could tell me something I didn't know. " Just out of sight of conventional academia and industry all around the world is this dense web of inventors. All around the world, we're not bringing invention; invention is already all around the world. The one thing they miss is the means for invention. We're just bringing the tools. They understand the problems, but if you think about it, nobody is really on the job for providing the means for invention. Adi Ignatius: Mass collaboration is something that works, it's been proven and something that's here to stay, but it's also something that has some flaws. Where do you go forward and how to do you minimize the flaws?
But we don't worry about this too much, which is one of the reasons why we can do this not Encyclopedia Britannica, who are uptight about these things being completely right before it goes out of the door, whereas we're from the Internet and used to the process of constant improvement, so while we don't like mistakes we don't get too worried about it and kill the goose that laid the golden egg. At the same time we are looking at features. In testing right now is something that can put articles in a particular state and what's shown to the general public is something that has already been looked at by someone who is part of our community - low threshold, someone who has had an account for four days - so we basically know they've been ok for a few days without vandalizing. So we think that'll cut down on the vandalism seen by the general public, but it will probably only be applied to high risk articles. Over time we're slowing thinking about how to address these problems without inhibiting participation. Often when people see a problem they start locking things down and we've gone in the opposite direction. We've had to struggle with the media because there's a story arc that people want to tell that is "when Wikipedia was young it could be open but over time they've had to start locking things down." But in fact the progression has been us introducing features so we can stop locking things down. In the past, with persistent vandalism of an article we would have had to lock it down from being edited for a month. Now we can put it in a semi-protective state where users have to be logged on and registered. It's subtle and we're very slow and conservative in our own way. Michael Holmes: I read that someone at the U.S. State department put a pro-administration spin on an article. How to you see Wikipedia then as a resource free of spin. Jimmy Wales: There's been a fun news cycle recently. You can click on an article and see who has edited it either through their user name or if they didn't leave one, their IP address. A guy called Virgil made something called a Wikiscanner and matched all that data to maps of organizations and IP addresses and made it really easy to see what the CIA has been up to on Wikipedia, or the State department. Some of the fun ones were The New York Times and Fox News. Clearly it's not The New York Times doing in and vandalizing an entry on George Bush, it was just some random person goofing around at work when they shouldn't have been. The kind of transparency means people can see who has done what. We looked into this and one time in the past we had to block the U.S. House of Representatives for vandalism that was coming out of there; really stupid stuff probably just done by an intern. These comments are coming in with the rest of the general public's. They're coming in as peers and don't have any particular influence and have to defend their changes just like everybody else. We keep the history of everything, so that's pretty remarkable. Adi Ignatius: Kristin, the work you're doing is inspiring, difficult and necessary, why do you think now we are caring more and doing more?
Michael Holmes: What have you seen in changes to those people's lives on the ground, and is there any negative as we go forward in the peer-to-peer technology. Kristin Peterson: Knowledge through technology can change lives through ways we take for granted today. Most of the places we work don't have access to running water or the things we see everyday. So simple capabilities can make a huge change. For example if a farmer can learn where to sell his crops and it's say five miles away, he can make a decision and make some extra money that could be only a couple of dollars, but could be enough to send his child to school. We worked with an organization in Uganda with banana farmers that was researching how to better grow their bananas and using telephones to coordinate where the best places were to sell their crop. Another big change in the projects we're doing is in schools. Many of the schools we work with don't have books, so having access to a computer with access to content locally and the Internet really opens up the world to them. It changes their perspective and also the teachers' ability to provide better training, because the teachers don't have access to materials for education. They can start working with the students to better educate them through the availability of the information that they can access. There are many simple ways that technology can change lives. You asked: "Is there a danger to giving access to information, access to technology?" We do get asked that question and I do find it very surprising. Who would deny anyone here access to a telephone? Yes, access to technology can change people's lives, but people should have a choice and be able to make that decision themselves. Just like they should be able to develop their own ability to share information and their own solutions. Whether they choose to or not is another question. Neil Gershenfeld: I'd like to second that. As these labs started to spread I started to wonder is this a good or bad thing? To be fair every piece of technology throughout history has been used for good and bad stuff. Good people and bad people do good and bad things; it's not just the technology. So as the labs spread I wondered, "Is this the appropriate thing to do?" And just the overwhelming response I got was that the most cultural imperialist, elitist thing to do would be to say: "There, there dears, you go through the whole industrial revolution, then once you've done that you can come and talk to us." Everyone we deal with wants to skip over all those stages, and the worst possible thing to do is think that it's up to us to decide what's the most appropriate technology there. Adi Ignatius: Fabio what is your experience in how to bring energy to difficult places.
We are talking about a very big market when it comes to getting access to electricity and a big opportunity. From the other side, sometimes I return to these communities and I see people have built in bathrooms, and I wondered what the relationship was between energy and bathrooms? A local woman told me: "If I have energy I can stay here, if we don't we have to go the city. But having electricity here means we can improve our way of life." We can adapt technology to this kind of market and this is our challenge, using our best knowledge and skills to include more people and promote their social inclusion. Michael Holmes: Which brings me to Jimmy, do you think peer-to-peer will be a new way of doing business and what's the impact on traditional corporations Jimmy Wales: That's a big question. One of the big things happening inside corporations already with communication technology is that is cuts out the hierarchy or you can get rid of lots of it. One example is BestBuy that set up an internal wiki that all employees can use. Car stereo geeks can now talk to each other across the enterprise, and share innovative ideas directly. That's just one simple anecdote but that the general concept: people in lots of different places can have a much more organic form of communication and collaboration. It has impact for farmers who want to know where the best place is to sell their crops. It may negate the need for certain types of firms that control access to this kind of information. But I think it's really hard to even really fathom the scale of change that direct peer-to-peer communication can have on all kinds of things. Neil Gershenfeld: I was at an unusual party with some kids and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos and we all ended up playing with a kids' construction kit. There was this amazing moment when we all looked at it and thought "Mmm, isn't that nice the kids can do this", then thought, "Hang on there's an opportunity here," and that led to "We're doomed." If an 8-year old girl with a few thousand dollars can do this on that kind of scale, their whole business model is challenged. That led to me paring billionaire venture capitalist types with grass roots inventors to develop these businesses and everyone ended up miserable. The inventors felt they weren't getting the coaching they needed, the successful business leaders felt the inventors weren't following their instructions enough. That's when I realized micro venture capital is not the same as micro-finance. Micro-finance is fan-out and based in social relationships, but much more to do with banking asset valuation. Speculative, risk-based investing, with fan-out, so you go global by acting locally, really doesn't quite exist as far as I can tell and needs as much invention as the business models. There are a few pioneers, but this is a really important frontier. Michael Holmes: What innovation do you see having the most impact in the next few years? Neil Gershenfeld: If you can make anything, there's a flow from just technical empowerment, the joy of "I can do this." From informal, peer-to-peer technical training and local problem solving, to small scale hi-tech business creation and distributing an invention; all of these stages are important and the point is not to single any one out in isolation, the valued comes from having all of them in the same place at the same time. Michael Holmes: Kristin, when you talk about the technology that is going to help you the most, is it very basic technology? What do you need to do your job?
We've taken a lot of the technologies that have ridden the cost curves and been proven today, but the innovation that needs to happen is to make all these technologies bullet-proof and much simpler to install and support. So you can deliver it and end-users with very little knowledge can maintain and operate these systems themselves. We still have a long way to go with this. Michael Holmes: Are governments supportive or do they get in the way? Fabio Rosa: This is a very central question. I think today that governments are not able to solve problems alone. The field where the social entrepreneurs work, mainly in the southern hemisphere, is just to solve the problems that the governments never solved. But the governments are the power. When I started it was very important to invite the government to be a partner as a minimum. But survival strategies need to think and develop a road map where the government is not always involved. From my experience when I started doing cheap models of rural electrification in Brazil I was alone - that was in 1983. It took 20 years from then to when President Lula announced a national public electrification scheme. Today when I go to meet people in this process I don't meet anyone who has been involved as long as I have been, so then the government was very important to me. Michael Holmes: Do governments feel threatened by what you're all doing? Neil Gershenfeld: I would clarify that Governments aren't monolithic entities. Domestically there are advocates in ever single agency in the U.S. that want to work with the Fab Lab networks. And for just about all of them, as it's constituted it's illegal for all of them; in each case it violates something. So there are opponents but also very strong advocates. The challenge is to package what we're doing in a form that they can get their arms around. For example I'm creating a national lab system that fits with what governments know what to do. In South Africa they have the means, but such development challenges. They did a lateral slice through the whole government and they have these tech incubators, schools and energy, and all these programs weren't working well, so they're doing a whole network of these labs as an experiment in service delivery, for invention. Fabio Rosa: I think it was very important to work in the field of law and the rules of congress because the government can change. If we have good laws they will provide guarantees to work in the process. Kristin Peterson: We're a relatively new organization, we've only been doing projects since last year, but we've found that the governments that we work with most closely, in Uganda and Rwanda, for example, are fully embracing the idea of access to ICTs. They're creating very progressive policies around ICTs and wifi. I believe in Uganda they've just taken off all tariffs for computers and many peripherals. They have a real vision of how technology can improve their country's economic standing, and making real progress in building that into policy. It's really opened doors for us and been very supportive. We just hosted the vice president of Uganda and his ICT minister, and they were extremely excited about how we can work with them to better accelerate technology.
Kristin Peterson: I think it's really exciting. The two most exciting aspects are the awareness it has generated about the need and the opportunity for access to technology to help create an equalizer in the developing world. There's also a lot of innovation around the technology, so we're watching to see where it goes. There are huge opportunities for technology in developing nations and our approach is create solutions for organizations, taking existing technologies and may perhaps one day when their technology is out we can support their project. Jimmy Wales: I just ask because I'm a skeptic. I agree with both points you made, I question the top-down nature in the way they want to acquire and distribute the technology. It just seem problematic to me. Also in the places I've toured in an educational context, visiting Delhi and talking to for-profit schools there and I asked them about it, and they were like, "well, it's useless." The quality of the education there looked very good, if not a lot of fun. Tuition is about $2.50 a month. A $100 laptop is still extraordinarily expensive in this context where they have three computers in the school for 600 kids. In that particular context a $100 laptop is a mis-allocation of resources. To me I think we have some really good answers to avoiding the mis-allocation of resources. One is bottom-up rather than top-down. It's really easy to do a mega-project and hand out a $100 per child in laptops when that's not at all what they really need. If it's coming from the grassroots and people are saying this is what we need and this is what we need to achieve, that is always a lot better. I also don't care for the interface but that's just my preference. It's like a toy. My daughter was very excited about it, but afterwards said: "That toy computer was really cool." By using a real computer, she learns real skills she'll have for the rest of her life.
Jimmy Wales: Absolutely, and I think one of the things Kristin talked about is it's role in really enhancing and popularizing the idea. People actually understand and believe that putting technology in the hands of the worlds poorest people is actually worth doing and within reach. That's enormous. Even if the device and approach to the project turns out to be wrong, they've still launched us on this idea, and various other organizations might actually deliver the technology they end up using, but it's just enormous. Neil Gershenfeld: It's an important project that had to happen, but I think what's interesting is to think what comes after the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. I'm biased but I strongly believe in a thin client; it's not the whole computer, but for $10 it assumes a network and for a few more dollars it uses a server. That's how I compute, I use the network and configure a server wherever they are. So the notion of one person equals one computer and one box, only makes sense if you don't have connectivity. Also there's the notion that you don't have to develop them through AMD or Flextronics and send them out, but there's a different model where you can locally develop and produce them, they don't have to be all the same, and the skills and the economic can be local, so you can have an ecology of computing. I think OLPC needed to happen to bring us to this point, but there's a chance to look at the next stage in computing, where it's not this monolithic thing you settle in front of in a room, but everything comes from the bottom up. Kristin Peterson: That would work for us great. It's our goal to continuously add technology and additional value, and the thought of a thin client solution can work in several situations in rural areas. There are many technologies that need to be brought together for different situations, what we do is work on the ground to understand what the organizations need, and how to bring them to meet their needs. You asked about participation at the local level. We're partnering with an organization in Uganda called Action Aid and interviewing villagers about their needs. They had a village radio and that was their only access to information, but they knew about telephony and computers and knew what they wanted to do with them. Some didn't want them: one village said he'd rather have a goat than a computer, but another said they really wanted email. And we were shocked. She said she wanted it because she wanted to apply for a grant for a farm cooperative. That was the first project where we got some information from the ground directly rather than organizations. There shouldn't be just one monolithic solution. Audience member: Are you thinking of developing services that go with these computers? Kristin Peterson: We partner with relief organizations and micro-finance organizations and newer clients I think we'll have at the end of the year are community co-operatives. We work with them to understand what they need to help their community of interest. They're the ones on the frontline making the service useful for users. Could better microfinance opportunities make a difference online? Yes. When we start to connect these communities the thing that is most important to the individuals and even the organizations is understanding what's going on locally, so finding out what's happening in the local news, they want to find out where the market is. We believe that once communities get access to the tools they're going to start building their own solutions and social networks for their issues and their concerns.
Jimmy Wales: We have a little joke in our community that whenever we see an error about Wikipedia in a major publication we say, "We looked all over and couldn't find the edit link to correct it." There's still the idea in the main media that the article is done and it's published. There was an article in The New York Times when they were puzzling about what to do in their archives when there had been an error. It's an interesting question. For many people in the wiki world or blogging world it's an old issue, so interesting that The New York Times is just wondering what to do. Adi Ignatius: No mainstream media is just offline anymore, so for us (TIME Magazine) an error would be corrected in its online version. We have the same ability as you do. Jimmy Wales: You have the same ability but you don't have the resources in a social way to deal with that, just as we don't have the resources to always prevent vandalism like"doo-doo head" comments. As we move forwards, some of the things we're going to see in the media are some types of hybrid solutions emerging. In traditional media it will become more participatory in lots of interesting ways. I actually think that the most doomed people in journalism are sports columnists, simply because unlike most reporting sporting events are held at a time and place where it's very easy for the public to take part and passionate fans are very interested. Whereas reporting from war-zones is still very much the province of professional journalists with a whole infrastructure behind them. Adi Ignatius: I think we coexist, maybe not happily necessarily. You had a wiki model and decided you needed some adult supervision, or some traditional supervision, right? The blogs keep us on our toes and contribute and can't really exist without institutions like us, they need to hate us and say how stupid we are, but they also need the raw data we get from places like Baghdad and comment on whether or not we're doing the right thing. Jimmy Wales: When you say that the bloggers hold your feet to the fire sometimes, I think most journalists would say this is a really cool era in journalism. Everybody is really pushed to a new standard of quality, you can't wing it otherwise you're going to get burned really quickly. |
Adi Ignatius: Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia which I hope you all contribute to or at least use as a resource. He's also set up the Wikimedia Foundation and the for-profit Wikia Inc, which among other things is developing a human-powered search engine that I'm sure we'd all like to know more about. 
Neil Gershenfeld: We've had a sea-change in aid from billion-dollar mega-projects to grass-roots entrepreneurs, but when you think about energy, communication or computing the means themselves are developed by heroes and institutions and sent out to the world. Increasingly the solutions can come from the bottom up.
Jimmy Wales: One of the things that has happened as we've grown is that the community has got more and more insistent on the need for sources. Usually if you remove something it leaves a note saying there is no source for this and it would stay gone. In terms of vandalism, usually the median time to revert to the page pre-vandalism is five minutes. Sometimes things slip through the cracks, so the next level of checking could be something like a day. Or sometimes it might last for two weeks if it's not a page that is viewed very often by many people, but usually its not more than a couple of days. 
Kristin Peterson: I think part of the reason is technology, things like Wikipedia and social interaction media sites. The more that we become connected the more we understand that we can't operate in our own bubble and that we need to understand what's happening. And the more we understand the more it matters to us and drives people to get involved. So I think technology is driving this change. 
Fabio Rosa: I'd like to share some impacts from two projects. When we brought electricity to rural poor places, 90 percent of people there bought modern things like television and cell phones. The question is what is the impact of our project. People may be excluded, but they have good knowledge of what is happening in the modern world and when they get this kind of opportunity they feel they are included and this is a very important impact. 
Kristin Peterson: We takes many technologies that are very low cost and low power and try and create a better solution to a make a system that is rugged and can be sustainable and affordable. 
Jimmy Wales: I have a question for Kristin. What do you think of the one laptop per child scheme?
Audience member: Didn't the project come from the bottom up in some ways? Those three computers in the school you visited might have cost them $1,000 each, wouldn't it have been better to be $100 each.? And from the bottom up can you work with AMD to make a cheaper chip and other innovations? Doesn't a $100 computer per school rather than per child make more sense?
Another audience member made a comment about the public's trust in the media and asked the panel to comment on the issue. 
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