I just attended a conference on the "Digital Divide or Digital Commons: Towards Global Knowledge Sharing." It was held last April 21 in Santa Clara University (SCU), the premier university in the heart of Silicon Valley in California. The 200 plus attendees included executives from high-tech companies in the Valley, professors from SCU and other universities in the country, and some students. They came to listen to various perspectives on the conference topic.

I was invited by Dr. Pedro Hernandez-Ramos of SCU"s Center for Science, Technology and Society to be one of two reactors to the main speaker in one of four tracks. Our track covered the legal and economic aspects of knowledge-sharing, in particular, the topic of intellectual property rights (IPR). The US academic community was becoming concerned that recent laws on IPR were making it more difficult to do scientific work by upsetting long-established practices of data- and knowledge-sharing among scientists.

Our track"s main speaker was Dr. Paul David of Stanford University and Oxford Internet Institute. His paper detailed current efforts in the US and in the UK to build "a new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies," that promises to "enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible." However, Professor David argued, "engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough." Aside from new technical advances, new social and legal transformations were also needed, he said.

Professor David referred specifically to the problems created by the increasingly stricter provisions in laws that implement intellectual property rights.

A developing country perspective

I agreed completely with his presentation. I pointed out that the balance between the interests of information producers, on the one hand, and information users, on the other hand, has in recent years tilted very heavily in favor of the producers, and that this balance was very difficult to maintain due to the unbalanced power structures themselves. I proposed the following strategies for developing countries to improve their access to new technologies:

1) Rely on Schumacher"s concept of appropriate technologies;

2) Use free/open software widely;

3) Apply genuine compulsory licensing more aggressively;

4) Set up public access stations that don"t require monthly charges; and

5) Work out mechanisms of public/community ownership of infrastructures to minimize private rent-seeking. I gave as examples our own local efforts to use cellphones and SMS, video players and, in the future, community radio stations, to facilitate information access by farmers.

However, I pointed out that developing countries also need to be aware that new technologies also come with deeply embedded, built-in biases or value systems, some of which may work against them. I gave as examples the following:

1) A bias for English, and those who learn the English tongue subconsciously acquire Anglo-Saxon taste;

2) A bias for automation, which may be apt for developed countries but makes less sense in developing countries;

3) A bias for the technofix, which is a more general expression of the automation paradigm, and which tends to overlook simpler, less costly social rather than technical solutions to problems; and

4) A hidden subsidy for globalization, which forces local players to subsidize global players.

Some professors were quite interested in my presentation, such as Prof. S. Ravi Rajan of the University of California in Santa Cruz, Prof. Saskia Sassen of the University of Chicago, and Prof. Paul David himself, our main speaker. I gave Professor David a copy of my book Towards a Political Economy of Information.

Meeting a Silicon Valley icon

On the way up the 16th floor of our hotel, the San Jose Hilton, my wife and I met on the elevator an old man who seemed lost. He was searching his pockets for his magnetic hotel card. It looked like he"d forgotten his room number. He finally found the hotel"s welcome card, which had his room number. It was on the 17th floor.

At the evening reception for speakers held by the conference organizers, I recognized the same old man as he came in. It turns out he was a member of an advisory committee of the Santa Clara University. I greeted him familiarly as I introduced myself. He called himself Doug. He was 80 years old.

Doug, I soon found out, was Douglas Engelbart, who, working with his group at the Stanford Research Institute, invented the mouse and hypertext, and originated ideas like windowing systems, online help, consistency in user-interfaces, and many other things. He was a Silicon Valley icon.

We became friends quickly. He lived alone, and still drove his own car. What I liked most from his ideas was his term "augmentation not automation." His special interest was "the co-evolution of humans with their tools." I found out that we were interested in the same areas, which I called "the social impact of technologies," but I think Doug"s formulation is better.

HP on non-refillable cartridges

One of the conference speakers was Brooke Partridge, Hewlett-Packard"s manager for emerging markets. By the way, she had also written an article which appeared in Linux Journal entitled "EOF: 441 Reasons to Go Linux." Brooke based her talk on the social pyramid that is so familiar among social activists. She acknowledged that HP"s marketing efforts had in the past been focused mainly on the top of the pyramid. She described the firm"s current efforts to reach out to the middle section of the pyramid.

Since I had written an earlier column about non-refillable cartridges, I submitted the following question: "It is so simple for HP to put a hole that can be resealed in its Inkjet cartridges to make them refillable. You can still make money selling the ink. Why hasn"t HP done it?"

Understandably, the moderator didn"t read the question I submitted, but I cornered the speaker after her talk and posed the question. She emphasized that she worked in a different field but, to her knowledge, she said, a refillable cartridge created printouts of lower quality. When I tried to pursue the question, she rephrased her answer, but it was still around the quality issue. I would have said that many of us could tolerate a slightly lower quality (as a matter of fact, we often use our printers in draft mode anyway), if it meant buying only the ink and not an entire cartridge/printhead assembly every time we ran out of ink. But she had to leave.

There you have it: a semi-official answer right from Silicon Valley on why printer companies don"t make their ink cartridges refillable. To me, the answer is unacceptable. As an engineer, I know it should be possible to make provisions for refilling ink cartridges without degrading the print quality. Even if their engineers were not creative enough to solve this problem, ink companies, at the very least, should give the consumer the choice of buying a new cartridge for the highest printing quality, or refilling their spent ink cartridge if they use their printers mostly for printing drafts anyway. Perhaps, the local HP representative would care to give us an official answer?

A market still awaits the first printer company to make refillable ink cartridges.

My dream video player

In my presentation, I referred briefly to my use of high-tech gadgets like the cellphone and the video player in my work among farmers. I had written about these in an earlier column. After my talk, I told some people in an informal discussion that it would be very useful to have a video player that also had the capability to browse HTML files on CDs. An attendee from France was intrigued with the idea. Dr. Dan Pitt, dean of the SCU College of Engineering, said it should be easy enough to do, if there was a market for it, but he wondered how much cost it would add to the player.

At the evening dinner after the conference, I sat next to a Panasonic executive, Dr. Satoshi Kabasawa, team leader of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co."s Strategy Planning Group. I jumped at the chance and pestered him to convince his company to design and market a video player with a built-in HMTL file browser. He said he will raise the matter with his company. He informed me that a network-ready Panasonic video player that can browse the Internet was in the works. That wasn"t quite what I had in mind, I said. I wanted a sub-$50 video player that could browse CDs and, perhaps, DVDs offline. This would require only additional software, not hardware. He was very polite and said he would tell his company about it.

By the way, he also told me that more and more Japanese companies were shifting to Linux/GNU for their built-in operating system, an interesting development.

Well, if you come across a Panasonic video player with an offline HTML browser, you know where the idea came from. It would make a nice example of "global knowledge sharing."