Content development to bridge the digital divide

This is a position paper by the African Internet Service Provider's Association, and is very similar to the kind of things I would like to do towards my PhD thesis.

Providing access infrastructure like satellite, wireless, or other means is only one part of the solution to bridging the digital divide. The other important things are identification of content to transmit over the access infrastructure, and ability to understand the content.

This paper largely talks about the need to produce relevant content, and then distribute it. Things like good irrigation techniques, or sanitation habits, or best farming practices, or school education, or e-governance, and many other things. They encourage organizations to produce this content, and fund it through advertisements. A system to put in requests for content can lead to more focused content development. All of these are great ideas. Saurabh from Udai also recently pointed me to the Digital Studyhall project, that was initiated by researchers from Princeton and UWash to leverage the postal network for creating a system to disseminate content burnt on DVDs. This content is mainly educational, filmed in schools in the nearby urban areas and then supplied to the surrounding rural areas.

I am personally of the view that all of these are excellent ways to proceed, but content creation should be gradually pushed out to the people themselves. This will turn out into a form of citizen journalism that will not only provide local content, but also encourage people participation in politics and welfare through sousveillance and empowerment. Even healthcare related projects can benefit greatly by disseminating timely information on these channels. And think of not just rural and developing parts of the world, but also urban cities where sewer systems do not work properly, or roads do not get repaired. What if we can build a video-wiki where people can supply video clips filmed from their cellphones, and a content developer can string them together. If we do so, how can we ensure authenticity of content. How can we plug news and status reports to build something like a balanced scorecard for governance. How can we let people follow the timelines of related newsreports. How can we let the citizen reporters connect better with each other. It is a basic instinct of people to get noticed, and we should use that to form a reward system to encourage people to participate. Financial returns should also be possible with advertising revenues.

But things do not stop even when content is available. What if the local people speak a different language, or literacy skills are not high enough to understand the text. Automatic machine translation and text-to-speech systems can only help to a certain extent. Volunteers will be needed to do the rest, and these volunteers can be one of the people themselves.

Many of these ideas are very raw, and if you have anything to suggest then please do write to me.