LIRNEasia in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) convened a two-day workshop to discuss a ‘research and policy agenda on big data for sustainable development in the Global South.’ The workshop held in Madrid on the 8th and 9th of October 2016, was a side event of the International Open Data Conference 2016. The objective of the workshop was to brainstorm ways of establishing Southern-led network to tackle some of the emerging opportunities and challenges in the use of big data in developing countries. The workshop explored a variety of issues around leveraging big data to tackle sustainable development. These include issues around representativity and marginalization, researching harms (competition, privacy, surveillance), researching solutions (legislation, regulation, ethics), and addressing challenges in relation to developing research capacity, accessing data and influencing policy.
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.
At LIRNEasia, we’ve been getting more and more interested in cities, for various reasons. Now it looks like Ericsson has given us an interesting new way of thinking about cities and ICTs: a new Index. Assessing the effects and benefits of ICT maturity within a city framework brings several opportunities. Firstly, cities represent a more universally comparable context than the more commonly used nation- based frameworks. Comparing London and Shanghai makes more sense than comparing the UK and China.
Writing a piece on the technological challenges that had to be overcome to increase connectivity in the 49 least developed countries (LDCs) recently, I was struck by how many words I devoted to electricity, both on the need for keeping down the costs of network equipment and for powering handsets. In the old days, we assumed that the footprint of the electricity network was larger than that of the telecom network; now it is the other way around. What is interesting is that the trigger for getting the USD 80 solar generator in the story below was the phone: For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market. Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid. Every week, Ms.
CHAKULA is a newsletter produced by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Named after the Swahili word for ‘food’, it aims to mobilise African civil society around ICT policy for sustainable development and social justice issues. The latest issue features an e-interview with LIRNEasia’s CEO Rohan Samarajiva, but it is not the only reason why we thought of highlighting the issue. The content is interesting and very readable. We publish two e-interviews from July 2010 issue here fully, as they are not available on public domain.