The Digital Minds Network is a network of consultants who specialise in digital publishing in emerging economies. While our consultants operate independently around the world, the network adds value for their clients by pooling our resources, strategies, insights and experience.
Arthur Attwell has posted the text of his recent talk at a meeting of editors in Cape Town, South Africa. He focuses on the effect that increasing levels of automation have on the publishing industry, and how editors can stay valuable in the face of that.
This flow, from human creativity towards automation, is like a stream that you must keep swimming against to stay valuable – to keep your job, that is. Only by continually moving your skills (and value-adding activities) up the flow towards its creative end can you keep your job in publishing. Any jobs at the automation end of the flow are quickly taken over by robots of one sort or another. In the same way, in order to add enough value to the publishing process to be able to charge money for their products, publishing companies have to offer creative, human input to the content they gather from authors. That's where editors are invaluable. Publishing companies that skimp on this will operate closer and closer to the automation end of the flow, employ fewer and fewer highly skilled staff, and eventually become no more than data-scrubbing clearing houses.
He ends on a positive note, emphasising the opportunities for anyone involved in making digital content for developing countries, where demand for that content will grow quickly, given the print-based cost and distribution problems it solves.
The idea on which Lick's worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be "informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government." He imagined what he called "home computer consoles" and television sets linked together in a massive network. "The political process," he wrote, "would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer." (from Where Wizards Stay Up Late)
That's a powerful vision, and one that has not been realised in Africa even sixty years after Licklider wrote it down. Computing is just too expensive. So I'm very excited to see a large-scale commercial venture (that is, beyond the wonderful and worthy OLPC project) bringing down the price of computing, along with providing 3G web access. Simon Dingle posted about it today:
Telecommunications group Vodacom has launched its Linkbook into the SA market – a super-low price netbook that will go for R199 per month on a two-year contract, including a monthly bandwidth bundle of 300MB. The Linkbook is running a customised Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, and ships with OpenOffice, some games and other applications. It has 2 USB ports, WiFi, a 8.9″ screen, 16GB of embedded flash storage, integrated 3G modem, webcam and a microphone.
The R199-per-month is about $27, and represents about a day's wages for an entry-level job in South Africa. Till now, content creators in South Africa have only been able to deliver rich media or long-form content to two or three million people, a fraction of South Africa's population of 50 million. This device is likely to be the first of many that that will explode that market size. And if you think like JCR Licklider, the Gov 2.0 possibilities are even more exciting.
(Thanks to Michelle Matthews at Trialogue for pointing me to the news.)
In this article published in Counterpoint, Octavio Kulesz discusses the need to revisit traditional copyright:
EPISODE 1. ‘What is virtual can have real effects’. This was the conclusion drawn by the Argentinean Professor Horacio Potel in 2009 right after the trial against him had come to an end. What had happened? Since the early 2000s, he had been managing a few websites related to European philosophers where he included information about their lives and ideas, as well as PDF versions of their books. The problem was that some of those works, such as Jacques Derrida’s, were not in the public domain, which led the rights-owners to take legal action against his unauthorised copies. However, the public reaction to the process was immediate and overwhelming: thousands of students and researchers flooded online social networks to express their discontent, the general claim being that Potel’s sites were vital, since very few people could otherwise enjoy those expensive translations imported from Spain. Eventually, on 13 November 2009, the Argentinean justice decided that Potel’s actions did not justify penal prosecution and all charges were dropped.
At the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference this last week, Ramy Habeeb talked about digital publishing in the Arab world in this interview. In particular, he emphasises the opportunities presented by an industry that is infrastructurally a blank slate.
Lead consultants from Kotobarabia (Egypt), Editorial Teseo (Argentina) and Electric Book Works (South Africa) have joined forces as the Digital Minds Network (http://digitalmindsnetwork.com), a cooperative venture that pools their resources, strategies and experience.
The co-founders, Ramy Habeeb, Octavio Kulesz and Arthur Attwell, specialise in digital publishing in emerging markets. Each are experienced professionals and entrepreneurs who hold or have held senior positions in publishing enterprises or entrepreneurial ventures. Individually, they have consulted to local and international clients on issues ranging from digitisation and ebook production to metadata management and print-on-demand. Working with small local businesses or large multinationals, the network's members will provide a distinctly global view, identifying trends and best practice in emerging markets that are often hidden from mainstream international publishing.
