RDVP Seminar: Henry Lowood (4/20/2005)

Henry Lowood came to speak about computer games, of the Serious Games variety. Stuart invited him hoping that by using the interactivity and playful attributes that cause people to spend hours with regular games, we could create powerful tools to help end users engage with our project material. We learned a bit about the debate of "narratology vs. ludology" (are games about telling stories or just about playing?) and the challenge between the pedagogical aspect of creating a simulation versus playing one. I was also surprised to learn how widespread game playing is--in Korea there's a virtual world game that counts some 4M subscribers (out of a population of 45M). And of course, some of the "lurid details" of the gaming world came up: the sad popularity of violent games like Grand Theft Auto and the lack of games that focus on growth and development rather than conflict. Henry did talk about some games like September 12th, where the nominal goal is to shoot cruise missles at terrorists, but killing civilians by mistake generates more terrorists. The game is "rigged" to make it impossible to win--a statement that Lowood compared to a political cartoon. The author of "Kaboom" (suicide bomber simulation) claimed not to have a political agenda. "There's nothing political in my game. It's just about someone blowing himself up."

Perhaps a bit more relevant to the RDVP focus of the developing world was the real world sweatshops where low-paid workers are taught simple "farming" techniques in the virtual world to accumulate points that can be converted into weapons, etc, and sold (for real dollars) on eBay (See for example, their market in Ultima Online goods). Upset by the manipulation of the game, a set of vigilantes has sprung up, trying to eliminate these farmers by drawing monsters to where the farmers do their work. Untrained in defense, the farmers are killed. So now, the virtual sweatshop managers are training their workers in virtual self-defense, too. Sigh.

Henry shared in my nostalgia for turn-based model/data simulation games, but said that they have been in decline, out of favor after the advance of the "Quake" model of "experiential" (also called first-person shooter) games. Even real-time strategy games are becoming action/click-oriented, he said.

RDVP Seminar: Hong Lu, UTStar (4/13/2005)

Hong Lu, the CEO of UTStar, (and a member of Time Magazine's Cyber Elite) came to speak about expansion of telecom services in China, the technology, and the impact. The PAS system allows "traditional" (copper/wired) telecom providers to provide mobile service in a metro region. The service goes for $5-6/mo in China, compared to $6-8/month for Unicom, and $10-12/mo for China Telecom. A 1 minute phone call is less than a penny (I just got charged $.45/"over plan minute"...). There are about 66M PAS subscribers in China, with UTStar controlling about 60% of that market.
Hong talked about a series of predictions they had made that had come true, and seem like ground truth today, though were speculative at the time they were made:

1. All copper / narrow band will become fiber
   
2. Communication will move from circuit-based to packet-based
   

He talked about some of the developments in the telecom market, specifically comparing it to the US market:

	China	US
Fixed	300M	250M
Wireless	330M (+9M/mo)	170M

In 1995, it cost $3,000 to register for a cell phone in China, the purchase price for the phone itself was another $3,000. At that time, the monthly salary for an engineer was about $50.

Today, that same engineer makes several thousand per month (GDP in Shanghai is $6,000/capita, with talented, experienced managers breaking into 6-figure salaries). The 1,000 parking spaces they planned for their 5,000 employees are going quickly, and the black market is discounting the official exchange rate for the US dollar. Internet usage has grown from 620,000 in 1997 to 94M last year, and Hangzhou is starting a campaign to have fiber to every home within a year.

Hong also talked about the possible expansion to data-carrying service. Currently only about 5% of the revenue in China is related to data, compared to 20% in Japan. Although some technical details remain to be worked out, he suspected that TD CDMA could support 1-2 Mbps, charging $100/mo and being very profitable for both the mobile and wire carrier, in contrast to the $100/mo that is currently charged for DIALUP in some markets.

He also had some interesting charts comparing teledensity (ratio of fixed and cell lines to population) to the GDP, showing a correlation. Stuart asked whether he meant to imply causation as well as correlation, and Hong said yes. Although it was not perfect, it did seem to bear up. US and Canada had about 62% (must have been for fixed line only) while China had about 50%.

RDVP Seminar: Prof. VK Samaranayake RDVP fellow from Sri Lanka (3/30/2005)

Prof. VK Samaranayake, or "Sam" to nearly everyone, joined the Reuters Digital Vision Program as a visiting fellow for about 3 weeks. He was supposed to join earlier in the year, but his plans were thrown into disarray by the tsunami that struck on the 26th of December.

Sam gave a background on Sri Lanka, a nation I knew basically nothing about. It has 19 million people, and has previously been a Portugese, Dutch, and British colony. There are about 1M fixed phone lines, with cell subscriptions easily outpacing the number (with about 1.8M, and growing much faster). There are about 2.3M televisions, but only 240K internet users. Email usage is below 1%, and only about 3.8% of the households have computers. The IT workforce in 2005 is about 25,000 people.

Sam himself has an impressive background. He has a Ph.D. in particle physics, and essentially started the study of computer science in Sri Lanka. He's the chairman of the new ICT Agency, a private corporation that's owned by the government (structured this way at the request of the World Bank(?)). The School of Computing has grown to 50 staff members, 1,000 students and 5,000 "external" students who study on their own, and complete exams toward a certificate.

Digital Diaspora Collaboration

Sam's project is focused on bringing research-level expertise to Sri Lanka, though he recognizes that given the salary they could expect ($450/mo for a Senior Professor) few will make the move to Sri Lanka. Therefore, he's focused on leveraging info tech to enable virtual collaboration. He mentioned that he's continued to present a weekly radio program via skype and cell phone while he's at Stanford, and thinks that similar techniques for tele-conference for lectures could enable the diaspora of Sri Lankans around the world to contribute by spending just a few hours a week, or remotely mentoring students. The e-Sri Lanka project (supported to the tune of $53M by the World Bank) is to increase penetration and usage of information technology.

The Tsunami

Sam mentioned a couple of the realities of being "on the ground" at the site of the disaster. He said the harbor is still clogged with in-kind gifts from around the world, many unused and unusable. Though he was appreciative of the outpouring of support that came from around the world following the tsunami, he wished that the support would be sustained. Only with ongoing injections of expertise and funding will Sri Lanka be able to reach higher levels of development. He mentioned that the focus on measurements was impractical: there were too many redundant efforts, and things were changing too quickly to be able to make any useful actions based off the analysis of the data. He mentioned one project Sahana, an open source effort for disaster management (tracking resources, missing persons, matching supplies and needs, etc).

RDVP Seminar: Zack Rosen, Civic Spaces (3/9/2005)

A lingering event from before spring break that I didn't yet post notes for... On March 9th, Zack Rosen from Civic Space came to speak about this content management system for community organization. Zack talked a bit about his background (interest in technology and society pursuing a degree at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), as well as his experience in working on the Howard Dean political campaign. He was proud of what he called the innovation of the Dean campaign: opening the doors to anyone. But although the "Meetup" system brought Dean supporters together, it didn't provide the direction needed to have an impact on the election. The role of the campaign was not to direct a master plan, but to facilitate the grass roots discussions and plans.

Zack started with the "Hack for Dean" effort, focused on open source grass roots organizing tools. Starting with Drupal, and expanding it to a network of communities that could talk to each other. Zack cited Reed's law: The number of (potential) groups within a network grows exponential with the number of members of the network. So their focus became to form, build, network groups, share content, profiles and events across sites. By doing that, Dean was able to raise $15M in one fundraising cycle, compared to Clinton, who, as an incumbent, had raised $10M.

With the end of the Dean campaign, they attracted funding from Andy Rappaport and are now an independent non-profit organization with 6 full time people. They're refining their business plan ("a community organiaing platform that works with others to service verticals (like schools, churches, civic organizations) and sells services to vendors"). In March, there were 150 organizations using it. Now there are 187 (see current list of known sites).

In spite of the failure in the ballot box, Zack felt the Meetup idea was a success: it went against the mores of the time separating the virtual world from the real one. Zack saw it as one of the signs of increased political power of the online world, and pointed to South Korea's Oh My News (English Version) where users submit the content, and it is selected for inclusion by an editor. It is, he said, the news medium with the broadest reach in South Korea, and its political endorsements helped candidates win the presidency and congressial elections. Zack mentioned the project that Dan Gillmor is starting in the area of citizen journalism.

Mans, acting partially with his Reuters' hat on, warned against the danger when people start debating facts, rather than keeping an objective reporting, and confining advocacy views to an editorial page. Zack responded: "We're already there. They lied and they won."

And so as not to end on that grim note, Zack pointed out that there was a large market for these services: some $100M annually, currently being fulfilled by companies like GetActive and Kintera.

Emerging from Hibernation

I can't let a month go by with no posts without some explanation. Some of the silence was semi-intentional: Stanford had a couple of weeks of down time for the program (winter quarter final exams and spring break). Then the first few sessions of our classes and seminar upon the start of the spring quarter were more internally focused: looking at what we hoped the program would accomplish in our final quarter. As such, it was more for the fellows, and less of interest to outsiders who might be reading the blog. I may sprinkle a few comments in some of the related posts, but for the most part, I'll skip this.

A quick project update as well: after a gruelling RFP (Request for Proposals) process to evaluate different potential partners to build version 1.0 of Mifos, we're very close to reaching an agreement. We benefitted from recommendations from a number of contacts, and evaluated the different candidates based upon their responses: the technical merit, how well they understood what we were asking, how well we felt they would work with us, the quality of product they would produce, the timeliness of their efforts, references of people who had worked with them, and, of course, the cost. It was a great opportunity to hear from outsourcing companies as well as US-based companies that had chosen to outsource work. My assessment is that running a project with a remote team adds a number of challenges around communication, expectations, skills, schedules, and people. There is a potential cost advantage over US-based development teams, but finding the right group and making the project a success is no less challenging than hiring a local team--and probably riskier.

It is, I believe, the right decision for Mifos: by engaging a team, we'll likely have a more coherent view of the global system than we would if it were pieced together by many volunteers working part time. It will probably be faster. We will probably have more dedicated QA resources. And given our expected partner is in India, they will probably have greater access to MFI's than a US-based team.