Hi all,

We are organizing an Open Session at ICTD 2012 focussed on 'financial sustainability' of ICTD Projects. Included below is a brief about it. If you feel for the topic or have a perspective, please do come by and express your thoughts. Here, we will try to gather inputs from people from different domains, discuss each other's perspectives and then come up with a few concrete suggestions on what we ought to do next.

In case, you are not able to attend but would like to tell your story/give your thoughts, please do email us and we would be happy to consider it for inclusion in the program.

Thanks!
All of us
(Anupam Jain, Arun Kumar, Amit A Nanavati, Nitendra Rajput, Jerome White)
IBM Research - India

p.s Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this email.



Sustainable ICTD
Date/Time : March 12 (10-11:15am) (11:45am-1pm)
Room: Conference 3

Overview
The last 5 years have seen an interesting momentum in the growth of technologies primarily meant for developing regions. Various research conferences, diverse social and technology platforms have seen an upsurge in ICTD literature as the world sees some amazing ideas and innovative solutions to problems that have the potential to help the next billions. It is a well known fact that the end users addressed by these efforts have a very limited financial income. But has there been enough research done in the area of financially sustainability for projects done for this population? We may have funds for good research work, good field studies and pilots but we may not always have enough funding for full scale deployments of these wonderful technologies to continually help the next billions in the long term.

There's an imminent need to figure out ways to generate enough revenue  from 'within' the development projects themselves and hence make them self-sustaining. The advent of Web 2.0 enterprises that offer everything for free to end users and generate income via third parties (like advertisers etc.) is one example of how financially sustainable models can be created for technologies where charging the end user may not be a viable option.

Though we may touch upon technical, social, and organizational sustainability during the session if and when required but we intend to primarily focus on financial sustainability of ICTD Projects.

Speakers
Dr. Richard J. Gowen, IEEE Foundation
Dr. Kentaro Toyama, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley
Leslie Dodson, University of Colorado-Boulder
Linda Raftree, Plan International

Structure of the session
Have 4 speakers with diverse backgrounds talk about 'atleast' one of the following:

        1) Their failure/success ICTD stories where financial sustainability played a major role
        2) Their perspective on the need for financial sustainability in ICTD
        3) Their idea of solving the problem

Please note that the speakers may/may not (and are not required to) converge on their ideas/perspectives on the above or the problem statement itself

A moderator summarizes all the talks and then the audience splits into groups for brainstorming.
After a brainstorming session, each group comes up with some concrete next steps or recommendations.