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'You
either demo or die -
we demoed'
- Fuchs
At
the end of the Acacia conference, Richard Fuchs,
Director of ICTs for Development of the International Development Research
Centre (IDRC), told WebTimes news editor Clive Emdon:
“We were inspired. In ICT you demo or you die. We
demoed.”
This interview demands a he said/I said format - it comes naturally
with any dialogue involving Richard Fuchs.
He said : “I thought the conference
was wonderful. Above and beyond my expectations. You either demo or
you die - we demoed.”
I suggested the success had been the
result of mass participation in the conference.
“If you can get 50% of the people involved in the
presentations, and panels and debates, they buy-in to the event,” he said.
All the technology worked as did the people!
I said one of the successes seemed to be
the short, to-the-point delivery of information and reports except for the
three or four key-note addresses, nothing was supposed to be longer than 7
to 10 minutes.
He said: “If
you can’t say it in 10 minutes go back to school.”
I asked how development programmes would
deal with language issues given the hundreds of languages and dialects in
Africa, and that just dealing with equity in English and French was
difficult enough.
He said new technologies were developing
automatic translation capability and digital fonts were being introduced
for languages where they did not exist – the latest was for Urdu, spoken
by 300million people.
He said because of the failure of
literacy in most developing countries provided an opportunity to use
graphics and pictures to effect.
I wondered about the future of the Acacia programme.
Fuchs said the future offered an increasing number of
opportunities for projects. These included the
scaling up of new technologies such as personal digital assistants (PDAs)
and the satellite technology VSAT; and a deepening and broadening of
networks; and the establishment of telecentres.
“In many areas we are dealing peasant
agricultural economies and moving people into the information society. We
have to give them room,” he said.
See also: Personality profile
of Richard Fuchs
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