Lee Thorn - Jhai - village telmed, ed, livelihood steps

Dear friends and board,

I hope this find you and your families well. We're doing well here in Laos.

I find the article on globalization at the end from the Independent in India illuminating. I do not agree with all points, but I do think this is a good read. fyi.

I am in Laos still working on telemedicine - a way for villages to get direct diagnosis, prescriptions and treatment plan from doctor without leaving the village - and sustainable education and livelihood project with

1. Phon Kham village and the middle school and clinic there, the Parents Association of 18 villages who use this school, Phon Kham parent association, the heads of all associations in Phon Kham, two youth in Phon Kham who are video documenting this project for a year, with help from videographer/instructor Eric Seldin from Bangkok and editor Jim Wigler in San Francisco,

2. Luxembourg Hospital (Maria Theresa Hospital - named after Luxembourg's grand-duchess),

3. Anousone, a hardware guy, Vorasone Dengkayaphichith, Jhai's country coordinator, a school principal from outside of Vientiane who has great success in sustainable ICT projects in schools ( we expect he will work in sustainable school projects with us on contract),

4. John Hawker and his wife, Tet, a translator/hugely intelligent woman from Sat-Ed in Thailand (John is a world class ICT4D guy and with whom we hope to work in Liberia and Ghana and who will return to Phon Kham to help us do set up and training in the schools), and
5. Gourav recently arrived from Delhi where he works for both Neurosynaptic and World Health Partners.

In the meantime we put together a new version JhaiPC for school use - 3.3Ghtz, 1Gig RAM, 60Gbts storage.

Got all that? ;D

What do I do here? Organize community organizers. I do not manage in a conventional way, but in Jhai the buck stops with me, so I guess I am a kind of a manager. I do not lead really. I organize and work on the strategic level. Organizing is a skill that can be taught without business school through formal training. It is mostly handed down, however, from trainer to organizer who turns into a trainer. That is how I learned. I was trained starting in 1967 by Q.R. Hand, Jr., an American civil rights organizer-trainer and Lorenzo Avila, an American farm worker organizer-trainer. I was trained for decades and still take Q.R.'s advice.

I taught at graduate business school so I know its value. I believe organizing is worth more, especially at the new entrepreneurial or innovation level. f course, organizing pays much less, but the benefits are awesome. You get to see people grow in skills and confidence rapidly and you get to see multiple projects come to fruition.

So here is where we are today:

1. We are doing final bench testing of three JhaiPC's and the telemedicine gear today Tomorrow we are testing the internet connection in the Luxembourg Hospital in Phon Mi and in Phon Kham clinic. We expect to do telemedicine training on Monday and possibly again on July 1.

2. We have spent over eight hours in planning sessions in Phon Kham with village, school and clinic leaders over three days. We videotaped with two cameras most of this effort. The parents association will 'own' the project and, thus, will get requisite permissions. We have developed with the school and villagers a tentative sustainability plan that includes asking parents for contributions of about $2.50/month/student using the gear while we will fund a scholarship fund - with help from our donors. I expect the association will buy the computers from us and pay running and maintenance costs from day one. The system will be run nights, weekends, holidays, and vacation periods as a community asset. Several of our people and our consultants will work to make sure this effort is successful. We expect all kinds of surprises, but we feel we are prepared. We are contracting assembly of the Jhai PCs to people here in Laos.

3. I am helping the founders of Jhai Association here, a new organization in Laos. They will operate a lot like a local ngo, once approved. They are in early organizing phase. I expect it will have a distinguished local board. I believe this association will carry out scaling later. This assumes our technology and financial plan is proven over time in the field here, especially in the health sector, and perhaps in the education and other sectors, too.

4. Gourav and I go to Hanoi on 29th and 30th for meetings with telemedicine decision-makers and probable investors.

5. We have solid leads since here on other projects in other countries that seem to want our equipment and expertise.

We're definitely on our way. I would appreciate any feedback on this. You know our highest expertise are

1. in the participatory development process and

2. in human networking.

This means the 'us' of Jhai is quite big. We organize. We are not that interested in getting credit and have no interest in getting rich. We do like rigorous business methods, however. For poorer people to own the tools they need long-term, there

1. MUST be a way not to pay for tools and training initially, and

2. to make money from these things look term, including enough money to replace the tools they chose to own in the first place.

We like working WITH poorer people as they decide what they want, then get what they need to get what they want.

As Dr. Virak the director of Maria Theresa Hospital and old friend told me over dinner a couple of nights ago - we focus on the poor people. His meaning was that when you focus on the poor people, solutions work for all. When you focus on the rich, the solutions may very well not work for the poor. So put your focus on the poor.

Sage advice.

More later. Thanks for all your patience and good will and birthday wishes. Please give to Jhai via our webpage's 'donate' button.

Thanks for your time and interest.

yours, in Peace,

Lee
--
Lee Thorn
chair, Jhai Foundation
I tweet @leethorn_jhai
Way cool .... see 30 sec video of
2003 JhaiPC bicycle-powered set up at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiZa_A0QrtQ

350 Townsend St., Ste. 309
San Francisco, CA 94107 USA
+1 415 344 0360 (office)
+1 415 420 2870 (mobile)
lee@jhai.org
www.jhai.org

Need a consultant? We have all kinds.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Shahidul Shuvra <s_shuvera@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 10:03 PM
Subject: [bytesforall_readers] Internet powered globalisation
To: bangla_ict@yahoogroups.com, Sayeed Rahman <banglait@gmail.com>, bytesforall_readers@yahoogroups.com, ict_of_bangladesh@yahoogroups.com, bdresearchers@yahoogroups.com, voice-of-south@yahoogroups.com




Internet powered globalisation



By Shahidul K K Shuvra



The rise of internet fuelled up the speed of globalisation and the network created among the people has been widened to make new world orders. Interconnectivity in the world, also regarded as a hyper-connectivity, supported people to implement their goals and involve other folks with their formed missions or new destiny they want to touch.



Nowadays we are accepting that came out of internet from the military periphery delivered new economics of development, social ideas and we started abandoning individualist life being disconnected from society and people. Human productivity is on the rise than previously assumed. Internet backboned economy is a guard and forces to enter every where for achieving the growth and goal.



Break up of the Soviet Union with the destruction of the communist dreams,

massive acceptance of software and popularisation of gadgets, mammoth investment in setting up fibre-optic telecommunications, the urgency to outsource technical works to the developing countries by the richer West, cyber problems, social net working sites like facebook, Y2K and bugs have all inspired us to perceive the world differently.

Economist Amartya Sen has noted that lack of communication and constrained media could be causes of famine in the some parts of the world. The Nobel Laureate economist showed in his research that despite having stocks of food, famine victims didn’t get the food for poor communication infrastructure and journalists faced dearth of press freedom to project their distress through the media. So better communication is the first priority to prevent famine and alleviate poverty.

This is another add to the contribution of internet that spread of terrorism is also connected to the cyber space. Deformed spread of globalisation boosted businesses of many, according to some thinkers terrorist attacks by fanatics is also connected to globalisation where internet played one of the prime roles. Devastative attack on the Twine Tower in US reportedly was done by cyber analysis, which was one of the parts of blueprint of the attack.


Social and economic changes that are made possible through intersecting technologies, and power of better software installed hardware can enforce the world’s catapulting process. Now any distinction can’t be marked between day and night and West and East. In the new era there is no need for half of the world to sleep when rest of it is working. Both worlds can be bridged and there is no need to see barriers between them. One of the requirements of the Digital World is fixing same time of work together with ignoring the distance between day and night.



Connecting all the parts of the world with lowering trade and political barriers and adding digital techs in doing business can revolutionise the desired development. Data entry company and call centres are acquainted with working at the same time of the two hemispheres of the world. Generally conceived distance between day and night first has to be removed before starting global services and businesses.



Info-tech had taught us that the locality where one lives does not a matter. One can access information and set up communication from a village of a remote place with a friend doing the same from Africa . So anyone can be well connected in the cyberspace and can explore one’s resources from anywhere in the world.

ICT is now taking a faster turn in many countries. For the sake of survival the industrially and technologically developed world is eager to outsource works to the developing nations like ours. It is now almost universally true that free flow of information and penetration of ICTs at the grass root level changing social and economic conditions.

However, globalisation and its one of the forces internet brought another horrible landscape of the world. Greater info and fastest communication facilities can invite more ghosts of exploitation. Neo-exploiters and multinational gangs can easily enter in these areas with the aid of info-tech and other communication tools that have been introduced. Unfortunately, the communication infrastructures can allow the capitalist and imperialist forces to move ahead with their mission of exploitation. Of course, a few of the deprived people get some benefits from such communication, but the outside capitalist force makes hundred times more profit. We have witnessed how the mobile phone companies, of course, they are multinationals gangs, taking out profit from our country.


Internet powered globalisation is determining our fortune and future. Before the technology other historical components were controlling our destiny. We are stepping back from calling ourselves historical determinists. The course of technology involved globalization is re-naming the flow of history differently as technological determine.



Technologies for spreading information could be called only man-made machines if these are without sufficient contents, innovations and better perspectives to win the world. Our country already branded as a Digital Bangladesh, second submarine cable is on the way and according to the recent budget much will be spent to develop IT infrastructure. But and unfortunately contents are out of headache and we still don’t know what the innovation will run the tools of internet.



My aforesaid internet powered globalisation yet to grip our nation. Gigantic multinational software companies are getting here businesses without investment, only a few staffs of them and partners are selling their products of crore taka, neither they are investing nor employing our software engineers with handsome salary. Mobile phone subscribers have no scope to escape from the net of telecommunication companies, they are in trap; by the name of SIM card registration and re-registration citizens information is in the hands of companies and it means the citizens information is available in the outside of our country, international counterparts of them are busy with the data for developing new products and marking module of next marketing strategy.

http://www.theindependentdigital.com/index.php?opt=view&page=9&date=2010-06-25



http://www.theindependent-bd.com/details.php?nid=179187



The Independent

25 June 2010

* Shahidul K K Shuvra

Editor of IT and Science pages

The Independent

01715245459

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