The Progress Project is the initiative set up by Nokia and Lonely Planet that is focused on capturing the human impact of mobile innovation; tackling social, environmental or economic challenges; bringing to life real stories of people through video. The site’s not fully live yet – I was told it will be up and running fully by Sept 3 – still, I thought I’d share this now, as videos of the documentaries that were made by the Lonely Planet and Nokia teams on our immersions into the Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Tej projects are already up there! And the Nokia Data Gathering and the Mobile Learning Institute projects that my colleague at Mosoci, Stuart visited are also on the site. Should be interesting stories to watch! I do hope there will be follow-ups too as the projects take a life of their own.

Although the site has both Flash and HTML options, you’d either have to view the videos on there, or download them – both of which don’t make it easy to blog. So I decided to post them on youtube so I could embed them in here.

Nokia Life Tools – Full length documentary – 4:42 . In this video, you will see different users than the ones I’ve blogged about. I wasn’t able to meet them all on the trip – so it’s nice to see similar stories but being told by different people!

Nokia Tej – 90 second edit:

Another small hitch at the Progress website – while there are Share options for many social networks, blogging platforms and other social media sites; only the URL is shared, and not the actual videos!

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

I took this picture of Dhanaji Dongre, the farmer we visited during our Nokia Life Tools immersions, on my test N97 (which has a pretty cool camera but a lousy touch-screen esp. when compared to the iPhone). He is taking a picture of the crew on his own little camera phone, who in turn, are taking pictures and videos of him using really hi-tech cameras!! We had professional “filming” on by the Lonely Planet crew during our visits – to the right are Jere Hietala an immensely talented young Finnish photographer, and Brad from Australia, who was directing the film being made. Still, it must be remembered that photography is really a relatively new behaviour in India, encouraged by easy access to cameras on mobile phones!

An interesting juxtaposition of low tech (note the manual plough worked by bullocks too) and hi-tech in several ways – almost as if several eras coexist side-by-side.

Alan gets this super shot:

And it happens again during our Nokia Tej visit to Kolhapur  which I will be writing up shortly – we’re meeting the sales Agent at a small tea shop in the crowded market, and other customers decide we’re interesting enough to capture on their phone cameras!

Another example of this co-existence that struck me on my trip. In the picture below, on the right, you will see traditional accountants sitting on the floor, doing their manual accounting under the blessings of the Gods. It’s a huge open room, and to the left are desks with computers and the manager’s cabin which is equipped with the latest gadgets. This is an old tradition of accounting, and the owner of Arvind Textiles in Icchalkaranji, Kolhapur told Frances Linzee Gordon and me that although most of his systems are now computerized, he would never let go of these employees who have been a part of the family business for many decades, and are like family members. The practice of manual accounting, according to him, will perish only when these people are no more!

It’s how Natesh, Head of  Nokia Life Tools India describes the program – I like the realism when he uses ‘million’ and not ‘millions’ or ‘billion’! Alan Reiter, who was with us during our rural immersions has a great article on Life Tools – here’s an excerpt:

Farmers view Dhanaji Dongre’s crops in Khandali, India, and ask why they are looking so much better. Dongre says it’s because he is using agricultural information transmitted to his cellular phone, and he shares that information with others. This is how mobile data empowers people in rural India.

Dongre farms some eight acres with such crops as corn, tomatoes, eggplant, and wheat. He lives in a modest home with simple furnishings, and he typically uses animals for farming rather than tractors or other motorized equipment.

Dhanaji Dongre is a farmer from the Mohar Taluka in Sholapur District, Maharashtra; one of the crops he grows is ber or bor. By no means poor, despite his simple living and manual field operations, Dhanaji tells us how he was helpless at the hands of middlemen, transporters and wholesale markets prior to using the Agriculture Life Tools.

How it Works:

While there are many programs, including those run by the government, that hold a lot of useful information on market price, dissemination of this information is usually poor. Here’s where the Life Tools program delivers – it allows access to this information, and disseminates it in the simplest manner – through SMS. Internet kiosks are doing some of this, however they are plagued by infrastructural problems (erratic electricity, high outages etc.).

What’s interesting is that Nokia as an Agri Desk at the backend which works with State Agricultural boards and NGO’s; and collects/mines/analyzes/validates/disseminates this information – most of this backend work is done via the Internet. However, for the end-user, the farmer, it is his mobile phone that is the touch-point, the delivery mechanism, and he is totally unaware that the Internet is actually being used. It’s often been said that India will leapfrog the PC stage, and it is the mobile that will be the device that delivers the internet to people – this is a real example!

For Rs. 60 (US$ 1.3) a month, he gets three types of information daily:

• market prices within a 100 km radius for three crops registered by the farmer – price alerts are sent late evening every day, and are factored upon minimum-maximum price traded that day, and supply levels.
• daily weather updates at 7 am – based on location of the subscriber (the more rudimentary method of using pincodes rather than GPS for now) and advisories based on the three crops registered by the farmer (eg. if you’re growing this crop, take this precaution)
• advisories – alerts, precautions, tips on best practices, pesticides and fertilizer information; and neighbourhood news within the 100 km radius and dependent upon the crop. (eg. there’s a growing incidence of red colour stains on sugarcane crop – take XXX precaution). These are sent early evening.

Benefits and Motivators:

We interviewed Dhanaji for a while, between shooting breaks, to try and understand how all this has impacted his life, changed it and made it better.

[Picture credit]

Dhanaji told us that he had wanted to purchase the Nokia 3110 seven months ago, but when he went to the dealer, he was shown the Nokia 2330 with the Agriculture Tools service. He was primarily attracted by the fact that he would get daily market prices for the crops he grew. As a farmer, he was otherwise almost held to ransom by the middle-men and transporters who would take his produce to the marketplace. These middle-men worked on a commission basis with the wholesalers and retailers at the markets, and did not really look after the farmer’s best interests, holding him hostage to their greed. So more often than not, he never did get the best price for his crop. Moreover, approximately 25% of his revenue was “eaten up” by these intermediaries he felt.

With the power that comes with access to information, Dhanaji now insists upon a fixed price with the middle-men, and also asks them to take the produce to the market of his choice. Also, he feels better equipped to buy and more in control of the pesticides and fertilizers he needs.

How does he make is assessment whether the Agriculture Tools service on his mobile phone is working?

• his revenue has increased – he says “if earlier I earned Rupees 100, now I earn Rs. 150″
• he feels he’s better equipped for timely interventions and precautions that ensure his crop is doing well
• he feels more knowledgeable when he goes to the shop to buy pesticides and fertilizers. Often product info on the packs are in English or Hindi and he doesn’t understand either very well. So he would rely on the shopkeeper’s recommendations on type, brand, method, timing – which he feels could be biased by the margins they get on each product. Now he knows better and has been asking for specifics

He says people ask him why his crop looks “visibly better” – which for him is proof! Another consequence is that he is now perceived by other villagers to be the thought-leader – and this gives him immense satisfaction and a sense of power, status and achievement. I asked him why others in the village weren’t buying the service, especially since it had all these benefits, and he said they don’t need to – all they need to do is ask him for his advice on how they can grow a healthier crop, and get better market value!

Equipped with knowledge around farming, access to better prices and the ability to make choices, I do hope these sorts of initiatives will help alleviate some of the strife our farmers face, often leading to suicides, especially among poorer farmer.

It’s also a smart marketing move on Nokia’s part and can be a really profitable venture – 70% of India is still rural, a large proportion of that is in agriculture. Mobile phone penetration urban and rural in India is at 34% and the rural segment is growing quite fast. This means many many many millions who are yet to be connected. Natesh’s estimate of connecting the next million using the cell phone as the device seems reasonable.

It’s also smart in terms of pricing and payment model – for the most basic information, the farmer pays Rs. 30 (less than 1 US$ a month) while for the full suite of services, he pays Rs. 60 a month (US$ 1.3). The interesting bit is that since almost 90% of all subscribers in India use pre-paid services, Nokia is able to deduct Rs. 20 (if it’s the premium service) every 10 days, rather than deducting or adding on Rs. 60 at the beginning or end of the month. As a result, the farmer doesn’t feel the pinch as much. This taps into the  concept of bite-size pieces or small and therefore affordable pack sizes, propagated by C.K. Prahalad in the  Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Given that the service was launched only in July 09, although pilots were on much earlier,  time will tell what attrition rates will be like. I doubt it though, as the potential benefits don’t seem to be driven by economics alone – using a service like this also delivers emotional benefits of not being at the mercy of middle-men, and of a higher stature derived from using a hi-tech approach to agriculture!

Additional Links:

• More of Alan and my pictures from the village visits
• Watch this TEDTalk with Iqbal Quadir of GrameenPhone who says mobiles can help fight poverty.
• My earlier post on Mobile Innovations for rural India – Educational Tools

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

Umesh Markat, a 9th grade school boy, shyly rattles off this line, quietly proud that he can actually string together a sentence in English! Another example of a sentence in English he shared with us – “Raja Ravi Verma is the best Indian artist”. In the picture below, taken by fellow-blogger Alan Reiter, Umesh shows us how the Learn English program, a part of Nokia Life Tools works:

We arrived at his little home in a village in Sholapur district late evening and in addition to Umesh, had the opportunity to speak to his father, his siblings and his friends who had gathered around us briefly. His dad, Hanumant Markat had recently purchased a Nokia 2330 mobile phone. He told us that he had visited the dealership with the idea of buying another Nokia model (he only used it for making and receiving calls as he was illiterate himself), but came back with the 2330 because it had the Learn English Tools available on it. While at the dealership, he was told about the Learn English Tools and believing that it would be great for his son, he purchased  it for Rs. 30 a month. He saw it more as an expense than a cost, as the money was deducted from his pre-paid account, rather than being added onto a post-paid subscriber bill. (In fact, a large percentage of mobile phone subscribers use pre-paid cards in India).

According to the father, the moment he gets home, the phone is usurped by his son, who is really serious about getting ahead in life. His aspirations for his son are for him to get a good job in the city, as farming is not profitable. Knowing English would give his son access to a better job, he felt.

I often see this desire to learn English among many many villagers (youth, parents aspiring that their kids learn English, kids), when I travel to rural areas for my research work.  As with Umesh, the aspiration is to improve their status, get out of farming which they feel is unprofitable and unpredictable, and shift to larger cities to work in large companies where they perceive they can earn better.  For instance, rural women in Haryana ask to learn English, as they see it as a “global language and passport to their children’s success“.  Or as Binu Varghese who works for Dalit education through the Operation Mercy Charitable Company says, the “power to dream”.

The Education program from Nokia Life Tools has four sub-programs:

Umesh had selected just the one – Learn English. He felt when he moved to the 10th grade, he would subscribe to the Test and Exam Preparation programs as well.

On the long drive to the villages, Natesh, Head of Nokia Life Tools, India spoke to us extensively about how they developed this concept. It started with debunking the myth that people in villages are so poor they cannot afford such tools, and figuring out through research, what would make a real difference. They found that the need “to better my life” is huge, and Nokia Life Tools might find a space in this, by making users “better prepared when the opportunities strike”.  Currently the service is available in 10 official languages of India. I believe this is a little step in that direction and has a lot of potential for distance education too.

The dynamics we observed between Umesh, his friends and his younger siblings were quite interesting – Umesh said most of them had not really seen the Learn English tool he was using – and he did not wish to share it with them. It was almost like his little secret weapon to stay ahead of the pack. Neither had he shown it to his teachers at school, where he was taught English in a very rudimentary manner (alphabets, sentences but he felt most of that was not meaningful). Because this tool actually gave him both the Marathi and English versions of each sentence, learning was easier he felt.

In the picture below, we see first a definition of the term “search”, and its use in a sentence. In English and Marathi, to make it easier for the user to understand the meaning well.

We asked Umesh whether he’d like to have audio content instead of text – he thought about it for a moment and said no! His reason was with text, you can read it again and again, understand the sentence well, and make corrections easily, which he felt would not be possible with audio.

We also checked with him if he was aware of the Internet – he said to us “I’ve heard of it (he said “him”) but never seen it. I’ve heard you can ask him a lot of questions and get all sorts of information”.  Humanizing the internet in his own little way, bringing it alive, a body all of its own – right from the mouth of the “babes – well almost – Priceless!!!

[Disclosure: I was invited by Nokia to share in these experiences, and was paid travel expenses only, and not a fee.]

For a few days over the next two weeks, I’m going to be a “scribe” where I will visit with people who’s lives are being transformed through mobile innovations. This will be in rural Maharashtra and Kolhapur, and the two projects we are covering in India are Nokia Life Tools and Nokia Tej.  This is part of  Progress, a Nokia initiative with Lonely Planet that is focused on capturing the human impact of mobile innovation; bringing to life real stories of people.

As a scribe, I will be reporting on ordinary people progressing through mobile innovation from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, taking parallel content – text photos, podcast and video.

Why I accepted this project is because it’s a great opportunity to be exposed to mobile innovations on-the-ground. One of my pet research themes for the last few years has been to study how technology is making or can make a real difference in the way we live, work and play. Also how it might bring real changes in people’s lives. It also ties well into my experiences and skills of being a researcher, and I’m hoping to view these projects through an ethnographer’s lens.

I, like Stuart who is covering other programs in San Francisco and Manaus Brazil, was asked by Andy Abramson [@andyabramson] and Danielle Ross of Comunicano to participate in an evolution of the Nokia blogger relations program.  Stuart has a good post on what this means for blogger relations and how might a company engage with bloggers in such programs.

Full disclosure – I’m not getting paid to do this, but my travel and accommodation costs will be borne by Nokia.

UPDATE:

Here’s the full series:

1. Mobile Innovations – Introduction
2. Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
3. Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – “Raju go get bakery” – mobile innovations in rural India
4. The old, the not-so-old, and many facets of the new
5. “My laptop, my MBA” -  Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

Application Deadline: November 30, 2007

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for the second round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for citizen media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

In July we funded five projects out of the 142 applications we received from over 60 different countries. The first five Rising Voices grantees are based in Bangladesh, Colombia, Bolivia, India, and Sierra Leone. You can view their applications by clicking on the relevant links underneath the sub-heading “Grantees” in the sidebar of the Rising Voices wiki

Rising Voices aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities. Examples of potential projects include:

• Convincing a group of taggers or graffiti artists to transfer their medium of expression from walls of buildings to blogs, podcasts, and online video.
• Approaching a local NGO with the offer of training their participants to blog and upload video in order to document the NGO’s work and the community where the participants live.
• Distribute $10 digital cameras to two different groups of the same community and create a Flickr group where they confront each other’s photographic perspectives of their city.
• Distribute mp3 recorders to participants of a youth group and help them produce monthly audio documentaries featuring elders who describe how their community has changed over the decades.

I’d urge you to go apply if you have a project idea, or wish to run a pilot or an experiment, that will bring more people , especially those that are underrepresented, into the conversational web. What you will gain is not just the grant, but access to an absolutely wonderful global community at Global Voices Online, many of whom I know personally, and am sure will be willing to mentor you and guide you through your project. [disclosure - i'm one of the Advisors for GV]

Learn more about how to apply through this neat screencast David Sasaki has made, or at the wiki or download the forms at the announcer post.

This is great news!

The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) has collaborated with One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation to bring the latter’s much-hyped $100 laptop to India to promote e-learning among poor children. Under this initiative, Reliance Communications (RCom) will provide Internet connectivity, network backbone, logistics, and support to the OLPC initiative. The initiative aims at covering over 25,000 towns, and 6,00,000 villages in the country by 2008. The larger OLPC project has already provided laptops to 5 million school children across the world, and aims to cover 150 million by 2008.

OLPC and Classmates from Intel are good schemes.  I just don’t believe they are going to bridge a digital divide so easily, as they claim to achieve. In fact I’m not sure I like the term Digital Divide that much – the real divides are much deeper than just digital; they are linked to the digital divide but will not go away with an OLPC.  I’m all for ICT for development, and do believe that technologies can enable change and help people better their lives – I just hope they don’t create other divides. Where some children have them and others don’t.  Where adults intervene and wrest them away from the children.  Where more powerful caste groups get them and the lower castes are left out – I say this because I have seen this divide in village schools over and over again – where benefits (such as school uniforms, free meals) that are meant for all children, are ‘hoarded’ away by the more influential upper castes. Where a new breed of agents and middlemen come into play, creating yet another layer that divides society.  Where the entrepreneur in the Indian sees opportunities to make money out of either selling the laptop or selling time on it.

And who’s going to guide usage and mentor these children – teachers and parents in these areas are digital ignorants. Then maybe, kids are smarter and they will teach themselves. Or the OLPC will be their teacher.
Perhaps, because it’s not the government, but  The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) that is bringing the OLPC to India, I’m hopeful that at least it will be more professionally managed. At the same time, it is a private sector profit-making enterprise – I hope business does not drive their management of the project. 

Global Voices Online has announced the first five citizen media outreach projects to receive Rising Voices microgrants.

Congratulations to all those receiving the grant – I really believe this is a huge step for blogging outreach programmes!

The Indian Express reports that a couple of Israeli geeks have set up a low-cost wi-fi network in Dharamshala, spread over 70 acres, more than 7,000 ft above sea level.

“Thirty-eight-year old David’s technological expertise and perhaps
even nimble athleticism (courtesy his Mossad training) proved useful in
setting up the network in the mountainous terrain. Antennae were
erected in the most unlikely places (in one case the tower was painted
with the insignia ‘Om’ and served as the spire of a local temple), the
Linksys routers were re-engineered to make them power-efficient(most of
them run on solar energy) and the towers were made “monkey resistant” after it was found that the primates found perverse pleasure in
dangling from them.

Other “sabotage” bids were similarly thwarted. There was one
last year in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDSA)
on the website of the Tibetan Technology Centre. Says Ginguld: “It is
difficult to pinpoint who did it but it started after an extensive
series of scans which happened somewhere in China. The same URLs were
loaded to access the database repeatedly…” In a written reply to The
Sunday Express, the Chinese Embassy said it was “unaware of any such
thing”.

Schools, hospitals and other NGOs have benefited immensely
from the service, though the network’s limited bandwidth means it is
not accessible to individuals and laptop-carrying tourists. Says Dawa
Tsering of the Tibetan Medical Institute: “Our earlier connection would
break down frequently and wouldn’t be repaired for long durations. The
connectivity now is more or less uninterrupted.” While the vision of
BPO centres coming up in the region might be a bit too romantic, the
network is being used to promote trade. Dolma Kyap of Norbulingka Art
Institute says they offer Tibetan art works like Thangka painting and
statutes for sale on the Net. But what Ginguld is particularly thrilled
by is the sight of children using the network. “Computer labs in Indian
schools have lots of computers but no internet connection, which is
akin to having a sleek car without petrol. Today when I see
10-year-olds logging on to sites like hi5, chatting with people, I
realise we are on the right path,” he says.”

Cool!