Negroponte seems to have briefly addressed some of the criticisms that we’ve been hearing about the $100 laptop recently from Microsoft executives and others: Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off
See also Slashdot.org for many many MANY comments.
They managed to sweep the issue under the chair at WSIS, but that doesn’t mean it went away: BBC NEWS | Technology | Unease over how the net is run.
This years report has been published:
World Economic Forum – Global Information Technology Report
There’s an incredible amount of movement over the years in the Network Readiness Index. It’s not entirely clear to me what of these changes are due to actual progress in the area, changes in the way the index is formulated, or both. Nevertheless, there is some very interesting information in this generally optimistic report that specifically highlights the transformative power of ICTs.
Also check out the interactive map that comes with it. Mac users will need to use a browser other than Safari to view it because the Flash compatibility check doesn’t catch the relevant info on Safari.
World Information Access Project – 2006 Briefing Booklet – See also the main web site here.
This report is based on existing data from a variety of sources, so don’t expect anything too earth shattering. I think some of the assumption might be stretching it a bit. For instance, finding #4 of the five that are mentioned concludes that “developing countries – especially countries in Latin America – are putting more cultural content online than they are pouring into books.” As far as I can tell, the internet part of this claim is based entirely on the number of web hosts in each country. Going from there to cultural content seems a bit of a leap to me.
It’s Sunday – time for a big post! A few days ago I posted a couple of things about Negroponte’s $100 laptop. One of the things that I mentioned was the common criticism, which extends to ICTs for development in general, that there are more pressing problems in developing countries than the lack of ICTs. This got me thinking about how we justify the ICT4D agenda and sent me back to the Millennium Declaration in a quest for answers. What follows is a fairly lengthy analysis of the Millennium Declaration, what it says about ICTs for development and how this relates to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). What it boils down to is that the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs do make it clear that ICTs should be leveraged in whatever way possible to facilitate development efforts. But, to get a complete picture of how they are to do this and what are the intended outcomes, we have to look beyond both the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs. Click below to read on…
A recent interview with Tim Berners-Lee: Isn’t it semantic? : Articles : Internet : BCS.
There are some interesting points there, but the real significant stuff is towards the end, about the “Semantic Web”. People familiar with Berners-Lee’s Book, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, will know that this has been his pet project for many years now. I think that for the development community it’s an especially important project. If things work out as planned, the development of the semantic web and web savvy ontologies will make it possible to tie together, by various levels of association, a wide range of electronic resources, no matter what the language or context. For example, this could increase the accessibility of indigenous knowledge. It could also increase researchers’ accessibility to resource from other fields, where a different terminology may be used to describe similar things. Lots of potential, lots of uses.
