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.