Abstract
Improving the productivity of small farmers is essential for economic development in most poor countries.  Providing access to timely and relevant information could improve the opportunities available to farmers.  However, there are significant challenges related to literacy, infrastructure, access to technology and social, cultural, institutional and linguistic gaps between producers and consumers of knowledge.  The increased adoption of mobile phones is rapidly reducing the physical barriers of access.  Providing voice-based services via low-cost handsets could empower farmers to become producers as well as consumers of knowledge.  In this talk, I discuss several applications my students and I are developing to explore this potential.  Avaaj Otalo (Gujarati for "voice stoop") is the voice-based equivalent of an online discussion board. Farmers and agricultural experts call a toll-free line to ask questions, provide answers, and listen to each others questions, answers and experiences.  We conducted a six-month trial deployment of Avaaj Otalo with fifty farmers in Gujarat, India. Farmers found it useful to learn both from experts and other farmers, sharing advice on many topics - including the best time to sow fodder, recipes for organic pesticides, and homemade devices to scare away wild pigs at night. Digital ICS allows coffee cooperatives to monitor quality and organic certification requirements, and to be more responsive to farmers' needs.  Field inspectors use mobile phones to document growing conditions and record farmers questions and comments through a combination of text, audio and images.  In a six-month trial deployment, the system significantly reduced operational costs, saving the cooperative approximately $10,000 a year.  The cooperative also obtained richer feedback from its members, which can be used for targeting extension, improving decision-making and reaching out to consumers.  In both of these systems, voice provides not only an accessible interface to information, but a medium for aggregating and representing knowledge itself.  We found this approach more suitable for engaging communities more comfortable with oral forms of communication, for whom text and structured data represent significant barriers to expression.  Most importantly, we have found that rural communities have a deep desire to be "heard", and simply need the tools required to define and achieve "development" on their own terms.

Tapan Parikh's research focuses on the use of computing to support sustainable economic development across the World. I want to learn how to build appropriate, affordable information systems; systems that are accessible to end users, support learning and reinforce community efforts towards empowerment, economic development and sustainable use of natural resources. Some specific topics that I am interested in include human-computer interaction (HCI), mobile computing and information systems supporting microfinance, smallholder agriculture and global health

Summary of the Seminar
Tapan Parikh, of UC Berkeley School of Information, spoke about a number of projects that are using mobile phone based technology to give small businesses the information they need to improve productivity. He argued that voice technology has distinct advantages over text, because it overcomes challenges of illiteracy while responding to a strong need people feel to be heard. 

Paul Romer is a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Center for International Development (SCID) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). His contributions to the field of economics include being the primary developer of New Growth Theory, which reduces the traditional emphasis on the scarcity of objects and directs attention to the power of new ideas. His theory has brought renewed optimism about the potential for growth in both advanced and developing economies.

For his work on the economics of ideas, Paul was named one of America's 25 most influential people by TIME magazine (1997), elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000) and awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics (2002). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Prior to his current Stanford University position, he taught in the university's Graduate School of Business as the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics and was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award (1999). Before moving to Stanford, Paul taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

In addition to his career in teaching and research, Paul founded Aplia, Inc., which is now part of Cengage Learning. Aplia, which develops and applies technologies to improve student learning, grew out of Paul's conviction that it is possible to use information technology to raise productivity in education. This lesson has important implications for how societies keep up with the growing demand for highly educated workers-a demand that is driven by the use of new technology in all other sectors of the economy.

This seminar examines possible explanations for a striking anomaly in the distribution of democracies around the world. While 60 percent of all the independent states in the world are at least electoral democracies, the Arab world is alone among major regions in lacking a critical mass of democracies. In fact, not a single one of the states of the Arab Middle East is classified by Freedom House as a democracy today. This presentation examines possible cultural, historical, economic, political, institutional, and geostrategic explanations for the democracy deficit in the Arab world. Rejecting some of these possible explanations as implausible or untenable, it affirms others and considers what factors might foster transitions to constitutional democracy in the Arab world.

Summary
Larry Diamond's presentation explored the question of why there is no Arab democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Using Freedom House panel data, he demonstrated the relatively stagnant levels of democratic freedoms that have typified this authoritarian slice of geography for the last several decades: only two countries out of nearly twenty could be considered electoral democracies, and these were the non-Arab states of Turkey and Israel. He next sifted through several potential explanations for the absence of democratization.

The first was the culturalist thesis, that something inherent within Islam or Arab culture precludes the formation of a genuinely democratic set of institutions and values. However, the presence of democracy in other non-Western regions casts doubt on this contention. The second was economic development, a popular variable often correlated with democratic transitions; however, Arab autocracies each have analogues in other regions with similar levels of development but with democratic governments. More plausibly, a variety of political and institutional variables lay at the heart of the problem. For one, these regimes have become extremely adept at repressing dissidents and reformists within their societies. For another, they have adopted an adaptable ecology of liberalization, in which short bursts of political reform relieve temporary demands for reform while leaving intact executive monopolies over state resources. Further, they efficiently divide opposition parties and civic forces, often by imposing electoral rules and regulations that make it impossible for civil society-which is generally weak and fragmented-to mount concerted campaigns against the state apparatus. Finally, the dual conundrums of Islamism and the Arab-Israeli conflict play into each regime's survival strategy.

Authoritarian incumbents play up the nightmare of Islamic extremists gaining power to curry favor with the West and delay reforms; they also use the Palestinian issue to defuse popular grievance by way of rechanneling indignation against Israel.