Building collaborative communities

Typical Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects in developing areas of the world focus simply on delivering computers for educational and community use. This basic and simplistic approach has often been tried and the results are varied. Organizations have been committed to sending “refurbished” computers to schools while others have helped start Internet cafes in towns like Gulu, where access to the Internet had only recently been available for the last few years.

An environment like Gulu, however, presents a few basic obstacles to the traditional and tried approaches for bridging the “digital divide” with ICT and computer solutions. For example, one organization we’ve come across is refurbishing old computers in the United States and then shipping them to schools here in northern Uganda. These desktop personal computers (PCs) were built for the 1990’s and consume large amounts of power. Unfortunately, most Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camp schools in northern Uganda don’t have access to a power grid. Consequently, these PCs require use of expensive generators (fuel costs over $8 per gallon in Gulu, Uganda)—most schools can’t afford this and thus can’t use their “refurbished” PCs.

Other locations across northern Uganda do have access to grid power and are at a distinct economic and social advantage. But what good is a PC in these locations if the infrastructure for accessing the Internet is not there and the cost of other solutions like satellite service is prohibitive? In today’s world, providing computers to groups without access to the Internet is like providing a car without wheels—the computer provided is not going to take its users anywhere.

However, BOSCO overcomes these difficulties by providing low-power PCs that can run on a 12 volt battery charged by a small solar panel. On top of this we leap over the gaping infrastructure holes by transmitting our Internet signal over a radio wave that can reach sites as far as 60 miles away from our hub in Gulu. The expensive cost of high-speed Internet service is then shared over the whole network because all of our sites are connected with one modem located at our Gulu office. Each rural or IDP site ends up paying only about $15 per month for access to the Internet.

But besides the technical side of BOSCO, what makes it truly innovative is the philosophy behind what we are trying to do. BOSCO, while delivering ICT resources that leap over the holes in the infrastructure, operates on the premise that the local community has the power to articulate and communicate their own needs better than any outside actor. So, with the help of the Internet we are diving in to a training program at each of our sites that throws the traditional curriculum—heavy on theory and light on practical experience—out the window.

We, instead, begin with small groups of local users, led by volunteers who have prior computer and Internet experience. These groups train together, helping each other learn by biting right into the meat of ICT in today’s world—the Internet. The first thing we do is get them on email, then we let them navigate our simple Intranet site which connects all BOSCO sites to a high speed internal network, useful for posting photos, blogs, and other educational content. After these groups gain competence navigating the web, we point them in the direction of our BOSCO Wikispace so that they can begin collaborating immediately. Collaboration between previously isolated communities can help them reconcile with each other, share information, and articulate local solutions to community problems. Check out the chart below which gives a visual of how this kind of Web 2.0 collaboration can work.


Step 1: User groups formed at BOSCO sites with ongoing competence training (represented by block of people holding hands on each blue space)

Step 2: Local user groups sign up and begin posting their own content on BOSCO Wikispace from their respective school, community center, or IDP camp. (Solid blue lines between blue boxes represent user collaboration on Intranet between BOSCO sites; Dotted black line represents posting of material on BOSCO Wikispace for rest of world to view)

Step 3: Collaborators from within other parts of Uganda and across the rest of the world log onto the BOSCO Wikispace and view user content directly from IDP camps and schools in northern Uganda: Stories are shared, war-ravaged cultural practices documented, community development project proposals are posted.

Step 4: Collaborator input is returned from across the globe as people develop a vested interest in the plight and recovery of the people of northern Uganda. For example, one collaborator funded a small community proposal for $100 dollars to help a youth group of former abductees carry out traditional reconciliation practices. This proposal was posted by the youth group in one of our IDP camp sites.

See image below of what the Pagak camp Wiki site looks like. Notice that various users at this site have links for educational proposals, farming proposals, journal sharing, and a community notice calling for sign ups to partake in computer training at the site.



Please visit our Wikispace site at bosco-uganda.wikispaces.com to begin exploring what is happening on the ground and begin learning how BOSCO is turning the keyboard over to the people who know best what the needs are on the ground: the Ugandan’s themselves.

If you would like to begin responding directly to users at each site by adding your own content to the pages (a wikispace site is by definition a community site where anyone who is a member can edit and add content to the pages) please send your email address to me at kpbailey3@gmail.com .

-Kevin

Tower Problems

One of the challenges of trying to launch an innovative non-profit organization in a former war zone is that on any given day, you can run into serious and unexpected problems that can impede your progress.

One story from a couple of months ago best illustrates these surprises and challenges:
One morning, I received a call on my cell phone in Uganda: it was one of our regular users of the BOSCO network, named Jokondino, in Pagak IDP camp, a fairly large and congested camp of over 15,000 people. As an aside, Jokondino is a primary school teacher and has been using our network to find educational information on the web to enhance his knowledge of the school subjects he teaches—many teachers in northern Uganda do not receive adequate training and almost none of the primary school teachers have received a university education. Jokondino also journals about his experiences in Pagak as a primary school teacher on our BOSCO collaborative wikispace workpage (See http://bosco-uganda.wikispaces.com/Jokondino%27s+Journal).

Anyway, back to my story: Jokondino called me and told me that the network was down, he was not able to access the Internet or the central server we use to remotely store user files. At this particular time, our technical assistant was on vacation in Austria so I was left—without many technical skills—to try and figure out what was going wrong with our long range wireless computer network between all of the IDP camps. That morning I received a dozen or more calls from users in other IDP camps wondering why their access to the outside world had been cut off.

Our network uses a 100 foot TV tower to broadcast the long range WiFi signal out to all of the camps using directional antennas. The government’s Ministry of Communication had given us written approval to broadcast from this location free of charge. After doing some preliminary testing of the network to find the problem, we were able to determine that the camps were not receiving their signals from the TV tower our equipment sits on.

I asked Fr Joseph Okumu, the Director of BOSCO-Uganda in Gulu, what we should do and he instructed me to drive out to the TV tower to see what I could find.

When I arrived at the tower—with its rusty chain link fence around it—I found a couple of security guards watching over the property, armed with AK 47 guns. In the corner of the property, lying on the ground was a large wooden box with yards of cable coming out of it—The box was labeled with the logo of the government telecom company.

I was a bit confused, confronted with a “coup” of sorts of our TV tower. And I was certain that we never previously had used armed guards to protect our equipment. I ended up approaching the two guards and made casual conversation with them. Eventually, I inquired about what was going on and who had moved into the tower property. They informed me that it was the government telecom company. They had purchased the land and wanted to erect a cell phone antenna on top of the tower we were using to transmit our long range WiFi.

I then asked them if I could take a look around the property and they agreed to let me. I looked up at the tower through the glaring sunlight and counted the BOSCO antennas, still mounted 100 feet up—they were all accounted for. Then as my eyes followed the long, thick black cords coming down the tower from the antennas, I noticed that there was an abrupt cut in the wire, which left the wires hanging precariously five feet off the ground with nothing attached to them.

Someone had cut the wires which were attached to a couple of pieces of equipment on the ground, including a solar panel and batteries which powered the antennas on top of the tower, enabling them to transmit the Internet WiFi signal to the IDP camps. It was clear then that someone had stolen the equipment on the ground—equipment totaling almost 2,500 dollars.

Later on, we would come to find out that the government telecom company had purchased the land that the tower sat on. They wanted us to remove our equipment from the tower—it’s still not clear who actually stole the equipment we had on the ground. We did climb the tower to remove our antennas and spent the next weeks trying to figure out a way to redeploy our system on a new tower—either renting space on another tower or building our own.

Since that time we have been in discussions with the government telecom company and have come close to resolving future disputes regarding the renting of tower space for our equipment. The difficult part about this incident, from the perspective of our organization, was that we had a legal right and permission to be there and no recourse or funds to contest such a large government entity in a court of law.

Last week, we had just finished discussions with the government telecom company about the legal arrangements for renting space on the tower they had taken over for us. We went into the discussions with a clear understanding of a potential partnership: We would be providing Uganda’s poorest and most rural areas with Internet access (people who would be unable to afford a regular Internet subscription) and the government telecom company would benefit from this because we were training their customers of tomorrow. Our preliminary rental discussions had us renting tower space for about $40 a month—a reasonable rate we presumed.

Well, after going to Kampala to finalize the legal documents, we discovered that the government telecom company had inserted a price in the contract calling for rental space on the tower to be charged at $700 per month—per piece of equipment. We have 6 small antennas to mount on that tower so the total price would have come to $4200 per month! Keep in mind, building our own tower would cost between $12,000-$15,000. Of course, we didn’t sign this contract and came away a bit disappointed.

The work carries on, however, as we try to find a creative solution to this problem. We have permission to use a Catholic radio station tower in Gulu Town as a short-term solution and then are experimenting with new technology that may allow us to skip large towers all together. We hope that as we learn and overcome these challenges that we will be able to accomplish our mission of reaching all of the most rural and war-affected areas of northern Uganda.

A long overdue update!

It’s been a long while since I have updated my blog here. A lot has been happening with BOSCO since I last posted about our human rights monitoring initiative that we are doing.

In fact, you may not have known this, but between the last time I posted and now, I spent about 7 weeks in South Bend, IN working with the BOSCO board of directors and folks at the University of Notre Dame on our initiatives.

I arrived back in Gulu, Uganda last week to continue my “on the ground” efforts, working with people in the IDP camps here to find useful ways to connect them to the outside world with our solar-powered Internet PCs.

Maybe I’ll just start by giving you all an update of where the project is at now and then where I hope it will be going:

Right before I left Gulu for the US at the end of October, we had just found funding to support local capacity building. We realized that if this ICT project was going to be sustainable in the long run, we were going to have to have local, Ugandan, staff available and trained to carry out a lot of the technical computer networking tasks, especially as we expand to new sites in northern Uganda.

We were able to hire two new Ugandan staff, one as a “Technical Assistant” and the other as a “Project Coordinator.” This brings our team total in Gulu, including myself, to 6 people. We now have four Ugandan staff—our Executive Director, Fr Joseph Okumu, (seen here talking about the project) is a local Diocesan priest who is very politically and socially connected in this area and brings a ton of development expertise.

The next piece of big news is that we were able to secure an agreement with a group of local partners to expand our network to 12 new sites east of Gulu into Kitgum and Pader Districts (map of northern Uganda here). We will provide connectivity to a local NGO looking to setup ICT resource centers for youth who were formerly abducted by the LRA and have returned home. Also, we are connecting the local government offices and a couple of vocational training schools to our network. It is hard to imagine that until now, even the local government offices in district headquarters (a district here is like a state in the U.S.) still do not have access to Internet or the infrastructure for reliable service in the year 2009. We are hoping to setup an e-governance concept whereby people in rural outposts will be able to communicate and collaborate with their elected officials at the district headquarters.

We hope to begin deploying at these new sites in the next couple of months. We also will have the help of a Notre Dame engineering student this summer who is being sponsored by Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns in a summer service/internship capacity.

As for what is next on the horizon: Much of what I have begun here on the ground in Gulu and at Notre Dame will require my continued involvement into next year. Last December, when I began raising funds to support my involvement, I originally had committed to one year of service with BOSCO. As I grew comfortable with my role it has taken on something like a full-time management role. I am very invested in the future of the organization and I was lucky enough to have great support and prior experience in Uganda which made for a smooth transition into my work in Gulu.

As a final note, I came across a reflection I was reading on how we can always strive to be more compassionate with those we interact with and those we are serving. This reflection basically says: compassion is not a gesture of sympathy for those who are less fortunate or who grow up in places of violence or destruction; compassion is not a bending toward the underprivileged from a privileged position; it is not a gesture of pity either; compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is most acute and investing a part of your life with them; it is about learning from them and listening to their stories while reaching out to offer your own story, giving a helping hand where possible. I think that is what I’m striving to do and I hope that is what the BOSCO project is ultimately about.

-Kevin