June 16-17, 2005 | De Balie, Amsterdam

The Incommunicado network deals with information technology for development. The approach of the Incommunicado conference was to mix many viewpoints in order to understand and further develop a critical survey of the current state of ‘info-development’, also known by the catchy acronym ‘ICT4D’ or ICT for Development.

Up until quite recently, most ICT expertise and infrastructure was located in the North, and info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. However, the new info-economies of Brazil, China and India have rapidly expanded and are forming South-South alliances that challenge the established sense of what ‘development’ is all about. Development-oriented projects (like India’s Simputer and MIT’s ‘One Laptop Per Child’ programme) emerge and re-emerge. The corporate sector, in their drive for markets beyond those now increasingly stagnant in OECD countries, has discovered new markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. While still widespread, the assumption of a ‘digital divide’ following this familiar geography of development is now too simplistic. What is needed instead is recognition of the more complex maps of actors emerging within networked global info-politics.

The ‘Incommunicado’ project started in early 2004 as a web research resource combined with an email-based mailinglist. It was founded by Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, who had earlier collaborated during the European ‘Make World’ and ‘Neuro’ events – events which attempted to develop critical work around new media and no border issues. Incommunicado was a merger of two lists, Solaris, founded in late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein, and a defunct G8 Dotforce list. The Solaris email list was an early attempt to develop a critical discourse around ICT4D policy. It was inspired by the then-newly opened Sarai centre in Delhi, a place that embodied new cultural practices beyond classic development models. Beginning in late 2003, the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva accelerated the awareness that critical voices, both inside and outside, had to gather in order to reflect on the circulating metaphors and rhetoric. Incommunicado 05 was the first meeting of this network and proved that there was a great need for radical critique of notions such as ‘information society’, ‘e-governance’, ‘digital divide’, ‘info rights’, and ‘global civil society’.

themes: NGOs in info-development, after WSIS: exploring multistakeholderism, open source, open borders, E-waste, after aid: info-development after 9/11, ICT corporations at the UN, FLOSS in ICT4D, culture and corporate sponsorship in the ICT4D context, new info-politics of rights, digital Bandung: new axes of info-capitalism, nuts and bolts of Internet governance, and rethinking ‘underdevelopment or revolution’ through ICTs.

speakers: Sally Burch, Beatriz Busaniche, Enrique Chaparro, Muthoni Dorcas, Anriette Esterhuysen, Felipe Fonseca, Steve Cisler, Michael Gurstein, Ednah Karamagi, Thomas Keenan, Monica Narula, Tracey Naughton, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Ned Rossiter, Robert Verzola, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Bernardo Sorj, Sylvestre Ouedraogo, Ravi Sundaram and many others.

website: To access audio and video conference documentation (including interviews with speakers), or to download the Incommunicado Reader pdf or subscribe to the Incommunicado discussion list, go to www.networkcultures.org/incommunicado.

publication: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds.), Incommunicado Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005. For a full description and information on how to order a free copy see page 25.