Center for Future Civic Media Blog, News, and Events

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part Two)

Henry — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:00:00 -0500

Last time, I shared with you some of the work being done by Harvard University's Web Ecology Project, specifically focusing on the use of Twitter in the aftermath of the Iran Elections and around the death of Michael Jackson.

Counting on Twitter: Harvard's Web Ecology Project (Part One)

Henry — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:30:00 -0500

Anyone who has read my blog long knows that I am not big on counting things. Some of it is that I have math anxiety -- a serious vulnerability for someone who spent the first 20 years of his career at MIT! Some of it is that I think people often act as if counting things is the same thing as analyzing things or that the only things that count are things that came be counted.

Click Click Ranger: A Transmedia Experiment for Korean Television (Part One)

Henry — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:35:00 -0500

I am offering today's post as part of the ongoing conversation I've been having throughout the semester about transmedia storytelling practices. Below you will find the first of two installments written by HyeRyoung OK, a recently minted USC PhD, who I have met through my work with a new MacArthur Foundation Research Hub on Youth, New Media, and Public Participation.

Reflections on Cultural Politics: My Interview for Poli (Part One)

Henry — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:50:00 -0400

Earlier this fall, the French cultural theory magazine, Poli, ran an extensive interview with me conducted by Maxime Cervulle. The interview explored a range of topics surrounding the cultural politics of participatory culture and web 2.0, specifically addressing concerns raised by European intellectuals about some of the themes I explored in Convergence Culture.

Neighbors for Neighbors and Boston Mayor's office join forces to launch city-wide social network

Andrew — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:34:58 -0400

Our friends at Neighbors for Neighbors have officially teamed up with the Boston city government to launch a social networking website, allowing city personnel to better communicate with residents and hopefully address problems more quickly.

From the Neighbors for Neighbors press release:

“By providing these social networks, Neighbors for Neighbors is providing our residents yet another way to stay in touch with each other and their neighborhood officials,” said Mayor [Thomas] Menino. “We continue to use the latest technology to make government even more accessible and more responsive to our constituents. Just this week we launched the City’s first-ever iPhone application to send constituent requests to the Mayor’s 24-Hour Hotline and now we’re providing them another way to connect with city officials.”

On the networks, users create profiles and post information about themselves (and organizations they represent), and can find and communicate with neighbors. Users can also post blogs and events, participate in forums, add videos, photos, music, and create and join interest groups.

Coordinators from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services as well as District Police Captains and Community Service Officers will all have a presence on the website to answer any questions users may have about their neighborhoods from broken street lights and trash pickup to various public safety issues.

Neighbors for Neighbors also held a kick-off this past week, announcing their partnership with the city:

Rick's Startup Whiteboard #3: Designing a Validation Trajectory for your Startup

rborovoy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:32:52 -0400

[If the video is not embedded above, go here]

Everyone knows that creating a startup involves a carefully-ordered sequence of steps -- eg, don't start selling your product until you have a product (actually, that's surprisingly easy to screw up). However, there's a guiding principle about designing the right sequence that doesn't get talked about enough. You need to think about designing your "Validation Trajectory". Here's the deal:

In the Pony Diving phase (see Episode #1), you're trying to put together an idea with funders, users, and a development team. But each one of these key groups is going to need to see a certain amount of proof about the viability of the project, i.e. validation, before they sign on. Of course, the killer is that these same people are going to help you establish validation, so you've got the makings of a brutal chicken-and-egg problem. The solution is a workable validation trajectory: The first key player you sign on has a low validation "buy-in". That player then produces some validation "benefit", and now you have more validation to recruit the next player. A workable validation trajectory moves you from where it's just you waving your arms to where you've got all the key players on board. A broken one leaves you needing some high-validation-buyin player without any way to get the validation to bring him/her on.

Here are pointers to a few things I called out in the video.

Here's where Vinod Khosla discusses the Ethanol Trajectory
Here's the LostInBoston.org project I talk about
Here's George Eberstadt's Blog. He's my colleague who would always say "How do we get there from here?"

So now you tell me. Is this obvious? Is this useful? Is this obviously useful? I need feedback. Post it below.

Why would bees need free honey?

clay — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:21:36 -0400

Hey, the FTC just made it illegal for bloggers to accept kickbacks for writing puff pieces about products on the internet. Good. Maybe the discussion about this will make people call out for independent, non-profit, verifiable product information. I put puff journalism and greenwashing in the same sentence. Hey bloggers, if [...]

Rick's Startup Whiteboard #2: You Need Partners, Not Employees

rborovoy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:41:49 -0400

Welcome to Episode #2 of Rick's Startup Whiteboard (the video is at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4106-ricks-startup-whiteboard-episode-2-ear... if it's not showing up above). This one focuses on the importance of working with partners -- not employees, not contractors -- when you're the pony-diving stage of a startup project, still trying to figure out the key pieces of the puzzle (see episode #1 on pony diving). Personally, I learned this one the hard way in a start-up. We contracted out the design of our next generation product and wound up on the rocks. There were a lot of accusations and alibis, and a distressing lack of "we're going to keep at this until it works". Lesson learned: when the project is in the early stages, and still involves as much problem-finding as problem-solving, you need to work with people who have as much at stake as you do.

When have you been on the right or wrong side of this?

Iranian Government’s version of “privatization”

nadav — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:42:28 -0400

A few days ago the Iranian government completed the process of “privatizing” the Iranian national telecommunications company.

Sounds great right? Less state control, more public sector involvement, free market and all that jazz.

However, a closer looks shows that the majority stake (50% + 1 share), purchased for $7.8 billion, were bought by a consortium that is directly connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Out of the 3 groups contending, one was disqualified by the government for not having the necessary security credentials (read: probably not affiliated with the Guard).

If you are not that familiar with the Guard, here’s some background: The Revolutionary Guard, or in its full name, “Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution”, was founded right after the revolution in 1979 as an independent force loyal to Khomeini, but later became a full military force alongside the regular army.
Here’s what AP describes in their article (link below):

Newsfail: No major newspapers able or willing to cover catastrophic floods in Atlanta

Andrew — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:33:44 -0400

With the exception of the beleaguered Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no major papers are covering the flooding currently ravaging Atlanta, Georgia. I only know about it because my mother and step-father live there---they're fine, but my mother nearly couldn't get home last night because of so many downed trees, washed-out roads, and police barricades. My step-father, being ex-Special Forces, was ridiculously well-prepared (hurricane lamps, a universal charger for multiple cell phones that hooks up to his car's cigarette lighter), but their neighbors aren't so lucky: good friends of theirs have seen their house so damaged that they expect to live in a hotel for months.

Can someone explain how this isn't a news story? Where's the coverage? Atlanta received 14 inches of rain in a few days, which all goes on hard-packed clay (it's a very dry part of the country) and thousands of miles of roadway. There's nowhere for the rain to go except into people's houses. Police are rescuing people by boat. The three interstates are shut. Every school in the city is closed. And the best the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe can do is stick the same A.P. link at the bottom of their national news subsections: "Toddler Among 6 Killed as Storms Drench Southeast". And that story is 12 hours old.

I sincerely hope that it's my familial proximity to people at Atlanta that has me seeing this story all out of proportion. But if it's not, are we seeing the news industry's Katrina? Is this evidence that newspapers are unable or unwilling to expend the resources to help inform people during a natural disaster?

Rick's Startup Whiteboard

rborovoy — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:53:28 -0400

Welcome to the first video webisode of "Rick's Startup Whiteboard" (it's at http://bit.ly/eqeAX if you don't see it above for some reason)

It's a sharper-than-broken-glass-and-every-bit-as-dangerous look at what's involved in getting a new social technology project started. The first clip is about "Pony Diving" -- the very early stages where you're trying to put together an idea with a technology that can implement it with a group of people who will use it, another group of people who can an build it, and a third group of people will fund it. Here's the feedback so far:

"Your head is too shiny" -- Totally true
"It's too long" -- Also true.
"Good ideas. Loved it" -- Thanks, Mom.

So give me 7 minutes on this one, and give me some feedback, and I'll make the next ones shorter and better.

And if you're wondering what I know about this: I co-founded a startup in 2002 based on my Media Lab Ph.D. work on technology for face-to-face community building (check out http://ntag.com). On top of that, I've gotten many social technology-oriented projects off the ground, and have thought a lot about the process.

Rick Borovoy
Visiting Researcher, Center for Future Civic Media, MIT

On trust, eight years after 9/11

Andrew — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:54:40 -0400

Something that characterizes everyone I've met in my year at the Center for Future Civic Media is a visceral frustration with tools and schemes that chip away at community ties or shut down communication between friends and neighbors---contrasted with an earnest desire to use technology to engender trust, heal rifts, and collectively build a better future. For every soul-crushing "See Something, Say Something" campaign, someone's working on a Hero Reports to counteract it.

On this, the eighth anniversary of 9/11, it's worth reflecting on this frustration and this desire to reestablish trust.

My in-laws are New Yorkers, and for many years my father-in-law worked in the World Trade Center. He was further uptown that morning, but, when the attacks happened, he made his way downtown to search for his nephew---who at that moment was escaping the WTC subway station through train tunnels. He was on the last train to leave before the towers fell. Together they walked up Manhattan island. They crossed a bridge into Brooklyn, turned back a moment, and recognized that their lives and their city were irreparably different.

So if anyone should want their government to guarantee safety at any cost, it's New Yorkers like them.

But as these eight years have gone by (admittedly perhaps because of a lack of new attacks), they have come to resent the breakdown in community particularly in contrast to the camaraderie felt in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, camaraderie despite fear of that next attack that we were all sure was coming. Sadly, it's human nature, and in the nature of government, to be influenced more by fear than by trust, and it's an old story. To act with perfect rationality in the wake of 9/11 would have been like Achilles not flipping out after Hector slays Patroclus. But Achilles, distraught, is who led us in our day to confused wars, sacrificed liberties, and, worst, a loss of trust in one another.

On this anniversary, I look with quite a bit of pride at our Center's long list of impressive projects in the context of reanimating that trust. It's the practice at MIT that we develop technologies to address really specific puzzles, but each of those technologies can be and are expanded to other contexts, ones that build up relationships between and within geographic communities:

The aforementioned Hero Reports helps people praise acts of civic courage before they're forgotten.
Extract organizes landowners---both urban and rural---so that they can represent their best interests to oil and gas companies.
The technology behind VirtualGaza, though focused on Palestinians, can be adapted to help communities in the midst of crisis when mapping and storytelling is most critical.
Newer projects, like Between the Bars, exemplify how a narrow cause---building a system that allows prisoners to blog---establishes a template for mutually beneficial relationships between groups that are usually adversarial.
And even ostensibly geek-centric work, like GoodApp, a cloud-computing environment to collaboratively develop web applications, means that a tool now exists for anyone---citizen, company, government---to build and share code, easily and transparently.

None of those projects works without a high level of trust, even between complete strangers. It's not a naive trust. Not one, childishly, where you renounce responsibility. It's one where you respect your neighbor, acknowledge his or her worth and talents, and know that you're stronger together than apart.

It's the lesson we learned eight years ago, and it's one to which the Center stays true.

A report from Gov2.0

csik — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:38:32 -0400

I had not planned on attending the O'Reilly conference Gov2.0 , an exposition and dialog about new forms of government and information technology. But at last week's Foo Camp (another O'Reilly conference) I met a great number of people in the area, and I became pretty excited with what I heard. For instance, I was in a session on government and data, sitting next to a deputy CTO from the White House, and was surprised by the sincere and urgent dialog that was taking place with information activists and coders. The White House and geeks? What is not to like? So now I am sitting in a huge room in the third sub-basement of the Grand Hyatt in D.C. Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy officer is speaking, so it is a good chance for me to reflect on what I have seen so far.

Youtube in the Amazon: Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet

Henry — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:00:00 -0400

The following account will appear later this month in an issue of In Media Res, the newsletter of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. It was written by Audubon Dogherty, one of the graduate students I am working with this year. She is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media, which is funded by the Knight Foundation.

Youtube in the Amazon: Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet

Henry — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:00:00 -0400

Help the Knight Foundation promote the 2010 News Challenge

Andrew — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:48:17 -0400

From our good friends and sponsors at the Knight Foundation, spreading the word on 2010 News Challenge. Use the code below to place a badge on your own website.

The 2010 News Challenge is accepting applications from now until October 15.

You can help us promote the 2010 News Challenge by putting a banner on your web site or blog. Click here for a page with images and html code which you can copy and paste.

URL: http://www.newschallenge.org/sites/default/files/knc-banner-for-icfj-280x140px.gif

Code for your web page:
<a href="http://www.newschallenge.org/?utm_source=c4fcm&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=banner&utm_campaign=public"></a>

URL: http://www.newschallenge.org/sites/default/files/knc-bannerknc-170px.gif

Code for your web page:
<a href="http://www.newschallenge.org/?utm_source=c4fcm&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=banner&utm_campaign=public"></a>

German Language

banner_knc_german_468x60.gif (468px x 60px)

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Spanish Language

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Portuguese Language

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Note: If you want us to know that you're sharing the love by sending traffic our way, change the value "&source=banner" to &source="your_name" and you'll know we can see which friends are linking to us.

Next Step in US-Russian relations: OP Collaborative Coverage & Transparency for Pittsburgh G20

Florence Gallez — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:12:28 -0400

C4FCM Research Assistant and Open Park developer Florence Gallez leads a roundtable discussion with Russia experts on US-Russian relations at the Media Lab July 14 as part of OP's first case study on collaborative journalism.

Future of News & Civic Media: The Motion Picture

csik — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:32:21 -0400

Last June we held our Future of News & Future Civic Media conference, here at MIT, with many recipients of the Knight News Challenge meeting, speaking, and demoing their work. We chose to use the "barcamp" un-conference technique for most of the sessions, where all participants to the conference were able to host a session.

Tech.del to Mexico: Civil society @ work in Ciudad Juarez

csik — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:22:33 -0400

How can NGOs working on diverse projects—including graffiti, rap music and education—better reach disadvantaged communities and youth in the barrios of Juarez? How can journalists in Juarez and across Chihuahua state better communicate the positive elements of the region, encouraging citizens to play an active role in civic life? How can university students at Tec de Monterrey and other institutions in Juarez better organize both with each other and with other campuses across Mexico to become agents of change?

These are some of the questions that tech.del participants addressed during a series of roundtable events with civil society players in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on Tuesday, August 25. Tech.del participants—including representatives from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T, Adefro Group, Liberty Concepts, FastForward Group and MIT Media Lab—explored how technology can help these grassroots organizations better communicate both within their own team frameworks, as well as to the communities they seek to engage. The idea is to support Mexican civil society efforts to address the violence, renewing and reinforcing a positive, hopeful image for Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State and all of Mexico. Tech.del participants repeatedly encouraged these groups to use the tools that make the most sense for their particular context—whether mobile-based SMS texting, online applications or simple face-to-face contact with the right people—to deepen the roots of civil society in Mexico. By introducing and advising on the right communication strategies, Tech.del participants are helping Mexican citizens best address the challenges they face.

After our meetings in Juarez, we flew to Mexico City, landing around midnight last night. We are about to begin another full day here on the ground in Mexico City, engaging with NGOs, mobile providers, university students and professors as well as representatives from the Mexican government to discuss these same issues, but from the context of the capital city.

Our goal is to tease out deliverables and implement them as quickly as possible with the contacts we made in Juarez, and will make today in Mexico City.

Stay tuned for another installment reporting on our efforts.

YouTube in the Amazon: Rural Peru’s Transition to the Internet

audubon — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:01:45 -0400

Forthcoming in the Fall issue of In Media Res, the newsletter of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.

We arrived in Cajamarca in northern Peru just in time for an information and communications technology (ICT) training session for local internet entrepreneurs from rural villages across the country. The training site was picturesque – a large house surrounded by cows, streams, mountains, dirt. The minister of technology was in attendance, as was the project manager from FITEL – a public fund distributing subsidies to national telecommunications companies to set up wireless internet in thousands of villages – as well as representatives from various NGOs. I had come to film some of the trainings and try to get a sense of how technology for development was being implemented.

All this was part of a documentary I was making on the use of new wireless internet in extremely rural areas of the Peruvian Andes and Amazon, a project funded in part by the Carroll Wilson Award via MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center. An old friend of mine had become the chief project manager for Rural Telecom, a Peruvian company based in Lima. The company had won a government subsidy to provide internet and basic tech and business management training to people in 2,000 rural villages, locals who volunteered to become entrepreneurs and start their own internet “cabinas” or cabins.

The idea was that cabina proprietors would independently finance the purchase of a few computers (often by selling cattle or taking out bank loans), and Rural Telecom would build a wireless tower to provide internet access and sometimes public pay phones, then conduct an initial training with end users in the community. Entrepreneurs would charge a small hourly fee for local internet users, often young people, which they would use to pay monthly connection fees (about $40 USD) to the telecom.

The project, dubbed Banda Ancha Rural, began in 2007, and I had come to assess its progress and the impact the internet was having on communities. Due to safety and language concerns, I hired Maurice, a bilingual Peruvian photographer and videographer, to accompany me on the trip and help conduct interviews in Spanish with entrepreneurs. He was an invaluable asset, but neither of us really understood what we were getting into.

Over the course of six weeks, we spent endless hours on buses, planes, taxis, four-by-fours and hiking on foot to visit communities in Andean regions (Cajamarca, Huancayo), rural areas outside Lima (Cañete, Huaral) and tribal areas in the Central Amazon (Satipo, Pangoa). I had expected to find mixed reactions by villagers: perhaps the adults are wary of the internet and computers, I thought. Perhaps they don’t feel it’s valuable for agricultural societies. Perhaps some entrepreneurs have gained advanced skills from the technology trainings and are now using the internet to sell their goods online and improve their local economy. Perhaps they’ve learned to blog but don’t want to write about their village because they’re not interested in encouraging tourism.

I was wrong about all that.

What we did find were communities that had embraced internet implementation, understood its value and its potential for education and business development, but who had not received enough training to fully utilize internet services and most often had huge problems with the wireless connection. We visited over 40 villages, more than half of which had slow or broken connections.

But telecom representatives had no idea there were problems because the government subsidy they received was not sufficient to cover further technical assessments or in-person trainings for every internet cabina, especially since these communities were often difficult or impossible to access by public transportation. And the communities that did have working internet still needed help promoting its use since their financial intake was usually barely enough to break even after paying for electricity and internet.

To counter this, Rural Telecom has endeavored to forge private contracts with NGOs, universities and technology corporations interested in supplementing funds for the project. They also hold ICT trainings a few times a year for groups of internet entrepreneurs who have the time and money to attend. Presently they are beginning a pilot project to provide online trainings (via the open source platform Moodle) to 120 entrepreneurs with reliable internet connections.

‘Critical Hub’ for Learning

What struck me was how internet proprietors see themselves: sure, they are entrepreneurs running a business, but they also see themselves as contributing to the cultural and technological development of their community. A majority of cabina owners define themselves as educators, responsible for training children and young adults in media literacy. Most villages have one local school, usually without internet, and no library; the internet cabina therefore becomes a critical hub for learning.

Cabina proprietors help kids with their homework online, teach them how to search for information and make sure they don’t visit questionable websites. Although many adults lack the time or literacy level to use computers, some farmers come to research agricultural prices; mining areas often receive business from engineers and other professionals who rely on the internet for communication; and some local adults learn to use email and chat for communicating with family members in other areas.

It was striking to see how important computers became for cabina proprietors whose standard of living was otherwise extremely low. In one village outside of Cajamarca, we visited a cabina that was part of the entrepreneur’s house. It had dirt floors, thatched roofs, chickens everywhere and an outhouse several meters away. But for the proprietor, keeping the computers in his home was a top priority. This man had studied computer science and was also an elementary schoolteacher; local kids saw him as a resource, and began to rely on the internet cabina as a place they could go to get help online with math or history lessons.

The proprietor’s six-year-old son worked quietly at one computer as we interviewed his father. When the interview was finished, I asked the child what he was doing on the internet. “I’m looking for my favorite video,” he told me in Spanish, inputting the word “dinosaur” (in English) into YouTube’s search field. “This is it,” he said, clicking on an animation about dinosaurs and hooking up external audio speakers into the hard drive so he could hear the narration. A few minutes later, he was searching for juegos, online games, from an educational gaming site in Spanish.

Although the proprietor joked with me about his son’s technological prowess, it spoke to a crucial need for ICT projects in rural communities: sustainability. Many entrepreneurs start internet businesses but then leave the area to pursue job opportunities elsewhere; conversely, older cabina owners rely on their children to run the business, only to be left without managerial or technical skills once their kids go elsewhere for college or to find employment. Training the younger generation is essential, the proprietor told me, not just for their own education but for the continuation of the business itself, and to enable villagers to communicate with the outside world.

A few hours away was another teacher who doubled as an internet entrepreneur. She complained about the inconsistent internet connection and the competition from cheaper internet cafés in the nearby city of Cajamarca but explained that young customers from the village still preferred to come to her cabina because of the personal assistance they received. She envisioned turning her small cabina into a library of sorts, not with books but with online references and one-to-one teaching. She wanted to learn VoIP applications like Skype to allow users to make free calls online, as well as upload news and information about her community to a website. Although Rural Telecom offers a section of their website for entrepreneurs to upload information about their village (contactorural.com.pe), many proprietors don’t receive enough training on the web interface or don’t fully understand citizen journalism and the incentive for publicizing their village.

Paying for Access

The downside of garnering a loyal clientele is that internet users become upset when the connection goes down. We met young users, now used to relying on the internet for information and communication, who will commute to the nearest city to find an internet café – a trip that is often long and unsafe. A few proprietors we met have begun to supplement internet services with offline gaming consoles, such as Playstation, so that thy can stay open and make a little money even when the internet connection breaks. One woman used the revenue from gaming to pay her electricity bill, which had gone up with the installation of new computers.

Some entrepreneurs we met were also artisans, hoping to sell their stone carvings or painted crafts online, although still without the tech knowledge to do so. Alejandro Cipriano lives in a mountainous area outside Huancayo and runs a family business making traditional painted gourds (mates burilados). He became an internet entrepreneur after a friend in Lima started taking orders for his crafts via email, which came in from as far away as Japan. Although his internet connection has been down for months, he still hopes to eventually have his own website and sell his goods directly to international consumers online.

We also heard about a nearby Andean village that had transformed their economy through online self-education. A governmental ICT manager told us how the community made money from selling fresh river trout but could only sell the fish to local buyers. With the arrival of the internet, they found online resources outlining the process for canning trout. This revitalized their industry, allowing them to sell preserved river trout as far away as Lima.

The Peruvian jungle presented a completely different context. Native tribes still live throughout the Amazon, and despite tribal protests over land disputes that blocked roadways for weeks, we were able to visit two native villages where internet had been set up. Although leaders from both villages were wary of tourism and wanted to preserve their traditional way of life, culture and language, they saw technology as a critical means through which to develop their community – to further education for children, to stay informed about the latest prices for agricultural products, and to communicate with people in other areas.

We spoke to a teacher in one native community who emphasized the need for more governmental support for technology education, including more computers and lower rates for internet connections. “I would also like my school to have a video camera like yours,” he told me, “so the students would be able to put footage from this village online.”

Perhaps if I embarked on this project five years from now, I would be able to focus on the innovative uses of internet and communication technology in areas previously cut off from all forms of communication. But the rural internet project is still in development. Until the government or private telecoms can increase funding to secure stable, affordable wireless connections and expand training for entrepreneurs, there is little progress.

While pressing needs for basic services in extremely rural areas remain – for better education, phone lines, improved roads – there still exists a great desire by rural Peruvians to develop their communities through technology. Cell phones, for instance, have become the primary means of communication in remote areas. Perhaps the next time I visit Peru, internet will be in wider use through mobile devices, and I can make an entirely new documentary – from my phone.