Great new post on the Atlantic Blog from Kentaro Toyama, the co-founder of Microsoft Research India, where he write about his frustrations trying to get technology to change the lives of the rural poor in India and elsewhere. It’s not really a surprise to many of us, but it’s important to hear, over and over again, comments like this:
“In project after project, the lesson was the same: information technology amplified the intent and capacity of human and institutional stakeholders, but it didn’t substitute for their deficiencies.”
I find this particularly refreshing because the MSR India team produced one of the all-time simple (and open-source) SMS toolkits for using a cellphone (actually Windows mobile smartphones) connected to a computer as a SMS base-station. Just by updating a spreadsheet you could setup a price-query system, a mass messaging system, or an alerting system. While systems like FrontlineSMS do this very elegantly, and even add forms, my old team at Microsoft adapted the open-source MSR toolkit to work in Afghanistan as a prototype gateway that connected simple feature phones to internet search and other services. That’s a story for another time though.
