RDVP Seminar: John Katz (10/15/2004)

Jon Katz is not your run-of-the-mill development consultant. Over the last 10 years or so, he's gotten deeply involved in working with the remote mountain community of El Limon in the Dominican Republic. He's lived for long stretches in the community, where he has become a "pet gringo". His initial project (with students from Cornell) was to use irrigation canals for small-scale hydroelectric power generation, creating enough power for the 40 or so houses and community buildings. Adding phone and internet access were other critical steps for his continued involvement with the community and its development.

Jon spoke at a very practical level, describing the particular hardware that was used and its merits, as well as challenges that they ran into with unreliable service providers (both private and public). Improving reliability, ease of administration, and reducing power consumption (replacing hard drives with compact flash, e.g.) were design goals. But he also spoke about the changes in the community: children that used internet chat applications as a way to interact on equal footing with their peers worldwide; more students attending high school in the valley rather than topping out at the 7th grade (more like 2nd grade equivalent) offered in the mountain school. A base of people with technical skills is growing: Jon identifies techies early on and includes them in the planning and development stages, so that they are better able to handle the support; but he still finds that much of his time is spent on trivial hardware issues (perhaps twice as much as on grant-writing and the like).

He started off a bit on the philosophical side, pointing out that as globablization and knowledge work became the typical, rural people could contribute on equal footing with their urban counterparts, but lack of access, education, and transportation are leaving these people behind yet again.