Long Time No Blog

Monday was a hard day. Too hard for blogging. But still productive. In the morning we went to the Ministry of Commerce, Science and Technology to meet with Camella Rhone and her project director, Richard Gordon. Camella is sharp and was right on top of the strategizing for our project, helping us lay out quite a few next steps for contacting people and moving forward. It was by far the most productive/constructive meeting we've had at the Ministry. Further they were enthusiastic about hosting a skyServer themselves so that they could actually be hosting websites themselves. It was a very good meeting, but left us still looking at a relatively long road ahead of us before we could get into many more schools. She left us with some leads for schools, but they were names of principals and board members, invariably not the people we first need to convince. I am personally convinced that the way forward for this project is through bottom-up development in schools. It is the computer teachers we have to get to first.

Next we met with Courtney Jackson, the organizer of the conference at which I am speaking this weekend. I am scheduled for two panels, but he had my email address wrong, so none of the materials (like the program or the guidelines for presenters) had actually reached me. He was extremely gracious and intelligent, and the program for the conference looked great: focused and relevant. The main topic is Internet access, an issue of great import in Jamaica right now. Cable & Wireless has just lost its monopoly on Internet service provision and on mobile phones. In a few weeks they are scheduled to lose their monopoly on home phones. They have a steeply priced ADSL service which is quite new. We gave in and signed up yesterday, and the woman who was handling my application had only ever processed one before. Broadband is not a commonly known term here. There are other high-speed access providers (though I'm not quite sure how they are doing it). InfoChannel, I discovered, offered ADSL service but discontinued the service because they were overwhelmed by demand--a questionable business strategy if you ask me. GoTel offers it as well, but there is a two month waiting list. Most people in Jamaica have no Internet access at all, and nearly none have high-speed. This conference is bringing together major players from Cable & Wireless to other ISPs to policy makers to businesses to educators. Plus they are putting us up at a very nice all-inclusive resort in Ocho Rios during the conference. (Yay! A trip to the beach!)

In the afternoon we went to Denham Town again. Here's where things got tough. We arrived with Arthur who was telling us how they were finishing up the articles for the newsletter so that they could have it printed for the launch next week. He wanted the website launched at the same time. When we arrived it took a while to get the students assembled. Maxine was not there, nor was the girl with the key to the office. The Internet access couldn't be turned on from anywhere but in the office. Arthur spoke to the students about having missed a scheduled appointment to visit a print shop to learn how to use it to print up invitations, posters, etc. Printing is one of the skill areas they are doing. The others are the newsletter and the ill-defined Internet project. Next he asked who was in the newsletter group. No one raised their hands. Then a few. He asked who was working on articles for the newsletter. Again no hands. And none went up. They were all polite but appeared completely apathetic. He split off the Internet group and sent them to work with me on the Denham Town website. Of course, in order to do this, we had tracked down the girl with the key (by sending a student to her house to get her) and been able to dial up for access to the Internet--the single 56k modem serving the entire lab. I solicited some ideas about what might go up there. One student suggested that we put computer games like football on the site. I began to realize what an uphill battle we were facing: how were they supposed to get excited about having their own website when they didn't even really understand what it was? I showed them how to use skyBuilders and even had a few of them edit pages on the site. We put their names up and linked them to their email addresses for those who had them. Most did not have email addresses or could not remember them. As far as editing the pages was concerned, they clearly got what I was showing them. They were polite but apathetic. When we were done, Maxine disconnected from the Internet (whether to save money or stop them from surfing, I'm not sure.)

The computer lab is in bad shape. We can't run the music program because we can't install Fruityloops on the computers. We can't install Fruityloops because no one knows the administrator passwords for most of the computers. We did get it on a few computers, but the students to whom those machines are assigned won't share them with the other students (and are not being encouraged to.) I saw excitement in them during our one day of music workshop, but none on Monday when they were asked to focus on writing articles, printing invitations, or coming up with stuff about the community to put on a website. We can't even start at the beginning with the Internet--getting them aquainted with it by doing some surfing or some live chats--because the Internet isn't turned on when we're not there and they can't all share the one 56k modem connection and still download pages fast enough for it to be interesting for them. There was a spark of interest in some of them when it came to the idea of making pages for themselves with pictures, but I expect it seems no different to them than making the same thing in a Microsoft Word document.

This is the stuff that community development is made of: so many small obstacles all contributing to the inertia of the situation. Though I left with hope that they would each spend some time before next monday doing a small "story" for the website with a picture and a little text, I'm not too optimistic. It is quite sad.

Tuesday: I swept, I washed, I mopped, I did laundry, I went to C&W to sign up for ADSL, I went back again with an authorization letter from Wayne...

The big news for today is that I did an Internet training at St. Andrew and we began to add content to the St. Andrew website. I suggest that you check back over the course of the next week because I expect it to grow rapidly. In addition to posting a lot of generally useful content, the students are working on personal profiles consisting of pictures, work they are proud of, a little writing about themselves, etc. It appears to be headed in a very good direction. In addition we planned to culminate our 6 weeks of work there with a few weeks spent with the students working out performances that accompany the music they've made, either dance routines or DJ'ing or both. We'll have an assembly for the whole school to come see.

I also wrote my remarks and made my slides for inclusion in the proceedings of the Jamaica Internet Forum. I'll put them here, though there isn't much to see in the slides themselves, you'll have to come to the talk if you want to hear what I have to say! (ICANN panel written comments, ICANN panel slides, ISP panel slides).