NYTimes - Can the cellphone help end global poverty

Check out the NY Times coverage on cell phones and poverty!

Get My Vote

NPR recently launched a site called Get My Vote, which is an online discussion that seeks to get at the heart of what people want from their politicians this election. Its an interesting case of using ICT for democratic participation. Although it is not designed to be read by policy makers, it is monitored by NPR and commentaries will be used by NPR to understand how the public sees the issues in the election and contributors to the website may be asked to appear on air.  So it perhaps it will help media better serve public interests and give the public greater opportunity in setting the news agenda, which can ultimately affect political discourse.

Municipal Wifi

Hi guys - I wrote this post 2 weeks ago, but it never got posted, so I thought it has been deleted, but I just found the draft was saved, so I am posting it now. Sorry, I’m new to blogs!

A few weeks ago, Francois posted about the webcast on the future of municipal wifi in the US. I wanted to raise this topic again since todays conversation was so relevant to this issue. Since I am from Philadelphia, I have been reading about the issue as it unfolds there.

Philadelphia’s municipal wifi efforts were launched as a way to close the digital divide between the rich and poor in the city - highlighting once again that the digital divide is not just an issue in LDCs and that indeed “development” issues exist here at home as well. This article nicely outlines the digital inequality in the city and planners’ hopes that the wifi initiative would address it.

The wi-fi initiative in Philadelphia, which involved public-private partnernships between the city and Earthlink, is an interesting example of one potential approach to achieving universal access at the municipal level. However, both in Philadelphia as well as in other cities, such initiatives have faced many obstacles, and Earthlink has pulled out in some areas - higlighting the difficulties involved in getting corporations on-board in servicing low-income markets. This NPR story is a nice overview of the issue, and this article covers some of the difficulties facing Philadelphia.

For a broader discussion on the issue, Robert McChesney’s article Let There Be Wifi: BRoadband is the electricity of the 21 century — and much of America is being left in the dark does a nice job of describing how South Korea and Japan are leaving America in the dust in terms of providing universal broadband access.

While not directly dealing with developing countries, clearly this debate raises many of the questions we talked abotu today : who is best able to develop infrastructure for the public good (governments? private sector?) and how can we ensure equal access to these services?

Legislation 2.0

Our discussion of the use of ICTs to promote participation in the creation of government policies reminded me of the work done  by another PhD student in my cohort this past summer. While working with Senator Dick Durbin, he managed to start a partnership between the senator’s office and the progressive blog OpenLeft.com to open avenues for public participation in the drafting of a new broadband legislation.

Check out this article from PC world for the details.
http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,135194/printable.html#

Senator Durbin joined the online discussion - fielding questions about media consolidation, net neutrality, etc.and posting YouTube videos along with his blog entries - and said he would use the ideas from the blog (as well as from the conservative blog RedState) in crafting his legislation.

The co-founder of OpenLeft is quoted in the PC World article: “The online legislation-writing effort isn’t designed to eliminate lobbyists… but to give other people voices into the process as well. OpenLeft plans to host more legislations-writting discussions”

This is a great example of how ICTs can be used to bring the legislation-writing process into the public. As Durbin wrote in his blog post,  this marked  ” a unique experiment in transparent government and an opportunity to demonstrate the democratic power of the internet”. But it also raises some questions that we touched on in class as to whether this form of participation really gives the public power in the process: will the thoughts of the public actually be incorporated in his draft legislation? With so many diverse opinions being gathered through this process, does the process just become a way for politicians to justify whatever decisions suit their own ends? Does this really promote greater accountability to the public? Durbin’s draft legislation is not out yet, so it is hard to tell, but according to the student who worked on this, it was effective in educating Durbin’s staff about public opinion, so in that sense, it was a success.

Initial post: http://openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=70E645990165E9DDB362EF4867D422A5?diaryId=363

http://openleft.com/tag.do?tag=legislation+2.0 has all the posts related to this project.