Reading the interview with Viktor Mayer-Schonberger from which the quotation below is taken, I was reminded of an exchange we had in Doha earlier this month, at ITU Telecom World. What do you have to say to those who are still unsure about ‘Big Data’? To them I say: The only way that you can be in power and not be ‘controlled’ by data is to first understand its power and then use it to your own advantage. Otherwise, you will always be at the receiving end in the balance of power between the ‘big guys’ who analyse data and the ‘every man’ who supplies data – whether consciously or inadvertently. The question was from Dr Shiv Bakhshi, now with Ericsson and whose association with me goes back to the 1990s.
Reliance on public-sector entities alone was identified as a critical weakness in India’s NOFN plans during the Expert Forum we organized in New Delhi in March 2014. The event had significant participation from senior Indian government officials. Did it, and other writings, make any contribution to the change in course described below? In a shift from its previous stance, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has now decided to rope in private sector for the ambitious National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) project. The moves comes since it sees roping in the private sector as the only way out to meet the new deadline of March 2016 set by the government, as against December 2016 earlier, to complete the R21,000-crore project.
This debate about access to data about railway delays in Britain has interesting implications in other fields such as electricity. She told me part of the problem is when public services are provided by the private sector; such firms claim that selling data is a revenue stream for them, and ask for public-funded subsidies to make it open. For example, the state-owned Ordnance Survey mapping company has made much of its data open, but takes a £10 million annual subsidy to do so, according to The Independent. “It’s particularly frustrating when organisations aren’t making much money from it,” Tennison added, noting that the costs of selling data—including lawyers for licensing and enforcing terms—often outstrip any revenue. Tennison hopes that’s not the case.
All the plans for advancing the lives of people in South Asian countries, including Internet access, are not likely to achieve fruition unless the electricity problems are solved. For this, one essential action is the the tapping of the abundant potential of the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Another is interconnection of the national grids of the South Asian countries. The Economist wrote about this, focusing on sub-continent, and leaving out Sri Lanka. A second reason, says Raghuveer Sharma of the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), was radical change that opened India’s domestic power market a decade ago.
I moderated a panel session on “Affordable International Backhaul” at ITU’s annual event in Doha on December 8, 2014. Success of a moderator solely depends on the panel members’ participation. I am truly indebted to all of them. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis, Dyn Research, pointed out, from a purely technical perspective, when it comes to creating an ICT hub, there is little difference whether a country is landlocked or on the coast. “It is wishful thinking to design developmental projects without the regulatory framework and basic best practices which enable investment in the sector, “ said Khaled Naguib Sedrak, CEO and Founder, NxtVn.
Based on writing and interviews done in June 2015 in the context of LIRNEasia’s events organized to mark the 10th anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 2004 http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Regional/2014/12/22/Contributing-to-global-knowledge/. The first multilingual trials of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) – a data format for exchanging public warnings and emergencies between alerting technologies – were carried out in Sri Lanka as part of the Hazard Information Project funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre.
Abstract: It is proposed that research-based interventions be undertaken in parallel on all major aspects of the Internet eco-system in Myanmar, namely infrastructure and services, users with skills, user interfaces and attractive content and applications. It is contended that with this novel “allfronts” approach has the potential to accelerate Myanmar’s progress from one of the least connected countries to an inclusive information society. The work will be undertaken in partnership with Myan ICT for Development Organization (MIDO), with the intention of mentoring the members of MIDO to reach their potential as policy intellectuals and future leaders and to strengthen the organization. The proposed work includes quantitative and qualitative studies that build on the baseline nationwide survey and qualitative studies. This research will be utilized in policy interventions and in the development innovation briefs for the development of apps and content useful for “those unlike app developers.
Except for the hearing and speech disabled, voice telephony is a relatively simply technology to use. The Internet is different. We’ve been thinking for some time about how we can improve our understanding of persons with the skills needed to make good use of the potential of the Internet. It’s in this context that I read the summary results of the 2011-12 Sri Lanka Census: Literate population : Final census data indicates that out of the population aged 10 years or more at the time of Census, 16,142,267 (95.7%) of Sri Lankans are literate.
Lokanathan, S.
Over the past weeks, Sriganesh Lokanathan and I made multiple presentations on the above subject to potential funders and data donors in multiple countries, using the slideset given here. In an ideal world, we would be using our energy making presentations to those could make better informed policy decisions as a result (we have done such presentations and plan to do more in January 2015), but these efforts are also necessary. Without data and without money, this kind of public-interest research cannot be continued.
I was in Thimphu, speaking to more than half of the small regulatory agency’s professional staff. I’ve been engaged with BICMA since its inception in 2001 and I routinely volunteer to do something with the staff when I visit. This time, I offered to talk about systematic reviews, centered on one that we completed recently on the economic benefits of mobiles in rural areasbust re Bhutan had spent 80 percent of its universal-service funds on rural rollout and BICMA was interested in demonstrating to government what impacts the rollout had achieved. I guess the most effective in terms of persuading politicians would a new study that specifically looks at the results in Bhutan. But given the nature of this Himalayan country, around 800,000 people distributed across a series of valleys that are separated by mountain ranges, this would be a costly exercise.
We have discussed the involvement of military and lack of connectivity in Cuba’s prehistoric telecoms sector. This week’s rendezvous of Havana and Washington is expected to make the difference. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, strongly suggests that Myanmar should be the role model for Cuba’s telecoms reform. If the Cuban government is truly committed to opening up greater access to the Internet for the Cuban people, its decision makers should carefully review the case study of Myanmar over the past three years. Like Cuba, Myanmar was considered one the last green fields of telecom – countries with virtually no telecommunications infrastructure.
I was asked to participate in panel that posited a series of questionable propositions as its starting point. “Regulation was becoming less relevant; ITU had done a good job building regulatory capacity; now it needed to find new things to do” is a rough paraphrase. We have now fully emerged from an environment where service and carriage were tightly related, and where regulation was self-contained within a single organisation. New dimensions today include some where the ITU is a participating entity in a broader formal regulatory canvass, and some where facilitation relies on multi-stakeholder freewheeling market forces such as are associated with the Internet. This represents a challenging cultural change for the ITU to establish its active participating role.
An unexpectedly detailed description of our big data session was included in the Day 3 highlights: Big data is usually in the headlines for the wrong reasons – surveillance, exploitation of personal data for commercial or governmental ends, intrusion of privacy – but can also serve a valid and immensely exciting social purpose for development. Kicking off a fascinating, packed and highly-interactive session, moderator Rohan Samarajiva, Founding Chair and CEO, LIRNEasia, set out this contradiction in perception of big data as a “competition of imaginations” between hype and pessimism, reminding us that big data is “of interest to all of us, as we are the creators of this data, the originators of this data”. Our mobile telephones, and by extension we ourselves, are permanently in communication with the nearest towers, sending out details of our whereabouts and activities in an ever-growing, highly personal call record. This session aimed to “talk not about the imagination, but about what has been done”, exploring current and future trends in the use of big data for development.
Much of what is discussed as “big data” does not include the poor, because smartphone penetration is still low, social media are not used by all classes and datafied records are rare in developing countries. Therefore, the session focused on research that has been/is being done on pseudonymized mobile network big data in developing countries. Instead the usual “battle of imaginations” which posits the optimistic scenarios that tend toward hype against the pessimistic scenarios that imagine all sorts of bad things that could happen, we began with reality. What had been actually done on the ground in countries as different as Namibia, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka were presented by data scientists who knew the ins and outs of data cleaning, pseudonymization, and what software needs to be used to analyze petabytes of data at a time. The active audience raised a range of questions.
So I have been invited to participate in the panel moderated by Tim Unwin that is described below. I did not use the session title, “balancing participation and facilitation” because that does not seem to correctly reflect the language in the descriptive paragraph below. We have now fully emerged from an environment where service and carriage were tightly related, and where regulation was self-contained within a single organisation. New dimensions today include some where the ITU is a participating entity in a broader formal regulatory canvass, and some where facilitation relies on multi-stakeholder freewheeling market forces such as are associated with the Internet. This represents a challenging cultural change for the ITU to establish its active participating role.