Alexander Osterwalder
Jacques Panchard
Ibrahim Rhissa

Despite its intent to open up to civil society, the WSIS with its rather closed and rigid intergovernmental top-down approach seems like a relict from the past compared to the vibrant networks of today's information society. Wouldn't one expect openness and integration to be an instrumental part of such an event, since they are inherent to Information and Communication Technology (ICT)? ICTs put individuals and organizations in contact and facilitate the flow of information. In addition, more recent ICTs, such as the Internet, Wireless Local Area Networks and mobile phone networks have made an explosion of interactivity on the local, regional and global level possible. This, in return has overthrown the traditional balance of power as it has leveraged the impact of individuals and small organizations on the grassroots level as they virtually gather, organize and concentrate power. In the virtual space, the center of gravity has moved from top-down to bottom-up, as the Free and Open Source Software FOSS movement illustrates. This stands in strong contrast with the WSIS that is based on the traditional intergovernmental top-down logic of the United Nations.

While heads of government and ministers were working behind de facto closed doors at a plan of action similar to the Millennium Goals, the actors of development present in the field (be it international organizations or the civil society) were presenting their success stories at the ICT for Development (ICT-4D) parallel event. A sad fact is, no matter how much the two parties need each other, it was striking to see how little they seemed to communicate.

On one side, the focus is on very general principles (Access, Human Rights, Millennium Goals), broad policies and top-down statements requiring the unanimous consent of official UN declarations. Such agreements are based on lowest common denominator language and are yet to be implemented. On the other side, bottom-up grassroots projects have already proved to be highly successful, but rely on recognition and are dependant on sound policy environments to scale-up and replicate.

Strategies that work in the field, such as those exposed and discussed at the ICT-4D event, rely on micro-financing and entrepreneurship, build-up of local capacity and locally designed and implemented programmes. However, these bottom-up projects cannot develop without healthy ICT policies and governance. For example, the remote IT village project of the Jhai foundation in Laos has been on hold for months because of national security concerns of the authorities. The real challenge is to make bottom-up man-power, innovation and creativity and top-down policies, structures and programs meet.

So why is it that these "two worlds" have such difficulties to meet? We argue that this gap is based on two reasons. Firstly, governments and international organizations operate with large funds that hardly allow them to finance small projects, while the so-called civil society concentrates on micro-projects that tackle a specific problem. Former naturally pursue a top-down approach while latter are evidently confronted with the grassroots. Secondly, the discourse of the WSIS and ICT-4D differ substantially. Former have a tendency to focus on general concepts (e.g. connectivity) while the latter prefer focusing on concrete needs (to sell one's crop at a better price).

In this context, we feel that it is time for a new paradigm. The gap between top-down and bottom-up must be overcome to take the best of the two in order to fill the so-called digital divide. In particular, we want to make the case for academic research to play the role of the missing link between policy makers and field implementers. At first sight, this may seem an exotic idea, since the academic world has a reputation of being out of touch of the political world as well as of "real life". However, some specificities that the "scholar way of life" may bring ought not to be underestimated.

Academics are well placed to build theoretical frameworks around successful hands-on grassroots projects and cases in order to make them replicable, adaptable and scalable. A collection of ICT success stories and anecdotes, as we have seen many to date, are obviously not enough. Furthermore, academics could study the link between success stories, legal rules and policies in order to foster and nurture new concrete projects. From this point of view, academic research can help to make both ends meet and harmonize the top-down and bottom-up approach. By building theoretical frameworks and by analyzing a wide range of data in order to construct systemic models, research will allow top-down decisions to be more efficient and to lean on better monitoring criteria to assess the success or failure of public and donor money.

Finally, academic mobility between North and South can contribute to build-up links between universities of very distant -geographically and culturally- countries. This will help both to raise awareness and understanding of development issues in the institutions of the North and to facilitate transfer of technology to the universities of the South.

Figure 1: Towards increased cooperation in ICT for development projects

In conclusion we would like to see a world where academics build the foundations for an increased understanding and cooperation between policy makers, stakeholders and specialist as illustrated in Figure 1. Regrettably, this cooperation has not materialized at the WSIS 2003 and considerable gaps must still be overcome. We believe this can be achieved for the second phase of the summit in Tunis in 2005 while reminding professor Swaminathan's message at an ICT-4D panel that specialists and policy makers must stay humble and respectful in the face of the knowledge of local stakeholders in order to succeed in ICT for development projects.

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local stakeholder

specialists

policy makers

cooperation

ICT knowledge

political influence

Alexander Osterwalder
Jacques Panchard
Ibrahim Rhissa
University of Lausanne, HEC
alexander.osterwalder@hec.unil.ch
1015 Lausanne Dorigny
Tel. +41 21 692.34.20
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL
jacques.panchard@epfl.ch
1015 Lausanne Dorigny
Tel. +41 21 693.56.13
University of Lausanne, SSP
ibrahim.rhissa@etu.unil.ch
1015 Lausanne Dorigny
Tel. +41 78 726.36.49