The research for cheap computing solutions for providing computing services for children from poor families or communities led to the development of the XO laptop from MIT. Similarly, Intel had also run their own research with the same goal. Though, recently both of them lost a bid for providing education computing services to Andhra Pradesh, India to NComputing's solution using virtualization (where each student only has peripherals like a monitor or screen, and a mouse and keyboard, and all computing is done on a central computer. This solution proved cheaper than both XO and Intel, costing $70 per student), nothing can undermine the need for research in areas such as this. Poor countries have less money to spend, and thus the cheaper the technology, the more those societies can reap it's benefits.
Another research project will take us back to the issue of accessibility. As it turned out, two separate researches done in two different continents produced similar results - one in USA and another in Italy. Both developed a system to help navigate people with blindness around an area using RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification). In the case of the research in Italy, they installed RFID transponders into pavements and they each hold an ID. These get activated by chips installed on the tip of the canes and this results in the ID being sent to a smart phone which uses the ID to search a database of locations to retrieve information about the current location and announce it to the person using the cane. This way people with blindness can know where they are, or if they are at a crossing, etc.
A story closer to home is of the work of Tapan Parikh, who helped the fishermen and MFI's (Micro Finance Institute) achieve efficiency in a village in Kerala, India. Without really doing something innovative in terms of creating technology, he thought of a way to harness the computing power of modern cell phones to bring about managerial improvements for self help groups (little groups formed by those taking the loans from MFI with a common goal to achieve).
'Sustainable development' is a term well known, practically, everywhere today. It is a very important fact that development cannot be considered without thinking about whether it is sustainable or not by the community it is being sought out for, and in that scenario, if technology is to be used for the benefit of third world countries, it has to be affordable. This phenomenon has been observed here with mobile phones whose market is now full of different brands of a wide range of prices. So, projects like Tapan's is now easily attainable and sustainable for its target group. Phones with the advent of GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) and EDGE (Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution) that allow them to access the internet can do a lot to reduce a digital divide. Another aspect in computing is software, which is also getting help achieving sustainability from the open source software development community. Linux has been from a long time ago, been the favorite operating system (OS) of choice in many research circles/academia. As mentioned before the XO Laptop for children in poor areas also used Linux as its platform in helping keep the price of the product low. Considering that the XO and Tapan Parikh's work are quite recent happenings, research along these lines started long before that, at the beginning of the 21st century, a research with the intention to help the poor farmers in India by providing computational power in the form of a simple computer running on a Linux OS. That simple computer was also small, as the size of a PDA, and was aptly named Simputer. Though developments in other ares even half a decade later brought to question the success of the Simputer, it was a deserving research area - reducing the digital divide. The license to develop Simputers were given out to two computers who still continue to manufacturer devices based on the Simputer specifications (search online for the Amida Simputer).
There are also organizations out there who continue to reinforce the use of ICT for social change, for social empowerment. These organizations do their part by showing their appreciation for those who directly contribute towards bringing about social empowerment and change.
A lot of the readers probably heard of the Stockholm Syndrome, and now its time to hear about the Stockholm Challenge. This is a contest that has been taking place since 1994. Its current organizer is The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH for short), which also happens to be a mildly popular destination for students from Bangladesh to go for higher studies. The challenge is meant to promote and appreciate projects in ICT that help sectors in society which might go overlooked normally, to “counteract social and economic disadvantage”. The award is given in six categories:
1.Public Administration, 2. Education, 3. Economic Development,
4. Culture, 5. Health, 6. Environment, and 7. Global Knowledge Partnership (Included from 2008's competition).
The Stockholm Challenge is now a biannual event, and the winners of this challenge receive a trophy and cash prize, and has some big Swedish companies as sponsors – Ericsson and Sida, and the City of Stockholm. Though the competition for the current year is over, our students and researchers of ICT might want to start thinking on whether they are up to this challenge for 2009! Lets hope so.
There is also an annual conference on ICTD, with even biddings taking place to host them. Well known and respected universities like Berkley take part in those bids and host these conferences. 2009's conference is destined to take place in the Qatar campus of another well reputed university of the United States of America - Carnegie Mellon, with none other than Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates as the keynote speaker. At each of these conferences, many research papers are presented, workshops are held, and panels of researchers are poised to hold discussions on important, novel or unresolved issues on the use of ICT for development. This is also an event that the universities of a country like Bangladesh should be very aware of, and they should organize their students to think about and participate in these kind of events. We are operating in a country where there is a spectrum of economic divide, where the right kind of education is not accessible to most, and bad bureaucracy steals the life of most good intentions. ICT might have a way out from a lot of those used in the right context, or not, and that is the matter of research. The call for papers for the 2009 ICTD conference is open, and the details of this is laid out nicely on their website (Available in the references section below).
