Tapan Parikh, of UC Berkeley School of Information, spoke about a number of projects that are using mobile phone based technology to give small businesses the information they need to improve productivity. He argued that voice technology has distinct advantages over text, because it overcomes challenges of illiteracy while responding to a strong need people feel to be heard. 

Information is key for economic development and empowerment. But information is worthless unless it is also useable (leads to decisions the business owner can actually take), trusted (comes from a source he respects) and relevant (speaks about the issues he is facing). For information to be really empowering, it must also be two way: there must be ways for individuals to create content themselves.

Tapan described three current projects he is involved in:

Hisaab: Microfinance groups in India often suffer from poor paper based record keeping, making it difficult for the group to track loans and repayments. The Hissab software was designed with an interface suitable for those who may be illiterate and/or new to computing. The use of voice commands and responses in the local language, Tamil, prevented the software from feeling remote and inaccessible and contributed to the success of this initiative. 

Avaaj Otalo: Agricultural extension workers provide advice to farmers on pests, new techniques etc to help improve yields. But often they have limited reach, visiting areas only rarely, or perhaps lacking the expertise to respond to all the problems they encounter. Avaaj Otalo is a system for farmers to access relevant and timely agricultural information over the phone. By dialing a phone number and navigating through simple audio prompts, farmers can record questions, respond to others, or access content published by agricultural experts and institutions. The service has been hugely popular, with farmers willing to spend time listening to large amounts of material to find what they want. The opportunity to be broadcast was a major attraction, reflecting the desire to be heard and to create media rather than be a passive consumer of it.

Digital ICS: Smallholders' compliance with organic, fair-trade and quality requirements is usually measured via paper based internal inspections. The data uncovered by these is vital but often lost. Digital ICS is a mobile phone based application that allows inspectors to fill out the survey digitally, enhance it with visual evidence (e.g. from camera phones) and upload it onto a web application. This is being piloted with coffee farmers in Mexico. A key finding from the work is that farmers want to know who ends up drinking their coffee, what they pay for it and what they think about it. Greater links between producers and consumers may therefore be another area for this project to investigate.  

Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), has been awarded $500,000 by the National Science Foundation to identify patterns in the evolution of terrorist organizations and to analyze their comparative development.

The three-year grant is part of the Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative launched in 2008, which focuses on "supporting research related to basic social and behavioral science of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy."

Crenshaw's interdisciplinary project, "Mapping Terrorist Organizations," will analyze terrorist groups and trace their relationships over time. It will be the first worldwide, comprehensive study of its kind-extending back to the Russian revolutionary movement up to Al Qaeda today.

"We want to understand how groups affiliate with Al Qaeda and analyze their relationships," Crenshaw said. "Evolutionary mapping can enhance our understanding of how terrorist groups develop and interact with each other and with the government, how strategies of violence and non-violence are related, why groups persist or disappear, and how opportunities and constraints in the environment change organizational behavior over time."

According to Crenshaw, it is critical to understand the organization and evolution of terrorism in multiple contexts. "To craft effective counter-terrorism strategies, governments need to know not only what type of adversary they are confronting but its stage of organizational development and relationship to other groups," Crenshaw wrote in the project summary. "The timing of a government policy initiative may be as important as its substance."

"Mapping Terrorist Organizations" will incorporate research in economics, sociology, business, biology, political science and history. It will include existing research to build a new database using original language sources rather than secondary analyses. The goal is to produce an online database and series of interactive maps that will generate new observations and research questions, Crenshaw said.

The results, for example, could reveal the structure of violent and non-violent opposition groups within the same movements or conflicts, and identify patterns that explain how these groups evolve over time. Such findings could be used to analyze the development of Al Qaeda and its Islamist or jihadist affiliates, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, she said.

The findings may also shed light on what happens when a group splits due to leadership quarrels or when a government is overturned, Crenshaw said. "Analysis that links levels of terrorist violence to changes in organizational structures and explains the complex relationships among actors in protracted conflicts will break new ground," the summary noted.

Extensive information on terrorist groups already exists, but it has been difficult to compile and analyze. Despite such obstacles, Crenshaw said, violent organizations can be understood in the same terms as other political or economic groups. "Terrorist groups are not anomalous or unique," she wrote. "In fact, they can be compared to transnational activist networks."

Crenshaw should know. Widely respected as a pioneer in terrorism studies, the political scientist was one of a handful of scholars who followed the subject decades before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She joined CISAC in 2007, following a long career at Wesleyan University, where she was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought. In addition to her research at Stanford, Crenshaw is a lead investigator at START, the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.

End goal

Crenshaw wants to use the findings to better analyze how threats to U.S. security evolve over time. "Terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies abroad often appear to come without warning, but they are the result of a long process of organizational development," she wrote. "Terrorist organizations do not operate in isolation from a wider social environment. Without understanding processes of development and interaction, governments may miss signals along the way and be vulnerable to surprise attack. They may also respond ineffectively because they cannot anticipate the consequences of their actions." The project seeks to find patterns in the evolution of terrorism and to explain their causes and consequences. This, in turn, should contribute to developing more effective counter-terrorism policy, Crenshaw said.

Conflicts to be mapped

• Russian revolutionary organizations, 1860s-1914.
• Anarchist groups in Europe and the United States, 1880s-1914. (Note: although the anarchist movement is typically regarded as completely unstructured, there was more organization than an initial survey might suppose, and the transnational dispersion of the movement is frequently cited as a precedent for Al Qaeda.)
  
• Ireland and Northern Ireland, 1860s-present.
  
• Algeria, 1945-1962 and 1992-present
  
• Palestinian resistance groups, 1967-present.
  
• Colombia, 1960s-present.
  
• El Salvador, 1970s-1990s
  
• Argentina, 1960s-1980s
  
• Chile, 1973-1990
  
• Peru, 1970-1990s
  
• Brazil, 1967-1971
  
• Sri Lanka, 1980s-present
  
• India (Punjab), 1980-present
  
• Philippines, 1960s-present
  
• Indonesia, 1998-present
  
• Italy, 1970s-1990s
  
• Germany, 1970s-1990s
  
• France/Belgium, 1980-1990s
  
• Kashmir, 1988-present
  
• Pakistan, 1980-present
  
• United States, 1960s-present (especially far right movement)
  
• Spain, 1960s-present
  
• Egypt, 1950s-present
  
• Turkey, 1960s-present
  
• Lebanon, 1975-present
  
• Al Qaeda, 1987-present

Where has the venture capital industry been, and where is it headed? Recently Dr. Martin Kenney (Professor, UC Davis) delivered a fascinating presentation for a SPRIE audience, tracing venture capital from its pre-WWII angel investor beginnings all the way up to the present, which he sees as the most difficult circumstances the industry has ever faced. Dr. Kenney's presentation is available on the SPRIE site and the audio from the event is forthcoming.