Inside UP : Digital Divide

iCafés in China

jamesu — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:01:08 GMT

I spent the last week in China learning more about Internet Cafés (or iCafés) , which are becoming a key area of focus for the Unlimited Potential Group. This is part of our “shared access”strategy, where we are developing solutions for computers that are shared by a large number of people throughout the course of a day.

In emerging market countries, iCafés are a big deal. According to a recent report published by Euromonitor, 300 million people in emerging markets will be regularly using iCafés by 2010. That’s 5% of the world’s total population. In India and China, iCafés account for up to 40% of all Internet traffic.

And compared to the rest of the world, iCafés in China are huge, averaging over 100 PCs per facility. Some iCafés in Beijing can have as many as 350 PCs and are tricked out with fancy leather chairs and cordoned off “VIP zones” with large monitors and extra network bandwidth.

So I was pretty excited when I wandered into my first Chinese Internet café last Tuesday, located on the first floor of an office building right next to an electronics mall. It was a dark, low-ceilinged room with row after row of young men hunched over in front of flat panel monitors.

And what were they all doing there?

Playing World of Warcraft. Shooting at things. Winning at Mahjong. Some were watching movies. A few were surfing the web. But most were playing games. With great intensity. Many of the gamers were there with groups of friends and were playing together.

There is an interesting ecosystem that has built up over the last few years to support them. iCafé PCs in China have sophisticated game launcher software with up to 500 titles and are supported by a web service infrastructure that includes a Windows Update-like service to ensure that the games have the latest patches and bug fixes. Usage is closely monitored by the government, and your ID card is recorded before you can begin an iCafé session.

100 million people in China use iCafés on a regular basis. So this raises an interesting question for us: why on earth is the Unlimited Potential Group interested in this space, and how could any of our work here help us advance in our mission for enabling social and economic opportunity for people underserved by technology? Do we create a better gaming experience for the kids who hang out in Internet cafes? Build some better World of Warcraft add-on module tracking software?

In other words, by focusing on iCafés, are we really being true to our mission?

At first glance, the answer is obviously no. We are not going into the social and economic opportunity gaming business. But PCs are amazing tools that can be used for a lot more than just watching movies or gunning down imaginary dragons. They can be used for things like skills training and education. And that is where our strategy becomes interesting.

The government in China is really worried about unemployment right now. As my Microsoft colleague in China Nigel Burton likes to point out, the largest migration in the history of the world has occurred in China over the last 20 years, where 400 million people have moved from the countryside into cities (mostly in the eastern part of the country) to work primarily in manufacturing and construction. And as the global recession continues to prolong, more and more Chinese workers in manufacturing are losing their jobs.

So the government in China sees iCafés as a potential asset to help assist in the retraining of their workforce and are turning to companies like Microsoft for software and training programs to help with this effort. We have an iCafé eLearning pilot underway in one province in China right now, and are looking at ways to expand it to support more people.

But there are challenges we face in helping turn iCafés into a productive tool for society. Culturally, they are not viewed as friendly places where, for example, parents would want their daughters to go to learn how to use spreadsheets or other business software. We also need to create incentives for iCafé owners to support this training scenario. But our early experience from the pilot in China and from pilots in other parts of the world indicates that this idea of using iCafés as a workforce development tool has merit, and we are looking forward seeing how we can expand this idea more broadly.

“Phone First” in Boston

jamesu — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:41:58 GMT

Last month I had the opportunity to attend NextLab 2008: Designing Mobile Technologies for the Next Billion Users. It was a one-day conference at the MIT Media Lab involving projects from an interdisciplinary class there focused on how to apply cell phone technology to help create social and economic opportunity for poor people throughout the world. In UPG, we call these “phone first” applications, and it is an area of keen interest to us. I was invited by Sandy Pentland, one of the faculty advisors of this class; he also works with the Next Billion Network at MIT.

There were seven projects showcased at the conference, ranging from supply chain distribution to healthcare to the seemingly-ubiquitous “use a phone to help a farmer get crop prices” scenario. All of these projects featured a combination of the creativity and energy of students paired with the real-world requirements of an NGO. The projects were conceived and designed in the fall and are going into pilot in the spring. You can learn more about the class here.

My favorite project is the “Boston Baby Blog”, an application where health care workers use an SMS based notification network to share baby care information with low income families who don’t necessarily surf websites on PCs but who definitely use text messaging. It’s the sort of application we talk about deploying in places like Africa, except it is being deployed right here in the US! Rashni Melgiri, a second year student at Sloan, explains the project:

Another project called MoCa involves the use of cell phones as a diagnostic tool to extend the reach of doctors and nurses well beyond a single medical clinic. Here is Clark Freifeld explaining how it works:

As part of the class, each team of students had to create a video explaining their project. I’ve embedded a link to each project along with a brief description of each as well. Most of these are just now entering field trials, and it is too early to determine the long term impact they will have. But if you are interested in ICT4D, and in particular the use of cells phones in this field, then you will be hard pressed to find a better collection of scenarios that demonstrate the promise that phone-based applications can have as a tool for advancing social and economic opportunity.

M-Commerce
This project involves an application that enables a small store or reseller in a village in India to use a cell-phone to reorder commonly stocked goods from a wholesaler or distributor. It consists of a little database on the phone and an SMS fulfillment system.

Final Video from Kady Buchanan on Vimeo.

MoCA
”Mobile Care” is an application that enables field medical workers to record symptoms on a phone using forms, voice annotation, and photos, and then submit them to a health clinic for a nurse or physician to review. It is similar to a project UPG piloted with midwives in Uganda.

Final Video from Elliot Higger on Vimeo.

Fighting Farmers
This is an agricultural extension application being tested in Zacatecas, Mexico. It enables farmers to upload crop pricing data in order to access a database of historical and local pricing information and trends.

Final Video from Paul Moore on Vimeo.

NextMap
This is an application that lets people use an SMS message to report a locally occurring incident, and the report is then uploaded to a server where it mapped. Key scenarios for this include disaster response (e.g., “the people upriver are reporting flooding!”) or the tracking of environmental incidents. This project is similar to Project Butterfly from the students in Indonesia who won the Image Cup UP award last summer. And parts of NextMap run on Windows Mobile!

Disaster Management and Innovgreen Overview from Disaster Management on Vimeo.

Fellows Forum
This is a web and SMS-based social network for college students who have received grants from the Telmex foundation. Almost all of these students are poor and from developing countries, and the application gives them a way to connect with each other.

Final Video from Julianne Palazzo on Vimeo.

Multi-Level Marketing
This is a microfinance application in Ecuador that uses SMS as a networking and customer acquisition tool in a loan application process.

Get New Money Demo Video from Josh Kirchmer on Vimeo.

The Boston Baby Blog
My favorite application at the show involved a solution targeting a problem right here in Boston Mass. The Boston Baby blog is an SMS texting service that enables the city to communicate information around important parenting and healthcare milestones to low income parents of newborn children. They observed that many low income parents in Boston didn’t have computers or visit websites, but they all seemed to have cell phones and use text messaging. It’s a great example of a phone first scenario right here in our country.

Baby Blog Final from Javier Smith on Vimeo.

The Delightful People from Aga Khan

jamesu — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:07:20 GMT

I had the opportunity to participate in a signing ceremony today between Microsoft and the Aga Khan Development Network, a group of agencies administering a broad set of programs in education, health, and social development. Shown here is a photo of Iqbal Noor Ali from Aga Khan along with my UPG colleague Michael Rawding.

The agreement between our two organizations involves a collaboration across a broad set of activities including education, youth empowerment, NGO/Civil Society capacity building, rural access, microfinance, and health. A key theme across all of these programs will be the appropriate and sustainable application of technology (see my previous post.) They are strong believers in achieving generational impact with their programs and understand the importance of local training, support and infrastructure.

In some areas like rural access, our collaboration has already begun.

I have to tell you, in a week where there was a great deal of tech industry rhetoric around the questionable motives of corporations participating in this space, to be in the presence of the people from Aga Khan was a refreshing change of pace. The dignity and thoughtfulness they used to describe their values and mission will stay with me for a long time. It was a personal reminder of why we do this work and the type of societal impact we can achieve. I am looking forward to working on these projects with them.

How to Build Solutions for MOP and BOP

jamesu — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:53:00 GMT

Channel 9 is running an interview with with Tara Prakriya, a solutions architect here in the Unlimited Potential Group, as their featured video right now. Tara focuses on designing education solutions for poor schools and has some interesting ideas on the challenges we face in adapting a Windows-based solution for areas that lack basic things like electricity or reliable Internet access. Check it out...

Recent Recap (Rural)

jamesu — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:32:25 GMT

I was out of the office over the last 5 weeks, and during that time we had a lot going on in the Unlimited Potential Group, especially around some of our efforts involving rural computing.

For starters, we have posted a video and have engaged in a public discussion around Digital Green, an agriculture extension project in India that is being managed by the Microsoft Research Emerging Markets team there. The idea behind the project is to use "low tech" digital videos and TVs to help train small and marginal farmers on how to improve the way they farm. The project also uses elements of a participatory social network to get over many of the trust and cultural issues that can plague these type of training and aid programs. I was able to meet our team working on the project during some executive reviews here in April, and it is pretty cool to see the type of impact they are starting to have. This is a great example of creative capitalism. You can see a short video of their work here.

Secondly, Microsoft held the Imagine Cup finals in Paris two weeks ago and announced that the team from Indonesia won the Rural Innovation Award. Among other things, the winning team gets the opportunity now to work as interns in the lab doing Digital Green! Their winning project, called Butterfly, is an environmental reporting system that streamlines how citizens can report environmental issues to government agencies and then track how public officials respond. I love this project for multiple reasons: it deals with environmental sustainability, it is a "phone first" application that combines SMS with a web based portal along with BI and social networking, and it was designed by college kids who are applying their passion for technology to solve a critical social issue.

Finally, as I mentioned last month, we had a team of people from Unlimited Potential participate in a public outreach project in Western China with the goal of raising awareness around digital divide issues that affect people living in rural areas in that part of the world. The team donated technology to schools, met with local officials, and participated in a week-long "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert. Well, I am happy to report that everyone survived the race and made it home safe and sound. Their trip was covered by Chinese national television, ABC News, and the Seattle local Fox affiliate.

So it was a busy month while I was gone, and it was nice to see these hands-on projects getting the level of attention they deserve.

Western China Project

jamesu — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:47:16 GMT

A group of people from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team are heading out to Western China next week to raise awareness on a firsthand basis around issues involving the digital divide for rural communities in emerging market countries. You can learn more about the project on the UP home page. The team will be evangelizing existing UP programs targeting rural access like Telecenters and Infowagons. They will even be participating in a "Gobi March" endurance race across the desert.

From my perspective this is an interesting project because it involves direct interaction between people from Microsoft's corporate headquarters with people living in the types of rural villages that our programs and technology efforts are trying to serve. One of the goals of this blog and the UP web site is to "Tell the Story" around what Microsoft and other groups are doing in this space. Too often we wind up writing about announcements Microsoft execs (myself included) make at various conferences around the world. Now don't get me wrong, these conferences are important because they are often used by government and NGO leaders to exchange ideas around best practices and new programs they can use.

But there is something refreshing about actually "getting out there" and reporting on the kind of impact we can make. The UP team plans to do a lot more of this web based reporting over the next year. So I wish the team well and can't wait to see how this project turns out.

Look! Windows on the OLPC XO!

jamesu — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:00:03 GMT

Today Microsoft and the OLPC are announcing support for Windows on the OLPC XO computer. The two organizations will work together on several pilot programs in emerging market countries starting next month, and the offering will RTM in August or September. Initially it will only be available in emerging market countries where governments or NGOs are subsidizing the purchase of a large number of PCs for students, but there is the possibility of making this available for other customers through a broader set of channels at a later point in time.

From our perspective, Windows on the XO is a nice addition to the portfolio of products and services Microsoft has created to help transform education, one of the key themes of Unlimited Potential. It builds on the work we have been doing with partners like Intel and with programs like Partners in Learning, which has now reached over 100 million students worldwide.

And as you can see from this video featuring UPG's own Bohdan Raciborski, the Windows port to the XO is a snappy release that doesn't cut features or functionality in order to work in the constrained memory and storage environment of the XO.

It is the same basic Windows XP implementation that runs on the Intel Class Mate, ASUS eeePC, and other products in this emerging class of ultra low cost laptop PCs. As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast." Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.

So you may ask, why is Microsoft doing this?

The answer is simple: people are asking for it, it transforms education and it leads to the creation of jobs and opportunity.

You can classify demand for Windows on the XO into three groups. The first group consists of people who have fallen in love with that cute little green laptop with its excellent industrial design but are committed to Windows. I wrote last fall about the guys from the Romanian Ministry of Education who like Windows (their teams regularly place in the Imagine Cup) and thought it would be cool to evaluate Windows on the XO. Another example is the NGO Save the Children, who are interested in sponsoring projects with the XO but as an IT organization have a ~~Windows-only~~ Windows-standard policy. Any extra money they spend in IT supporting multiple operating systems or technology camps is money diverted from their core mission around service, which for them is not a good thing.

The second group involves governments who are considering deployment of the XO en masse but also want the low deployment risk and broad support that the Windows ecosystem can provide them. Let's face it, there are hundreds of millions of Windows machines out there in the world today, which means there are thousands and thousands of people who know how to deploy, support, fix, and upgrade them. Despite the "let the kids fix their own computers" mindset that exists in some parts of the open source community, what we call at Microsoft the "IT Pro" is exactly the type of person that is needed for these large scale education deployments. As we all know, computers break, and asking children and teachers to fix them is not always the best solution. When I presented Unlimited Potential in Guatemala to a gathering of Ministry of Education types from across the region, the slide that generated the most interest was the one that described Microsoft's IT infrastructure optimization framework for large scale education deployments. Based on that customer feedback, we've decided to invest even more into a formalized national PC deployment methodology that we are starting to roll out right now. And believe it or not, it's easier to find Windows system administrators in places like India and Africa than it is to find Linux system administrators, and the Windows IT Pros cost less. We'll be releasing a study on this next month, so stay tuned.

The third group involves people -- usually policy makers -- in governments who see a direct link between technology investments in education and the need to expand the skills capacity of their workforce on a national scale. In other words, they want to implement policies that can positively impact education and set the stage for better employment opportunities for their citizens. They see Windows as a key ingredient for making this happen because it is the software environment used by so many businesses around the world.

Microsoft has created the Unlimited Potential initiative around the themes of transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity. Today's announcement gives us the opportunity to reinforce how these three themes can support each other given the right scenario and the right set of tools. If we can provide children with a great learning experience, and do so in a manner that involves a massive scale with the right level of (local) support, it has the potential for being transformational across multiple fronts. It's pretty exciting.

We Have a Name: "Creative Capitalism"

jamesu — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:21:51 GMT

Bill Gates gave a great speech at Davos this week around the concept of Creative Capitalism, an approach where governments, businesses, and non-profits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities. It is an important and exciting way to think about the creative application of business models to help the world's poor. In addition to Bill's speech, there is also a good Wall Street Journal article and interview on the topic that appeared this week.

This is the concept that drove me to switch jobs within Microsoft last summer and join The Unlimited Potential Group, which is, of course, our company's main vehicle for Creative Capitalism. It is the concept behind the work Intel is doing with its World Ahead program. It is the concept behind the work the OLPC is doing with their XO computer. It is the concept behind the work of dozens of other companies around the world who are taking the philanthropic motivations of their Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) departments and integrating them with the creativity of their new product development departments in order to create a new, new thing: a systematic approach to applying the strengths of a company to serve the needs of poor people by essentially treating them as a new class of customers who previously happened to fall outside of the traditional market focus of a company. It involves a new approach to product design, research, distribution, partnership, and profit models -- all done in the name of helping a class of people that businesses have traditionally ignored.

A cool thing that Bill did with his speech is that he has given the concept a name. I really like "Creative Capitalism" as a description for the work we are doing.

From my perspective, there are multiple approaches companies can take to get on the Creative Capitalism bandwagon.

Differential Pricing - This is when a company creates versions of its existing products at a price point that poor people in emerging markets can afford. In Bill's speech, he talked about several examples of drug companies doing this with vaccines. CK Prahalad documents how Lever Brothers and others have successfully done this with consumer goods for the poorest of the poor in India. Microsoft's best example of this is the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite (MSIS), a $3 package of software sold through government programs where the government subsidizes the purchase of laptops for students.
New Types of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) - This is when governments and businesses transition from a classic buyer-seller relationship in order to partner in creating programs targeting specific social and economic outcomes. These PPPs usually work best in areas where government resources and expertise are achieving limited results. My favorite example of this at Microsoft is Partners in Learning -- a Microsoft program that we just renewed for another 5 years with a $235 million commitment -- that among other things has trained 4 million teachers on how to use technology in the classroom in a manner that emphasizes local collaboration and local impact. Also, Microsoft's Partnerships for Technology Access (PTA) program has worked with governments around the world to create dozens of these PPPs.
Affinity Campaigns - This is a branding campaign where a company publicly allocates a portion of its profits from a particular product to a development cause. These campaigns allow consumers in a small way to align their purchase choices with their desire to affect social outcomes. The best example of this, of course, is (RED) the branding campaign created by the singer Bono to help raise money for AIDS vaccines in Africa. Microsoft and Dell announced support for (RED) this week.
New Products - This is when a company designs new products from the ground up to meet the specific needs of people trapped in the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. This is the most exciting long term aspect of Creative Capitalism and is the main focus of the Unlimited Potential Group. We have software developers working in solution areas like education, low cost computing, and shared access computing. As part of this work, for example, some people on my team are conducting product design focus groups over the next month in Ghana, Morocco, and Peru. I've worked on a lot of products in my 13 year career here at Microsoft, and I can assure you that as a company we never used to do focus groups in places like Ghana. But it is the only way we can do what we do best -- which is develop new types of technology solutions -- in a manner that has the greatest impact on the needs of people that technology companies have previously ignored.

So why are we doing all of this?

From a long-term, pure numbers perspective this approach makes sense for us as a company. There are 6 billion people in the world today, and Microsoft's products are used by about a billion of them. As a company we can grow in the future by either selling more software + services to our existing billion customers, or we can grow by selling software + services to the other 5 billion. If we do the latter, than we have to do so on their terms, not ours. And the fact that our team is now doing focus groups in Ghana is interesting because it turns out that Microsoft sells more in Africa today than it does in either India or China. Most people in our company don't realize this. There is a real business opportunity here, but as I've mentioned before there is an emerging view that this opportunity requires new partnership and distribution models and even new types of products from us in order to sell into these markets in a relevant and sustainable way.

But there is a social aspect to this approach that goes beyond business, and this is an important theme in Bill's speech. People by their very nature like to help other people -- and believe it or not this sentiment is even shared by a lot of people like me who work at a company like Microsoft. There is a place for this personal need to help other people in business, and we can do this in a manner that goes beyond traditional corporate charity or philanthropy. In other words, it is OK to align business interests (the need to grow our company) with social interests (the desire to help people who need help) if it is done in a creative way that achieves measurable outcomes on both fronts, and those measurable outcomes for the company don't always have to be measured by profit numbers on this quarter's income statement. Microsoft has always focused on long-term markets, and why can't we continue to do this in a manner that helps poor people at the same time? Hence "Creative Capitalism."

Of course there are critics of all of these different types of approaches, and their general argument is that it is impossible for companies to serve their own economic interests and the social good at the same time. There is also a more specific criticism focused directly at Microsoft, that this is all simply an effort to circumvent the appeal of free or pirated software so we can gain access to markets in emerging countries. One group this week even likened Microsoft's approach to education as being the equivalent of a tobacco company handing out free cigarettes to children. These critics are missing the point, because this is not about Microsoft or about software licensing models or even about technology. It's about the recognition that people who are in the middle and bottom of the social and economic pyramid are, well, people who might actually have the opportunity to advance in their lives if there are greater choices for products and services that are relevant, accessible, and affordable to them. This realization can create opportunity for companies, but more importantly it can achieve a social good because the creative energies of businesses are now focused on the needs of people who were previously ignored. When software engineers in Redmond and India are focused on meeting the needs of farmers in Ghana, then the world becomes a better place.

And that is the beauty behind the idea of Creative Capitalism.

OLPC in the News ...

jamesu — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:09:22 GMT

Well, it seems like the OLPC organization is in the news a lot lately, even more so than usual. Stories that caught my eye over the last week included a CNN report, a BBC story from Monday, and of course the Wall Street Journal page A1 story that came out this last Saturday.

Microsoft's approach to the OLPC continues to be that we will work with them to see if we can get Windows to run on the XO machine -- there is still a lot of technical work to do, despite what you might hear in the press -- but otherwise we need to remain focused on our Unlimited Potential mission for enabling social and economic opportunity for the next five billion through transforming education, fostering local innovation, and enabling jobs and opportunity. We are applying a great deal of energy across these three areas in pilot projects around the world, and we don't really want to get distracted by the public rhetoric taking place around the OLPC and their XO machine. We are working with partners on a broad spectrum of solutions for education in emerging markets -- and low cost computing is just one of them -- but we also have pilot projects in other areas ranging from rural kiosks to new approaches for subscription computing, new applications for cell phones, new models for Internet cafes/community centers, and new approaches for mobile and remote access to the Internet. We have a lot going on and really need to focus first and foremost on the needs of the communities we are serving. Our mantra in all of this is "Relevance, Access, and Affordability."

The WSJ article was kind of cool in the sense that I was interviewed and referenced in the story, even though I didn't land a direct quote. I've been at Microsoft since 1995, and this was the first time I have appeared on the front page of the Journal. (By the way, my sister Lisa -- who also works here -- was featured in a page one WSJ story last year, for those of you who are keeping tabs on the Utzschneiders.)

Anyway, I've thought a lot about this whole OLPC phenomenon, and the best way for me to summarize my thoughts on the topic is to refer you to two quotes, both from bosses I've had at Microsoft.

The first is from David Vaskevitch, one of Microsoft's CTOs. He was an early mentor of my career here, and at one point I ran a technology incubation team working for him. David always liked to remind me that "the technology industry consistently overestimates what it can accomplish in 2 years, and consistently underestimates what it can accomplish in 10". This is coming from a guy who chose to center his 1996 Professional Developers Conference keynote around the emerging importance of digital photography -- we all thought at the time that he was nuts -- but look at what happened 10 years later. It's now one of the most widely used scenarios on the PC today (and among other things, a staple ingredient for how I create this blog.) And for what it's worth, I used this quote in my interview with the WSJ to summarize our view of what Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC are doing.

The second quote comes from Doug Burgum, the man who spent 25 years building the Great Plains/MBS business into what ultimately became a billion dollar division for Microsoft before he retired this past summer. Doug had an amazing capacity to inspire a community of channel partners into creating an ecosystem around a shared vision and more importantly a shared set of values. His quote -- it actually originated from Margaret Mead, but Doug liked to use it a lot -- was to "Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." One of the powerful ideas behind the OLPC is their approach for harnessing the power and excitement of a community to accomplish a shared (and in this case, noble) mission. We know at Microsoft what this can feel like; sometimes people forget that my company has a lot of experience with building communities organically. There's nothing like the feeling you get when you start a parade!

So my view on the OLPC is that Nicholas, Walter, Mary Lou-- all people I've never met but whom I admire at a distance -- are a group of dangerous dreamers (another Dougism) who are out to change the world and could have a huge impact on education over the course of the next ten years, but not so much in the next two. I love the boldness of their vision, their focus on serving the needs of poor children, and their desire to do great things.

But I also know the reality of the physics of the IT industry and the difficulty in trying to go from zero to millions of deployed, functioning, supported machines in a matter of months. About the nature of how this industry works, where one group may come up with an idea and then other organizations or individuals build on the idea and come in from seemingly nowhere (hello ASUS!) with a different type of solution to fill a vacuum created by the original vision. (Ask me how I felt after I read the first public draft of the Enterprise Java Beans spec, a document that was "inspired" by work we were doing on COM and MTS in the mid-90's.) And how the implementation of IT visions ultimately comes down to customer choice, because people -- even people who work in government Ministries of Education -- are rational actors who select things that are in their best interest and take into account price, roadmap, TCO, pedagogies, politics, local infrastructure, support, bake-off results, the need for measurable outcomes, you name it ... the whole variety of factors that go into a complex government purchase process.

It takes a village to buy a computer, and it's always harder than you think it will be.

But that's all OK, because the OLPC vision isn't going to go away. There will be a permanent role for low cost, flash-based PCs in national education and technology policies. The XO will survive and evolve, and I bet every laptop vendor on the planet including Dell and HP will have a competing machine within 24 months. A new ecosystem of collaborative, social network-inspired and Internet-enabled education software will emerge. Cell phones will play a bigger role in this space than even Nicholas is publicly acknowledging. And kids and teachers will author a lot of the content.

Dangerous dreamers who assume they will change the world in two years but actually do so in ten, in a manner they never initially anticipated. That's my personal view of what the people at OLPC are trying to do. I love the industrial design, I love the screen, and I love the rabbit ears. I wish the team well. But there are other dangerous dreamers out there, and ultimately it will be the magic of software delivered in a sustainable manner that will be the key to transforming education.

But now I need to go back to work.

Beyond Stories

jamesu — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:00:24 GMT

Yesterday I attended AMD's 50x15 partner summit in Sunnyvale, California. 50x15 is AMD's equivalent to Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, with the idea that 50% of the world's population can achieve access to the Internet and computers by the year 2015. In attendance were representatives from technology vendors (HP, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, Google, Sun, Microsoft), some NGOs, and even the guy who played Janice Soprano's narcoleptic boyfriend on season three of the show. (More on that later.)

The meeting format was a day-long roundtable with about 50 people in the room. I have to confess after the first couple of speakers I was really worried that it was going to be a bad day. It's not because Tom McCoy or Dan Shine were poor speakers with little to say, it was just the opposite. They were interesting, with heartfelt and inspiring stories about ICT projects AMD had sponsored in emerging markets around the world. Great stories told with flair and LOTS of photos. AMD is doing really cool work.

It's just that AMD's stories are pretty much the exact same stories that Microsoft tells, that Cisco tells, that Nokia tells, that Intel tells, that Qualcomm tells. I was worried that that I was going to sit through a day-long meeting listening to different vendors going through variations of the exact same storytelling approach we (I) use in UPG: sponsor pilot in remote location; go there and take pictures, tell the story, hope it spreads, and potentially accrue some goodwill for your company. Instead of being involved in a coordinated effort of "Doing well by doing good", by seeing for the first time what other vendors in this space are doing, it made me wonder ... are we all engaged in an exercise of "Feeling good by doing good?"

That's why I was worried it was going to be a bad day.

Don't get me wrong, these pilots have huge impact in the communities they serve, and you can see it in the faces of the people we film. Maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was bummed with the realization that the work we were doing in UPG wasn't necessarily that original or unique.

But what I realized yesterday is that the emphasis on storytelling by vendors masks the two huge problems we need to address if we, as an industry, are going to move beyond stories and drive these programs to scale to achieve the true impact we all hope for:

We need to figure out which projects actually work
We need a better way for ICT vendors to work together

The first point is quite significant. The ICT4D community doesn't really have a systematic, objective, and agreed-upon way to measure the true outcome of these projects -- whether it's the design approach for a telecenter or a project for rural Internet access or a BOP student computing architecture -- that helps us determine if the project is scalable and sustainable. During the afternoon of the AMD summit there was a panel discussion that called for the creation of an online community to help share ideas around best practices or even ratings of different ICT4D projects, and this would be a good starting point. (We have kicked around the idea inside of Microsoft of starting one of these, send me a note if you are interested or would like to participate.) My gut feel is that ultimately market forces will pick what works, but the market may need some help in at least sharing ideas on what is out there in a consistent and accessible way.

On the second point, I wonder if we need some sort of industry manifesto or consortium to better integrate the efforts of different vendors involved in this space. A starting point might be some voluntary standards on how to document and report on the investment, shape, and outcome of these pilot projects we are all doing. This might be hard given that many of these projects are incubations for future products that will compete in the market (because emerging markets are in the end, well, markets) but if the technology industry can agree upon standards for measuring claims of system performance, we should at least be able to agree upon standards for measuring claims of social performance. The last thing we need is some heavyweight standards type effort that slows down our work or even worse sucks up resources that we could instead be spending in the field, but there are so many vendors engaged in these types of projects that there is clearly an opportunity for synergy. Perhaps this is an area where the Clinton crowd can help.

In the absence of wide-scale and repeatable successes driven by closer levels of cooperation among participants in this space, all we have to rely upon for the time being are stories, and what ultimately made it a great day yesterday was that the quality of stories told at the summit were very, very good. The actor Turk Pipkin (the Sopranos guy) spent an hour going through the Nobelity Project, which centers around a documentary film he created involving interviews with 9 Nobel laureates discussing ideas on how to improve the world. (Attendees got copies of the film, and I may write a review in the next day or two.) Mathew Chetty (right) from AMD described some of the Learning Labs his company has in place in Africa, and it was great to hear the passion of an African describing ICT successes in Africa. Kristin Petersen, the founder of Inveneo, walked us through some of the projects her company is doing. Inveneo is interesting because they are essentially a non-profit systems integrator that does turnkey communication and computing solutions for NGOs, mostly in Africa. They also have created a skills certification program that will be the sort of thing we will need to sustain these projects from within local communities, especially in rural areas. Joe McCarthy from Nokia did a fly-by of some of the great projects his company is doing. This is clearly an area where I would like to learn more (I also plan to post pointers to the different slide decks people used.) Finally, Kate Stohr from Architecture for Humanity described how her group took a simple idea -- volunteers doing architecture and design work in emerging markets -- and scaled it with minimal overhead to a mass phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of participants. She also had some sample chocolate bars from one of their projects in Ecuador that she handed out to the crowd.

So in the end I'd like to thank Dan Shine and the AMD 50x15 team for organizing a great summit yesterday, because it got me thinking about what we need to do beyond telling stories, creating a systematic way to get the projects to scale without sacrificing the sense of energy and hope that draws so many different types of people into this effort.

3.6 Million Innovative Teachers Can't Be Wrong

jamesu — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:00:50 GMT

Helsinki, October 29, 2007

I am attending the Worldwide Innovative Teachers Forum, a "Celebration/Competition" that Microsoft is holding in Helsinki as part of our Innovative Teachers Network, a grassroots community around the world that promotes and celebrates cool uses of technology in the classroom. It is a component of Partners in Learning, our core program for working with governments and educators to transform education. I wish as a company we could do more to let people know about the work we are doing here, because so much of our discussion on education seems to be about computer systems and not about learning. This show is all about learning.

And this is not, I repeat not, a typical Microsoft event. Sure, we have opening keynotes, in this case from Lauren Woodman and Dave Walddon (both shown at right, Dave is spectral) along with two educators from Finland. But the heart of the event is teachers. There are no customers, no buyers, no trade show vendors, and no salespeople. Just teachers -- about 260 of them from 40 countries -- all coming together to present and discuss 85 examples of innovative best practices. These 85 were the "winners" from about 100,000 submissions of lesson plans and course curricula from teachers worldwide. (Partners in Learning has touched 3.6 million teachers since the program started a few years ago.)

The show has the feel of a science fair, except instead of kids the participants are teachers who developed really interesting learning modules. And there is a competition, we will be announcing final "winners" at a dinner tomorrow night. But it is mainly a celebration of the great teaching demonstrated by all of the projects.

If you walk the show floor, you can see why. (I will try to post a list of all the entrants later this week.) There is a team from Thailand that had a project where the kids made claymation videos. The teachers had examples of the clay statues in their booth and were showing the videos on a Zune. It looks like something you'd see on television, except it was created by high school kids in Thailand.

A team from northern China had a project where they taught children about puppetry, an ancient art in their region. The children interviewed local puppet craftsman and performers, made a film about it, and then made their own puppets (a couple of examples are shown to the right.)

A teacher from Sweden demonstrated a project on the topic of biodiversity that involved a networked collaboration between her classroom and a classroom in Madagascar. This project had the added benefit of helping children in both countries learn English.

There were two strong entries from South Africa. One of the teachers built an "mLearning" system, complete with quizzes and online homework assignments broadcast to the students' cell phones (all of the 12th grade students in his class had one -- and as I've said before, there is more to our approach for using technology to transform education than simply deploying PCs). The other teacher built a module for his rural students called "Bright Lights, Dustbowl" that had the kids do all sorts of interesting activities ranging from visiting the local "city" to parsing songs by the Police to creating online and radio advertisements for local businesses. He even played some of the radio ads for us.

To me, this conference seems little different from Microsoft's software developer community events I was involved with in the 1990s, except instead of geeks showing off their Visual Basic applications, you have teachers showing off their geography lessons. And just as developers were always a core community for Microsoft in its first 30 years -- we never "sold" to developers, we always had to excite and inspire them to do cool and great things with our tools -- teachers are a core community for Microsoft moving forward. And it is great to participate in a showcase of what inspired teachers can do when they have the right tools.