Social space for connecting hearts, rekindling memories

We have finally got this pet project off the ground: an online social space for people to share their memories from the 1947 partition between India & Pakistan. We have all heard horrific tales from those times: uprootment, terror, homelessness, sudden change in fortunes, & more. But as the decades have marched on, there also surface fond memories: the house you lived in ( or your parents or grand-parents lived in), the neighborhood cake shop where you spent an inordinate amount of time & pocket-money, the evenings spent strolling the streets girl-watching, those hot sizzling summers spent lazing with friends in the dark cool room & nights motorcycling to the street-side gol-gappe wala for several mouthfuls of that indescribable taste!!

The 1947 wiki is the place to go to, to share these & other stories. Think of this as your digital nukkad, a space to hang out, share your memories, write on behalf of family, & hopefully watch new connections take place as people from the other side of the border respond & reciprocate.

Tags: India, Pakistan, Social Software, 1947, digital commons, community

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Laptops <$100 or cellphones: which is it to be

I came across an interesting twist to the long-brewing <$100-laptop-for-developing- countries scheme. It appears that Microsoft has better ideas, or so they think: internet-enabled cellphones for kids in these countries to get access to all the resources on the net. (See Technology Review).

Granted that cellphones are a known commodity in most parts of the world, & are largely outnumbering landlines in developing countries, but I think it needs to be remembered that cellphones are loved because they let you TALK, not because of cool videos you can see, or music you can listen to, or even text messaging. Repeated research is showing that a very large percentage of cellphone usage is about speech.

Secondly, how in the world is a kid to manage to surf efficiently given the size of that screen. I loath having to read the occasional text message I receive, and would absolutely balk at reading large chunks of text on that teeny screen. The MS folks need to understand that it takes more than slots for keyboards to make use of cellphones for extended surfing.

The third issue is of power to recharge the gadget; it appears the under-$100 will be designed with a hand-crank to recharge, which is a good idea in developing & under-developed countries. I can speak for India, where frequent power outages are the norm ( Delhi is a prime example) in large cities groaning under the weight of rapid growth; the rural areas are worse, with power available for just a few hours every day.

And of course, all of this rests on having access to internet connectivity in the first place; the very logic of the exercise gets defeated if children in these countries are unable to get onto the web. So given the unreliable power scene, & relatively thin telephone connections per capita in the rural areas, it must be wireless connectivity: how feasible is that?

Very important too is the argument from Seymour Papert against the cellphone idea: a lot of the power of computers derives not from passive consumption of all that is on offer on the web, but on enabling the younger generation to be active producers through writing their own softwares/ applications. This is virtually impossible with a cellphone.

There are a myriad other issues that go against both of these options: physical conditions such as dust, heat, improper storage ( remember, poor households do not have special tables to neatly house these machines), & how these will affect longevity. And of course paramount are the social, economic & psychological factors: how good will be the translation for all the excellent resources out there; also poverty takes on a completely different color in such countries: it is well-known that all hands, young & old, must be put to work to seek refuge from hunger for that day; putting a kid into school, even a free, municipal-run facility, is a luxury that such subsistence kind of living simply does not allow. There is an opportunity cost to schooling; in addition, an inescapable script that runs among the poor is 'What good will education do anyway?'. I know that in my country, the poor would pooh-pooh the idea of studying & getting an education. That sort of dreaming is better suited to the middle classes ( who may not benefit as much from this scheme, as most likely they already have access to computers & the internet). So as happens with mid-day meal schemes in poor societies, where kids are sent to school only to get a decent meal, I suspect this computers-for-all scheme may meet with the same fate. Let the kid get one, the family will sell it off to buy more meaningful & useful things for the family, or even to buy liquor for the father! Sadly, this is the reality in poor countries, & one hopes that the folks sitting in the pristine campuses at MIT & Microsoft, & debating do-good ideas at Davos have toured the places that they hope to bring such change to. As always, here too it appears that the overwhelming logic is that if we can crack it technically / technologically, we have a winner. And how often, such a logic has met with failure!

On a related note, we met with clients of ours who are in the business of asset recovery for major companies in the US: they take charge of discarded computers from these users, shred the equipment of all that is recoverable, then reuse & reassemble these to ship off to developing countries. In fact, several NGOs & charities are into making these recycled systems available to countries in Africa & Asia. I wonder how this will play against the much-touted under-$100 laptop venture. Of course, with these recycled machines, the other issues remain as confounding: power availability, internet connections, & the socio-economic variables. But hardware to hardware, it seems the world's resources might be better spent resurrecting old hardware rather than creating it anew.