Starting with a comparison between 40 year old TPRC, 25+ EuroCPR and 7 year old CPRsouth, I presented data from CPRsouth developed by the Human Capital Research team headed by Sujata Gamage to an engaged audience (they had to be, given it was the last session on the last day of the conference). The majority of the discussion focused on my claim that we did not focus on face-to-face interactions between scholars, government people and industry representatives, given we were a multi-country network lacking a geographical focus like Washington DC and Brussels. The presentation is here.
CPRsouth seeks to encourage evidence-based interventions by members. It was a happy coincidence that an op-ed by a paper-giver at CPRsouth7 appeared in print while she was at the conference in Mauritius. She had written it up based on the paper delivered there: The diagram shows the percentage increase from 2009 to 2010 in the number of Facebook users among the top five countries on Facebook and the largest increase was recorded in Indonesia (793 percent). Using web analytics, it was found that Facebook was a popular upstream site that online users visited prior to their visit to official government websites. Over 70 percent of Facebook users in Indonesia access the social media site through their mobile phones (Facebook, 2011).
LIRNEasia is the administrative partner of CPRsouth, an entity that seeks to build ICT policy intellectuals in the South. As with most of the administrative activities we undertake, we treat CPRsouth as a research project too. The heavy lifting is done by LIRNEasia’s Human Capital Research Program headed by Sujata Gamage. The slideset that was prepared based on her research and presented to the Board at its meeting on September 7, 2012 showed that for an inter-disciplinary group, CPRsouth was making rapid progress in the transition to a real network. One of the most important slides showed that the average ages of paper-presenters and young scholars were 34 years and 29 years respectively.
The pre-conference tutorials for the 7th of the CPRsouth conferences just started, here in Port Louis, Mauritius. I am teaching a unit tomorrow on research-to-policy. The slides are here. It is not easy for a capacity-building enterprise such as CPRsouth to provide evidence of efficacy in terms of taking research to policy. By definition, capacity building is a long game involving relatively young people (the average age of paper presenters is 34 years; of young scholars is 29).
CPRsouth is LIRNEasia’s principal capacity building vehicle. It has, from the beginning, been shaped by research on networks. It is also an object of research for the Human Capital Research Program at LIRNEasia. We were therefore pleased that a research paper looking at the metrics of CPRsouth performance was accepted at the 40th anniversary conference of TPRC, September 21-23, 2012 at the George Mason School of Law, just outside Washington DC. Link to paper.
Yesterday, I was pleased to have the opportunity to share our thinking on measuring the efficacy of our research and capacity-building work with colleagues from RMIT, Swinburne and ACMA at a seminar organized at RMIT. It was intriguing to hear that some of the participants thought that Bangladesh gave more room for genuine policy inputs from those outside government than Australia. I know first hand the limitations of the policy process in what I like to call my countries, but they do not. Did not get much help in solving the puzzle of measuring the efficacy of CPRsouth. Here the surprise was that Australia seemed to lack a forum such as CPRsouth for two way interactions between policy people and scholars.
We learned to our great sorrow that Haymar Win Tun passed away. Our condolences go to her family and many friends, among who are many from LIRNEasia and CPRsouth. She was at LIRNEasia only for a short time and attended only one CPRsouth conference, but the bonds that were forged were deep and strong. It is a tragedy when a young person dies; it is an even greater tragedy when a person of great potential dies. Haymar was a person of great potential.
An unexpected benefit of our visit to Islamabad was learning that a new academic publication had been launched in December 2011 by the Bangladesh Institute for ICT in Development and the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. The working papers are listed below: * Bottom of the Pyramid Expenditure Patterns on Mobile Phone Services in Selected Emerging Asian Countries by Aileen Agüero and Harsha de Silva * Mobile banking: Overview of Regulatory Framework in Emerging Markets by Rasheda Sultana * Factors Affecting e-Government Assimilation in Developing Countries by Boni Pudjianto and Zo Hangjung * Inclusive Development through e-Governance: Political Economy of e-Government Projects in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala in India by Rajendra Kumar * New Media, Knowledge Acquisition and Participatory Governance in Rural Bangladesh by Jude William Genilo and Marium Akther * e-Krishok: A Campaign to Promote Agricultural Information and Services through ICT by Shahid Uddin Akbar, Parvez Mohd. Asheque, Shariful Islam Four out of six of the papers came from LIRNEasia/CPRsouth. The first is authored by Aileen Aguero (of DIRSI, worked up during her time at LIRNEasia) and Consultant Lead Economist Harsha de Silva. The second, third and fourth papers are from CPRsouth4.
When I was running a graduate program at Ohio State University in another life, we had a joke among the faculty about the convoluted ways in which we described the incoming group of graduate students. The temptation was to say this was the best incoming class ever, but then we’d get grumpy looks and protests from the previous classes. So we’d try all kinds of legerdemain to describe the incoming class, without offending the previous ones. I have a similar problem with the 30 young scholars from 13 countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Taiwan ROC, Thailand) taking part in the tutorials. This is a bright bunch.
CPRsouth, LIRNEasia’s primary vehicle for capacity building, places great weight on the practice of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” also known as conducting literature reviews, and referring to previous work through citations. Is this an importation of an alien Western practice? Is there an alternative? Our objectives and those of Wikipedia are not the same. Still, it may be interesting to see if there is anything to be learned from the Wikimania debate.
Last week, representatives of all the entities engaged in advancing research on communication policy and regulation met in Sevilla, Spain, at the invitation of Euro CPR, as part of the annual Euro CPR conference. This was a follow up to the initiative taken by CPRsouth in December 2008 in Beijing, when it invited representatives of its peer organizations, TPRC in the US and Euro CPR, for a public discussion. For the Sevilla meeting, in addition to CPRsouth (represented by Rohan Samarajiva), ACORN-Redecom (represented by Raul Katz) and the inchoate CPR africa (represented by Alison Gillwald) were invited separately, signifying rapid growth in the South in the past few months. Of course, both Alison and a representative of DIRSI, which is a key constituent of ACORN-Redecom, were present in Beijing as well. Each of the representatives shared their views on how they set about their missions.
LIRNEasia is organizing its fourth CPRsouth conference, in Negombo, Sri Lanka from 7-8 December 2009. Themed ‘Speaking Truth to Power’, the conference aims to provide a forum for senior, junior and mid-career scholars to meet face-to-face and exchange ideas, establish networking opportunities and improve the quality of their scholarly work, in order to facilitate the long-term objective of fostering the next generation of active scholars and in-situ experts capable of contributing to ICT policy and regulatory reform in the region. Please check the Call for Abstracts and Call for Young Scholar Applications to see how you may participate at this event. Visit the CPRsouth4 conference page for more information. Please mail info[at]cprsouth[dot]org for any queries.
LIRNEasia , in association with the School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication (BUPT) , is organizing the third CPRsouth conference, in Beijing, China from December 5-7, 2008. The conference aims to provide a forum for senior, junior and mid-career scholars to meet face-to-face and exchange ideas, establish networking opportunities and improve the quality of their scholarly work, in order to facilitate the long-term objective of fostering the next generation of active scholars and in-situ experts capable of contributing to ICT policy and regulatory reform in the region. To see how you may participate in this event and join an emerging community of scholars committed to improving the lives of people in Asia through information and communication technology, visit the CPRsouth 3 conference page . Please note that the deadline for Young Scholar Applications has been extended to Friday, June 6, 2008.