incommunicado

Robert Verzola (Philippines) notes that the utility of personal technical skills depends on context; working in rural projects, he concluded that farmers have more important skills in relation to local needs. Verzola has been trying to find a way to apply his technical knowledge to rural projects, yet many places have no electricity.

For Ravi Sundaram (India), the central dynamic of 'development' is an informal network economy on the margins (or even outside of) of modern property regimes. His research focuses on ordinary people constructing decentralized technological infrastructures through extra-market, non-legal forms of organising access to media.

Bernardo Sorj, who is researching telecentres in Brazil, argues to develop an integrated view on the use of Internet in the slums. Digital inclusion is not an aim in itself. It only makes sense in a broader context of social and political If you can't read of type it is cynical to talk about universal access. These days, civil society is facing a crisis of maturity.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta (India) calls on those promoting ICT development to 'develop a thought of our own obsolescence', just as today's gadgets will be obsolete tomorrow, our self-image as those who already represent a technological future that has yet to arrive elsewhere is mistaken.

Sylvestre Ouedraogo (Burkina Faso) works at an NGO called Yam Pukri, meaning 'open your mind'. Whereas Western countries tend to think that everyone should have a computer, Ouedraogo stresses the fact that it is more important to learn how to use the computer as a tool for information gathering and communication means.

The Australian digital media theorist Ned Rossiter (Northern Ireland-based) comments on the rise of China and the consequences of geopolitical shifts for the future study of media.

Richard Rogers (The Netherlands) focuses on the implications of global civil society's 'issue drift'. As global civil society moves from issue to issue, from place to place and from forum to forum, the question is: do they remember to keep up with what is happening on the ground?

Long-time analyst of development regimes, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (USA) summarizes Incommunicado 05 as 'civil society meets development', since commercial parties and governments were not represented at the conference.

Tracey Naughton (South Africa) comes up with a few humbling accounts of the fundamental obstacles to (info) developments. She argues to go back to the seventies, a time in which work for and with the poor could be done in a direct and non-bureaucratic manner.

Monica Narula (Delhi) talks about the 'listening project' she did with Raqs Media Collective. Sometimes you have to listen beyond the words, and an event like Incommunicado 05 means being attentive to one another. At Sarai, Narula works with the broadsheet collective, with which she publishes a broadsheet, a poster/factsheet/newspaper.