Inspired by the recent successful launch of the Television White Spaces pilot in South Africa, I am once again tempted to engage in providing  mostly unsolicited advice about what Google’s strategy in Africa ought to be.  What I want to propose today is the launching of a Netflix-like streaming television service aimed at African markets and serving African and international content.  In this I take a more radical point of view than I did in my recent post about the Digital Dividend. This idea is borne of two recent experiences, one, some work I did recently looking at the migration process from analogue to digital broadcasting in Africa; and, two, my personal experience with Netflix.

Digital Migration

Most of the industrialised world has made a transition from analogue to digital broadcasting of terrestrial television.  The process in most African countries is much slower.  Because digital broadcasting requires a fraction of the spectrum needed for analogue broadcasting, a transition to digital television broadcasting:

1. creates space for more television channels;
2. allows the possibility of broadcasting in High Definition (HD);
3. makes some spectrum available for other purposes such as broadband; and,
4. allows broadcasters to keep pace with changes in broadcast technology.

Of the above benefits, I question whether a. and b. are relevant in Africa.  There has always been plenty of space for television channels.  The majority of African countries have four or fewer terrestrial broadcast channels.  As for High Definition broadcasting, it is hard to make either the social or economic case for HD broadcasting.  You could make the argument about Africa not being left behind or given second class technology but frankly I have trouble seeing the real market demand for HD television in the industrialised world, perhaps for sports broadcasting.  HD television feels like the upgrade that manufacturers tell you you want.  Which of course doesn’t rule out HD television via other means such as satellite.  So the real benefit of the switch-over to digital terrestrial broadcasting is the spectrum that is freed up for other purposes such as mobile broadband or TV White Spaces technology, etc.  And if that’s true, then does there really need to be a switch-over to digital broadcasting at all?

Across the continent, the switchover process is not going very well at all.  Very few countries seem to have come up with an effective strategy of how to manage the switch-over let alone finance it.  Few countries have an effective strategy of even how provide everyone with the Set Top Boxes (STBs) that are required to view digital broadcasts if you don’t happen to have a shiny new digital television set.  In South Africa, unspent funds from the Universal Service Agency are being re-purposed for the purchase of STBs for the masses.  The bottom line is that the economics of the transition to digital broadcasting simply don’t make sense.  It is an extremely expensive process for an, as yet, undetermined benefit.  Digital broadcasting is being treated as a giant “build it and they will come” project that will hopefully create both supply and demand at the same time.  And if you don’t buy that, there is always the argument that one must embrace the digital switch-over because it is inevitable.

Most African countries signed an agreement in 2006 that they would commit to the digital switch-over.  The general sense is that you simply have to get on board because analogue broadcasting will soon be obsolete.  It reminds me a bit of the furore a few years ago about the need to move to IPv6 because all the IPv4 addresses were about to run out.  Strangely the sun has yet to set on the IPv4 address space.

So what if there were another option, an option that didn’t exist or seem credible in the near future in 2006 when the switch-over policy decision was taken?  I am referring to Over The Top (OTT) broadcasting or the delivery of what was traditionally broadcast content over the Internet.

The Success of Netflix

Netflix is the most successful example of OTT service delivery.  As of the end of 2012, they claim over 33 million subscribers worldwide, most in the United States.  Not too long after moving to Canada from South Africa last year, I signed our family up for Netflix.  I was unprepared for how cheap and how efficient their service is.  $7.99 per month for all-you-can-eat television is pretty good, by any standard.  In fact, $7.99 looks roughly like mobile ARPU in Africa. People complain about the choice and how up-to-date their offering is but for our family it is the right blend of price and service.  What was even more impressive is how well it works.  We have a single 6Mb/s dry-DSL link that provides all of our household communication including VoIP phone service and Internet.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my kids watching Netflix did not affect the quality of my VoIP phone calls.

Last month, I attended an event at which Netflix’s Director of Cloud Infrastructure, Adrian Cockcroft, spoke.  He further impressed me with just how far and how fast Netflix has come.  One of the first things he said was that Netflix expects to become the largest Content Distribution Network (CDN) in the world some time this year.  That may or may not turn out to be true but just the fact that he thinks it likely is saying something given the likes of Akamai, Level 3 and others.  If you know anything about the distribution of video and other big media on the Internet, you know that it is dependent on CDNs which are gigantic local caches of content.  So when you request that YouTube video in Cape Town, it appears to stream internationally at high speed but actually you’re just getting a local copy from Google’s Global Cache CDN in South Africa.  This makes for much more efficient use of the main arteries of the Internet although how CDNs should be implemented and by who is a subject of much debate.  Netflix have built their infrastructure entirely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure which makes them a completely virtual organisation.   It impressive just how flexible and efficient at content delivery Netflix are.  No doubt the competition is not far behind them but just to say that remarkable things have been achieved in the last 6 years in both video compression and content distribution.

An Opportunity for Google?

So, a bold move for an African country would be to scrap the digital switch-over entirely and invest all that money planned for a digital broadcast network into broadband fibre and wireless infrastructure to support OTT service provision.  Bold but inconceivable.  I think we all know that that is never going to happen.  The digital switch-over ship has sailed and there is too much money already committed to it.  It is officially too big to fail.  However, that wouldn’t stop a smart company from doing the right thing.

Google already operates its own CDN network in Africa.  There are Google Global Caches in South Africa and Kenya and doubtless other countries on the continent.  It is well-positioned to manage the delivery of content on the continent.  Arguably, as a company, Google understands African media markets better than most international Internet companies having invested significantly over the last 4-5 years in local offices and local talent in Africa.

An African digital television service could be a low-barrier opportunity for new content-makers and a great way to promote thriving national industries like Nollywood to the rest of the continent.  It would be an opportunity to innovate service delivery perhaps creating new super-low-bandwidth options or perhaps overnight updates or local WiFi-based mini-caches of television content.

Are Google the best company to do this?  They certainly have all it takes although it doesn’t mean that someone else might not do it faster and better.  The three takeaway points I want to leave you with are these:

1. The switch-over to digital broadcasting in Africa is a slow-moving train wreck.
2. OTT television services are growing faster and more efficiently than you might have imagined.
3. The combination of 1 and 2 could mean a different television future for Africa.

I think it started back in 2006 when the South African government established a policy directing the use of Open Source software within government departments “unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior”.

This policy did not achieve its aim of converting government departments to the use of Open Source. If anything it probably alienated civil servants more than it made them converts to Open Source. It made them feel like FOSS was some kind of second class solution they were obliged to use because they couldn’t afford the best. I knew I didn’t like this policy at the time but I couldn’t really put my finger on why except for the basic awareness that nobody likes to be forced to do something, even if its good for them.

Fast forward a year to 2007 and we have Tony Blair saying:

“Open v closed” is as important today in politics as “left v right”. Nations do best when they are prepared to be open to the world. This means open in their economies, eschewing protectionism, welcoming foreign investment, running flexible labour markets. It means also open to the benefit of controlled immigration.

Once again, I respond positively to openness and indeed open vs closed does seem a more practical unit of political analysis than left vs right these days, at least on some levels. However, again I experience a trace of unease and this time I can’t put my finger on it. And in the ensuing 5-6 years we see openness emerging as a western agenda with the implicit assumption that open = good and by extension more open = more good.

I expressed some of my concerns when I wrote about this in 2009. I likened open vs. closed as a kind of yin and yang, two parts that can’t live without each other.  That was close to what I want to say here but I think the problem is bigger now and that analogy misses some critical nuance

More recently I’ve been thinking about “open” in the context of Open Data and how that relates to personal privacy. Clearly more open cannot always equate to more good in this context. If we acknowledge that the need for privacy is contextual, then it is axiomatic that the need for openness is also contextual. The problem with making a virtue of “open” is that it tends to steamroller nuance and context.

I am reminded, as I often am, of the Taoist parable of a farmer and his “good” fortune.  Nothing is inherently good or bad but is defined by the context in which we understand.  The more I think about it, the more I think the crux of the problem lies in an essentially manichean worldview where open is now equated with virtue, where we must fight the forces of closed-ness wherever we find it.

This is wrong in the same way that the Golden Rule is wrong. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What could be simpler? Yet, the angry drunk who enjoys getting into fights in bars has no problem with this rule. It helps him get into more fights. Absolute rules tend not to fair very well in complex environments.

So, let’s consider some other “good” words.  How about “kindness” and “cleanliness”? Any parent or anyone who has been in the wrong relationship knows that you have to be “cruel to be kind” sometimes.  Doing the right thing might actually involve not being “kind”.  So perhaps kindness is not a very good goal.  And cleanliness.  We know it is next to godliness and on the surface of things how could one argue with it.  But a quest for cleanliness actually has led to some surprisingly negative outcomes such as the growth of allergies.  The more we understand about our bodies, the more we realise that what we previously thought of as “unclean” is actually a part of what makes us human.

So, would a “kindness” movement serve us well?  Or a “cleanliness” movement? Well, the answer is not yes or no, it is “mostly”.  Mostly being kind is a good idea and mostly being clean is a good idea but they are bad when turned into doctrine and orthodoxy. The rationale for orthodoxy is that if you don’t keep things pure enough, then it is a slippery slope to the increasing adulteration of all you hold dear.

The problem with purity is that is that it leads to fragility.  In Anti-Fragility, Nassim Taleb argues that all complex systems need to be stressed in order to grow stronger, to reduce fragility. Perhaps open works need proprietary works to stress them into improving and evolving.  As I wrote previously, the evidence from multi-party prisoner’s dilemma simulations would seem to support this, namely that “open” strategies succeed very well in a very closed ecologies and “closed” strategies succeed very well in a very open environments.

So what’s an Open Source advocate to do?  Well, if you were Evgeny Morozov you could rubbish the entire open movement but that doesn’t work for me because I really do see and live the benefits of open all around me.   I think what is needed is a new concept, that of “Right Openness”.  In Buddhist philosophy, one of the principal teachings is the Noble Eightfold Path, which describes the “path” to enlightenment.  Each path begins with the word “right”, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, etc.  What is notable about this is that there is no prescribed behaviour.  There is the overall goal of reducing suffering and being compassionate but the way you achieve that is not specified.  Mostly kindness is a great way of being compassionate but not always.  Mostly openness is a great way of achieving good outcomes in the growth of knowledge  in good governance, etc but not always. One need only look at a for-profit 3-D gun printing initiative to see how “open” as orthodoxy can lead to the wrong sort of outcome.

Let’s take the example of Right Speech. In the west, we value truth and freedom when it comes to speech. Yet, anyone who has uttered the words “Let’s be honest” in a relationship, knows that there are truths and there are truths. Time and geography matter when it comes to truth. Learning the truth about a murder that happened hundreds of years ago, half-way around the world is not the same as learning the truth about a murder that happened an hour ago, next door. The same with freedom of speech. Encouraging someone to help their neighbour is not the same as encouraging someone to kill their neighbour. We know this, yet we still defend freedom of speech when I think what we really mean is Right Speech, speech that does not harm others, that is timely, etc.

What then would Right Openness look like? It would recognise that “openness” is not an inherent virtue but rather a contextual good. What would that look like in practice? Well it would always hark back to the question of the larger goal, whether more equitable sharing of knowledge, good governance, etc.  It would then ask what right openness looks like in that context. It would lead by example, not by doctrine. In the Open Data world, it would embrace privacy issues as being fundamental to effectiveness openness without getting hung up on privacy as a violation of openness.

As we struggle to understand the complexity of the world we live, we look for simple rules to help guide us through the storm.  That’s great as look as we treat them as rules of thumb.  To paraphrase George Box, all rules are flawed, but some are useful.

So let’s hear it for Right Openness and remember kids, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”

–
Photo courtesy Stephanie Davidson 2008 CC BY SA

Current television spectrum allocation

Digital Divide, Digital Dividend, Digital Yadi-yadah.  You would be forgiven if the term Digital Dividend didn’t immediately resonate with you given the proliferation of all things “Digital” in recent years.  A quick reminder then.  The Digital Dividend refers to the spectrum that is freed up in the conversion from analogue television broadcasting to digital broadcasting, also referred to as the Digital Switch-over (DSO), a change that has largely already taken place in the industrialised world and is slowly gathering pace in Africa.  This involves deploying digital transmitters to replace the analogue ones and either new digital televisions or digital Set Top Boxes (STBs) for existing televisions.  But the fact that more channels may become available or that you can receive television channels optionally in high-definition is less exciting to me than what can be done with the spectrum that is freed up. How much spectrum is being freed up?  There is over 400MHz of television spectrum.

Digital broadcasting uses a fraction of the spectrum that analogue broadcasting does and in Africa, there are few enough analogue terrestrial television channels per country to begin with.  What is more, it turns out that television spectrum exists within a very attractive range of the frequencies. What makes a frequency attractive?  Propagation or the ability of a radio wave to go through obstacles.  The lower down you go down the spectrum, the longer the radio waves and the less they are inclined to bounce off solid objects.   That means that you can cover a larger area with a single transmitter and that means that the cost of building a communication network drops significantly.  There are trade-offs however.  Longer waves carry less information so you can’t pack as much data into the same channel but that is a very reasonable trade-off when it comes to planning rural networks where the cost of network deployment may be a bigger issue than ensuring >20MB/s download speeds. So the Digital Dividend spectrum is extremely appealing from an infrastructure cost-of-ownership perspective.  It is unfortunate then that most of the debate around the Digital Dividend has largely been held within the broadcast community.  Not that digital broadcasting isn’t important but the Digital Dividend is an extremely valuable resource that needs to be considered holistically in terms of its national strategic value.

At the World Radio Congress (WRC-12) last year, there was confirmation of 790-862MHz (popularly known as the 800MHz band) as a global IMT (mobile) band. There was also a move by some African countries to have the 694-790MHz band (popularly known as the 700MHz band) made available in Region 1 (Africa and Europe) on an accelerated basis, probably because there are lots of CDMA players already in the 800MHz band. 700MHz is likely to be confirmed as an IMT band for Region 1 at the WRC in 2015.  So that’s good news for mobile operators except that the release of the 700MHz and 800MHz bands is being treated as contingent on the completion of the DSO.  Given the delays that have plagued the DSO on the continent, this seems like a dangerous strategy.  Why can’t one or both of these two new IMT bands be cleared for use while the DSO is going on in the lower end of the television spectrum?  At the very least, preparatory work for release of this spectrum ought to be going on now.

What a future allocation of spectrum might look like.

But the situation is worse than just a disconnect between the broadcaster and mobile operators.  There is also the prospect of missing out on an alternative access technology that could make a real difference for rural access.  Television White Spaces technology has the potential to create a vibrant rural access industry in Africa.

Television white spaces refers to the guard bands left between analogue television broadcast channels in order to prevent interference. TV White Spaces technology is capable of serendipitously re-using that empty spectrum without interfering with existing television broadcast. The initial vision was that through spectrum sensing, the devices would automatically use whatever empty spectrum was available, as a secondary user. That means if a television signal suddenly turn on in a frequency being used by a TV White Spaces device, it would automatically cease using that frequency and find another empty frequency to use. The broadcast and wireless microphone industry in the U.S. were not satisfied with this solution and the concept of an geo-located authentication database was introduced whereby TV White Spaces devices would need to authenticate against a spectrum database to see what spectrum was available for use in the area it was being used. Very low power TV White Spaces devices are still allowed to use just spectrum sensing. In general TV White Spaces regulation in the US has been the victim of massive lobbying and the result is some extremely hamstrung regulation.

The UK has largely followed the US regulation with one significant improvement. The power output level of the devices is not fixed but can be dictated by the settings in the authentication database. This means that higher power output levels could be assigned in sparsely populated rural areas versus areas where there are many other spectrum users.

What is exciting about this technology?

1. No spectrum license required or at least a very nominal one. This means new opportunities for small entrepreneurs to provide alternative access.
2. Great propagation. A typical TV White Spaces link can go 8-10km without any effort and is not obstructed by trees, buildings, etc.
3. Innovation. WiFi has gone from a niche spectrum for experiments to an industry that is expected to be worth over 6 billion dollars in 2015. ~70% of smartphone data traffic in the rich world goes over WiFi. This is what open spectrum offers. TV White Spaces has the potential to be another such industry because of the low barrier to entry.
4. No spectrum re-farming required. Because TV White Spaces technology is designed for secondary use of spectrum, there is no need to move the primary spectrum holder. This is a quick and easy win. Conflicts can be easily resolved by the regulator thanks to the authentication database.

TV White Spaces are finally gaining traction however.  Google is sponsoring a pilot in South Africa and in Kenya, Microsoft are supporting a pilot in partnership with the Kenyan government and a satellite operator there.  Those are good signs but in general the discussion of the Digital Dividend has been trapped in bureaucratic silos.  There needs to be a broader acknowledgement of the strategic value of the Digital Dividend and a strategy that addresses it holistically.

For those working in the complex world of International Development trying to bring about more equality in the world, through means misguided or otherwise,  information and communication technologies (ICTs) seemed to offer tremendous potential to accelerate positive change in the world.  And so new aid programs were born that attempted to catalyse development activities through the use of ICTs.

As the Internet optimists had foreseen, ICTs turned out to be very useful for everyone, even and most especially the poor.  But where there is utility, there is money and the communication infrastructure business soon became a multi-billion dollar industry.  Technology companies rapidly outpaced development efforts and soon mobile phone infrastructure had spread across the developing world.

Slightly embarrassed by their own efforts, development agencies leapt on board with mobile and Internet companies to partner in bringing access to the developing world.  A beautiful public private partnership was born. Sounds great doesn’t it?  Everyone go to Davos.

What is missing from this picture is the fact that large technology companies are not in the business of saving the world.  They are in the business of serving their shareholders.  And that means that the story they tell the world about their involvement in the developing world, is one that serves their shareholders.  What do I mean by “story they tell”?  Narrative is the basic unit of human thought and everything we do is constructed in the context of a story that we tell ourselves and that we tell others about what is happening in the world and what our role is in it.  Some years ago I was introduced to a beautiful quotation from Alasdair Macintyre (thank you Steve Denning) that has stuck with me:

“unless we have the critical tools to understand in which story we stand, our praxis runs the risk of prolonging not only the problem but the problem story. Often a problem will be solved only by dissolving the story”

In other words, if you don’t know whether your Hamlet or Rosencrantz or in King Lear or The Comedy of Errors, there is little chance of you successfully changing your role or the outcome of the story.

Corporations have been known to occasionally deviate from the very strictest truth in the stories they tell in order to serve their corporate interests.   An energy company might de-emphasise the danger of certain kinds of energy sources because of the vast profits to be made from them.  A mining company might obscure the provenance of minerals sourced from a conflict zone.  Otherwise upright corporations pay bribes where there is a lot of money to be made and an opportunity to do so without getting caught.  Where there is a lot of money on the table, corporations tend to act first in the interest of their bottom line.

And there is a lot of money in the world of telecommunications and the Internet.  Carlos Slim didn’t get to be the richest man in the world by baking cakes.  This turns out to be a problem because communication networks, thanks to the magic of network effects, naturally tend toward monopolies or at least oligopolies.  This makes it much easier for communications corporations to extract more than their fair share of revenue from the average customer.  Why do they do this?  Because they can, because it is what they exist to do, to maximise profits for their shareholders.

This is not about the developing world in particular.  It is true in the U.S. and Canada.  For an insight into the U.S. watch this chilling talk by Susan Crawford about the state of broadband infrastructure.  Communication companies have the chips stacked in their favour and absolutely require regulation in order to counter-balance the natural tendency toward monopoly.

When it comes to the developing world however there is an amazing dearth of critical discussion about the narrative put forward by communication companies.  Development agencies treat these corporations as if they were their friends.  They are not your friends.  They may have temporarily aligned interests but they are not your friends.  They may be staffed by excellent and well-meaning people but their collective interest, nay their responsibility, is to their bottom line and it is frankly amazing that development agencies have managed to maintain an apparent state of willful naivete for such a long time.

This obliviousness leads to pretty dubious activities like the funding of “mobile apps for development”.  Oh sweet saffron, how the mobile operators must have chuckled when they heard that one.  Honestly, they don’t need your help.  Curiously there is little funding going into supporting good policy and regulation of telecom and Internet markets in the developing world, to ensuring real competition and fair pricing.  There are some stand-out exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.

So when the ITU develops a global next generation broadband strategy and it fails to mention WiFi, do you think it might be because mobile corporations have an interest in promoting their own infrastructure rather?  Do you think that when Google launches a campaign to Save the Internet that it is altruism or self-interest?  When Facebook offers free access on mobile phones, is that because they care about the poor?   Please don’t get me wrong, I am not some whining lefty moaning about how corporations are evil.  Corporations are lovely.  Google, in particular, in serving its corporate interest of having more bits consumed globally is in a position to do some very useful  disruptive things in both the rich and poor worlds.  Disruptive corporations in particular are lovely as they pry out the roots that monopolistic corporations dig in the ground.  However, they are still not your friend.  They need to be watched and called to account when they behave badly, especially when a big fat pile of money is on the table.  And this is what the international development community is signally failing to do.

So what’s the tl;dr?  Fewer apps and more support for ICT policy and regulation, please.  It’s not sexy, it takes a long time, and often it fails to succeed against the massive advantage that huge communication corporations have.  But it is where a more ICTD support should be going.  Naturally I speak with a degree of self-interest.  Simply making WiFi and VoIP legal everywhere would be a big leg-up for Village Telco.  Where would I be without my own little corporate narrative?  :-)

Original image courtesy Philip Martin.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
Published: Oct 2011

My reaction on reading this book is that it ought to be required reading for entry into adulthood. Kahneman draws on a career of research to reveal how profoundly biased our thinking is even when we are confident of being unbiased. He suggests that the mind is made up of two different thinking systems: System 1 which is quick and dependent on intuition and the emotions; and, System 2 which is slower and uses reasoning and logic. Both systems have their flaws and he does a masterful job of illustrating the many ways in which we can be misled.

It is perhaps not a surprise that, given his experience of human bias, Kahneman is a fan of algorithms.  He argues that in many cases an algorithm will make more consistent decisions on average than humans will. He presents some compelling evidence for this across a range of fields. This is at odds with the work of Gary Klein whose research on the power of intuition was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell. Instead of belittling and undermining the work of Klein, he embraces their differences and embarks on a research collaboration with him that is detailed in Chapter 22: Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It. In the end they recognise that their different conclusions were influenced by researching people in very different professional roles e.g. parole board members versus firefighters. It is a beautiful example of collegial respect leading to deeper insight.

This is a very sobering book.  It wasn’t completely new territory.  Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational was a great introduction to behavioural economics but the wealth of evidence presented in Thinking Fast and Slow is almost overwhelming.   The notion of System 1 versus System 2 thinking is also a very interesting and a more nuanced understanding of thinking than simply logic versus emotion.

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt
Published: Mar 2012
I found Haidt’s multi-dimensional view of morality in The Righteous Mind very appealing.  Intuitively the notion that morals might be more like a sense of taste with more than one axe of exploration e.g bitter, sweet, salty, sour, etc.  rather than simply binary e.g. good vs. evil, is quite a compelling one.  It was particularly timely published in the run-up to the U.S. elections where it was possible to see morality battles every day in the news.  He suggests that the dimensions of morality fall along the following axes:

Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their “just desserts”.
Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgements in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
Source: Wikipedia

Interestingly, Haidt comes to the same conclusion as Kahneman regarding the existence  of two different thinking systems in the brain.  He refers to them as  ”seeing-that” and “reasoning-why” systems which is perhaps a little more intuitive than System 1 and System 2.

Haidt has attracted his share of critics but, right or wrong, I have found the notion of a moral matrix to be a very useful tool for looking at problems in a new light.  Take, for example, Open Source software.  There is a very interesting analysis of Open Source that can be made looking at the motivations for contributing to Open Source through the lens of Haidt’s moral matrix.

Further, this book also introduced me to the concept of group selection in evolutionary theory which in turn gave me new insights into the Beinhocker’s Origin of Wealth.  Once again looking at Open Source software, it is easy to understand the success of Open Source approaches through an evolutionary group selection lens.

Since reading it I have found that, once you start looking, you can start to see the morality matrix at play everywhere.  It’s not the only way of looking at an issue but I have found it often offers a perspective I would not have thought of otherwise.

Why Nations Fail - Daron Acemoğlu & James Robinson
Published: Mar 2012
Why Nations Fail is another book that has provoked some controversy.  It could hardly fail to given the epic sweep of history that it covers and the retrospective coherence with which the authors fit historical narrative to their theory.

Once again, right or wrong, their theory is a very interesting one that has shed new light for me on challenges within the world of international development.  They argue that a country’s political and economic institutions need to be analysed together and that they can be broken down into two types.  There are “extractive” institutions in which a “small” group of individuals do their best to exploit their political and economic environment for maximum gain and to inhibit the sharing of wealth; and there are “inclusive” institutions which are broadly open and encourage participation.  They argue that inclusive states become wealthier over time and that extractive states, though they may experience short term growth, ultimately make countries poorer.

Given that their theory operates over generations, even hundreds of years, it is very hard to assess the validity of their theory as its predictive power will take some time to asses and even then political/economic systems are complex and, I think, resistant to this sort of sweeping analysis.

However, that doesn’t it make it any less fascinating a work.  Most interesting for me was the notion of trust and how important it was in an “inclusive” state to create the conditions where individuals do fear to invest their time and money in enterprises.  Land rights feature as a particular issue in the book and it made me think about the world of communication infrastructure and the digital domain in general.  I think there is an interesting analysis to be made of “inclusive” versus “extractive” digital infrastructures.  As another way of looking at the problem, I think the notion of “digital land rights”, being able to afford digital land, being confident that you can keep it, being sure of rights of way, etc is a metaphor worth exploring further.

Mindset - Carol Dweck
Published: Feb 2006

This is a slightly older book but I only discovered it in 2012. It is another book where the author divides the world into two categories: in this case the author divides people into those with a “fixed mindset” or a “growth mindset”.  To quote Dweck directly:

“In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”

I cannot emphasise enough how profound this book has been for me both as a professional and as a parent.  Her thesis is not especially complex and seems obvious in retrospect but then so many brilliant things do.  It has everything to do with how you understand failure.  If you see failure as a personal commentary on your abilities then it can be destructive and disabling.  By contrast, if you see failure as containing the ingredients for learning and growth, then failure can be an enabler.

Intellectually this is obvious but I have never really taken on board in a personal way until I read this book.  Her narrative style and many many examples from a variety of fields helped the idea to sink in.  It has helped me professionally.  As an entrepreneur, I am confronted with failure on a regular basis.  I have never liked rejection.  Who does?  MindSet helped me make a fairly profound internal shift to not judge myself every time an investor or customer said the dreaded word…. “No”.

Interestingly it has been just as useful as a parent.  As my kids struggle with developing mastery in a variety of domains from academics to sports, they run smack into the failure demon.  Mindset helped me help my boys think constructively about failure as a breadcrumb trail to success.  And with that I leave you with this profound piece of wisdom from the children’s classic, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Happy 2013.

If you work in the area of Open Government, Open Data, Transparency,  or even just ICTs and Development in general, you have probably heard of the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative.  MAVC is a Grand Challenge for Development which brings together the UK Department for International Development (DFID/UKAID), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Omidyar Network (ON), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) to create a $50 million fund to “support innovation, scaling-up, and research that will deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness.”

On Saturday, in response to an increasing number of interactions around MAVC that I’ve had over the last few weeks, I tweeted the following:

Boy oh boy.Seems like everyone’s got their hat out ready to catch money falling from the “Making All Voices Count” sky.

— Steve Song (@stevesong) December 15, 2012

which garnered a few reactions.  Most interestingly @wayanvota issued a challenge to speak up and say just what was wrong with MAVC.  I was a little surprised by his reaction as I thought there were some fairly self-evident problems, mostly related to what happens when there is a large pot of money on the table.  It then occurred to me that perhaps this was perhaps not self-evident to all or perhaps even that I was simply jaded and cynical.  My first thought was to blog about the challenges that I think MAVC will face.  But frankly it’s easy to be a critic and anyone engaged in the field of philanthropy knows that it is hard, very hard indeed to do well.  If I had the time, I could pick holes in development initiatives all day.  Like shooting fish in a barrel but not as much fun.

So, perhaps more challenging, more constructive, and more fun would be to say, well *what would I do*. That is to say if someone said, here take this bag of 50 million dollars and go forth to create more open governance in the South.  A challenging prospect.  Achieving impact through the giving away of money is much more difficult than achieving impact in the private sector. Philanthropy lacks that marvellous feedback loop called the market which provides plenty of data for self-correction.  This doesn’t, as some suggest, make philanthropy bad. It just makes it more challenging.  So herewith my suggestion as to how to most effectively spend 50 million dollars on Open Government in the South.

My recipe is very simple.  I would pick 10 universities, one each in 10 countries in the South.  I would endow a chair for Cyber Law and Governance in each university for 10 years giving each university 5 million dollars.  That’s it.  Maybe I’d keep a million or two back to fund and facilitate networking among the universities but that’s it.  Here is my rationale:

1. Open Governance, if it happens at all, has to be home-grown.  The power imbalance in development assistance hasn’t gone away.  Putting southern researchers in control of the agenda is a start towards mitigating that problem.
2. Open Governance is still in its infancy.  There is no significant body of evidence of it making a difference in the South.  Granted MAVC plans to fund research, as do others, but what is really needed is sustained dialogue in the south between informed civil society and government.  Think of the role that someone like Michael Geist plays in Canada or Rufus Pollock in the UK.  Universities were and are the critical enablers for them.  We need more of that in the South, that is to say dialogue not solutions.  Solutions emerge naturally from constructive dialogue.
3. Open Government is complex.  There is a kind of naive optimism around Open Government which comes from the forty thousand foot view that many donors have.  Kenya, the poster child for Open Government in Africa, has experienced its own challenges with Open Government. There are vested interests, entrenched centres of power, contradictory priorities (protection of privacy, cyber security, etc), lack of capacity and many other issues, all of which take time and engagement to deal with.  This calls more for sustained local dialogue, engagement, and capacity building than for entrepreneurs building open data apps.
4. Most countries in the South have a critical lack of institutions that can engage on cyber governance issues.  It is not just Open Government but digital privacy, surveillance, cyber security, Internet governance and a host of other issues that demand a generation of researchers and policy-makers with the interest and capacity to lead their countries and probably the world to better decision-making on these issues.  Invest in those institutions and you will get Southern leadership on these issues and make it easier for future funders to find the right places to engage.
5. Policy work is a long game.  Institutions need to know they can commit beyond a few years.  This would allow them the time and resources needed to bring about real change.

My 2 cents or 50 million dollars as the case may be.

“mobile broadband could prove the platform for achieving the boost needed to get progress back on track – at end 2011, there were already almost twice as many mobile broadband subscriptions as fixed broadband connections.”

But what does it actually mean and is it really true?  When talking about our mobile broadband future, it is essential to distinguish between devices and networks.  The two things are not necessarily the same thing.

The Future is Mobile Devices

This future I believe in.  Small, low-power wireless devices whether phones or tablets are taking over the way we interact with each other and with content.  New markets and services are being created every day for mobile devices.  The world of app and apps stores are creating new opportunities for innovation and adding value.

The Future is Mobile Networks

This is the future mobile operators would like you to believe in but the evidence is increasingly not in their favour.  Here are some statistics that may change your perspective of our mobile broadband future.

Global Smartphone-originated Data Traffic
January 2012 – Source: Mobidia

A recent study by Mobidia revealed that about 70% of smartphone data traffic travelled via WiFi and not mobile networks.  Keep in mind that this research was not done in Africa, it was done in the industrialised world.  What we are seeing overwhelmingly is WiFi become the default form of data access and cellular access being relegated to those times when WiFi is not available, an increasingly rare phenomenon in the rich world.

The figures are even higher for tablet traffic.  And while we’re at it, since when are tablets “mobile” devices?  Of the fifty million tablets sold in the United States, only 8% have mobile capacity.  The tablet is not a mobile device, it is a WiFi device.  Google’s Nexus7 tablet is WiFi-only.  Both Microsoft’s new Surface tablet and Apple’s new iPad Mini are likely to launch as WiFi-only devices.  Why would Apple and Microsoft do that?  Well, one reason might be to avoid the painful process of negotiating mobile carrier agreements.  Imagine if computer manufacturers had to negotiate ISP agreements to connect a computer to the net.  The latest tablet is also a whole lot cheaper than a smartphone.  Compare a $200 Nexus7 tablet with an $800 Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone.

So what’s my point here?  My point is that the UN Broadband Commission’s recently published report on Achieving Digital Inclusion mentions WiFi exactly twice, both times parenthetically.  Mobile operators would like you to believe that the future of mobile broadband lies in the LTE networks that they are building.  And certainly that is partly true but only partly.  If the Mobidia stats are to be believed, about 30% true.

Mobile operators have no interest in WiFi because they currently have no control over WiFi networks although that is beginning to change in the U.S.  And we get reports like the one from the UN Broadband Commission because the dialogue at the ITU is dominated by operators.  The Broadband Commission itself is chaired by Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world.  The irony of putting the richest man in the world in charge of a commission to connect the poor appears to be lost on the UN.

In any discussion about the mobile broadband future of Africa, WiFi is simply not part of the discussion.  Yet the evidence is before our eyes of the strategic importance of WiFi to our “mobile” devices.  It’s cheap and fast and grew to solve the problem of affordable access by chance not by design.  It happened because WiFi is an open space for technology developers to innovate.  No carrier agreements required.

Also not mentioned in the UN Broadband Commission’s report is the potential of Television White Spaces spectrum, a space for with the potential for massive innovation in rural access.  Another area not controlled by mobile operators.

The benefits of WiFi go beyond just cheaper access.  They also create the opportunity to eliminate the weakness of a single point of failure that mobile networks create.  WiFi infrastructure can make it harder to wilfully shutdown communication in a given geographic region.  The key to resilient networks is plurality of access and WiFi is already embedded in every smart device you can think of.

It would be nice to see WiFi recognised for the powerful role that it is already playing in mobile broadband and to see it figure in national strategic broadband plans for the future.

The implementation of mandatory SIM card registration has been justified as necessary in order to assist law enforcement agencies in tracking down criminals.  Images are conjured up of thieves executing elaborate plots with the aid of disposable mobile phones.  In the post 9/11 zeitgeist, this is an argument that most find easy to digest.  Indeed, so much so that I am unaware of these policies being buttressed by any research evidence linking SIM card registration to a drop in crime or an increase in solved criminal cases.  Most news articles seem to provide as rationale the fact that other countries in the region are implementing such policies. A search through Google Scholar reveals very little research on this.  And indeed the only research I could find on mandatory SIM registration in Africa focused primarily on its economic impact on subscriber growth.

So what’s to worry about?  The classic rebuttal to objections to this kind of data collection is that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.  And indeed, the “intent” of most legislation around SIM card registration is to clearly define and control when and how this information might be accessed by law enforcement agencies. But what is worrying is not so much lawful interception but rather when those rules get bent or broken.  We have seen countless examples now around the world of sensitive data being unlawfully accessed from email accounts to credit cards.

The very act of collecting data carries the responsibility to provide adequate methods and oversight for securing that data.  When organisations propose to collect potentially sensitive data, the burden of proof should be on them to justify the need for such data collection as well as their ability to keep that information secure.  I don’t believe the case has been clearly made for SIM card registration.  Certainly I don’t think the benefits outweigh the dangers.  Here is an example of why.

IMSI Catchers

There is a paradigm shift going on in the world of electronic surveillance.  It has gone from complex, expensive, and sometimes unreliable to simple, inexpensive, and highly accurate.  Increasingly surveillance technology has become commoditised.  The device advertised at the left is a great example of this.  It is an IMSI catcher, a device that listens passively to mobile phone traffic and picks up the identity of all of the phones in a given area.  It can be purchased for a few thousand dollars.  About the size of a suitcase, it can be installed on the bottom of a helicopter or on top of an apartment building.  In many countries, the passive nature of the IMSI catcher often means that using one does not legally constitute interception and thus they can be used with oversight by law enforcement agencies.

Now imagine that the government of the beautiful democracy that you live in does the unthinkable and implements some legislation that you object to.  You decide to exercise your free speech by participating in a public rally objecting to this legislation.  A helicopter hovers in the distance with an IMSI catcher attached to it.  Now your phone is in a database that has been collected of everyone who participated in the rally.  Without mandatory SIM registration, that database is just a list of phone numbers.  With it, it is potentially a list of names and addresses of people who the government has now identified as troublemakers.  Perhaps that sounds a little paranoid?  For a healthy democracy it probably is but there is plenty of evidence of authoritarian regimes using these tools and others.  And maybe your country is a democracy now but will it always be?

Naturally such violations of privacy couldn’t happen if the rules for accessing the SIM registration database were observed but that is precisely my point.  I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that the rules won’t ever be broken in the name of “security”.

Time To Ask Questions

The point of this post is to suggest that the time is now for civil society organisations in countries where mandatory SIM card registration has been implemented to starting asking questions, such as:

• Does adequate technological and policy oversight exist to prevent SIM card registries from being misused?
• What evidence is that that SIM card registries are actually contributing to crime reduction?
• Are law enforcement agencies already using passive surveillance technologies like IMSI catchers?
• Are passive surveillance technologies covered under existing legislation concerning the interception of communication?

And of course this is just the tip of the iceberg as we begin to understand the many ways in which in which the ever smarter mobile technologies create new possibilities for the invasion of personal privacy.  In the rich world, organisations like Privacy International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are working hard to ensure that rapidly evolving communication technologies do not end up compromising our right to privacy.  Every country in Africa needs a civil society voice to ensure that individual right to privacy is not eroded with a phone call.

A List of African Countries with Mandatory SIM Card Registration