Information and Communication Technologies for Development

I'm blogging from the departure lounge of JFK - how often do you get to say that! I should be arriving in India around lunchtime tomorrow Boston time, where the weather is a cool 25 degrees (thats in the seventies for all you Americans...)

The plan right now is for a preliminary meeting with the staff in Delhi on Saturday. I'm flying out to Patna Saturday afternoon, and then on to Muzaffarpur (where the Bihar regional office is based) on Sunday morning. This is somewhat subject to change as the Holi celebration (the Hindu festival of colours) is taking place on Sunday in Bihar, as well as it being Easter Sunday, so I will just have to play it by ear - but that's pretty much what I expect from India anyway! More on my plans for the trip below the line.

The main agenda for the visit is to get a sense of what all the end-users require from the project. So far we've only talked to the people at head office in Delhi, so it will be very useful to get the opinions of CRS Bihar, as well as the partner organizations who will actually be gathering the data. It's also possible that a fresh perspective will lead to a new approach to the problem - it's so easy for people close to a problem to lose sight of the bigger picture.

On that note, the other main thing I'm planning to do is assess what technology is best suited to solve the problem. CRS is a .NET shop, and so they seemed quite keen on the phone to use Windows Mobile for developing the data entry application. We think that Java might be a better solution, because it runs on a huge variety of devices, including Windows Mobile but also including $30 cellphones which could be densely distributed across at-risk areas. This would allow first-response data could be gathered in the hours following a disaster instead of waiting for days for agents with expensive phones to make their way to the affected area. Again, this is something I'll have to investigate - there may be other factors at work which we're not yet aware of.

Right now I'm trying to get the demo app up and running. I think I'm pretty close to getting the Java app running in an emulator on my laptop talking to a web server, also running on my laptop. The Holy Grail would be to have a cellphone talking over a GSM/GPRS link to a laptop. I'm not sure if that's going to happen (I don't know how easy it will be to get a mobile internet connection in India) but it would be awesome if I can manage it.

Next entry probably from Muzaffarpur, hopefully with some pictures!