Inside UP : NGO

Paul Polak and the Art of Listening

jamesu — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:56:52 GMT

Paul Polak is a hero of mine.

He created a nonprofit organization called International Development Enterprises (IDE) and spent 25 years there developing creative ways to make poor people in Asia and Africa less poor. His specialty is developing sustainable tools that rural farmers earning $2/day actually buy in order to increase the amount of cash they generate; his approach is to spend an intensive amount of time in the field listening to these types of farmers in order to truly understand what they need; and his results have been amazing. His organization developed and marketed something called a treadle pump, a low cost human-powered $25 pump that made it easier for subsistence farmers to grow lucrative off-season vegetables by simply tapping into the water table that lay 15 feet beneath their feet. IDE has sold over 2 million of these pumps to some of the poorest people in the world, and almost all of them achieved a payback on their investment in a matter months, lifting their families from $2/day to $5/day in the process. What’s cool about Paul’s approach is that he didn’t just invent a pump, he created a complete ecosystem of local manufacturers, distributers, and marketers that figured out everything they needed to do in order to connect with local people and sell a product on local terms that could transform the lives of poor people. IDE is now a 500 person organization chugging along on its mission of helping the rural poor.

Paul’s Book, Out of Poverty, is required reading for anyone working in the International Development or ICT4D spaces because it lays out a fact-based model for managing projects that achieve their desired impact. Heck, it should be required reading for anyone in business because, well, it lays out a fact-based model for managing projects that achieve their desired impact.

Paul visited the Microsoft campus on Monday and gave a talk about his work. So what does a 75 year-old ex-psychologist, businessman, NGO-founder, and author do as a next step in his life? Why, start two new companies, of course! One of them is the design firm D-Rev that helps multinationals in designing products for poor people. The other is a firm that is developing its own products to take to market. The photo above shows Paul describing the concept behind one of his new company’s products in the speech he gave on Monday.

During his talk, he described his “Don’t Bother Trilogy” of rules that you absolutely need to do in creating a business case for a product targeting people living at the bottom of the pyramid. He calls them this particular name because if you don’t do them, then don’t bother proposing the project to him.

Go out and talk to at least 25 poor people in your target market, and spend at least four hours with each of them in order to truly understand what they need
Create a pricing and costing model where the poor people buying your product can achieve a positive return on their investment within three months of purchase
Select an idea with an addressable market of at least one million units

Clearly, the most important tool in his toolbox, the one he places the most value in, is the art of listening. Paul estimates that during his time at IDE he conducted 3,000 of these 4 hour interviews with farmers and their families in their homes and in their fields throughout the world. He actually videotaped most of these interviews and still has the tapes if any aspiring documentary film makers out there are looking for a new and interesting project.

After his speech on Monday, I had the chance to sit down with Paul and among other things discuss with him the art of listening within the context of developing new products. Here is a quick video where he describes how he went into the hills of Vietnam looking to sell drip irrigation systems but wound up getting into the pig business.

From his perspective, it comes down to making a human connection in a fact-based conversation that focuses on the outcomes that matter. For $2/day consumers, that outcome is increasing income.

So what does all of this have to do with Microsoft? Well here in the Unlimited Potential Group, we are trying to build technology products that target the specific needs of consumers in emerging market countries. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we are trying to reach, and I have to tell you it is a really hard thing to do, especially from Redmond. Sure we have local employees and local partners who help us understand emerging market requirements, our research and user experience teams do various types of behavioral and ethnographic studies, and our product managers spend a lot of time on the road interviewing people and evaluating our various technology incubation trials (while taking lots of pictures and videos in the process.) Shown here is my colleague Alberto Martinez, who was with me in India 10 days ago when we were doing some consumer research there.

But it’s hard enough to get customer requirements right for products being launched in the US; getting them right from the US for products designed for customers in India and China adds a degree a difficulty that reminds me of the line from Ginger Rogers, where she said she had to do the same dancing Fred Astaire did, except she had to do it backwards while wearing high heels.

So it can be done, and Paul is helping us, oftentimes in ways that we didn’t initially expect. No, he is not teaching us how to dance backwards, but last summer he was a judge in the Imagine Cup Rural Innovation Awards and participated on the panel that gave the first prize to the kids from Indonesia and their Project Butterfly submission. After the contest, he gave us feedback that he didn’t see enough evidence of students actually listening to their target customers in the process of designing their submissions, so for this year’s UP award at Imagine Cup we are making a formal requirement that the submissions adopt Guidelines for User Centric Design and document the number and types of conversations they’ve had with their target customers.

(By the way, the entire 2009 Imagine Cup is organized around the UN Millennium Development Goals, which means 200,000+ college students around the world will be applying their energy and creativity in a competition addressing the world’s most important social and economic problems! It is an amazing idea and will occupy a big chunk of my 2009.)

Anyway, for marketers and product developers, doing a good job at the art of listening can make the difference between writing an interesting trip report and delivering a product that achieves real impact with measurable outcomes in a completely different part of the world. And this week many of us here at Microsoft had the chance to meet face-to-face with someone who demonstrates on a consistent basis that it can be done. So it was a really good week.

And Paul, I listened. :-)

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.

ICT4D Explained

jamesu — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:38:36 GMT

ICT4D, or "Information and Communication Technologies for Development" is the name for the multidisciplinary academic approach involving the application of high tech to address international development problems. Kentaro Toyama - who leads Microsoft Research's Technology for Emerging Markets (TEM) group in India - just forwarded around some pointers to a series of papers that appeared in IEEE's Computer June 2008 edition. These articles combine to serve as a great primer on the subject.

You can read an overview paper on ICT4D that Kentaro co-authored here, along with instructions on how to access the rest of the papers here. We are going to try to get permissions to host the papers on the UP website, so stay tuned.

Included in the papers is one the TEM team wrote with Rajesh Veeraraghavan from Berkeley. It provides an overview of some of the projects the lab is doing, including Digital Green (which it describes as "Farmer Idol"), and presents a model for the 5 stages of design that ICT4D projects seem to experience:

Wonder: Recognition of the size or severity of a particular
challenge in development and wonder that
the problem persists.
Exuberance: Excitement at devising an initial technical
solution.
Realization: Discovery of ground realities when the
initial solution doesn’t quite work and realization
that the real problem is elsewhere.
Adaptation: Creation of a new solution that solves
the real problem.
Identification: An identification with the user that
often explains the gap between exuberance and realization.

Kentaro always hammers us back in Redmond on the need to get out into the communities where these projects are being deployed in order to truly understand how the solution is (or is not) being used. Oftentimes what you think you are working on isn't the real problem that needs to be solved. The paper describes how the team evolved this model from experience in projects involving "textless" UI, micro enterprises, microfinance, social enterprises, and agriculture extension.

Another paper from Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester describes "ICT4D 2.0", a concept that reflects the importance of sustainability and relevance in getting these projects to succeed. These are lessons learned from over a decade's experience with these types of projects. In Heeks' view, ICT4D 1.0 involves primarily PC and landline- based solutions (usually rural telecenters) that encounter environmental issues (rodents gnaw cables, dust clogs machines) or relevance issues (if I live in a remote village, exactly who am I sending an email to?) He thinks a more accessible platform for these types of projects are low cost cell phones using SMS and messaging, community radio, and even community participatory video (like what is used in Project Green.)

Within the UP Group, we are strong believers in the importance of simple cell phones as a platform for these types of scenarios and have multiple projects underway in this space.

In other papers, Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town discusses pragmatic design approaches for these low cost, "Phone First" applications that involve the creative application of Bluetooth, SMS, and phone UI. A team from the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group at UC Berkeley describes the sustainability issues they encountered in designing and deploying a series of remote eye care clinics in India.

If you want to learn more about ICT4D, these Computer papers are a great starting point.

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.

OLPC in the News (Part 2)

jamesu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:17:17 GMT

Well, I will be flying out to Cambridge next week for my first meeting with some of the people at the OLPC, and I have to say I am looking forward to it. Some of my UPG co-workers from Microsoft have been meeting with the OLPC team for about a year now, but since I am a relative newcomer to our group, this will be my first trip.

One of the things we will be discussing is the status of our port of Windows XP to the OLPC XO computer. There have been suggestions in the press by Nicholas Negroponte and others that “Windows already runs on the XO.” That’s not really the case yet, and with the attention the OLPC’s “Give One Get One” campaign is getting, along with the strong level of interest we are receiving from some Ministries of Education and NGOs in buying a version of Windows for the XO, we thought it would be useful to provide some clarity on the topic.

For starters, we are hard at work on the project here, and we are using an approach that is a little unusual for Microsoft in that we are managing the entire process of adapting and testing an existing version of Windows for a new PC. Usually the hardware vendor does this. And the Windows port to the XO is by no means done. Between Microsoft employees and third party contractors that we have brought into the effort, we have over 40 engineers working full-time on the port. We started the project around the beginning of the year and think it will be mid-2008 at the earliest before we could have a production-quality release.

Because of this, we have not announced formal plans to support the XO yet, and we will not do so until after we start getting feedback from our first limited field trials starting in January before we make the final call. We do not want to set expectations we subsequently cannot meet, especially when it comes to supporting the children’s machine. For governments in emerging markets evaluating purchases of Windows for the XO, this means that so far we are not announcing an availability date, pricing, or support policies. In fact, you should not yet assume that Windows on the XO is a done deal. We are hopeful that we will have a different story for you within six months.

It also means that if you are in the US and Canada and are participating in the “Give One Get One” program, you need to understand that Microsoft is not currently planning to support a retail consumer release of Windows XP on your XO computer.

Why is this work taking so long?

Flash
First, the XO computer uses flash memory instead of a hard disk drive for storage. This is one of the reasons OLPC can get the production cost of the computer down to $188. This is a relatively new class of machine, and we have to do design work to get Windows and Office to work reliably and with good performance using only 2 GB of storage. The XO actually only comes with 1GB of flash, and we asked the OLPC to add a slot for an internal SD card that will provide the 2 GB of extra memory needed to run our software. (By comparison, an entry level $499 Dell laptop comes with 60 GB of hard disk storage.) The potential payoff for students and schools from this work, of course, is that the tens of thousands of existing educational applications written for Windows can potentially run on the XO. As part of this engineering effort, we have to design a new BIOS – the layer of software that runs between the hardware and an operating system -- to have Windows boot and run off the SD card. For us this is new work and requires a design and processes for supporting the XO’s custom SD interface and for the installation of Windows on the SD card, both at the Quanta factory that manufactures the XO hardware and also in the field.

For much of this XO flash design, we are able to leverage the work we did to get Windows to support the Intel Classmate PC, another computer that uses flash memory for storage. However, the Intel computer comes with 2GB of flash storage, so we did not have to use the SD card approach we are designing for the XO. The Classmate port took us about 9 months, but we started that effort a year and a half ago. A third example of these low cost “Flash PCs” on the market is the ASUS Eee PC, and surprisingly enough getting Windows running on this computer required a significantly shorter amount of time because ASUS used a more standardized approach to its hardware design compared to the XO. In technical terms, ASUS put the flash drive behind the IDE disk controller, making the flash storage "look like" a hard disk drive to Windows.

Microsoft plans to publish some formal design guidelines early next year that will help Flash PC manufacturers benefit from our early work so they can design machines that enable a great Windows experience at as low a cost as possible, and with a minimum of custom design work necessary to get Windows to run on their machines, such as we have encountered with the XO.

Cool New Features
Secondly, as we all know there are many innovative features in the XO computer that set it apart from other designs, and we are working with partners to write the driver software so that Windows can support all of them. This includes drivers for the XO’s wireless networking, camera, graphics processor, audio system, and the various user input devices (game pad, writing pad, touch pad, directional pad, and mouse pad.) There are ten custom drivers in all that we are writing. We also hope to support the XO’s mesh network design, its power-saving “e-book” mode, and its capability for excellent screen visibility in full daylight.

And we have a different support model than OLPC is envisioning: we are not expecting K-6 school children to access the source code and do their own programming in the event they have to fix a problem in the computer. Certainly, we think there is a role for students in the support of school computers -- in fact, as part of our Partners in Learning program we have trained over a million kids in a student helpdesk program (like in this case study from Brazil) -- but we also think that local entrepreneurs and businesses need to play an important role here when you are talking about deployments involving tens of thousands of computers.

We want to support these new XO features without sacrificing compatibility with existing Windows applications, and we want to deliver an out-of-the-box user experience similar to the quality people expect from Windows running on more expensive classes of machines. All of this takes a lot of work.

Fast Moving Partner
Finally, we are doing this engineering work for a moving target. It is literally like designing parts of a car – well, actually a school bus -- while it is running down the highway at a high speed. I am not meaning this as a knock on the OLPC organization, because they are a small group of people doing an amazing amount of innovative design work in a short period of time. But we have only received a handful of machines for most of the last year, and the XO team was doing some hardware design changes as recently as this past August. This affects our schedule.

Much of the technology in the XO is developed using open source technology licenses that make it difficult for engineers employed by commercial software companies like Microsoft to work directly on the project. For this reason, we also had to follow a complicated process to figure out interfaces for many of the XO’s hardware components and to deal with some of the hardware bugs they were reporting in their design process in order to make progress on our port. All of this slows us down, but that’s OK given our overall shared mission here.

We appreciate the support we are getting from the OLPC team, and we know the focus their engineers need to get the XO out the door and into the hands of students. Now that they are finally shipping, our ability to support the XO with a quality release of Windows is accelerating. I also have to say that if our team continues down the path they are on and the system performs as we hope, then that cute little machine with the Wi-Fi ears will run Windows!

What Does This Mean for Users?
The Unlimited Potential Group at Microsoft is developing technology to enable social and economic opportunity for “the next five billion," and one of our key focus areas for doing so is through the transformation of education. As part of this, we are investing in programs and partners around the world to foster innovative schools, innovative teachers, and innovative students. We have a lot going on here, and there is clearly a role for low cost hardware as part of this vision. In fact, there is a good alignment between what OLPC is trying to do and what we are trying to do. And frankly, nothing would please us more than seeing hundreds of thousands of these XO computers that are now starting to be deployed all running Windows given the very high interest that has been expressed in the market for it. We are committed to developing a quality port of Windows XP for the OLPC XO computer, but we still have a lot of work to do to complete the effort.

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.

Will the Digital Divide Widen Before it Narrows?

jamesu — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 09:18:24 GMT

October 19, 2007

I had a scary thought in Budapest today. What if the digital divide widens before it narrows?

The thought occurred to me on Day 2 of our launch event here. I was attending a meeting of an informal group working on a program called "EUGA", or "EU Grants Advisor." This is an ad hoc consortia of government agencies and tech companies in Hungary coming together to share ideas on how to improve digital literacy in the workforce, in this case through a program to make it easier for SMBs to apply for technical training grants from the EU. Some of the companies present included Microsoft, Intel, HP, Cisco, Nuance, and XAPT (the Microsoft partner who worked on WizzAir, one of my favorite case studies from the Dynamics business).

I was stunned to learn from the companies at the meeting that there was a skills shortage in Hungary, and that they all had job openings they couldn't fill with local talent. This was in a country who's economy is going through a rough patch but in general has a highly literate population.

During the meeting we were going around the table discussing ideas on what to do about some of these issues. At a national level in Hungary, there is a need for new programs to train citizens on basic "digital literacy" concepts like how to use a keyboard and how to navigate with a mouse. The government is considering some aggressive moves like a new initiative to buy 100k laptops for all the teachers in the country; another idea is to fund the deployment of a computer into at least half of the country's classrooms within the next two years.

But then the scary thought dawned on me. In "Top of the Pyramid" communities -- and I do mean communities, because there are rich people in Romania and poor people in Ohio -- we are beginning to graduate the first generation of students who have spent their entire life using the Internet. For these kids, it is not as much about computer skills as is about a mentality of living in a networked world where everything is connected, tagged, and discoverable. Articles are beginning to appear that describe how this generation doesn't even use email anymore, yet here I am in a conference room discussing ideas on how to train people to type with more than one finger.

So, is there a "technical skills" generation (where people learn how to use a computer) followed by an "Internet mentality" generation (where people grow up with a new mind-set - that everything is connected and tagged - that shapes how they communicate and work?) And does the wide-scale introduction of "Internet-mentality" students into the workforce widen the gap between developed countries and countries struggling with convincing their government on the need to fund programs to train their population on how to use a mouse.

One of the government officials from Hungary definitely picked up on this idea, expressing concern that his country may have an entire generation of citizens left behind. Hungary definitely has its Facebook crowd, but apparently many of these kids are leaving the country because there clearly aren't enough of them to work at the local Cisco and Intel offices.

If so, what impact will this have on relative economic growth among countries and communities? I am not sure if anyone is formally studying the economic impact of relative or generational levels of computer literacy, but I couldn't help but feel I was in a meeting discussing steam engines at a time when others were booking their own jet travel online. The situation could be more urgent than people realize.

UPG Launch in Budapest

jamesu — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:40:55 GMT

October 18, 2007

We held our big press event in Budapest on Thursday and Friday this week. With most Microsoft events, we try to hold on to some important piece of "news" that we unveil at the show in order to make it easier for journalists to write a story. In this case we did indeed have some news, but our main goal this week was to work with journalists to help establish some context on the overall approach we are taking with our Unlimited Potential strategy, with an emphasis on the impact we are making with our partners in specific countries in this region. We'll have to wait a few days to read what the press writes from the event, but I think the team in Europe overall did a good job in putting the launch together.

The keynote speakers were Nenad Pacek from The Economist Intelligence Unit; Steven Frantzen from IDC; and Will Poole and Vahé Torossian from Microsoft. Costas Andropoulos from the EU was also keynoting, but he had to appear via video. Nenad's speech was interesting, because he reinforced the point that government policy does matter in terms of driving economic growth; among other things he observed that Ireland and Greece had the same GDP 20 years ago, and Ireland's today is now twice that of Greece. Why? Steven Frantzen from IDC walked through country data from their recently released survey of IT spending in 82 countries, where they did an analysis of the impact of IT spending on national growth.

Will Poole provided a good overview of our global UPG efforts and included a video of the Romanian family I mentioned yesterday. Will also wrote an update to the UPG executive blog. Vahé (our VP for Central and eastern Europe, shown at right) discussed in more detail some of the specific programs we are doing in the region, and had an excellent guest speaker on the topic of "reverse brain drain": Bodin Dresevic, a former Microsoft development manager in Redmond who returned to his native Serbia to open a new Microsoft Development Center doing software R&D there.

When I joined Microsoft in 1995, I think there were only four places in the world where you could work for Microsoft as a software developer: Redmond plus three small satellite offices: Montreal (SoftImage), Silicon Valley (PowerPoint), and Israel (security and MSMQ). Now it seems as a company we are aggressively opening dozens of R&D centers wherever we can find pools of talented software developers, which is great for countries like Serbia because it enables them to develop local software economies.

The "official" news from the UPG launch event consisted of the following: (grouped together by focus areas)

Transforming Education

Family Education PC program in Romania (subject of the video mentioned above)
IT Academies
Microsoft Digital Literacy curricula

Fostering Local Innovation

Microsoft Innovation Centers (including one we opened in Budapest)
Release LiPs in new CEE languages (subject of a future post, this is a cool program for community-driven local language versions of Windows and Office)
EU Grants Advisor (EUGA) (making it easier for SMBs to receive EU digital literacy training grants)
IDEA Center opening in Moscow (here is a video that explains more)
Expand Microsoft Development Centre Serbia
Technical Computing Initiative in Russia

Enabling Jobs & Opportunity

IDC economic impact studies for CEE
Slovak Telecom Subscription Computing program
Investment of US$15M in local CEE ICT projects
40UP program in Slovakia
S2B (Student 2 Business) program rollout and impact
Microsoft Digital Literacy curricula

Most of these involved particular stories relevant to individual countries. I personally did interviews with journalists from Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Greece, Latvia, and Slovakia. They all wanted to learn more about specific initiatives taking place in their countries to improve national competitiveness. So in aggregate what we were talking about today may not seem like "big news" like a major new product announcement, but for the countries involved our UPG programs appeared to be pretty significant.

Buchalost

jamesu — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:34:41 GMT

October 17, 2007

I began the morning in Bucharest today by going for a run and getting terribly and completely lost. I mean 45 minutes of "Do you speak English -- do you know where the Howard Johnson's Hotel is?" lost. The team ended the day having to cross a highway and walk along the side of the road a ways to get to our car. But in between these two we had a fabulous day, learning a lot about some of the progressive steps Romania is taking to apply ICT in a sensible way to improve education in their country. And as you can see, the weather was way nicer than Moscow.

We started the day (post lost run) in the Microsoft office where we met with people from Romania's Ministry of Education. Included in the meeting was Professor Adrian Petrescu, who is considered sort of the godfather of technical education in his country. Here is a photo of Dr. Petrescu along with Silviu Hotaran, Microsoft's country manager for Romania. Silviu (on the right) was a student of Dr. Petrescu's in the university.

Also attending from the Romanian government was Catalin Grosu and Decebal Popescu. (Yes indeed, there is a person in Romania who looks just like Jack White from the band the White Stripes and is named "Decebal".) Decebal seemed very smart and was passionate about IT curricula. Among other things, he asked about our plans for porting Windows to the OLPC XO device. Will Poole gave a good answer, the shorthand version is "Because the device is exotic and requires so many custom drivers, it's hard. But we are trying."

Before the 1989 revolution here, Dr. Petrescu designed and deployed across the country a microprocessor based system that used a TV set for display, a cassette recorder for storage, and was based on the Sinclair. Needless to say, he has a lot of experience with national PC programs. He also says he is inspired both by BillG's book "Business at the Speed of Thought" and Nicholas Negroponte's evangelism efforts around 1-to-1 computing, namely, that the best educational technology model for a country involves students with their own PCs with roaming access to the Internet. But he also clearly believes that there is no single optimal technology solution to this problem -- this is a theme I am hearing every time I go on the road now -- in this case because kids from wealthier families want machines with more capabilities than the Asus or the OLPC XO, but this class of machine might be ideal for rural students from lower income families. Early results from one of the pilots in Romania indicate that kids get quickly bored if there is limited software on one of these low end laptops.

Apparently Romania's Prime Minister grew up using one of the Sinclair-like machines, has a technical background, and did a side-buy-side demo of the OLPC XO and the Intel ClassMate PC to members of parliament, explaining how each of the machines worked. That would have been fun to watch. Also, Decebal was quite enthusiastic about the Imagine Cup (Romania won it last year!) and was effusive in his praise for the support they received from the local Microsoft team. Finally, we walked them through a slide deck describing our education strategy, and they expressed interest in learning more about Multipoint and about Microsoft's infrastructure optimization model for education. We will definitely follow up.

From there we went to visit Siveco, one of the largest software ISVs in Romania. We met with Florian Ciolacu, Florin Ilia, and a partner account manager (Flora?) who all spent an hour walking us some of the impressive work their company has done in education. Their product is called AeL, a suite of interactive K-12 learning content consisting of 1,800 interactive modules (called "objects") built on the Microsoft stack. They even referred to it as DHTML, not AJAX. You can find samples of their work on the Innovative Teachers Network, including this self-paced chemistry class. (Apologies, it's in Romanian). Florin says that about half of their classes are translated to English, and about 300 to Russian.

As far as we can tell, Siveco is one of the few technology partners who have successfully implemented a national education program. Over the last 6 years, in partnership with the Romanian Ministry of Education, they have deployed to Romanian schools 76,000 Windows/Office desktop systems and 1,500 servers; their software was used as the basis for training 80,000 teachers and 3 million students. The company is expanding to the CIS countries, Cypress, and the Middle East. They gave me a copy of AeL and I plan to start demoing it on my travels.

After Siveco, we went to visit RTC, a conglomerate of 70 companies that is partnering with us on a family education PC project in Romania called PC@casă. This is an incubation where we partner with an OEM, retailers, and software partners to package up a low cost PC loaded with education software. We met with RTC's leadership team and did a fun interview with a family that purchased one of these systems (the dad Nicolae and his son Alexandru are shown here, mom Camelia was at work). We'll be showing a video we took of this family at our press event in Budapest tomorrow. I will try to get my hands on a copy and post it.

Finally, we had a late lunch with Varujan Pambuccian from the Romanian Parliament. The guy is awesome. He has been an elected member of parliament for 12 years and is the chairman of their IC&T Commission, and he used to design computer systems at the country's Technical Institute (including compilers, and is show here with his fellow former compiler designer Paula Apreutesei, Microsoft's citizenship lead for Romania). We all had a great back an forth discussion, ranging from voucher models for the national "Euro200" PC program to motherboard design to the future of networking in countries in Romania. I loved the fact that a guy who is still hands-on technical (he is working on some patents for TCP/IP extensions) is engaged as an elected official in setting ICT policy for his country.

The meal was in a "classic" local restaurant called Casa Romaneasca where they served us a wonderful platter of meat, family style, which in turn resulted in "meat comas" hitting us on the plane to Budapest 90 minutes later. (Last photo courtesy of Will Poole).

More tomorrow from our launch event...

Snowing in Moscow

jamesu — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:40:43 GMT

A group of us are in Central and Eastern Europe this week, starting with two days in Moscow. It's snowing.

The highlight of our day yesterday was the official opening of an IDEA Center, a community-based computer center targeting unemployed, seniors, and people with disabilities. IDEA stands for "Information Dissemination and Equal Access" and is sponsored by Microsoft and Project Harmony, an NGO based in the US. There are over 50 of these centers across Russia, and the new Moscow center is essentially the showcase facility where they set curricula and manage the program. It is housed in a pedagogical library that was a mansion before the Russian Revolution.

Kati Fedotova, the director of the project, described how the IDEA Centers focus on digital literacy and community access. Each center offers on a monthly basis 24 hours of basic computer skills classes along with an additional 10 hours of training on career and capacity skills. All of these centers are located in libraries, giving new purpose to old buildings. The Moscow Center has 30 computer stations across 2 training labs and a walk-in room. Overall the centers have formally trained 17,000 people since last year.

The opening ceremony was apparently a big deal. Over 30 journalists attended, and two news stories ran on local television stations last night. We started with a meeting on a third floor computer lab where we met with the folks from IDEA along with Ann Martin, the executive director of the NGO. We were joined by leaders of the Russian teaching institute who manage the library and host the program. There is a very good partnership here. Will Poole then did some TV interviews and then there was an official ribbon cutting ceremony with Will, Ann and the leader of the teachers institute. Everyone then went downstairs to a converted ballroom where we held a panel discussion and a press conference. The whole event went about two hours, which included the time required for the translators we used for the Q&A

The ballroom had these cool Soviet-era fluorescent light chandeliers. I had never seen anything like them before.

We have one more meeting with an NGO this morning, and then it's off to Bucharest. And in case you noticed, I bought a camera.

"The Bottom Billion"

jamesu — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 06:08:54 GMT

I just had a chance to read "The Bottom Billion", a book by by Oxford University economist Paul Collier. He used to work for the World Bank and for the British Government and has created a model for why poor countries remain poor and then describes steps on what "Top of the Pyramid" countries can do about it. It is compelling reading, especially the prescription part.

His model is based on four "traps" that countries fall into that prevent them from growing: Conflict, Natural Resources (too many of them), Landlocked with Bad Neighbors, and Bad Governance. According to his research, 58 countries with a combined population of 980 million fall into one of these categories.

The book has a lot of interesting facts about the traps, for example, the "typical" civil war in Africa costs a country $60 billion in economic growth. He then goes on to assert that trade and aid policy from developed countries should be tuned to the specific trap a country is in. What works for a country emerging from a civil war will not necessarily work for a country with poor access to ocean ports.

More from Omar Dengo

jamesu — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:01:48 GMT

In an earlier post, I talked about a visit I made to the Fundacion Omar Dengo, an NGO in Costa Rica. Eduardo Monge was kind enough to send me some more information.

Below is a photo of their new facility in San Jose along with a photo of their resident artist posing next to one of his creations. The tree is a sculpture made from metal.

Also, here is the link to the video about the women taking the entrepreneurial skills class, and here is the link to the MovieMaker video a local middle school teacher made. The story is called "Aunty Misery" and includes some excellent pencil drawings.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the last trip I make without a camera...

Fundacion Omar Dengo

jamesu — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 12:49:31 GMT

Tuesday, October 2nd.

While I was in Costa Rica I had the opportunity to visit with Eduardo Monge and Clotilde Fonseca at the Fundacion Omar Dengo, an NGO focused on discovering new ways to use technology to improve education. They've been doing this for 20 years and have built up quite a legacy and institution.

When the staff gave me a tour of their facility, it reminded me of the first time Doug Burgum gave me a tour of the Great Plains campus in Fargo, North Dakota. And it's not because there are similarities between Fargo and San Jose Costa Rica, because there are absolutely none! And I mean none! But the FOD facility, which opened in a converted cigarette factory last March, places the same value on design and business purpose that you experience when you first visit Horizon and Vista. The foundation even has a resident artist who designed the steel sculptures you see in the courtyard and waiting rooms as you walk around their small campus.

As part of my visit the staff walked me through some of the projects they are working on, including ...

A classroom orchestration project using MS Math and Learning Essentials they (they are extremely active in the Microsoft Partners in Learning program)
A Movie Maker video that a teacher created based on a fable his class was reading. In the video the teacher used scanned images of pencil drawings he he had drawn of the different characters in the book. The illustrations he drew were amazing, and I asked Eduardo if there was a way I could share them online. Stay tuned ...
A small XO lab (they are strong believers in constructionism and have even named one of their lecture halls after Seymour Papert)
A very cool robotics lab with about 20 PCs along with many many bins of Legos. They use the lab to train teachers in how to teach robotics classes
Examples of an entrepreneur skills programs they've developed for students and women, where students use PCs to learn all aspects of running a business, including how to tracks costs and inventory, generate demand, etc.
A short film consisting of testimonials from women who participated in the skills program, where they describe how it has transformed their lives (this is another one Eduardo is going to try to share with us)

Clotilde will be attending the education summit Microsoft and Intel are hosting in Guatemala later this week, and she and Eduardo will both be attending the GKIII event in Kuala Lampur in December, so I will be running into the Foundation OMAR Dengo at least twice in the next 10 weeks. But they are the first NGO I have visited in my new role, and I have to say they have set a very high bar for others to meet.