RRamesh Srinivasan, assistant professor at UCLA in design and media/information studies, delivered the Oct. 20 Liberation Technology seminar. The talk was entitled, “Layers of Networks: How the Street, Institutions, and Mediascape Converge in Egypt.” This wide ranging talk takes us through his fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, India and other countries and culminates with his recent fieldwork in Egypt on the use of social media in the revolution. Through these journeys he argues that technology has the potential to act as a ‘bridge’ that could connect peoples across cultures.

Ramesh discusses his field experiments in India where he provided people in his fieldwork villages with video cameras to document any issue that was valuable to them, and discovered that the process of recording and watching the videos helped in developing broad social priorities. Similarly during his work in Kyrgyzstan and in Egypt he observed that a small sphere of bloggers used social media to create strong ties among themselves, and given the media ecology with the social media having connections with other media, they ended up having a broader reach among the international community. In essence, they served as bridges communicating across boundaries.

The key themes of the talk revolved around the concepts of bridges, interfaces and networks. Ramesh argued that he has sought to understand the role that technology could play in fostering meaningful dialogue among peoples who have different vocabularies and understandings with which they approach the world i.e. “What bridges will bring people together in terms of multi-cultural interaction?” Ramesh argued that technologies are culturally constructed, and culturally created and that technologies can serve as bridges if diverse cultural values or ontologies are considered in their design. Technologies can then act as bridges to connect people across networks.

The talk takes us through the complexities of social media serving as a bridge and discusses preliminary ideas for designing an online architecture that could provide a space for multiple voices and serve as a bridge across different cultures.

In the October 13 seminar entitled, "The Last Mile: Grassroots Development and Technology in Africa” Joshua Stern, executive director of Envaya, and Jesse Young, CTO of Envaya, shared their insights into how software could be used to strengthen grassroots development in Africa. Envaya’s mission is to build and deploy a software platform that provides “the last mile” of connection between grassroots activists and the larger development sector. 

Stern suggested that one of the biggest challenges in the development space currently was the lack of coordination between the community-based organizations, the NGOs and the foundations. He further argued that a system is only as strong as its weakest links. He therefore suggests that it is important to strengthen the weakest links. In the case of Tanzania and many other developing countries, Stern argued that the weakest link was in the connection between the community-based organizations and the international NGOs that often provided critical financial support. The community-based organizations are essential to focus on because they are embedded within the communities they are working in and have institutional memory, and they stay with the communities unlike international organizations and volunteers that come and go.

In Africa, Stern argued, there is a pretty robust grassroots civil society but often people are working on very similar work and do not know one another. Furthermore, organizations have trouble navigating secure funding. There is therefore a huge potential for collaboration. In particular, there is room for greater leveraging technology. Stern argued, “Despite leaps and bounds in hardware infrastructure, software is still tailored to the developed world.” Community organizations have therefore not been able to take advantage of the IT revolution. Envaya fills this gap by providing software that is optimized to work with infrastructure in these localities, thus enabling these organizations to make use of the connectivity that is now becoming available to them.

Josh and Jesse inspired us with the vision of Envaya to provide a technology platform for civil society organizations in developing countries so that communication and collaboration can take place beyond the occasional conference.  Young discussed the technical details Envaya’s innovation that enabled the rapid spread of their platform among the grassroots organizations in Tanzania and elsewhere.

Andrew McLaughlin, a lecturer at the Stanford Law School and the executive director of the Creative Commons delivered this inaugural lecture for the fall season of the liberation technology seminar series at Stanford. McLauglin argues that the internet originally evolved into a diffused and decentralized system amidst a small set of trusted organizations and security was not major concern at that stage.  The expansion of the internet has created substantial risks, and some of these risks are in areas over which no entity is in charge.  The question of who should address these and what role governments should play in it has implications for sovereignty and free speech.

In the current architecture of the internet, private organizations such as Certificate Authorities, browser makers, internet service providers and ICANN play an important and co-dependent role.  Their decisions have implications for the smooth operation of the internet and security of the cyberspace.  The growing importance of the internet to economies and increasing security risks makes a case for government intervention, and intervention in turn has implications for free speech.  The significance of such entities based in foreign countries also raises questions of sovereignty.

While free speech and other considerations present a case for governments not to intervene in regulating the internet, the decentralized architecture of the internet presents collective action problems.  Some of the security risks can be addressed only by collaborative effort between entities, but no entity has the mandate or the incentive to initiate the necessary changes.  This presents a dilemma for the governments, and McLauglin argues that instead of dictating solutions governments can play a role in creating solutions by convening meetings amongst various key groups, and thus create the impetus to address the risks.

The talk also deals with issues such as whether the decentralized nature of the internet is under threat, and promising models to address some of the specific risks mentioned above. 

Over much of the world, the growing season of 2050 will probably be warmer than the hottest of recent years, with more variable rainfall. If we continue to grow the same crops in the same way, climate change will contribute to yield declines in many places. With potentially less food to feed more people, we have no choice but to adapt agriculture to the new conditions.

To some extent, adaptation can be done by moving crops to more favourable areas and by agronomic tweaks. But that will almost certainly not be enough. We will have to give crops a genetic helping hand, infusing them with new genes to allow them to better cope with new climates, and the new pests and diseases they will bring. Where are these genes going to come from?

Some of them could come from completely unrelated organisms, to be spliced into their new genomic homes using advanced biotechnologies. However, there is significant public resistance to that strategy, and it is still unclear how effective genetically modified crops are at coping with heat and drought. We cannot risk putting all our eggs in that basket.

Another source of genes for crop improvement are traditional heirloom varieties, often called landraces, which are still grown by subsistence farmers in many parts of the world, although they are fast disappearing. Large collections of their seeds have been made over the years, creating genebanks that are scoured by plant breeders searching for crop diversity, and which helped spur the Green Revolution in agriculture from the late 1960s.

But there’s a limit to the diversity found in domesticated species, imposed by domestication itself. Cultivated species usually contain a fraction of the genetic diversity found in their closest wild relatives — a legacy of the ‘domestication bottleneck’. Ancient farmers selected relatively few plants from the progenitors of modern crops, in a limited number of places. Although there has been continuous gene flow between crops and their wild relatives where they coexist, a lot of genetic diversity has been lost as agriculture has developed.

We know that the ‘lost’ genetic diversity includes genes for resistance to high temperatures and drought, and to pests and diseases, as well as taste and nutritional composition, and even yield. If there was ever a time to go back and reclaim this diversity, that time is now. In fact, it is already being used more than many people realize. For instance, there is probably no widely grown rice cultivar that does not have some genes obtained by breeders from its wild relatives. But we could be making much more effective, and systematic, use of the reservoir of diversity our Neolithic ancestors left behind.

To read the full commentary, click here.