In the following we reproduce a sequence of electronic mail contributions to the 2050-Modeling mailing list which led to the experiment described in this report. The 2050-Modeling mailing list was created to facilitate follow-up discussions among participants of the 2050 project meeting held by the Santa Fe Institute, the World Resources Institute and the Brookings Institution in Santa Fe, Feb. 1994.
I understand your enthusiasm over Internet, although I am concerned about its equity implications when the world is connected as you talked about at Santa Fe. For example, I have recently been working in Zambia; there is no Internet node in the entire country! There is a fidonet node, with a total of about 200 subscribers out of 10 million in the country (and many of those subscribers are foreigners working in Zambia). Despite rapidly dropping prices, computers are still far from inexpensive in a country with an average per capita income of $300/year.
The World Hunger Program at Brown University sponsors an annual conference, the Annual Hunger Research Briefing and Exchange, this year from April 14-16, involving academics, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations concerned about hunger. We have set up one session on the ``Use of Electronic Media to Create Innovative Linkages`` to address the issues I raised above. Despite the late date, we are still looking for one or two more panel members to help address these issues; would you be interested in attending, or can you suggest someone who might be and would have many ideas to share? Bill
I appreciate the concern. I think the rapid growth of the Internet will dramatically improve the equity situation. I think it can be best seen if we consider the alternatives: What are the information links from scholars in developing countries to the information rich industrialized countries? Libraries and Journals? How long is the delay until a scholarly journal issue arrives in Zambia? What are the subscription costs? I assume there are personal links between researchers in Zambia and, say, the US. How does that communication work in a collaboration? How long does it take to exchange letters? How expensive are phone calls/fax? How much money is spent on travel? How effective are those travels? If we would ask, how much useful information can be taken home by a researcher from Zambia who visits a conference in the US, say, for one week, full of talks, jet-lag, maybe language problems...
I think a joint project proposal that has as a central item a PC+Modem (<1000$) some software that sends/receives messages and information automatically (a program that re-dials, tries to find optimal times to call, stores text information and data for editing and distribution). I think it would compare pretty well with other means of giving third world scholars access to information sources.
A main point is also the ``hallway-effect'': if you work at a privileged place like a top US university, you have an excellent chance to bump into world class experts in your field while you go to the bathroom/lunch/coffee break etc. This sort of casual information exchange in the same way as doing business deals while playing golf is a major source of lack of equity between people in the developed and developing countries. On the Internet you have something like ``cyber-hallways'', you bump into people who really can tell you something about your problem.
I don't say that the Internet can replace person-to-person meetings at conferences or research visits, but I am convinced that it can make them orders of magnitude more efficient.
I think what I just said applies even more when data/models are involved in the collaboration.
