Some news update, thoughts on future steps. Curating the ICTD Asia wiki.

[Ajay Kumar]

Hi!
I hope you all are doing very well! I wanted to gather advise on the next steps that I have been discussing with few of us here about ICTD Asia.
Some updates:
First of all, I am happy to welcome Ismael Peña-López ( http://ictlogy.net/ )as one of our advisors, who is a lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science. If you notice the http://ictd.asia/wiki it has a reference of his blog post as well :)
I thank him for agreeing to be a part of this and share his knowledge.

1) I went on to a Digital Native workshop in Taiwan where I got a chance to interact with likeminded young people from Asia who use Technology for Social Impact. http://www.ajuonline.net/blog2/technology/2010/08/13/story-yelling-at-digital-natives-workshop-in-taipei/
Here I talked about the "Caste Based Politics in India" and shared my experiences of running an nation wide activism campaign back in 2006.

2) Finished setting up standalone mobile network based communication system to broadcast information to villagers in the flood prone area in Eastern UP - part of the Early Warning System project at my job.

3) One of our Open Data Initiatives - collecting flood forecast information for india has been operational and we have been collecting and archiving data from September 2010. So we technically have the data that is released publically for this year, since the government stops supplying this information after October 10th each year. I think the next step for us would be to collect other "related" data available out there and start building around it and make the information and API access available. http://ictd.asia/wiki/CWC_Flood_Forecast_-_India

I will be at ICTD 2010 London http://ictd2010.org in December as a participant so a good chance to meet other practitioners in the field. And I am hoping to see Dr. Ismael Peña-López there as well :)

After some research and a lot of looking around, talking and working on the field of ICTD as a part of my job, i still see a lot of disconnect happening with information that is available and people who should be using the information, that in turn would help their ultimate beneficiaries.

The prime reason for me to initiate this group was to bridge the gap between many students willing to volunteer to do good and requirements from the ground by practitioners, academicians etc.

ICTD itself is a wide area of research both for academicians and practitioners as well, and the amount of knowledge that is available would be really useful if channelled appropriately.

I wanted to get the wiki into curation mode and collect information which is "out there" focussing on the Asian efforts that can be very well replicated or used within Asia. There is a difference between people in the Asian region and elsewhere working in the development sector, language barriers, local needs etc, where technology is still a "complex" change to adopt.

What I have in mind now is: we have country specific curators on our wiki that will help us gather and collect information and resources and index them for people to have them at one place.
There are many areas to focus and categorise these efforts in such as, efforts like:
Advocacy,
Livelihoods & Economic Development,
Education,
Democracy/Governance/Civil Engagement
Health
Disaster/Humanitarian Relief
and probably more...

And I am sure everyone on this list, has an area of interest in some or the other category and application of technology happening in that area and it would be great if we could reach out to others as well who have been working in such areas.

The idea is to gather information and make it available.
Connect with the practitioners in the region & help gather requirements.
Convert requirements into actionable tasks for volunteers to take over.


For now it would be good to have some thoughts from you guys if possible, and I am going to be updating the information that I come across on the wiki as well.

These are some initial thoughts that I have been wanting to share from so long, but havent been due to constant travel due to work :)

More soon!

--
Best Regards,

Ajay Kumar

http://www.ajuonline.net

[Subhankar Sett]

What I am about to discuss here is related to the system of Law. (Throughout this discussion I am going to refer to a common person as a person who is not a lawyer by profession.)

Every country has laws and most legal problems have so many ramifications associated with it that the common person finds it quite difficult to tackle a problem without the help of a lawyer. Sometimes, the lawyers themselves face this problem, especially in trans-national legal cases. The biggest setback, I believe, to the decision making process of a common person, with regards to the laws of a country, is that the laws of a country are not readily available. The worst case scenario is that the common person does not even have access to the law books of his/her own country let alone the laws of another country.

So what can we do to help solve this problem?

1. For a start we can make a central storehouse of a country's law books hosted on a server, preferably, within the same country.
2. Next would be to develop an indexing strategy using which we can enable the user to select a situation or a set of situations that the user is facing and then, depending on the selections made, suggest chapters from the laws of his/her country that he/she can refer to, in order to make better decisions.
3. And finally, if feasible, develop a system which could provide step-by-step approaches towards solving a legal problem using the laws of the person's native country. (I am not trying to imply that this system should or would eliminate the profession of lawyers because such a replacement can never be made. The motive of this system, IF FEASIBLE, is to help the lawyers themselves by helping them take better decision in support of his/her case.)
4. And going further ahead, extend the reach of this system to enable it to dig into the laws of other countries while making a decision. This would help us better understand the patterns in, for example, the Trade laws among different countries.

My idea is to bring this system into existence and my attempt would be to, at least, make it till point no. 2. We need to data from the Law books in order to proceed so anybody who is interested in solving this problem of Law can volunteer. :)

I may not be able to dedicate much time towards building this system, owing to the initial stages of my career, but I surely will support any decision process or any process for that matter, to the best of my abilities and available time.

To those who are interested: Lets work out a list of To-Dos and start scavenging for data and statements in our Law books!

If you are a lawyer, you can help by pointing out all the complexities involved and the feasibility of this idea.

Subhankar Sett.