Go to the audio archive download page to download this episode.

This week I'm focusing on a pragmatic aspect of free culture - international collaborative development, by exploring the volunteer organization IESC-GeekCorps. My guest today is Wayan Vota, director of IESC-GEEKcorps.

GeekCorps was founded in 2000 by Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard law school graduate, and one of the founders of Tripod, one of the early entrants into the web community space., one of the early employees at Tripod.com, and a graduate school dropout from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Tripod was purchased by Lycos in 1998. GeekCorps is a non-profit technology volunteer corps. Geekcorps pairs skilled volunteers from US and European high tech companies with businesses in emerging nations for one to four month volunteer tours, although many volunteers have extended their stays for much longer. Volunteers have served in 14 nations including Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Vietnam and Morocco, and have completed over a hundred projects. Geekcorps became a division of the International Executive Service Corps in 2001, where Ethan served as a vice president from 2001-2004. The group is now officially known as the IESC-GeekCorps, and is located online at geekcorps.org

IESC-Geekcorps' objective is to promote stability and prosperity in the developing world through information and communication technology. The organization is supported by grants from the United States agency for International Development or USAID.

GeekCorps' first project was in Ghana, West Africa. Ethan Zuckerman's interest in African music during his education at Harvard is what took him there initially. Ghana at the time was a country where small-to-medium sized businesses had a shortage of people trained in Information and Communications Technology skills. The gap that GeekCorps sought to fill was to create a connection between experts in the field, with local businesses, to ultimately provide training and technical assistance to fill the needs of Ghana's capital Accra's businesses. When GeekCorps went into Ghana, the technology needs were still quite great. IESC-Geekcorps' can at least partially be credited for Ghana now boasting the largest Internet cafe in all Africa.

It could be said that IESC-Geekcorps is not about doing community development work without pragmatic purpose. They are not a group doing feel-good projects distributing 1st world technology into a developing country. Instead the group focuses on knowledge transfer to build self-sufficient, scalable, local solutions. The idea of providing a strong technology skillset has great benefit when combined with communications across Africa. Tangible issues, such as political and weather-related news, are essential for a stable economic base. Tie that in with the ability to trade over wide distances using commodity prices gleaned from the internet, and you start seeing the ground-work for solid businesses going forward. This is exactly the kind of work that went into the IESC-Geekcorps' recently finished project in Mali, where they brought communications know-how to a remote village north of Timbuktu. The plan was to bring radio, and television access using wireless networking to the population for both entertainment and news, while at the same time to create a local economy and train local entrepreneurs. And all this was done wirelessly, which means the infrastructure can be moved easily, can be maintained easily, and there is less reliance on the entrenched monopolies.

In order to get their system in Mali to be reliable, IESC-GeekCorps came up with some innovative solutions, and the final product was nicknamed "The Desert PC". For their innovative engineering on this computing platform, IESC-Geekcorps was awarded the Accenture Economic Development award, a part of the Tech Museum Awards on Nov 15, 2006. The Tech Museum Awards is an international Awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

I spoke with Wayan Vota, Director of IESC-GeekCorps, to better understand how IESC-GeekCorps works, and how a group of volunteer techies are making strides to build a more solid economic base in remote areas in Mali.