Subject: [gaia] couple of interesting report and paper

From: Arjuna Sathiaseelan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2016 06:33:50 +0100

this will be of interest - some of us were interviewed some time ago by
Jonathan Donner from Caribou Digital -

the work received support from the MasterCard
Foundation to assess the changing landscape for access to (and use of) the
internet among rural and resource-constrained communities in sub-Saharan
Africa, with a special emphasis on the prospects for new technologies
(unlicensed spectrum, drones, near-earth satellites, etc.) to augment
conventional cellular/mobile infrastructure by 2020.

the outcomes were

A report for the MasterCard Foundation, entitled Digital Lives in Ghana,
Kenya, and Uganda
http://cariboudigital.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Caribou-Digital-Digital-Lives-in-Ghana-Kenya-and-Uganda.pdf

and a paper at the ICTD 2016:
http://geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/46/2016/04/ICTD-Spatial-Discourses_final_share.pdf
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2909659

arjuna
-- 
Arjuna Sathiaseelan
Personal: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/
N4D Lab: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~as2330/n4d

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From: "Paul M. Aoki" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2016 15:56:16 -0700

speaking for myself, as a researcher:

i found the ICTD paper rather grandiose in its claims.

i didn't object to the discourse analysis itself, which i found 
interesting. but i wish the authors had emphasized that a corpus of 
corporate public discourse (talks, websites, etc.) is largely generated 
by corporate communications and public relations. as such, its 
public-friendly tropes are aimed /at the public/. actual discussions 
with expert decision-makers may have some overlap, but are necessarily 
different in substance. the authors, the public, and external research 
experts have no meaningful access to the non-public discussions; 
external panel opinions about public materials says little useful about 
the impact of "silicon valley" on decision-making. (there were a couple 
of government relations folks on the expert list. it would be 
fascinating to see the raw interviews from those folks...)

as to whether connectivity rhetoric systematically keeps 
governments/NGOs from investing resources in unrelated development 
initiatives ("harm"), i can't say; but i doubt the experts consulted 
can, either. the one citation in the paper to corporations "capturing" 
philanthropic funding referred to O3b, which is a commercial entity that 
got commercial (venture/equity) funding and sells capacity on commercial 
terms.

[i would contrast this with the CSCW 2015 paper from steven jackson's 
group that examined the imaginaries deployed in corporate responses to 
US FCC NPRMs. while there is direct (invisible) lobbying involved in 
this process, we know that these filings are read, and the impact of 
actual data/arguments can often be traced using citations in the final 
FCC R&Os. i thought that was a nice bit of documentary analysis.]

-- 
Paul M. Aoki <[email-masked]>