When it comes to international development, the road to IT hell is paved with good intentions. Steve Howard of AMD mentioned a village he visited in Uganda that had been given an uplink dish for an internet connection: the kind donors had never told the locals they had to reposition it if it ever got knocked out of alignment. So when he visited, it was pointing uselessly at the ground.
He thinks the problem is that developers don’t think about everything that surrounds their machine in the field. He calls this the ecosystem approach. This means ensuring energy reliability, proper finance, and proper support and training. He noted the One Laptop Per Child project, where it’s not just a machine, but an integrated project: and, he added, it cannot and should not be the sole solution to getting helpful tech into developing nations.
And don’t forget means what limited equipment is in the field when you start writing code. “We’re talking about Web2.0 ” he said. “Emphasis needs to be put on Web.02.”
This article appears in March 7 • 2008.
