Dear John,
I've done a bit of tidying up, mostly to reflect our position as a group of
the BCS, i.e. a UK based organisation. Plus I added a bit of policy in (my)
fourth para. "targeted initialli at the Highly Indebted Poor Countries".
I don't know about the White Paper or dotforce. Will catch up with stuff
over the summer. I'm retiring :-))
Barbara
At 06:09 PM 3/5/01 +0000, John Lindsay wrote:
>last year the bcs technical board asked specialist groups to draft
>about two sides of A4 on the state of play of the terrain of the
>group.. not just a report on activities. I drafted what follows,
>though now can't remember whether I posted it to the list or not...
>but wonder whether it can still stand, or whether it needs any
>reworking ? Do let me have comments. Suspect it at least needs to be
>brought up to include the white paper and the dotforce stuff.
>
>Developing countries
>
>Almost one of the first specialist groups to be formed was that
>concerned with the use of computers in developing countries. It isn't
>just that machines behave differently in hot places, but that the
>whole range of political, economic and social framework as well as the
>technologies are different from what practitioners in the west are
>accustomed to.
>
>But even in this there is a level of exploitation: people in third
>world countries are having machines thrust upon them and are having to
>adjust to a rate of change which has been much more gradual in the
>west, giving people more time to acclimatise.
>
>The business processes on which information systems have been grafted
>have developed in the west over a long period of time and even now
>there is nothing like a standard across cultures. The different
>national traditions which colonialism forced on conquered countries
>(or even making up the countries in the first place) have meant that
>people are having to live with interventions in their daily lives
>which are completely foreign.
>
>The speed of uptake of electronic commerce has the potential to quite
>fundamentally change the access to markets and market mechanisms for
>people in the third world. The development of solar power panels
>quite fundamentally changes the production and economics of electrical
>power. The development of hand held connectionless oriented
>communication and processing devices (usually called personal data
>assistants, pdas) with line of site, infra-red, satellite based, and
>fibre based communications all change the provision of and economics
>of telecommunications networks both locally and globally. All these
>provide a potential to make a real difference to the delivery of the
>basic services of clean, healthy life.
>
>The forces of the market have no interest in providing services to
>those who can't get to the starting point of making them pay. The
>campaign for reduction in third world debt needs a parallel in the
>provision of software, telecommunications, data which exists already
>and for which no revenue can be generated by people who have no
>capacity to pay.
>
>With a small number of exceptions, most people are born with or soon
>learn the capacity to see, hear and speak. A much smaller proportion
>of the world's population learn to read, write and count. Yet without
>those functional literacies they are prevented from playing a full and
>active part in the world. It is a matter of social policy to achieve
>a full access to literacy for the whole world's population. But the
>introduction of computer based information and communications
>technologies a new set of skills are needed to comprehend the
>virtualisation and abstraction which follows and those who do not have
>those skills will find that their capacity to function will
>deteriorate. The price your labour power can commond will fall, you
>will not be able to bring a good to the market at a price the market
>will tolerate. This has happened before, sheep, steam mills, canals,
>and each time the consequences were disasterous for the losers. The
>consequence of the disaster is Kosovo and Ziare.
>
>If we can build the technologies we must also be able to build the
>societies and information systems engineering is responsible for
>making it possible to run clean water supplies, collect rubbish, run
>hospitals in developing countries as well as in the west.
>
>There is no point in simply reciting the rhetoric of the market. The
>market has singularly failed to satisfy the most basic needs of the
>majority of the world's population because they cannot afford to bring
>to is something which it wants. Equally there is no point in saying
>that the state must provide for all the evidence is that states
>cannot.
Dr. Barbara Farbey
Senior Research Fellow
Department of Computer Science tel: 44 (0)20 7679 3672
University College London fax: 44 (0)20 7387 1397
Gower Street [log in to unmask]
London WC1 E 6BT http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/b.farbey/
UK
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