So far I have written about efforts to inaugurate a new direction for technical progress as if the chief problem is a lack of methods and discipline. But there are other problems too. Technology does not exist apart from the people who create and use it, and its precise forms have a lot to do with the way these people choose to organise their society. One of the problems about the use of intermediate or appropriate technology in the developing countries is that the people there often do not have suitable forms of local organisation to make effective use of the equipment being offered to them. Frequently, it is equipment devised by well-meaning Westerners who have little understanding of the social component of technology or of complex local patterns of social organisation.

In the industrialized countries also, we do not have many social structures with suitable organisation to use alternative technology. And although the necessary changes in society may come partly through unconscious evolution, or through individual efforts to organise self-help groups, village societies or communes, change will be needed at the political and legislative level also. And Dickson sees the great weakness of much alternative technology as its neglect of the 'political dimension' -- neglect which implies 'an idealistic concept ... that does not coincide with the social reality of technology as it has been experienced'.

This is fair criticism in many respects, but it is a mistake to think that the political dimension is the over-riding totality within which all other aspects of technology are worked out -- and my book is very largely about some of the other dimensions of technological change. The distinction becomes clear when we consider the symbolic purposes which technology is made to serve, about which Dickson has useful things to say. For example, individuals buy automobiles or household goods and nations buy armaments, not solely with a view to their utilitarian value but because of what they symbolize. Discussions about more modest lifestyles for an age of zero growth, or about disarmament, rarely acknowledge this, and so become confused as people invent phoney utilitarian or practical purposes for their acquisitions, and nations invent unreal threats to justify their arms.

The Report from the Iron Mountain almost a decade ago explained how the armies, structures and industries associated with preparedness for war in fact perform many non-military functions. Many of these functions can be described in terms of the 'symbolic objectives' discussed in this book and have to do with 'ideological clarification' and building national unity.

As a partial substitute for the non-military functions of war, the Iron Mountain report suggested that a massive space programme could fill the place of the armaments industry in the economy and would provide an equally potent, but less dangerous, symbolism to express national goals and national prestige -- rather as the building of cathedrals in the 12th century, provided an effective substitute for the non-military functions of the Crusades (P. 42).

Dickson's argument is that the symbolism of armaments, or of cathedrals, is largely invented by the ruling groups within society as a means of controlling the mass of the people. Thus Dickson sees the building of the cathedrals as a way in which the Church could extend its influence over craftsmen, artisans, and I would add, merchants.

There is much truth in this, but to present such political aspects of a creative technological movement as the whole of the picture seems wrong. From the viewpoint of the architects and stone masons who built the cathedrals, the work was something that carried conviction because of its symbolic meanings, whether concerning the New Jerusalem, the glory of God or the prestige of their own home town. It was these things which fired the imagination and sparked the immense burst of artistic and technology creativity which the cathedrals represent. We need to understand the reality of the symbolism, and not just its political uses, if we wish to understand the ideals and objectives which give rise to discovery and invention in technology. So I do not agree with Dickson that 'technological development is essentially a political process'. It is partly a political process, but at the point where creativity and invention occur, it is the values and ideals of individuals that matter, and personal appreciations of 'quality' or fitness for purpose. The convictions and sensitivity of the technologist have a validity beyond just the social environment which shapes them, important though that is.

Related posts:

1. Developing intent A comment by the author, Tony Roberts, on his Laptop Burns post “Why apps can’t transform society”: The point I...
2. Social Media Community Architect and Manager Exploring the recesses of my email I came across some bad ideas I gave to a good friend, neighbor and...
3. That Californian Ideology From “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron who ask the question “who would have suspected that as...

As a result of building PrintAndShare.org I am hyper-sensitive to the drawbacks of URLs---which is my service's weakest link. I'm using bit.ly shortened URLs that unfortunately have an ambiguous mix of upper and lower-case letters; ambiguous both in terms of typeface (els and ones may look identical), but also that many people expect URLs to ignore case; for bit.ly that can be difference between reaching the specified DonorsChoose project page or... well... anything else on the internet which, statistically-speaking, I can say is something they definitely don't wish to see.

Regardless, I'm disappointed that bit.ly doesn't acknowledge the need for transcribable URLs. Below is a ticket, since closed, from their support forum (I've reformatted it):

Related posts:

1. Print & Share: not everyone is a social media ninja (nor need they be) Today is the deadline for DonorsChoose’s Hacking Education Contest, and fortunately I have completed and submitted Print and Share (with no...
2. DonorsChoose Contest Update: Consolation Prize Edition DonorsChoose announced the winners for their Hacking Education contest today and unfortunately Print & Share, the app I developed with...
3. Data-driven, content-first design I’m working on an app for the DonorChoose.org Hacking Education Contest. DonorsChoose works by having teachers submit classroom project/supply needs that...

In every domain in life, the questions we ask shape the responses we get. Our questions reveal our frame of reference and impose that frame on our answers. As a result, much is revealed by examining the assumptions, the reasoning, and the logic models of our questions.

I believe that most practitioners of nonprofit technology planning are asking the wrong questions. Because their questions are largely about technology, the results of these questions are answers dominated by the logic of technology itself, rather than by the mission or methods of the organization.

Many observers will agree that common complaints about technology projects -- resistance to change, long sales cycles, inappropriate technology, unexpected costs, unused tools -- are often the inevitable result of this technocentric planning. The only way to unravel this problem is to go to the source and challenge the questions we ask.[...]

What Should Planners Ask?
It's useful to look at other domains for inspiration about what the right questions might be. Although a proper examination would involve a much larger set of domains, for our purposes today, let's look at eye doctors and shoe sales-people.

Eye doctors don't determine how to correct your vision by looking at what kind of glasses you have been wearing recently. They evaluate your vision directly and possibly they investigate some lifestyle or workstyle issues, such as the typical distance of objects that you need to see. Even though your current glasses might reveal something about your eyesight, they don't use that as a form of assessment. Eye doctors rely on questions about eyes and about seeing, not questions about eyeglasses.

Shoes sales folk don't do an inventory of your shoes in order to sell you a new pair. Even though it's true that such an inventory might help them sell to you, even people with such a solid sales agenda focus instead on other things. They measure your feet, for example. They investigate your walking habits and contexts. They watch you walk. Shoe sales folks rely on questions about feet, fashion, and walking (or running or standing), not questions about shoes.

From these two examples, we can start to learn what kinds of questions planners should be asking. In both of these cases, the questions that allow the professional to offer the right technology are not technological questions. Instead, they ask questions about behavior and context. The behavioral questions are often goal directed and look at practices which, though they will likely be served by the technology, are not about the technology. The context questions, being both personal and practical, give the professional an understanding of the systems into which the technology will be introduced. Those systems include other technologies, but are in no way limited by them.

What Are Nonprofit Techies Asking?
[...] I started with the TechAtlas Basic Interactive Technology Assessment & Technology Project Recommendations. To their credit, TechAtlas asks you to describe your organization's mission. They promise to include that mission statements at the top of the documents produced. Unfortunately, there is very little in TechAtlas that actually tries to connect the technology plan to that mission, other than technology vision statement. Instead, the Basic Assessment asks about hardware, networks, virus protection, backups, databases, email, the Web, the Internet, training, and software.

What's missing? It doesn't ask about communication practices, business processes, stakeholder relationships, or anything else that might actually lead to meaningful requirements. The questions of the Basic Assessment provide a classic example of the determinism inherent in technocentric inquiry. In essence, each question takes the form of "Are you doing ______ (insert tech we think is good)?" If the answer is no, then the recommendations are more or less "Well, you should!"

The title for this post comes from our RFP for organizations requesting the support of the Digital Arts Service Corps; it is an effective bellwether for overall project success.

Related posts:

1. Nailed that response Google just announced a new national technology service corps, in partnership with the HandsOn Network and AmeriCorps*VISTA—not unlike the Digital...
2. Data-driven, content-first design I’m working on an app for the DonorChoose.org Hacking Education Contest. DonorsChoose works by having teachers submit classroom project/supply needs that...
3. Literacy is more than reading Below is a year-old memo I wrote for the Transmission Project was later polished into a more general statement on...

Google just announced a new national technology service corps, in partnership with the HandsOn Network and AmeriCorps*VISTA---not unlike the Digital Arts Service Corps I have managed for the past 4.5 years and will be shutting down this August as our funding expires. Google describes their program thusly:

These AmeriCorps*VISTA members will work full-time for one year developing introductory seminars and involved in-person trainings for smaller nonprofits that are working to lift people out of poverty. The Tech Corps will start in September with a one-week training at our campus in Mountain View, learning about both our nonprofit tools and cloud-based offerings from other technology companies like Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. Once they are armed with tech know-how, they’ll spend the rest of the year in three-person teams serving nonprofits in the Bay Area, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

Our response:

Google’s commitment is certainly a step in the right direction. However, we wish Google and HandsOn would place the particular needs of organizations at the forefront of their new initiative. Google mentions that its Tech Corps members will be trained in its own nonprofit tools. Although familiarity with these tools may prove helpful to some, the solutions its Corps will be able to offer organizations after this kind of training are still highly prescriptive and techno-centric. Nonprofits need and deserve to have a voice in determining the nature of the project that will presumably transform their organizations. For Corps members, much more important than technology skills are the skills to collaborate with organization staff and work toward a solution. For organizations, a technology solution that is well planned-for and has the support of staff is more valuable than a predetermined set of technology practices. Rather than prescribing specific practices, the Transmission Project serves as adviser during the project design process, so that organizations are prepared to maximize the impact that the addition of a Digital Arts Service Corps member makes.

The above was written by Howie Fisher and the top collage created by Billy Brown---both Digital Arts Service Corps members serving with the Transmission Project whose value far exceeds any training seminars they can deliver.

Related posts:

1. Similar message, wider audience I was interviewed for NAMAC’s (National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture) Idea Exchange and the interview is now up...
2. Literacy is more than reading Below is a year-old memo I wrote for the Transmission Project was later polished into a more general statement on...
3. “Describe the basis for your approach to this project. How did you determine the need for this project now and who was included in its design?” From the Gilbert Center in an excellent article entitled “Asking the Wrong Questions: Challenging Technocentrism in Nonprofit Technology Planning”: In...

One of my AmeriCorps members asked for resources on technology needs-assessment surveys and I came across some varied approaches. Above is from the US Department of Education hosted An Educator's Guide to Evaluating the Use of Technology in Schools and Classrooms. Below is from the National Center for Technology Planning's "Perceived Educational Technology Needs Survey" [PDF] (the Center appears to be more a guy then a center). Both appear rather aged, though I like the latter one better.

Note to the respondent: Please keep this questionnaire in your possession for the survey interval in your usual work location while performing your customary duties. Make entries to the items as appropriate responses occur to you. Your responses will help inform the technology planning process about the best application of technologies in your teaching situation.

1. Do you ever, or often, think, “there must be an easier way to do this?” If so, please list and describe as many of the things or situations as you can to which this statement would apply:

   1.
   2.
   3.
   4.
   5.

   [Note: All of the following questions repeat this format, but the phrase "If so, please list and describe as many of the things or situations as you can to which this statement would apply: #1-5" is omitted for brevity ]

2. Do you ever, or often, think, “I could do this faster if only...”
3. Do you ever, or often, think, “I wish I had a helper to help me do...”
4. Do you ever, or often, think, “I wish I had a computer or other device so I could...”
5. Do you ever, or often, think, “I wish I or my students could contact someone right now to tell them...”
6. Do you ever, or often, think, “I wish I or my students could contact someone right now to find out...”
7. Do you ever, or often, think, “I wish my students had improved computers or other technological resources available so they could...”
8. Do you ever, or often, think, “I wish my students had more computers or other technological resources available so they could...”

Please use the space below to state in your own words any suggestions, recommendations, or concerns you have for the use of computers, networks, or other advanced technologies for your work or for your students, your school, or the school district. Thank you for providing this information.

Related posts:

1. “Describe the basis for your approach to this project. How did you determine the need for this project now and who was included in its design?” From the Gilbert Center in an excellent article entitled “Asking the Wrong Questions: Challenging Technocentrism in Nonprofit Technology Planning”: In...
2. Developing intent A comment by the author, Tony Roberts, on his Laptop Burns post “Why apps can’t transform society”: The point I...
3. That Californian Ideology From “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron who ask the question “who would have suspected that as...

I don't get it either. But I've been increasingly thinking about a recent David Pogue column (http://nyti.ms/id0kep) in which he says "Things don’t replace things; they just splinter."

We have this idea in the nonprofit world that we must overly optimize the resources we have; cleanly transitioning from one model to the next with minimal duplication. That's not realistic and probably wouldn't be innovative either. Instead we just have this messy iterative process of broken models, half-starts and ignorant foundation officers---from which the next round of innovators can cobble together an itch-scratcher and pitch it as "Hotness-XYZ but for nonprofits".

I think Jumo sucks so far, but the few million dollars it took to launch is a drop in the bucket. Unless it causes Omidyar and Knight to pick up their checkbooks and go home, I think it will help move the ball towards something more transformational to the sector.

Related posts:

1. Nailed that response Google just announced a new national technology service corps, in partnership with the HandsOn Network and AmeriCorps*VISTA—not unlike the Digital...
2. Social Media Community Architect and Manager Exploring the recesses of my email I came across some bad ideas I gave to a good friend, neighbor and...

The following excerpt touches upon how technology enables the developing world to experience the same leisure activities the developed world enjoys:

Along with differential access and capacity, a third mechanism—differential motivation—contributes to the widening divergence between the privileged and the marginalized. What do people want to do with the technology they have access to? Those of us who have worked in interventionist ICT4D have often been surprised to find that poor people don’t rush to gain more education, learn about health practices, or upgrade vocational skills. Instead, they seem to use technology primarily for entertainment. Telecenter surveys find that when a village has ready access to a PC—connected to the Internet or otherwise—the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content. Many become proficient at the software incantations required to download YouTube videos from a PC onto a mobile phone. But these same users typically forsake software-based accounting and language lessons. What interventionists perceive to be “productive” use of technology is trumped by the “frivolous” desires of users. Even users in the developed world rarely take advantage of their technologies for purposes of self-improvement—the most popular iPhone apps are games and other entertainments, nothing that would improve productivity or health—but this tendency is exacerbated among those who have grown up with lessons of learned helplessness and low self-confidence.

I’m not blaming the victim. None of the three mechanisms necessarily speak to failures on the part of those who are poor or poorly educated. Blame, if it must be attributed, falls readily on historical circumstances, social structures, and the rich world’s unwillingness to invest in high-quality, universal education. In fact, one reason for valuing education is that it generates the appetite for and capacity to use modern tools—all the more reason to focus on nurturing human capability, rather than trying to compensate for limited capacity with technology.

Related posts:

1. Developing intent A comment by the author, Tony Roberts, on his Laptop Burns post “Why apps can’t transform society”: The point I...
2. Capturing well-being, not simply access and speed In January the Associated Press had a widely run article entitled “For minorities, new ‘digital divide’ appears” by Jesse Washington....
3. Minimal Mass I was searching for something else in Google Reader, but it seemed timely to resurface this note: A great example...

...living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and "piracy" normal (including on books) I think he might be "righter" than we think.

Currently there are "roughtly" 1 billion people living in countries where the majority reads at least "some" and 5 billion who live in counties where only a minority reads. (nb: of course india, china, etc have great literature, and la hogera in santa cruz is trying very hard to get good interesting local writers to the local market, but the realitly is that the wast majority of people in emerging countries do not read for "fun", they read if they are ordered to by their employers...., because:

If you are poor and a "cheap low quality pirated book" cost 4 to 5 hours of work you will not offer 100 hours of work every year to your child, so the child will not connect "reading with fun" (exept the statistical "lucky" one outlier)).

Moreover there is little avaiability of recent outside book (a hard cover foreign book can cost about 50% of a basic montly salary). So execpt the pirated copies of some blockbusters made popular by pirated copies of foreign movies, you do not read recent foreign books (softcover classics are about the end of it).

But "everybody" has access to computers (mostly of course in cyber cafés) and most students use pirated PDF's of school books, not just because they cannot affort the 30..40$+ * 10..20 they would need, but because:
- Amazon do not deliver in many 3rd world countries
- and other providers can take up to 2 month to get the book to you (assuming you have an internationally valid credit card)
- and the local bookshop are not very efficient (or just would not bother because they know you will hassle them when they ask 3..4 time the "amazon" price because they have to pay: the book, the transport the customs (40%)..

So ebooks are the best way to get books to these 5B people

Related posts:

1. Irrefutable gerunds Gerunds were referenced in yesterday’s post. Below is from William Easterly’s “Foreign Aid for Scoundrels”, published in the New York...
2. The point where creativity and invention occur From the preface to Arnold Pacey’s The Maze of Ingenuity : Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology: So...
3. App contest submission boilerplate This project represents a new way of democratizing access to [whatever, especially with a gerund; e.g. “the tools for understanding...

In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self---all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to "flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people," as MIT's Nicholas Negroponte put it. The stodgy men in gray flannel suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new "digital generation"---playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole---and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers. States too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic part-based politics to the "natural" agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices, pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.

But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley feared that America's political leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data. One after another, they took up blank computer cards,punched them through with new patterns of holes---"FSM" and "STRIKE"---and hung them around their necks. One student even pinned a sign to his chest that parroted the cards user instructions, "I am a UC student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me." For the marchers of the Free Speech Movement, as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life, and, ultimately, of the Vietnam War. Yet, in the 1990s, the same machines that had served as the defining devices of cold war technocracy emerged as the symbols of its transformation. Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture, computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community,and spiritual communion. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically.

As a number of journalists and historians have suggested, part of the answer is technological. By the 1990s, the room-sized, stand-alone calculating machines of the cold war era had largely disappeared. So too had the armored rooms in which they were housed and the army of technicians that supported them. Now Americans had taken up microcomputers, some the size of notebooks, all of them available to the individual user, regardless of his or her institutional standing. These new machines could perform a range of tasks that far exceeded even the complex calculations for which digital computers had first been built. They became communication devices and were used to prepare novels and spreadsheets, pictures and graphs. Linked over telephone wires and fiber-optic cables,they allowed their users to send messages to one another, to download reams of information from libraries around the world, and to publish their own thoughts on the World Wide Web. In all of these ways,changes in computer technology expanded the range of uses to which computers could be put and the types of social relations they were able to facilitate.

As dramatic as they were, however, these changes alone do not account for the particular utopian visions to which computers became attached. The fact that a computer can be put on a desktop, for instance, and that it cant be used by an individual, does not make it a "personal" technology. Nor does the fact that individuals can come together by means of computer networks necessarily require that their gatherings become "virtual communities." On the contrary, as Shoshanna Zuboff has pointed out, in the office, desktop computers and computer networks can become powerful tools for integrating the individual ever more closely into the corporation. At home, those same machines not only allow schoolchildren to download citations from the public library, they also turn the living room into a digital shopping mall. For retailers, the computer in the home becomes an opportunity to harvest all sorts of information about potential customers. For all the utopian claims surrounding the emergence of the Internet, there is nothing about a computer or a computer network that necessarily requires that it level organizational structures, render the individual more psychologically whole, or drive the establishment of intimate, though geographically distributed, communities?

How was it, then, that computers and computer networks became linked to visions of peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more authentic self? Where did these visions come from? And who enlisted computing machines to represent them?

If that hanging question doesn't make you want to read the book, I don't know what will.

I just bought a copy of this book for a coworker. I used to frequently give out copies of Richard Bach's Illusions to friends, but this is a little heavier reading.

Related posts:

1. “Describe the basis for your approach to this project. How did you determine the need for this project now and who was included in its design?” From the Gilbert Center in an excellent article entitled “Asking the Wrong Questions: Challenging Technocentrism in Nonprofit Technology Planning”: In...
2. Social Media Community Architect and Manager Exploring the recesses of my email I came across some bad ideas I gave to a good friend, neighbor and...

At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for an understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts—thin art—because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.

The following precedes the former, but if I put it in order the people who care about technology will stop reading when they hit romance (you know who you are!) and vice versa (same!) and the people who can grok both won’t care either way (yeah!):

In the past our common universe of reason has been in the process of escaping, rejecting the romantic, irrational world of prehistoric man. It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.

…

The time for a real unification of art and technology is really long overdue.

So go make something lovely (that’s for the people who can grok both; the rest of you are grousing).

No related posts.