Net-Hope

Last week I saw a news story about Ray Ozzie.  He is one of my technology heroes, an engineer's engineer. I met Ray at the Imagine Cup in Cairo in 2009 when we sat on a panel together. Before we went on stage I had a chance to reminisce with him about the era before the Internet, when collaboration on-line was a new concept.  Ray was one of the pioneers who saw the potential before others did. 

Having been a long-time Lotus Notes user and one-time developer, I asked Ray about the architecture of Notes with its replication engine and servers dialing servers again and again, handling dropped connections with panache.  "You know," I said, "Notes was built for the sometimes-connected world, and that's the world I live in."  In the Internet age, not many systems are built that way. "Yes," he said, "and we've built that into Azure so it works the same way."  

Today we take broadband, always-on connectivity for granted in the north and west.  But that's not the way much of the world works.  In our IFRC World Disasters report for 2013, we note that in some countries, less than 10% of the population has Internet access. [1]  For those of us who work with vulnerable people, this is the very real digital divide.  And with rapid growth of technology, there is the ever looming risk that many will be left behind.

However, this is not a reason for pessimism.  It would be easy to conclude that technology is not relevant, that the glass is half full.  When I wrote my first strategy paper at Save the Children, over a decade ago, I said "Don't bet against the network; before you can build around it, it will be where you need it to be."  In many places where we work, that is now true.  But it's taking longer than I thought it would, and there is much more work that we need to do.  Nevertheless, those who have seen the changes information and technology has brought over the past decades since the dawn of the computer have the hope that it will be universal in our generation.  

It is this hope that Ray wrote about in his 2010 "farewell" memo at Microsoft.  This is also the hope on which NetHope was based, that technology can and will make a difference in the world.  And things as basic as access to information, will become a human right as basic as education.

I cannot say it better than Ray did:

"When I look forward, I can't help but see the potential for a much brighter future:  Even beyond the first billion, so many more people using technology to improve their lives, businesses and societies, in so many ways.  New apps, services & scenarios in communications, collaboration & productivity, commerce, education, health care, emergency management, human services, transportation, the environment, security - the list goes on, and on, and on." [2]

Thanks Ray, for rekindling that hope in me anew.

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[1] See the "World Disasters Report," available Oct. 17, 2013, here: http://www.ifrc.org/WDR2013

[2] See "Dawn of a New Day," here: http://ozzie.net/docs/dawn-of-a-new-day/