Postlude

The Information Age is relevant to the prosperity and security of developing nations and their indigenous, local, or rural communities. The relevance of telecommunications to these communities includes the ability to use information tools to create interacting spaces for knowledge sources to converge with the user-community and generate solutions for the challenges in their livelihood attainments. The establishment of such area networks in communities whose communication methods are predominantly oral, and which have poor telecommunications infrastructure, demands imagination among planners, businesses, and impact communities to translate the telecommunications and digital exclusion into digital opportunities. The digital opportunities could be deduced from the information and knowledge needs of these economies, such as the need for better access to telecommunication infrastructure, tools, knowledge networks and communities of practice, expertise, and opportunities to build on local knowledge. Communications-centred knowledge for development programming, as a matter of necessity and to serve as effective knowledge gateways, should function as information and knowledge brokerages related to the collection, processing, packaging, and marketing of relevant content in knowledge for development, and not as a conglomeration of gadgets alone. Connectivity should enable people to learn, solve problems, produce more efficiently, preserve natural systems, and foster peace among communities and nations. Ideally, connectivity could be a viewing point of knowledge systems into other knowledge systems, including individuals and institutions; indigenous or local institutions, such as indigenous governance structures, rural occupational groups, and local communities, and formal institutions such as schools, clinics, agriculture, health, and social development, would be able to interact among each other at the local (horizontal) and global (vertical) levels. Similarly, students, teachers, researchers, and staff of agencies that are concerned about global development but are located in spheres outside the primary impact communities, when guided information channels exist, would be able to dial into a community multimedia system to observe and learn about the activities of their development ‘partners’ from their offices far removed in reality. This way, they would be able to generate more meaningful models in their intervention programs.

Globalization and Frameworks for Digital Opportunities

Globalization may have already become entrenched, and developing countries may not have the power to reverse the phenomenon. Instead, given that activities remotely could affect the majority in a local environment, including poor communities that are not even aware of global economic regimes, managers of developing countries’ institutions are faced with the burden of developing effective interventions to minimize negative impacts of globalization of capital while enhancing the opportunities for their citizens. The influence of the Information Age on a nation’s wealth creation may be through its ability to create new competitive advantages in which the nation-state acts as a sink to pull global knowledge and capital flows. Development of human resources and establishment of the facilitating business environment in developing countries are therefore essential in creating the fertile environment that can attract the flow of capital and know-how toward building the Information Age in these countries. This would in turn nurture their knowledge economies and lead to sustainable economic and social progress. Developing countries need to design creative means to divert some of the global wealth and knowledge resources toward their issues. This needs to be done in a manner that could be mutually beneficial to the North and South, without being parasitic of the North or allowing themselves to be exploited by such capital and knowledge flows.

Nurturing Knowledge Communities

A distinguishing factor in IT-led knowledge for development models could be the concept of nurturing knowledge communities versus knowledge management, as advocated by Denning (2001). Knowledge management essentially implies the structural arrangement and aggregation of information or information sources while the nurturing of knowledge communities would include the psychology and philosophy of enhancing the civilization of the impact community, and the application of knowledge tools and resources to actualize those values. Knowledge management, by inference, is an important element in nurturing knowledge communities, but this practice in itself would not constitute the core activity that can transform an organization or a group into a smart community. Considering the permutations of words that could cover the vast field of sustainable development and communications, for example the challenges, assets, and opportunities of the impact community, it would be quite a challenge to arrange all development information entries and sources into subtitles that could be held by one or a few organizations for equal and user-friendly access by all in the community and globally. While such an arrangement of information is desirable and perhaps technologically feasible, the information revolution is ideally concerned with teaching people about how to find information and how to generate data about a community’s attributes, access complementary information from elsewhere, utilize that information, mine knowledge from the information and application, and generate innovative solutions that would enhance the attribute concerned; data could be spread on several Internet hosts, but technology can splice them into relevant information for local applications. Moreover, the realignment of the psychologies, philosophies, and other values of individuals, institutions, communities, and the nation-state toward application of IT as knowledge tools could determine the outcome of information and knowledge flows to a larger extent than knowledge management.

Standards of Knowledge Communities

Ironically, the sector that was expected to define and lead the global economy into the new growth era of the new millennium would be the first casualty of a global economic slowdown and a diminishing capitalization of new products and ideas at the very beginning of that millennium. This contraction in the information technology sector in 2001 may have created further doubts in the minds of those who are unable to conceptualize the relationship among the rapid development and diffusion of IT, nurturing and interlinking knowledge cells into knowledge communities, and the empowerment of communities in the traditional non-industrialized economies.

Preservation of Cultural Identity and Preventing Piracy of Indigenous Intellectual Properties

While the benefits of modern communications in sustainable development could herald new opportunities, there are dangers associated with the introduction of such tools and programs, including cable television, from external environments into communities that have different technological status and cultural values if foreign contents are not managed to interact in harmony with local values. Violent clashes of cultures and possibly dilution of locally held values could result if education about the philosophical bases of the foreign culture is not provided in parallel. Therefore, frameworks such as the United Nations Television Forum should ensure that introduction of new media and programming into new cultural terrains are not wholesale endorsements of the external values depicted. No democratic society should legislate what its citizens could watch on television, however, each cultural domain could saturate its own airwaves with the programs that are deemed as culturally appropriate and cherished by local norms. Nyamba of the Université de Ouagadou in Burkina Faso for example, in his Aspects Sociologiques, Etude de Cas, described cultural attributes and social interactions in Africa and wondered if introduction of online messaging would obliterate the values inherent in the indigenous salutations (Nyamba, 1999).

Capitalizing the Knowledge Economy of Developing Nations

Teleconnectivity and knowledge for development philosophy needs a companion—a knowledge trust fund—that would secure the necessary technical, financial, and human resources to facilitate the identification of ideas and their translation into the desirable outputs. Such a knowledge fund could aim to amalgamate fund and knowledge sources to maximize knowledge gain, enable crosscutting research, effect cost sharing, and reduce budgets while engaging in holistic research for sustainable development in the wake of inadequate development funds.

Splicing Modern Knowledge and Ancestral Wisdom

Communications channels with and within the developing world, hence, should be considered in light of the transition of such economies into knowledge societies. The transition from abject poverty to humanly secure is getting shorter, and the tools to foster brain convergence in development planning have become significantly more powerful, more user-defined, more flexible, more abundant, and cheaper. Canada became a country only 133 years ago, and Malaysia and Ghana only in 1957. Yet, at the time of Canada’s 133rd Birthday on July 1, 2000, the United Nations had ranked Canada as the nation with the highest quality of life for the seventh consecutive time (Globe and Mail, 2000). And although Malaysia and Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, today the two nations are not at the same level of human security. Providing human security relates to optimization of multiple factors that interact nonlinearly; therefore nations in comparable agro-ecological zones that would have been ruled by the same colonial authorities might not achieve the same development status upon being granted political independence; the environment may be suitable for the cultivation of the same crop species, but land management and other inputs and farm practices would determine the yield that each obtained. However, a common feature among nations that have evolved a higher quality of life is probably the development of strategic national goals that are based on increasing the knowledge component of economic and socio-political attributes, and the design of mechanisms to implement and continuously monitor strategies and their effects on society.

Introduction

Issues about global security have become preeminent in the hallowed corridors of global diplomacy, especially following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the mainland of the United States of America. The events of September 11, 2001, stand alone in their nature and causes, but they have also aroused a renewed sense of urgency in the implementation of policy decisions and deployment of technological responses to issues and regions of insecurities around the world. World leaders, writers, experts, and groups have pointed to the need for a comprehensive understanding of the anger that some societies harbour against other segments of the global community and leadership, and for the implementation of policies and programs to eliminate poverty, injustice, and discontent around the world. The expected outcome of the global coalition to defeat terror was echoed by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, in his Churchillian speech to his governing Labour Party:

Digital Bridges and Digital Opportunities for Developing Nations

Multidimensional frameworks have been advocated in knowledge for sustainable livelihoods programming. Connectivity for development and poverty alleviation would also endeavour to be a convergence of themes, institutions, tools, and resources. Some of the multiple factors that may be included in such IT-led knowledge for development models are discussed in the following sections; they are not to be viewed as discrete elements, as these factors interact in complex forms.