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MISTICA: Global Development Gateway

From: Daniel Pimienta ([email protected])
Date: Wed Sep 19 2001 - 10:04:03 AST

Un analisis que nos parece muy pertinente del proyecto del Banco Mundial.

>From: "Michael Gurstein" <[email protected]>
>To: "community informatics" <[email protected]>,
> <[email protected]>
>Subject: [GCNDotForce] Global Development Gateway.Com
>
....
>For anyone who hasn't yet wandered through the World Bank's
>controversial Global Development Gateway <http://developmentgateway.org>
>it might be worthwhile to take the time...
>
>The criticisms that have been raised of the GDG have mainly been of
>"crowding out" (of existing sites), skewed funding priorities (toward WB
>associated sites rather than indigenous or grass-roots developed sites),
>and supposed self-dealing (of WB officials).
>
>I won't go into those--they have been well presented by others and
>particularly on the GKD listserve.
>
>What interests me is how the strengths and weaknesses of the site(s) are
>so revealing of larger issues concerning Development and the very harsh
>realities that are being discovered about information and E-Commerce on
>the Net.
>
>The GDG sites that I looked at were, I think, quite useful as
>compilations of materials--lots of useful (but selected) links and some
>access to information not readily accessible elsewhere (particularly WB
>and related information). So far, not very different from any of the
>zillions of sites which rose so quickly in everything from flower
>growing to auto-mechanics.
>
>Clearly, the model employed was that of the late '90s E-commerce
>"portal" phenomenon. And the approach appears equally to suffer from the
>limitations of most of those portals--naive (and failed) attempts at
>creating communities of interest, self-interested (and failed) attempts
>to generate volunteer enthusiasm and thus voluntary labour and
>(information) contributions, and overall a rather partial window on the
>very complex reality(s) into which they were meant to provide a
>"doorway".
>
>In the case of some portals, particularly those that didn't arise from
>or manage to create a linked self-organizing community of interest, the
>output has tended to be skewed to the interests/biases/limitations of
>its creators and raises the hackles and competitive juices of all those
>who don't share those assumptions.
>
>In the Development sphere particularly, there are a range of competing
>interests and "communities" and what seems evident from the WB portal is
>that the primary community with which it is associated is the "official"
>ODA/government/agency/consulting world. Thus the
>documents/links/presentations--"reality" which is provided through the
>portal are the "official" documents/links/"reality" etc.
>
>Nothing particularly wrong with that--it gives useful access to
>something that certainly occupies a lot of the available
>financial/psychological/political space; but there is, as many have
>observed, the very real danger (likelihood) of this having the result of
>crowding out/unfairly competing/defunding all the other
>"realities"--many of which may be closer to the interests and activities
>of folks on the ground or in the trenches--the NGO's, the implementers,
>the communities, the development activists.
>
>And over all of course, is the central dilemma of the E-Commerce
>phenomon which, though unstated, is visible on every page--how is all
>this "sustainable"--financially (and socially). For many of the
>E-Commerce folks, the answer was "advertising" and "community building"
>and those sites have been disappearing at an incredible rate as
>funders/advertisers asked uncomfortable questions of who was looking,
>for how long and for what purpose and the toughest question of all--is
>this site (and the money I'm putting in), cost-effectively having the
>desired outcome for my "bottom-line" i.e. impacting the behaviour of
>those I'm trying to reach.
>
>What most of them found was that maintaining an up-to-date useful,
>interesting, relevant portal was fantastically labour intensive (and
>thus expensive). And ultimately it is unsustainable unless there is a
>direct link to a supportive volunteer community where the
>updating/populating of the site is done as a matter of course by a
>community communicating within itself and as it goes about its normal
>community building and community maintenance activities, cf.
><slashdot.org>.
>
>The dilemma for the WB is that the only folks who, over the longer term
>are likely to provide on-going content development and in-put into the
>portal, are those who do it because they have a stake (financial) or are
>paid--take a look at the (lack of) participation in any of the "forums"
>associated with the various GDG topics or themes and compare this with
>any of the multitude of "community of interest" voluntary lists in those
>same topic areas.
>
>The very very much larger number of others who are involved in
>Development and who ultimately the portal is designed to reach, will
>find other and more accommodating and responsive/effective ways of
>participating in a "Development community" and making use of the Net and
>certainly ones that are inclusive of both "official" and unofficial
>channels and information. And they are very unlikely to offer their
>labour or their information for free where others are being (well) paid
>for the same efforts.
>
>So, the very hard truths of E-Commerce and Development are likely to
>come home to the WB GDG as they have to many others--content on the Net
>is an expensive business and communities (whether virtual or geo-local)
>are difficult to create and even more difficult to harness for any goals
>other than their own.
>
>Of course, the WB has the resources to ignore this, but I would guess,
>not for very long.
>
>Mike Gurstein
>
>(Visiting) Professor: School of Management
>New Jersey Institute of Technology
>Newark NJ USA

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