Ken Comments - Framework structure proposal

Hi Steph, All

Here are my initial thoughts and comments on this. Many thanks for your
continued work holding and bringing all this together, Steph!

1- Vision
What is the vision behind this group.
My view is the following
It is quite obvious that mobile phone are in the field already, in the 
pocket of lots of people, and also accessible to lots of others who 
don't own one.
However, for now they are mostly considered and used as phone, and not 
as an ICT platform on which services could be deployed.
But the proof-of-concept has been already demonstrated with all the 
success stories we heard about about m-banking, agriculture services...
So the potential is clearly here, it has been demonstrated, but how can 
we move to the next stage where it will be as easy to develop and deploy 
new content or applications on mobile phones as it is e.g. today to do 
it on the Web.

Agreed. Of course, no two countries are the same and uses and opinions on
the usefulness of mobiles varies from country to country. Some people love
(or don't object to!) IVR services, and others hate them (me among them).
Some people text like crazy (for example, in the Philippines), but in other
countries (e.g. my experience in Uganda) traffic is relatively low. So we
need to be sure in our vision that we don't paint the world one colour	

2- Targets
Here it is important to summarize the discussions we had on the 
mailing-list on the fact that each developing countries have all the 
different segments of the society from the very healthy one
which have similar way of living and expectation than any westerners, 
till the rural poor or underprivileged.
That said, talking about social and economic development, it concerns 
more rural poor communities and under-privileged populations for which 
specific services might improve their lives, and my opinion
is that this should be the segment we target.

Whenever you set the target as the "socially and economically deprived"
there are always going to be issues of definition. Generally projects seek
to help people living in rural areas, since it's assumed the need is
generally greater there. Of course, this isn't always the case (it rarely
is, in fact). A good example is Mobile4Good, which helps the youth in the
slums of Nairobi, a major African capital city, get work. I think that,
while we need to know who we're aiming at, we shouldn't get too tied up in
the definition. If you're developing a health service over mobile, and it
benefits the richer and the poorer, I don't think that's a bad thing.
Universal services would be the best way forward. Of course, if you're
working on a specific need (i.e. car insurance, for example) this isn't
going to benefit many poor people. But if it's life insurance, or health
insurance, everyone could gain. We probably also want to think about how we
reach the target. For example, everything I do goes through grassroots NGOs
- I have never done a health project, or monitored an election. For me, it's
about empowering the local NGOs who DO know how to do that, and are best
placed to achieve it

3- Stakeholders
What should be the participants in this group, why they should be 
involved (what they would bring to the group) and why they would be 
interested to join (what they could take out of the group work)
NGOs
International Organization
Mobile Industry
Academics (from developing and developed regions)
Government Representatives
Regulators
Entrepreneurship specialist

The biggest stakeholders are the people themselves, but it's not going to be
easy to engage them, unless we start doing action research and getting
academics on the ground to put something together. I think you have most of
the traditional stakeholders covered here, Steph, but we just need to
strategise more about how we get to hear the voices of our "target". When I
began the work on Grameen's "AppLab" initiative last summer (in Uganda), I
spent a month on the ground trying to get a sense of what mattered to people
- listening, reading, eavesdropping, researching, digging, etc. This is the
only way I know, but I'm sure there are better approaches

3- Goals

a- Identify the current practices, potential and issues/challenges in 
deploying applications for social and economic development on mobile phones.
We may want to structure this part in different topics we mentionned in 
the teleconference:
*Technology*
	- existing ways to deploy content, domain of applicability, and
issues
	- network aspect
	
Here again we would need to identify the different ways of deploying 
content, and define a methodology to analyse each in an homogeneous way. 
but this could be refined in the next round of discussion.
	
*End-user*
what are the specific challenges and issues to make relevant, usable and 
useful applications for the targeted users
	- HCI: targeting people without past ict experience and without 
technological background have surely implications on the way design 
interface and interaction
	what are the existing issues and potential solutions.
	- illiteracy: what is the problem ? what are the goals here ?...
	- internationalization: same here
	- type of applications:we might want to explore what are the major 
domains or areas where services will be most useful to people (health, 
education,....) and the specific opportunities and constraints.

I think we need to have quite a long, hard discussion around this. As you
know, I have my own thoughts, but these are based on helping grassroots NGOs
provide services to their own "targets" (who are likely to be similar to the
ones we identify). I blogged about this again earlier this week:

http://www.blogspot.kiwanja.net/2008/07/social-mobile-long-tail-20.html

*Context*
	- education/capacity building: what kind of curiculum could
disseminate 
the knowledge in society. what re the different potential targeted 
candidates (ngos ? student ? in which  domain ?...)
   - tools/toolbox: what exists, and what should exist for who (for 
which profile)
	- regulation: what are regulatory context that could prevent
creation 
of new content and services, or at the opposite that could leverage and 
enable them.
	- capture of ict needs: how do you identify the needs a specific 
community would have?
	
	
b- Develop resources
	- information of mobile infrastructure and device characteristics
	- information about available guidelines/ best 
practices/literature/training content...
	- information about available software/toolkit/solutions	
	- other suggestion ?

I think the important thing here is to draw on the existing (and growing)
initiatives in this area, such as at Makarere and with EPROM, etc. They've
likely figured a lot of this out, so we want to avoid re-inventing the wheel
		
4- expected output
What is the epected output of this group in the 10-12 month timeframe ?
I would consider a full success if at the end we have:
- a handbook for those who would like to develop and deploy ict services 
on mobile phones to do select the right technologies
- a set of ressources to help in deploying services
- a roadmap for W3C and potentially other organizations to launch 
appropriate actions to tackle identified issues

There is also the issue of tools, which is often overlooked. There are
already people attempting to build mobile toolkit (such as Tactical Tech
with their http://wiki.mobiles.tacticaltech.org/index.php/). There are quite
a few guides out there already, and I'm sceptical as to how much value they
really create. Things like tools and platforms which actually allow people
to DO SOMETHING are much better, but are much more difficult to develop.
Saying that, just because it's not easy doesn't mean we shouldn't try it

Ken
www.kiwanja.net

Received on Monday, 14 July 2008 00:30:01 UTC