Abstract
Mobile phones have been rapidly and enthusiastically adopted in rural and even non-electrified regions in Uganda. This trend brings with it new paradigms of access and use as phones have quickly become incorporated into the social dynamics of village life. In this talk I will consider the diverse practices of mobile phone sharing. By sharing I mean granting access or redistributing a privately-owned good without direct financial compensation. Sharing as a social practice is undertheorized but can be better understood drawing from literatures on gifting, common property, moral economy, reciprocity, and other intimate forms of exchange. In this talk I will discuss some of the implications of sharing configurations for equality in access to technology in this region. In rural Uganda, efforts at social policing and managing social obligations were mediated and concretized by mobile phones.  Patterns of phone sharing led to preferential access for needy groups (such as those in ill health) while systematically and disproportionately excluding others (women in particular). I propose a framework that takes into account the distinct roles an individual may have in relation to the phone and the benefits that accrue asymmetrically to each role. This framework may be useful for revising survey design work on technology adoption and access to suit research in a broader diversity of settings beyond the Euro-American context.

Jenna Burrell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. She completed her PhD in 2007 in the department of Sociology at the London School of Economics carrying out thesis research on Internet cafe use in Accra, Ghana. Before pursuing her PhD she was an Application Concept Developer in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation. Her interests span many research topics including theories of materiality, user agency, transnationalism, post-colonial relations, digital representation, and especially the appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by individuals and social groups on the African continent.

In 2005, a national referendum returned Uganda to multi-party competition, lifting a ban on the activities of political parties that had been in place since the National Resistance Movement took power in 1986.

The decision to restore formal pluralistic competition was arrived at in large part by international pressure on the government of President Yoweri Museveni.

However, five years later, as Uganda heads into its second round of elections under a multi-party system next year, the country is less “democratic” and has been described as a virtual one party state.

In some instances, observers have commented that the Ugandan parliament under the single-party “Movement” system had more bite than the current multiparty plebiscite, which is little more than a rubberstamp of the ruling National Resistance Movement.

What explains the apparent failure of the multi-party era to advance real democratic reforms in Uganda?

Angelo Izama is an investigative reporter at the Daily Monitor, Uganda's only independent newspaper, as well as a radio talk show panelist, researcher, consultant and analyst on security and governance in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. In his 7-year career in the media he has also worked as a radio producer, host, news manager and multi-media journalist for the Nation Media Group in Uganda. He has been a frequent commentator on current affairs for international news agencies including the BBC, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, AFP and African-based organizations. Mr. Izama was a fall 2007 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he proposed and assessed regional options for peace in Northern Uganda regarding the Lords Resistance Army. In 2008 he founded Fanaka Kwa Wote, a Ugandan-based think tank, to advance research on human security and democracy in the Great Lakes region.

In the course of his career, Mr. Izama has covered topics including national elections in 2001 and 2005, the conflict in Northern Uganda, internal security, corruption, and most recently, issues surrounding the discovery of oil in western Uganda. In 2009 he filed a case using Uganda's Access to Information Act to compel the government to make public the details of oil Production Sharing Agreements signed with foreign oil companies. The case was dismissed in February, on the same day Mr. Izama was arrested and charged with criminal libel in Ugandan courts over his critical writing.

Abstract
The historic focus of development has rightfully been on macroeconomics and good governance, but technology has an increasingly large role to play.  In this talk, I review several novel technologies that we have deployed in India and Africa, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of this new subfield of EECS research.  Working with the Aravind Eye Hospital, we currently supporting doctor/patient videoconferencing in 30 rural villages; more than 25,000 people have had their blindness cured due to these exams.

Dr. Brewer focuses on all aspects of Internet-based systems, including technology, strategy, and government.  As a researcher, he has led projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, sensor networks, and security. His current focus is (high) technology for developing regions, with projects in India, Ghana, and Uganda among others, and including communications, health care, education, and e-government.

In 1996, he co-founded Inktomi Corporation with a Berkeley grad student based on their research prototype, and helped lead it onto the NASDAQ 100 before it was bought by Yahoo! in March 2003.

In 2000, he founded the Federal Search Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization focused on improving consumer access to government information. Working with President Clinton, Dr. Brewer helped to create USA.gov, the official portal of the Federal government, which launched in September 2000.

He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering for leading the development of scalable servers (early cloud computing), and also received the ACM Mark Weiser award for 2009.  He received an MS and Ph.D. in EECS from the MIT, and a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley. He was named a "Global Leader for Tomorrow" by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the "most influential person on the architecture of the Internet", by InfoWorld as one of their top ten innovators, by Technology Review as one of the top 100 most influential people for the 21st century (the "TR100"), and by Forbes as one of their 12 "e-mavericks", for which he appeared on the cover.

Summary of the Seminar
Eric Brewer is Professor of Computer Science at the University of California Berkeley where he leads the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) research group.

Dr. Brewer spoke about the role for technology in effective development strategies at the base of the pyramid.

The history of development to date has been characterized by large agencies funding big projects with strings attached, usually in the form of debt or demands for political allegiance. These kinds of projects are hampered by their scale and the requirement to work with corrupt governments. They typically include little role for new technology as projects move slowly and lack the expertise to facilitate this.

Outside the sphere of traditional development, technology is having a major impact on economic prosperity. The mobile phone revolution, driven by bottom up demand, provides enormous advantages to any worker operating in a large radius. A taxi driver given a mobile phone, for example, will increase his revenue by 60% on average. Other bottom-up businesses have seen major success. The Village Phone scheme, which runs as a franchise model with capital coming from microfinance, now covers the majority of Bangladeshi villages. A village phone lady will make on average two times the income she would have done from farming.

However, the mobile phone remains a largely urban phenomenon since cellular networks require a certain density of users before they can economically justify the installation of a base station. The availability of an internet connection is crucial for the viability of businesses and services in rural areas.  WiFi-based Long Distance networks (WiLDNet) are emerging as a potential low-cost alternative to traditional connectivity solutions for rural regions. Unlike mesh networks, which use omni-directional antennas to cater to short ranges, WiLD networks are comprised of point-to-point wireless links that use directional antennas with line of sight over long distances.

Eric's Berkeley research team has partnered with Aravind Eye Hospital in Theni in the southern India state of Tamil Nadu to use this technology to address the problem of blindness in the region, 70% of which is treatable. The long-distance wireless network they have installed is allowing eye specialists to interview and examine patients in five remote clinics via high-quality video conferencing. 25,000 patients have recovered sight using this system and it is set to expand to 50 centers covering 2.5 million people.

Eric's team has also worked on software that addresses local educational needs in developing regions. In poorly resourced schools, students will often be sharing a mouse and computer screen with a group of others. Metamouse gives each student their own mouse to use; when answering questions all users must agree on a location before progressing. This encourages collaboration between students and has had impressive results in boys in particular, with a 50% improvement in scoring compared to each user having their own PC.

FrontlineSMS:Medic is a Palo Alto based tech nonprofit startup that began in early 2009 with several Stanford undergraduates and graduate students at the helm. The concept behind the group's software suite is simple: free intuitive mobile phone and computer applications built upon free and open source packages, such as OpenMRS and FrontlineSMS, to allow clinics and hospitals in the developing world to use mobile phones for healthcare services in resource poor settings. Their work has already broken rapidly out of their first pilot site in Malawi and now 2.2 million patients are being covered by their software in Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, Kenya, Burundi, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Bangladesh. Their service partners include Partners in Health, Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, and Village Health Works.