IP: World Bank conference report: Global Knowledge 97

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Tue, 05 Aug 1997 03:46:54 -0800
From: Steve Cisler <sac () gala apple com>
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.


While some of you were at INET 97 in Malaysia, I was attending a
conference on Global Knowledge in Toronto.  Here is my report.
Other conference reports may be found on my home page:


http://www.research.apple.com/people/cisler/home_page.html


Steve Cisler
Advanced Technology Group
Apple Computer Inc
sac () apple com



---
Global Knowledge '97 Conference


Toronto, Canada June 1997


Report by Steve Cisler, Apple Technology Group, sac () apple com. This
report may not be archived, mirrored, stored, or republished on any
commercial server or service without the permission of the author




In March 1997, a posting appeared on various Usenet groups about a
conference to be held in Toronto during the summer. Sponsored by the
World Bank and other international agencies, Global Knowledge 97 (Le
Savoir Mondial 97) solicited possible presentations and ideas from the
Net public. They must have been inundated because they never responded
to my proposals, but through the Benton Foundation (one of the U.S.
sponsors) I received an invitation to be part of the American delegation
and the $750 registration fee was waived.


It was de rigeur to have a web site and listserv as adjuncts to this
conference. Rapidly the listserv exploded into many themes, some
critical of the World Bank and western development, and others on the
male-dominated program that seemed to be emerging. Few details about the
conference were available until just weeks before the event, so most of
the discussion was speculative. Many of the participants on the
discussion group had neither the means nor were they invited to attend
the Toronto gathering, but they contributed a steady stream of accounts,
theories, web pointers, and metaphysical questions about the nature of
development, of the quest to preserve and use local knowledge as well as
global information and ideas. The moderators did an excellent job in
running the list and especially in posting weekly summaries, but there
seemed to be very little input from those involved in planning the
events, except for a few panel moderators.


Personally, the most rewarding exchanges were between people from rural,
less industrialized areas who may have felt a bit less isolated, having
shared their stories with subscribers in Europe, North America, as well
as Cameroon, Botswana, Argentina, Philippines, and Mexico. The size of
the mailing list grew into the thousands, and the traffic increased to a
point where several hundred postings a day were submitted to the
moderators. Some of those on the list were able to meet in ad hoc
sessions in Toronto and at meal times. Because we had conversed online,
we were able to start up our face-to-face meetings with few
self-introductions.


I had spent the week before the conference visiting rural community
projects in Ohio and West Virginia, talking with extraordinary people,
some of whom specifically rejected modern information technology but
were still having a strong beneficial influence in their local
communities. I detected a strong ambivalence about the global forces
that some people felt were to blame for the closing of their high sulfur
coal mine, of their local variety store that could not compete with
large chain stores near the Interstate, and even cessation of service by
their local post office. Clearly, some of the problems were of local
genesis, but many were strong ripples or even Tsunami effects of the
global economy.


In New Perspectives Quarterly for April 1990, "The obsolete race:
development after east-west rivalry" Wolfgang Sachs writes about the
beginnings of the "development" ethos when President Truman, in his 1949
inaugural address, unveiled his plan to relieve the world's suffering
through "industrial activities" and a "higher standard of living." Sachs
says this move from colonialism to the competition of independent
nations in a global economic marketplace is the key element in the post
WWII world order.


The sponsoring agencies and organizations and companies for GK 97 would
agree with this in some ways, but it seemed that with the waning of
industrialism in Europe, North America, and some Asian countries, the
sponsors were now counting on ICT--information and communications
technology--to achieve what large scale development projects had not
done over the past 30 years: to close the gap between the poorest and
richest nations and to improve the lots of perhaps billions of people.


I must admit that we do not have a vocabulary that is accepted by all
the parties in the conversation. Some still use the outdated term,
"Third World" when there is no longer a Second World (unless you count
Cuba, North Korea, and Viet Nam). North and South are still popular even
though geographically speaking Tajikistan is in the North and New
Zealand and Chile are in the South. Developed, developing,
underdeveloped, industrialized, rich, poor, all have connotations that
upset large numbers of people engaged in this debate.


The day before the conference began, the Toronto Media Collective
organized an ad hoc conference called Local Knowledge- Global Wisdom.
The proposed agenda include "What's really going down. Deconstructing
the global corporate agenda: convergence, electronic money,
surveillance, media concentration, the Internet, information warfare,
megacities, monocultures, intellectual property, genetic patenting, and
the future of work" The first day was to end with a session devoted to
local responses to globalization and to preserving local knowledge. It
overlaps somewhat with the IFL agenda (see my report at
www.research.apple.com/people/cisler/default.html) as well as some of
the topics at the Global Knowledge 97 meeting itself. The Toronto Media
Collective ("the bastard progeny of Toronto's own McLuhan") describes
itself in a provocative flier on which the yin-yang or Technocracy
symbol has been turned into a happy face.


Other participating organizations included TAO communications,
Information Highway Working Group, McLuhan Program, Food Not Bombs
(which provided a great free meal at lunch--proving Milton Friedman
wrong), Citizens Concerned about Free Trade, Citizen For Local
Democracy; Friends of Lubicon; Channel Zero/CBC.


About 75 people showed up the first day. Some speakers were scheduled,
and most had compelling messages but not enough time to deliver. Jesse
Hirsch, one of the organizers from the McLuhan Program "The mythology of
technology: the Internet as utopia." said this was a counter event to
the World Bank conference. He asked everyone to introduce themselves. It
was a diverse lot, but this is Toronto, so that's to be expected. Some
GK97 participants from South Africa, Spain, and Guatemala were in the
audience. I was probably the only person working for a large
corporation. Someone came up to me and asked, "Where's Microsoft?"


Anna Melinkoff said "When the World Bank planned the event there were no
women speakers and only 70 women were invited out of the 1200
participants. " Because of the actions of her ad hoc group this changed.
She gave the first short talk:


"The computer is not a good model to represent the human mind and how it
works. It's not a good medium for global knowledge. A conversation is
the best way to share, and information is used to make connections. Our
language has been coopted by those in power. The words they use are not
ones used in normal communications. Conversations can adjust themselves
to the cues provided in the exchange. The GK issues are not accessible
to most people. Technology is not going to solve our own problems;
people are going to solve our problems."


During the discussion people made a number of provocative comments, ones
that probably would not be voiced at the official meeting:


The Brussels G7 principles were rammed down our throat. " --Charley
Lewis, S.A. Communist Party, COSATU. =A0 "Globalization is another word
for American imperialism, and we want to become an independent country.
" --Blake Harris, McLuhan program, Toronto =A0 "We can't stop this stuff;
(technology) it's like a moving train and the best we can do is to steer
it. " --unidentified speaker.(But if a train is on tracks, how do you
steer it. You tend it)


Several commented on the replacement of national regulations with
international ones as framed by NAFTA and the World Trade Organization.


Some believed the growth of internetworks were being used to get around
governments only for the benefit of transnational corporations.


"The Internet: a virus from West Virginia brought to you by AT&T."
(Little did they know the trouble AT&T had with the Internet in the
early 1990's)


" Globalization? Confucius organizing while Mickey Mouse distracts.
Authoritarian controlling methods but very non-linear"


PJ Lilly mentioned that GK97 was at the same time as the Earth Summit in
New York. She parsed a glossy booklet called "Signals of Change:" from
UNDP. The term "sustainable" is being misused, she feels. The UNDP and
its business allies are talking about sustainable capitalism. She
thought it was ridiculous that Unilever was going to give a talk on
preserving local culture. A key concept of this group is that
globalization is not tolerant of diversity so any corporate action to
the contrary is, at best, window dressing. More likely it may be
disinformation.


During the lunch there were poems and raps by Gabrielle--a young,
radical feminist from India ("We will frighten you with our freedom")
and D Sanjani who has a very good interview with another rapper in the
print zine Anarchives vol 4 issue 1. Write media () tao ca to find out out
to get a copy. He wore a Rasta hat and his t-shirt was emblazoned with
the Shell logo, blood flowing over much of it. No, this was not your
normal meeting of development consultants and beneficiaries.


After lunch there was a talk by Sidney White of The COMER Assn:
(committee on monetary and economic reform.) She said that the money in
your pocket will be your freedom, not just because of what it will buy
but what can't be traced. She is most concerned about large banks and
government surveillance agencies working together. There was a long rant
about Jean Chretien, the Trilateral Commission and how the International
Monetary Fund caused the breakup of Yugoslavia and the subsequent
events. It was getting time to go. On the way out I picked up more
literature. Very strong anti U.S. hegemony articles and a nice logo
showing the Canadian maple leaf as part of the U.S. stars and stripes.
Under it the words, "No, eh!" As I left for the GK 97 reception, I heard
White say, "Oh, you're saying this is another conspiracy theory! Well, I
have a real problem with the coincidence theory."


The counter conference continued on Monday but I did not attend. Some of
those present took part in a street demonstration and using the miracle
of desktop publishing, crafted their own badges and attended some of the
official events.


That evening I met with Jim May, a Keetowah Indian interested in
multimedia, distance learning, and cultural preservation of native
languages. He helped develop an electronic BBS in the Cherokee language
that inspired Hawaiians to start their very successful project for
language preservation (http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/) May and I were
invited to the conference by the Benton Foundation, one of the sponsors
<www.benton.org> We attended a screening of some videos of varying
quality produced by the World Bank and other agencies.


Nature's Pharmacy, a Global Links production (globallinks () worldbank org)
showed the way local plants were being used by herbalists, healers, and
how the supplies are dwindling because of urbanization and the leveling
of the habitat that provides such plants. Associations of indigenous
practitioners in Nigeria are organizing to deal with this issue. Nicely
done, but many of the stickier issues could not be covered in depth. For
instance, the agreement between Costa Rica and Merck Drug company to
exploit local cures from the forest is very controversial as is the firm
Shaman Pharmaceuticals. The World Bank wants to target the developing
country television outlets, but I think they should go after PBS and
stations in Europe and Japan to help people realize what is going on in
the rest of the world.


"Building Africa's Information Highway" was atrocious. Made up of stock
footage and the cliche disparities that are impossible to miss in
Africa, we were subjected to a long essay on projects in Egypt,
Mozambique, Senegal, Ethiopia. Dozen of shots of people at terminals, of
satellite dishes, of information beaming down on the continent from
satellites, goats walking in front of satellites, web pages zipping by
(sometimes with no scan converter to stop the rolling image on the
video) and fast cuts to people farming, walking, waiting for transport.
It was depressing, but in a way it is reflective of the reality: this
information technology is not integrated into every day life, even in
the government offices and schools, and certainly not among those whose
live s might be most affected by it. As a video production it showed the
near impossibility of capturing the excitement visually that can happen
when you are online and connecting with the right person or the right
information.


A great finish to the video session was "Igalaaq Internet" about the Leo
Ussak Wlementary School, Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories in the far
north of Canada that is using the Internet for the usual things:
pen-pals, research, chat, exploring the outside world, but the teacher
and the students were able to involve the local community and the
outside business community (airlines, electricians, computer firms) to
donate time and equipment and about $100,000 to expand the lab, so it's
now open to adults, and 20% of the 2000 inhabitants have accounts on the
system.


After a crowded opening reception we entered the main ballroom. It could
not hold the 2000 plus delegates, and many stood around the edge as
Royal Canadian Mounties played a fanfare for the entrance of various
dignitaries from Canada and the United Nations. The head of the World
Bank made opening remarks in French and English, and like Kofi Anan the
Secretary General of the UN, the speakers were cognizant of the problems
yet hopeful that information technology would be able to solve some of
them. The themes of the conference will give you an idea of how this
might happen:


1. Empowering the poor with information technology


2. Policy and Regulatory frameworks for the information economy.


3. Information and capacity building


4. Fostering science and technology in developing countires


5. Knowledge flows, civic dialogue and the informed citizen


6.Distance education and technology for learning


7. Partnerships (regional, public/private, NGOs)


Anan said the main issue is how to relieve the suffering of the poor,
the sick, the young, and women. He spoke of the widening gaps, of the
need to relax government control and stop censorship and to open up the
countries to foreign investment. Again this highlights the subtext: what
are the best local policies? What local culture is worth fighting for?
Should one protect local businesses? To a lesser or greater extent all
countries do that. Should this extend to the local education system? How
will the Internet change these very different world views?


Monday


When I was a child my friends and I would sometime say a word over and
over to transform it, to make it lose meaning, to become just repetitive
sounds coming from our mouths. In some ways, this happened to a cluster
of words being used at this conference. They were repeated in many
contexts, and they began to lose meaning and, at the same time, took on
more significance than is warranted, and I'm not sure if the people from
130 countries would even agree on the starting definitions of words such
as:


-global -sustainable -knowledge -transformational -markets -community
-learning -empower


The morning plenaries included a video with many of the messages the
organizers hoped to convey:


-It's never too late to learn -Learning to use a computer is as
important as learning to read and write. -"Get with it or eat dust"


This last message was echoed throughout the conference. Not that it's
unique to the agencies setting the agenda, but the feeling that
technology is being developed, set in motion, and if you don't learn
about it and get with the program, you will be left behind, seemed to be
the only option for both donor and recipient, for lender and borrower.
Wolfensohn, the head of the World Bank, made opening remarks and said
he's aware of the gap but is heartened by the possibilities. He has seen
Moroccans doing desktop publishing for accounts in Paris, Amazonian
chiefs being interconnected, and Ghanaians selling coffee on the Net. He
noted that the private sector was investing in only a few countries in
Africa. He saw the main issue as 'how to develop a civil society which
comes from the development of democracy and the free market system.'


Jose Figueres the President of Costa Rica said, "There are only two
nationalities: those who are connected to the Internet and those who are
not." Costa Rica is revamping their educational system to fit into this
world, one where the 50 hectares of Intel property in that country will
produce more than 100,000 hectares of coffee!


President Museveni of Uganda gave a strange speech. Outside Congolese
were protesting his presence because they said his troops had invaded
Zaire and Kabila was just a puppet. Most people did not talk to them, so
by pausing to look at their literature I was swamped with young expats
from Zaire who wanted donations, my email, and help with their cause.
Their pamphlets showed Kabila's troops herding Rwandan refugees into
cattle cars, and this was juxtaposed with Nazis loading Jews into trains
in Krakow.


A World Bank economist named Joseph Stiglitz read his long paper and
complained about the amount of time he had on stage. He said the World
Bank was a knowledge bank.In my opinion, some knowledge is a local
currency and in many cases won't convert outside the communities in
which it is traded or hoarded or coined. It is not necessarily
convertible, and many times you can't digitize it. Linking intellectual
to the word capital, then, is not always a good metaphor because IC may
just be a locally traded currency; knowledge may not be convertible or
when it is attempted, something may be lost in the translation.


Let's take the case of knowledge about local plants. It is a kind of
knowledge that has a very specific context that may include beliefs
about the other plants and animals, about the origin of a particularly
useful (magical) plant about the times when it can be used and for whom.
The use of that plant may be bundled in a whole system of beliefs that
are based on local knowledge and taboos. Some of this may not be
scientific or true or verifiable. If a drug company comes upon the drug
through its own exploration or through contact with local informants,
they may indeed mine it for the valuable chemicals and have it become
part of a product line. Some rewards in the form of money or goods or
even recognition may accrue to the tribe to an intermediary, but the
process takes the plant out of the context in which it was used, and
that process may be lost or discarded, along with the traditions that
grew up around the use of the unrefined plant. That may weaken the link
between the inhabitants and the environment in which the plant was
found. This is how local knowledge can be debased by a refined global
knowledge.


Claude Forget (for-djay) of Teleglobe said "governments are wisely
stepping aside to let private parties and foreign investors respond with
typical efficiency." Not too much applause on that one... He also thinks
technology will be a genuine equalizer and that there won't be the
monoculture problem than globalization critics anticipate.


There were certainly a huge number of government representatives at the
conference, some from the donor agencies like CIDA of Canada, the UN,
and USAID and many of the invited participants were government workers
who were not in telecomms or computing but in other agencies who needed
to learn about the trends and benefits and how their own agencies would
be affected..


UNESCO simulation: Creating Open Learning Communities:


In 1993, an ad hoc forum advised UNESCO to support Learning Without
Frontiers - enabling "people throughout the world to obtain access to
all forms and levels of education within the context of lifelong
education". This program has been growing and in Toronto, LWF
representatives staged the beta version of a simulation whereby
participants took roles as consultants and citizens in two mythical
countries that had suffered war, unequal economic systems, different
language and linguistic groups, and varying rates of Internet
connectivity. We spent a large block of time "playing" the game,
discussing our roles, and giving feedback on the effectiveness of the
whole exercise. It was a good way to have extended contact with new
faces, but we actually needed more time to do what the organizers had
hoped would be accomplished.


Empowering Women


> From what little I know about development, projects that invest in
women's education or economic well-being result in dramatic changes for
the donor and for the women involved. There was a whole morning devoted
to "empowering women with knowledge" and an afternoon session on
"Promoting Grassroots Women's Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries:"
which included anthropologist's Susan Schaefer Davis' Virtual Souk, a
means of marketing woven goods for Moroccan women using digital cameras,
the web, and no middlemen. She set up a rug gallery in 1994 and has gone
from selling two pieces a year to twenty. A weaver would pay $5 for the
raw wool, spend many hours work and then sell it to a trader for $25. It
would be wholesaled for $75 and an American retailer would buy it for
$150 and end up charging $250 or more back in the U.S. Davis sells for
much less and much more goes back to the women who created the rugs.


A number of the programs were on infrastructure growth, how the
countries were privatizing their telcos, and the expanding role of
private firms. "Community-Owned Telephone Systems: An Alternative Way to
Serve the Unserved" moderated by the National Telephone Cooperative
Association was a real nuts and bolts session on starting coops in
Poland and the Philippines. The speaker said that higher level execs
were much more supportive of the infrastructure improvement projects
than were the lower level workers. They saw the use of older equipment
as a guarantee of job security and were afraid of technological
displacement. NCTA and others were interested in telecenters in Africa
and any other place that might help provide universal access.


On the last day of the conference there was a marathon session on
telecenters (telecentres, telecottages, or community technology centers)
chaired by Dana Ziyasheva of UNESCO. She did a good job as timekeeper
and managed to get 19 speakers in three hours plus some Q&A.


The spread of these centers was a common theme. Some sessions on this
topic conflicted with each other, and some were just overloaded with
panelists, indicating a lot of pressure on the moderators to jam in
sponsors' suggested speakers even if there was not enough time to do
more than scratch the surface in some presentations.


Johan Ernberg (ernberg () itu ch) has been a longtime supporter of this
concept. He called the sites MCTs, Multipurpose Community Telecentres,
and the ITU has been promoting them for many years. There has also been
a high failure rate once the funding dries up. Recently, there have been
pilot programs in Surinam, and planned centers in Bhutan and Vietnam.
Ernberg's paper "Universal Access through multipurpose community
telecentres--a business case" details the cost of one center in Uganda.


The Organization of Rural Assn for Progress in Zimbabwe will be setting
up 15 centers at a cost of $3000 to $20,000 each. Don Richardson of
Canada used a term that I have been using for a couple of years, "First
mile", to describe the groups working at the grass roots level. All the
speakers voiced the sentiment that the projects should serve all sectors
of society but left unanswered how the poor would be served if not by
subsidies.


One community organizer from Pakistan cautioned the group not to
overemphasize the Internet. In her village the crank phones could not
even reach the capital, let alone be used for moderate data speed
connections.


David Reed of Industry Canada summarized the rapid progress the
Community Access Program was making, at least in the start up funding
and establishment of 5000 sites in settlements ranging in population
from 400 to 50,000 by the year 2000.


Scott Robinson , Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, Mexico,
outlined his work to provide rural information on gophers and WWW sites
to support campesino projects. He criticized the World Bank for being
part of the problem in his part of the world by not being forthcoming
and sharing information, and there were nervous glances by some of the
officials, as if his mild statements were somehow radical or shocking.
He reminded us that this massive transfer of technology can be as
disruptive to the elites as it can be to the common folk and traditional
groups.


Charles Musisi of Uganda visited Apple with the Internet Society in
1993. It was interesting to see how far he had come from those early
days of networking, and now that Africa is the focal point for many
networked computing projects, Musisi was very busy with public
libraries, the Uganda PTT, and he hoped that ICT would help fight
corruption, if only because of the accountability demands of donors.


Just as the woman from Pakistan cautioned the Net-heads against counting
too much on the Internet, many speakers I met during the conference
talked about the use of more traditional media including community radio
and cassettes. Two outfits for more information include Developing
Countries Farm Radio Network and AMARC, World Association of Community
Radio Broadcasters.


Anne Jellema of Action Aid in the UK gave a most interesting talk on
participatory planning for local people to produce and control
knowledge. Using the techniques of Paolo Freire, Action Aid has had
great success (60-75% success rate) in teaching basic literacy in many
countries where previous methods had a much lower success rate


Conclusion


This is just a brief overview of my experiences at a tiny portion of the
working sessions. I left out much of the information from the plenary
sessions where thousands sat and listened to the main sponsors talk. I
missed the speech that received the highest acclaim: Pepi Patron, a
philosophy professor from Peru, spoke about the retreat of the state in
a time when market forces were proving unable to solve a number of
social problems.


How much impact this conference will have won't be known for a while,
and it will vary by sponsoring agency and by individual. The mailing
list continues, and new ones have started as a result of the conference.
The agenda of the participants and the sponsors converged in some cases,
but many were present to sell ideas and products, consulting services
and awareness of trends, while others were there to learn, to solve
problems in far-off lands, and to take back some appropriate solutions
to use in their own communities or countries.






=A0