The Reuters Digital Vision Program is a one-year fellowship at Stanford University for mid-career tech professionals. I'm blogging my experiences there: the amazing guest speakers, the interesting classes and discussion groups with other fellows, and thoughts on how technology can help reduce the gulf between the global rich and poor.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

RDVP Seminar: Jose-Luis Sanchez (1/26/2005)

Jose-Luis Sanchez of Hispanic.net and Barracuda Networks spoke at the RDVP seminar. He started off with a quick overview of Hispanic.net, a business networking group that focuses on identifying promising companies started by Hispanics and providing them with mentoring, assistance with fund-raising, etc. Although a relatively small group, they have managed to attain some visibility, even at the international level, and had succeeded in attracting corporate support from companies like HP and Telemundo.


The second (and longer) half of the talk was about Mr. Sanchez’s current company, Barracuda Networks. Barracuda is a young (started in 2002) fast growing (approximately 80 employees, 12,000 customers) startup that sells a hardware supported spam-filtering service. A Linux box incorporates 10 filters (7 open source) that are updated hourly from a centralized service. It processes all incoming mail scanning for filters and spam; high-end versions also have a mail client plug-in that allows end-users to teach the spam filters by marking false negatives. Spam can be marked and passed through, deleted or “quarantined”. Outgoing traffic can be inspected by a second box to insure machines haven’t been compromised to send spam and that no internal users are sending out inappropriate information (e.g., credit card numbers, large attachments, etc.)

He attributed their rapid growth to their value: while not the most effective at filtering spam (~92% vs. 94% for the market leader) they are significantly lower priced (by a factor of 5) and use flat pricing (buy a machine that handles the volume of mail you deal with) rather than per-user licensing. He had been responsible for the growth of their distributor/reseller channels in Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries (in Central and South America plus Europe). He was very sanguine about the prospects of the company, and optimistic that a lucrative exit (IPO or acquisition) awaited them soon, following the development of three new products that were in the works.

In response to questions, he spoke a little bit about the role of open source in their products (Greg speculated that their use of open source, like Spam Assassin filter, would obligate them to release their source code to any customer that asked for it, but pointed out that the real value of the company and service resided in the hourly updates). He also talked about the price differential between US and international markets (about 3X) and response to resulting gray market (shut off updates to boxes that were connecting to the service from an IP address in a country other than the one they were sold in). He described “Voice Spam” as a growing market opportunity as Voice over IP (VoIP) carries more traffic. He described his relationships in Latin America and experience as the key values that he brought to the role, critical in a youthful company.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Mifos Overview Meeting (1/25/2005)

I'd had a number of requests for additional project info, so I held a "non-technical" overview meeting tonight. A dozen people came, which I thought was a great turn out, and even better, these were people who were themselves doing interesting things in microfinance. The presentation (powerpoint show file) covered a quick overview of microfinance, though most of the people present were knowledgeable about the methodology and its benefits. Then I went into more detail about Mifos, the who, what, where, when, and why of it. A great discussion ensued. Venky Natarajan gave a demo of some loan tracking software that he'd developed for a commercial bank in India to track loans for self-help groups. Attendees also had ample time to meet each other, and it sounded as though some good connections were made.

Monday, January 24, 2005

RDVP Class: Open Source Software and e-mandi (1/24/2005)

Today’s class covered two major topics: open source software (OSS) and a new project idea for e-mandi, a virtual marketplace in India, by visiting fellow Vipal.

The first reading for the day was Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. We talked a bit about whether it was appropriate to encourage fellows to do their development work using open source technologies, given that some countries were starting to think about requiring it. Jose talked about Venezuela, where a two week debate had raged in congress over whether to REQUIRE replacement of proprietary systems with open source equivalents within two years (unless certain conditions were demonstrated to be true). Jose further pointed out that the Venezuela country gateway, one of the most successful in South America, runs on Microsoft technologies, which might be a factor (since they could focus on content rather than worrying about the technology).

I think the consensus was that while OSS offers interesting development options and is forcing Microsoft to keep on their toes regarding product innovation, the inferior documentation and support that you find with most OSS can be a hurdle. Therefore, it’s not appropriate to mandate that RDVP projects be built on OSS—understand your user requirements, but then use the easiest technology to fulfill them, so you can focus on the application rather than the underlying technology. That said, don’t ignore open source, since some very cool tools (as Carlos has demonstrated with Moodle, etc.) are available and ripe for the taking. One that he especially pointed out was RSS, suggesting that it would be a good way to re-make the RDVP site to have feeds from fellows’ content, yielding a fresh site, combining the recent updates of all of our projects. There was also some optimism about building applications from pluggable components (like a shopping cart).

Vipal has joined the RDVP as a visiting fellow with just a few weeks planned here at Stanford. His plan is to build a virtual market place for agricultural goods in India, complete with an agency to assess quality and warehouse goods until they are sold. He will use the time at Stanford to do project planning: create a business plan, timeline, and budget. He’s found an investor in India who’s willing to back a one-year investigation/initial foray into the project, and so is anxious to get started. His project fits in well with a number of the other fellows’ projects (Dipak, Mans, Moulaye, Helen) so there was enthusiasm for the chance to brainstorm with Vipal. Mans offered some interesting insights about alternative market clearing schemes (suggesting a Dutch auction, where prices descend until someone expresses a willingness to buy, which can lead to greater efficiency, as well as more of the surplus going to the producer…) There were a number of complexities to Vipal’s project, including:
  • Logistics (e-mandi would pack goods for export)
  • Financial Information
  • Market making (aggregation of demand, splitting or aggregation of supply)
  • Pricing as market or “limit” orders as in the stock market
  • Re-using (by leasing) the government-owned food warehousing infrastructure
  • Creation of a futures market as well as a delivery market for speculation in commodities
  • Financing by using savings from the discontinuation of food subsidies

A lot of big ideas, and a short amount of time, and we welcome his enthusiasm!


Saturday, January 22, 2005

You know journal costs are out of hand when...

All right, so this is a bit off-topic, but it amused me.

During my grad school days, I was part of the Stanford Digital Library Project (wow, that was a blast from the past--those pages are essentially unchanged in structure, information architecture, even content, since I was the webmaster for the site in 1997...) Part of the purpose of the project was to improve access to online information, focusing on search and retrieval protocols (in one of the bigger unsung successes of government funding, the NSF-funded "Digital Library Initiative" sponsored the research that eventuallly turned into Google). Another aspect of the project that I worked more closely on was different business models for online content and providing flexible IT systems for managing access and payment collection, also known as shopping models (see the text of the paper).

At any rate, this is all background to a citation on the web today for someone apparently thanking me in a journal that I had no recollection of submitting to, refereeing for, etc. So I was curious enough to follow the pointer:


Note of Appreciation from the Editors
Source: Computational Intelligence, November 1999, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 3-3(1)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing


Aha! A 1 page note of appreciation from the Editors. I wonder how much it costs? I scrolled down a bit farther and found:


The full text article is available for purchase
$38.40 plus tax

Friday, January 14, 2005

RDVP Seminar: Len Kleinrock, "Father of Modern Data Networking" (1/12/2005)

Len Kleinrock, computer science professor at UCLA and the inventor of packet switching and a key figure in the creation of the Internet, spoke at the seminar. He combined a history of the internet along with his views on the next stages of network development, and a few entertaining stories for good measure. He asserted that the explosion of the internet was a result of the desire of hundreds of millions of people to access and contribute information and communicate with each other combined with the culture that had been established in the early days and had persisted for much of its growth. The key elements of that culture include:
  • open research
  • open architecture
  • shared ideas
  • no overbearing, centralized control
  • trust (though he felt that trustworthiness had eroded on the network today)
  • group consensus

He talked a bit about the network protocol stack, judging the creating of the IP layer as the critical layer of abstraction providing the application layers above it the ability to rely on whatever network service layers happened to be below it. And it had focused simply on addressing and quality of service.
He offered a chronology of key events in the creation and growth of the internet. I’ve included only a small subset below, but the surprising thing to me was how recent it all was. Just realizing that the inventor of packet switching is still an active researcher puts some of it in perspective. A couple other “events” in the early-to-mid 90’s that I still remember clearly as “not that long ago” showed up as “historical” events that marked some turning point in the development/commercialization of the internet.

  • April 1962: First paper on packet switching
  • 1963: Kleinrock joins the UCLA faculty
  • 1967: Wes Clark argues for network control being separated from host computers (routers)
  • 1968: Bob Kahn at BBN starts building, selecting UCLA as the first node.
  • July 3, 1969: Press release where Kleinrock anticipates the provision of network computing as a utility.
  • 1969: UCLA connects from the host machine to the switch
  • October 29, 1969: First message sent from UCLA to SRI “Lo” (actually the start of Login, before the SRI machine crashed)
  • 1972: Roy Tomlinson introduces e-mail, the application that becomes the bulk of traffic
  • 1983: Standardized on TCP/IP
  • 1988: Robert Morris writes the first worm, spreading beyond his intent. (Robert Morris overlapped with me at Harvard, where he was a research associate. It was hard to believe that this was nearly 17 years ago, or almost half the life of the internet.)
  • 1991: NSF, which has jurisdiction of the Internet, opens it up to commercial activity, sowing the seeds of yet more growth.
  • 1994: Cantor & Siegel send the first spam, announcing the end of the green card lottery. (This was also a trip down memory lane. Sure, I remember that! I remember the firestorm of outrage that followed. Spam is really only 10 years old? It seems like such a common part of life now that it MUST be older than that. There are whole industries around spam filtering.)
  • 1996: The number of email messages in the US surpasses the number of physical mail messages.

Kleinrock also talked about some of the bad assumptions that they made that are causing headaches now. The key one was that they assumed a person, his machine, his physical location, and his IP address were all equivalent: that is, office-based computing. As people travel with laptops, share computers, have multiple computers, etc, this simplification has caused problems.


This mobility and proliferation of machines has also set the stage for the next 3 phases of internet development, which he described as:


  1. Nomadic computing
  2. Embedded Technologies for Smart Spaces
  3. Ubiquitous Computing

Assumptions about trust within the environment meant that now that trust has eroded, there’s no easy way to either perform (or add the capability) for strong authentication, protection against malicious attacks, provide strong end-to-end encryption.


He mentioned a current project to address some of the issues of nomadic computing, called Spheres of Influence at UCLA, which handles some policy management issues for networks and users. He also talked a bit about the failure modes of systems, where some (especially complex systems) give no hint that they’re not working correctly until they fail catastrophically. This is an especially big risk when we delegate important tasks and don’t have adequate measurement. (Kleinrock established and ran the Network Management Center at UCLA from the very first days of the internet.)


Along the way, he told some fun stories about


  • His blackjack system
  • Making timings of the roulette wheel at Vegas
  • Samuel’s checker program programmed to lose and yet still playing a dominating game until the point where it sacrificed everything
  • Trying to get distributed systems to learn a pay-off matrix that relies on the outputs of all the agents in the system, but with no communication between agents (the agent’s learning can only take into account the payoff that it receives from the system)
  • Challenged to find an obscure landing craft from WWII on the internet, finds not only the history of it and a picture, but a picture that includes the person who issued the challenge!


Afterwards, Durga and I gave Len a ride to the San Jose airport. Durga took this shot of him in my car
.

RDVP Class 1/10/2005

Greg's trip report: Development aid, good governance, and family ties


Monday’s class started off with a bunch of news, none of it good: a death in the family for one fellow, another down with pneumonia, and a tree from Stuart’s property had fallen in the storm, striking a neighbor’s house. On the plus side, Greg Wolff was back from his extended trip through Southeast Asia, and he gave a trip report. Though he had not been far from the Indian coast when the tsunami struck, he hadn’t even heard about it until late that evening, in contrast to his brother in the Midwestern US, who heard about it soon after it happened and had been trying to reach Greg. Greg talked about attending meetings of two different MFI’s in Bangladesh, and the worry that donor aid (both tsunami as well as traditional “big money” projects) would distort the local economy more than help it. He felt that the best approach was to connect local groups with each other and facilitate exchange with other groups, increasing the accountability, transparency, and responsiveness at the local level to build up trust. While Bangladesh is certainly poor in terms of dollars of GDP per capita, Greg warned against using solely that metric, pointing out that in other aspects (social relationships, etc) they were not poor at all. Greg favored a definition of poverty more as a deprivation of opportunity (not far off from Amartya Sen’s thesis in Development as Freedeom, I think.

Greg had asserted that the distinction between developed world and developing world was going away (from a communication and inter-relation impact point of view, I think) and that there were certainly communities of wealth even in the midst of “poor” countries, a view that Mans echoed from our time in the Dominican Republic. But when asked whether poverty should be viewed instead at the community level, Jose objected, saying that there are important examples of national poverty, such as the legal system of Venezuela. Greg agreed, and thought that clear title for land ownership was another “national” property, saying that more than one-half of all property in Bangladesh was involved in litigation, and that even the “winners” of the litigation came away poorer from the process. It was not an issue of laws, as good laws were on the books, but more a matter of execution, where local officials were not transparent or accountable. Yann agreed that a fair interpretation and execution of the law was something that you could not count on in many places of the world. Mans also commented that the extreme change you see with an administration change in some places (the Dominican Republic) exacerbates the patronage system and inexperience of officials. Greg argued that in order to build up local power and make the government responsible to the people, you need to minimize the distorting effect of power from the military, donors, and rich landowners. When these small groups account for too large a fraction of the dollars or power, the needs of the community are ignored in favor of the needs of the stakeholders that are providing the money.

Digression into efficiency of government services: Jose asked how many people we were killing just waiting in line? Greg said that kiosks were working for some government services in Hyderbaad, providing a more transparent interface with the government. He felt there was the need for a common platform that handled things like intermittent power and easy interfaces for semi-literate users, rather than having each project start from scratch.

Returning to the main thread of aid and money and government influence, Mans repeated a quote that he’d heard that 80% of all aid was worthless or worse. Farai said that with the continuous creation of new NGO’s and turnover of government officials, there was little continuity, or understanding among the NGO’s how to navigate the government. Even the government officials lacked the local context to help the NGO’s help the community. Greg mentioned that at his meeting with BRAC (MFI in Bangladesh), they’re addressing teaching women’s rights, providing legal aid, and practice rotation of loan officers and branch managers every three years (primarily for anti-fraud reasons). Greg waxed poetic about family values and the level of trust within families in the countries that he visited, but also pointed out that trust outside the family was practically non-existent. The result was that people tended to be very conservative, viewing a high cost of failure. Helen said that the previous family-orientation was starting to erode in China, leading to a higher level of economic activity. Greg and Durga mentioned that the importance of family could also be seen in the scale of the weddings that took 15 days and involved everybody—essentially a family reunion and business networking conference. Greg contrasted the social world of relationships (with the strength of collaborative authoring) with the commercial world of dollars (with its ability to allocate capital efficiently in conditions of scarcity), and wondered if there were some way that we could get the best of both. He felt that the social world was harder to “manage” since there wasn’t a currency with notions of transferability, divisibility, objective value, etc. But now more powerful IT systems allow record keeping that captures some of that nuance.



Helen recommended the an article on Social Capitalists in the January 2005 issue of Fast Company magazine (I was surprised to learn that my collaborators, Grameen Foundation USA, were featured as one of the Top 25. There’s even a somewhat garbled mention of the Mifos project: “Currently in the works: open-software technology to facilitate more efficient delivery of microcredit to banks.” They meant “open source” not “open software”, and it’s not really about delivering microcredit to banks, but to borrowers. Most MFI’s are not technically banks.).


Trust and Brand


There was further discussion of the tradeoff of trust and business efficiency, with Jose saying that the implicit level of trust (for consumers and businesses) was amazing: that (aside from cabbies, a problem everywhere) you could generally expect people to charge you a fair price, give you what they promised to do, and provide good service. Helen agreed, saying that it was the power of the brand, and when people cared about maintaining a brand, they generally dealt fairly. The competitive benefits of doing so meant that even US-based brands could succeed in China (like Starbucks) and that by entering the market, they raised the standards for all.

Politeness, fairness, and cooperation


Here we got into a bit more of a discussion on trust/politeness/fairness, with Amy commenting that one place in the US that she certainly did NOT see the level of cooperation was in driving. Citing the example of her recent trip to Tahoe, where merging to one lane caused a multi-hour backup because people were trying to eke out a small advantage rather than following orderly rules, making the overall system much less efficient, and slower even for those that “cheated”. Greg introduced an experiment called “The Trust Game” a two-stage two player game run on groups of men, women, and mix gender group in Portland (US), Tanzania, and Bangladesh.

Setup

Each player is given $100 (or equivalent local currency). They are told that they will be playing with (in one set of experiments) another person from their village or (second experiment set) from the poorest part of the country. They do not see or have a chance to talk with the partner.

First play: A gives to B

Player A chooses a portion of her initial allotment (between $0 and $100) to give to Player B. But along the way, the referee TRIPLES the amount. So if A chooses to give up $10, the referee gives B $30.

Second play: B gives to A

From the resulting money that B has, she chooses some amount to give to A. There is no way for the players to generate a binding promise, and as initially described, it is a one-shot (non-repeated) game.

Results

In general, player A gave 50% of their initial allocation to player B, and player B gave 50% of the (tripled) gift back to A. One significant difference though (and Greg noted that the sample sizes were small) was that Bangladeshi women gave a smaller amount (typically only 20-30%) when they were player A.


Saturday, January 08, 2005

RSS, Feedburner and My Yahoo!

I'd heard about RSS for a while now, and figured it was finally time to investigate a bit further. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to "announce" recent updates to your site (or blog) in a standardized, machine-readable way (XML). The blogging service that I use, http://www.blogger.com generates a competing format called Atom. Fortunately, Feedburner does an "enhancement" of that to enable both Atom and RSS (plus adding hit counting and some other interesting features). My Yahoo! lets you add RSS feeds by merely clicking on this link:
http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=feeds.feedburner.com/DigitalVIsionFellow-SteveKetchpel

Voila! I'm now a module in your My Yahoo! page. I was impressed with how easy the whole process was. I'll have to see if some of my favorite bloggers also publish their feeds...

Dan Gillmour: http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/index.rdf
(didn't know he'd left the SJ Mercury News!)

Ed Felten: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/index.rdf

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Teaching Microfinance the "JA" way

I had occasion today to think about how I would start teaching young people about Microfinance, and I thought a fun way to do it would be practical: in the same way that 13 year olds start a business in "Junior Achievement" in middle school, we could have a "JA in the Developing World".

The prototypical business is, of course, the lemonade stand. And in a tropical climate, a lemonade stand should do good business. So, to make things concrete, let's say that there's a street in China where you can set up your lemonade stand, and people will pay 2 Yuan per glass (about 25 cents). All it takes to make a pitcher of lemonade is 2 lemons (3 Yuan each) and 1 cup of sugar (another 3 Yuan). A pitcher has 10 glasses worth of lemonade. So, we run the numbers, and we see we have a profitable business: 9 yuan to make a pitcher of lemonade, and 20 yuan by selling it. Great! Let's get the signs and start making money.


Uhh.... Just one problem.... You only have 2 Yuan! Oh, and by the way, each of your 3 kids needs to eat 1 Yuan worth of food each day or starve.

Hmm... If this were the Silicon Valley, we could get a venture capitalist to invest in our lemonade stand business and buy a share of the company. But it's not. If there were other parts of the US, we could get a bank loan and repay it with our earnings. But it's not. So, it looks like one of your kids will starve today, and the other two will go tomorrow.

You know what? I'm going to do you a BIG favor. I happen to have extra lemons, and some sugar. I'll LOAN it to you, but you have to give it back in the form of lemonade ready for sale. You deserve something for your labor of making the lemonade, and I'm big-hearted and don't want to see your kids starve, so I'll give you 3 Yuan for the finished lemonade. Sure, I can turn around and sell it for 20 Yuan, which is not bad for me:


  • 9 Yuan raw materials
  • 3 Yuan of labor
  • 8 Yuan profit

So of the 11 Yuan of value that "we" created, I get 8 for contributing the capital, and you get 3 for contributing the labor (squeezing lemons for an hour is hard work!)


Hardly seems fair, does it? And yet, what are you going to do about it? Let your kids starve? So, I'll see you tomorrow, and if I'm feeling generous, I'll give you the same deal.


Pretty bleak, isn't it?

That is the situation faced by many entrepreneurs in the developing world.


Now, let's re-imagine the scene, but with microcredit.... You have the option of taking a 10 Yuan loan, which must be repaid, 6 Yuan per day, in each of 2 days. (Yes, that's a very steep interest rate, but you know what? You only have 2 Yuan to your name, and no collateral, so you're not a very good credit risk.)

Day 1:
You borrow 10 Yuan, add it to your 2 Yuan, and have 12. You buy the ingredients for lemonade (9 Yuan) bringing your total down to 3. You sell your pitcher of lemonade for 20 Yuan, now wealthy at 23. You feed your kids (3 Yuan), and repay the first payment of your loan (6 Yuan). You have 14 Yuan left at the end of Day 1.


Day 2:
You buy ingredients for another pitcher of lemonade (bringing you down to 5 Yuan). You sell it for 20 Yuan, so you now have 25. You can pay off the second installment of the loan (6 Yuan), feed your kids, and still have the princely sum of 16 Yuan, 14 more than you started with 2 days ago!


Day 3:
A nice pattern emerges: Your daily costs (9 Yuan for materials, 3 Yuan for food) are easily covered by your income (20 Yuan from lemonade sales), leaving you a profit of 8 Yuan per day. Until you suddenly realize, you could make TWO pitchers of lemonade. You only need to feed the kids once, so you make 11 Yuan profit on the second pitcher.... Hmm, maybe you CAN feed the kids a second time. Or think about paying the 2 Yuan daily tuition for school for the older one....




Hmm, not quite so bleak now, is it? That's the power of microcredit!



Wednesday, January 05, 2005

RDVP Seminar: Cynthia Typaldos (1/5/2004)

Cynthia Typaldos talked a bit about an idea that she has that's still in "stealth mode". In respecting her request to keep it confidential, I'll just refer you to a posting in her blog, describing SubscriptionPal, and note that her talk hit on many of the same themes.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

RDVP Class 1/3/2005: Trip Reports

The RDVP fellows re-grouped for the new year with a bit of a solemn start. Rather than focus on the reading (a chapter of Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-László Barabási, on the growth of the internet and the risks/vulnerabilities), we reported briefly on the project-related travel that we had done in the past month, and reflected on the contributions that the RDVP could make with respect to the tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Trip Reports

Durga Pandey

Durga was in India, and mentioned some successful programs, one that had taken 150,000 children aged 9 to 14, either dropouts or those that never enrolled, and gotten them into school. Part of the process was to place them in a special camp for 12-18 months, and that was often enough to get them close to an "age-appropriate" grade. Enrollment rate was 95%, but more impressive, the retention rate was also 95%. Initial opposition from government-paid teachers (who occasionally collect paychecks without showing up in the classroom) has turned around given the success of the program. Durga also mentioned a UNICEF project that started in 6 districts in the early 1990's, and has achieved some success and built up a lot of expertise. He thinks that replicating their findings and approaches into the other 16 districts would have a big impact; that will likely be the focus of what he does in 2005.
Stuart encouraged Durga to think about IT tools could be used to link people in communication. Also, look to the gaming community which has proven the abiility to create compelling environments where hundreds of thousands of virtual identities interact. Every successful IT project has some social aspect to it, he said.

Steve Ketchpel
I gave a brief report of my trip to the Dominican Republic, which I've described elsewhere in this blog.

Helen Wang
Helen spent two weeks in China, meeting with a host of interested parties, including China Mobile, venture capitalists, micro-entrepreneurs, Motorola. She learned a couple of important lessons for her project: 1) The pricing of communication services was higher than she realized (Only the value-add subscription price, not the air-time communication charge is revenue-shared by the mobile carrier to the service provider) 2) Microentrepreneurs will need significant training to help them with the marketing of their businesses, probably by face-to-face training. On the plus side, their seemed to be good support for a listing service that she described, with nearly all expressing interest at a price point in the $4/mo range, and some willing to pay $15/mo. Newspaper advertising (their primary existing outlet) is substantially more expensive. They do have cell phones, so could use an SMS-interface to posting. VC response was split by age: younger partners tried to fit into a for-profit model, and when Helen pushed back, were uninterested; older partners saw the social benefit and expressed willingness to support, with personal money rather than the firm's fund. She also thought that China Mobile might be interested in burnishing their public image with some socially responsible programs, since their viewed as making "too much" money, to the point that they've had offices set on fire. Describing the role of the Chinese government, she said that they were interested only if an idea from the US also brought money from the US. Therefore, Helen was investigating foundations like Skoll, BMW, and Goldman Sachs that promote international efforts.

Carlos Miranda Levy
Carlos talked about the Christmas web site that he'd created, attracting 6 million visitors with some 18 million banner views, though the e-commerce component (selling holiday ring tones) gneerated only $93 for his share of the revenue (195 downloads sold). The banner advertising did a little better, netting $2,600. He shared the numbers, he said, as a demonstration of just how hard it is to make money in a content provision business.
He also spoke about his investigations into some of the recent generation web tools out there: Moodle, Civic Space, Drupal and MediaWiki. He praised them as powerful tools that were very easy to setup. Indeed, he has since created a CivicSpace site at http://www.reliefpage.com to enable us to start a conversation about tsunami relief efforts.
In terms of his project, Carlos conducted some interviews of students at El Limon in the Dominican Republic, and was worried by the lack of dreams that he found among them. They were, he felt, going along rather than being proactive. He didn't see a belief that they could change things or even that thigns could be different. He was also somewhat pessimistic about the state of education among the adults, claiming that without the fundamentals in place, they really didn't have the basic tools to deal with complex concepts or teach.
Mans Olof-Ors
Mans also traveled to the Dominican Republic, sharing some of my experiences, but also attending a whole other set of meetings that Carlos had organized. Mans commented on the dichotomy between wealth and poverty, sometimes existing side by side in the DR. Some of the wealthier neighborhoods are comparable to Europe; indeed, grocery stores there are indistinguishable from their European counterparts in terms of their range of goods. He also saw more businesses per capita in the DR than anywhere else he'd been, but this was out of necessity: they couldn't find another job, so they figured they'd better find something to sell. He described a lack of continuity, pointing primarily to government projects, such as new roads that are abandoned when presidential administrations change, but saying that it also occured at the private level, with houses just going vacant. He feared that the chain of 136 telecenters that are the pet project of the new first lady will share the same fate when the administration changes. He also noted a lack of distinction between public and private sectors, specifically the Fundacion Global, a "Non" Governmental Organization that was founded by the current president (after he was voted out in 2000. When he was re-elected in 2004, he retained his seat as head of the NGO as well.) Government meetings occur within the foundation buildings, and many officials serve dual roles in the government and the foundation.
Specifically for his project, he thought that the DR might serve as a good pilot project for an information service for BOP producers. Inespera is tasked with national price stabilization and setting, but their efforts cover only about 2% of the market. He thought there was the opportunity to become an information provider covering weather, crops, and prices, and turn it into a commercially sustainable business. He pointed out that the DR is pretty well wired, including kiosks to handle betting, even in remote areas. Also, Mans visited both informal markets and formal (government-sponsored) markets. Although the formal markets were supposed to have better prices, and they were geographically close, there were more people at the informal market.

Jose Arocha
Suppressing a severe cough, Jose told us about his trip to Venezuela. He successfully completed his two goals:
  1. Clarifying the project vision with existing partners
  2. Lining up new partners (a student volunteer organization, an NGO fostering social entrepeneurship among high school students)
He also mentioned the challenge of community building in a violent barrio, with some 2M people. Although a tough neighborhood, there is civic participation and telecenters. He was hoping to setup a portal for the community that would enable the creation of virutal community through cell phones. He did a little work on clarifying his post-RDVP plans, an found very positive support.

Farai Chieza
Farai, a new fellow, arrived from Zimbabwe.