Well, a Happy Easter to all, and to all a good night. Or something like that.
Sarmad and I hit up the H-town (read: Hartford) scene for a tasty weekend full of roast duck on Saturday and roast leg of lamb in stereo (read: two of them) today.
Made some progress on the book front, but I had to wake up today at 6:45 am to do a phone interview. Missed the train connection in New Haven by mere minutes and had to wait about 50 minutes for the next one. Boo.
DC action tomorrow for the MGM v. Grokster case. Will be down there until Wednesday morning. Should be interesting so long as it doesn’t rain too much. Doing a radio documentary on all the folks that are camping out there overnight.
Engadget pointed me to this new blog about technology in Africa, Timbuktu Chronicles, which also pointed me to this neat Economist article talking about the Digital Divide in terms of cell phones. And as I delved back into my missed blog reading this weekend, I found that Ethan Zuckerman was also talking about African ICT stuff.
Best part?
The numbers of people using the kiosks for e-government services look small, at first glance – a few users per month. Mike points out that most of these certificates are someone one applies for once – there’s not a lot of repeat usage. And, when Mike compares the number of certificates applied for from wired villages to unwired ones of similar size, in the same region, the results are dramatic: citizens in wired villages apply for birth certificates five times more often and for old age pensions three times as often.
The reason for the increased usage is pretty simple. It costs lots less for citizens to apply for these essential documents online than it does to get them in person. To get papers in person, villagers need to spend one or more days in transit, which entails expenses, and often need to pay bribes to get the essential forms. The total expense for getting a birth certificate, including travel and bribes, is often more than a person’s daily income. That becomes a powerful incentive to learn how to use the Internet kiosks.
And Daniel Frysinger points to the site offering obscenely long email addresses for free. You know you want one.
