The enormous potential for digital technologies and the Digital Economy to help poor communities lift themselves out of poverty is no longer questioned. Poverty-alleviation organizations, social entrepreneurs, government institutions, corporate enterprises and even uneducated, village entrepreneurs are actively developing technological solutions to serve the often-overlooked customers at the bottom of the economic pyramid. These solutions are bringing the benefits of the Digital Age—increased access to markets, education, health and environmental information, economic opportunity, and government services—to bear on issues related to poverty. In so doing, they are helping to build the business, economic, and social cases for investing in the systems and infrastructures needed to serve even the poorest of the poor. Together, they are among the vanguard of a movement “Creating the Infrastructure for the Future”.

The purpose of this workshop (see the Draft Agenda and/or Speakers and Panalists sections below) to build on last year’s inaugural conference, Achieving Connectivity for the Poor in India, and showcase initiatives that are demonstrating how information and communication technology (ICT) is being employed to provide sustainable solutions to the needs of poor communities. Presenters and panelists—made up of social entrepreneurs, members of the development community, ICT entrepreneurs, and government officials—will explore the means and methodologies needed to collectively engage ICT, market-development, and poverty-alleviation efforts, synergistically, in order to catalyze rapid and permanent improvement in the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s poor.

Finally, the workshop will serve as the backdrop for the culmination of the Digital Partners Social Enterprise Laboratory (SEL). An outgrowth of last year’s conference, the Digital Partners Social Enterprise Laboratory identifies the most promising initiatives and assists them through a process to clarify their plans for sustainability and the integration of ICT into their programs. Funding will be awarded to several SEL “graduates” that have been judged by an international committee of ICT Professionals, development experts, and venture capitalists to demonstrate the best potential to deliver significant social and economic benefit to poor communities.

A unique aspect of this year’s gathering is that participants will be able to:

Draft Agenda
Friday May 31, 2002

	Deepak Amin is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of vJungle, Inc, an enterprise software company based out of Seattle, USA and Mumbai. Amin brings more than 10 years of leadership experience in computer science and engineering. His experience includes six years with Microsoft, where he was one of four original engineers for Internet Explorer. He also acted as a technical lead on Windows 95 and Internet Explorer versions 1 and 2. He has co-authored the HTTP-based "IrDA" standard for enabling communication between consumer devices over infrared ports. Amin is also a charter member of TiE-Seattle Chapter.
	Dr. Akhtar Badshah is the Executive Director of Digital Partners and an adjunct Professor at the University of Washington. Dr. Badshah has been instrumental in setting up the Social Enterprise Laboratory, the Global Classmates Initiative and establishing a Social Venture Fund to support innovative IT efforts that benefit the poor. Dr. Badshah has over 20 years of experience as a practitioner, educator, researcher, and development expert. He is the author of Our Urban Future: New Paradigms for Equity and Sustainability, (London: Zed Books, 1996); and has written numerous articles on Development. Dr. Badshah received his PhD from MIT.
	Dr. Michael L. Best directs the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Laboratory where he is a Research Scientist. He is jointly a visiting Research Fellow at the Center for International Development, Harvard University. At MIT and Harvard Michael researches technologies for social and economic development. He is interested in systems to empower, enrich, and inter-connect people and communities. Michael received a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab. Dr. Michael L. Best is a principal of the Media Lab Asia initiative in India.
	Peter Bladin is the Director of the Grameen Technology Center based in Seattle. WA. Peter started his when he came to the United States from Sweden to work at Microsoft. During his 10 year career at Microsoft, he worked on a variety of projects, both as an individual contributor and as well as manager of teams of up to 400 people. He is active in various non-profits in Seattle with a focus on technology and helping the poor. Heading up the Technology Center is something of a dream job for him, as it allows him to combine his interests in the appropriate use of technology with a focus on global poverty alleviation. His responsibility in the technology center is to drive the strategy, oversee all the projects, and establish appropriate partnerships. Website: www.tech.gfusa.org
	M. Cecelia Buchanan is the Director of the Computing Certificate in Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her dissertation was on multimedia synchronization. Prior to joining Penn, Dr. Buchanan was responsible for managing multi-institutional instructional technology initiatives at Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore Colleges. She has also conducted research in multimedia authoring systems at Xerox PARC and network protocols at Bellcore.
	Vinay L. Deshpande is the Chairman and CEO of Encore Software Limited and the Managing Trustee of the Simputer Trust. He co-founded Ncore Technology which later became Encore. Mr. Deshpande has over 27 years of experience in the computer and technology industry and has been responsible for the development of over 60 hardware and software products ranging from PCs, notebooks (including the world's smallest and lightest multimedia notebook), CNC, SCADA, Compilers, PC-BIOS, PCMCIA, DSP Software, Video set-top boxes, and several embedded products. Mr. Deshpande has an MSEE from Stanford University and BE from Osmania University.
	Dr. Ramesh Jain is both an entrepreneur and an academic researcher. He's founded three companies and was instrumental in raising capital. Currently he is the co-founder and CTO of PRAJA inc located in San Diego. Dr. Jain is a world-renowned pioneer in multimedia information systems, image databases, machine vision, and intelligent systems. While professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of California, San Diego, he founded and directed artificial intelligence and multimedia information systems labs. Jain was also the founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE MultiMedia magazine and serves on the editorial boards of several magazines in multimedia, business and image and vision processing.
	Satish Jha is currently Chairman and Managing Director of James Martin and Company India and the President of Digital Partners India. One of the co-founders of TARAhaat, among other projects, he has been actively engaged in using information technology for socially oriented projects for many years. Satish holds several degrees from universities in the United States, Europe, and India, served as an editor for the Times of India Group, and has taught at several Indian institutions.
	Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala is currently the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India. Dr. Jhunjhunwala leads the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group (TeNeT) at IIT Madras. This group is closely working with industry in the development number of Telecommunications and Computer Network Systems. Dr. Jhunjhunwala has been received numerous awards including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for outstanding contributions in the field of Engineering Sciences in 1998, the Hari Om Ashram Prerit Dr.Vikram Sarabhai Research Award for the year 1997 and the Millennium Medal at Indian Science Congress in the year 2000.
	Shri Pramod Mahajan is the Minister of Information and Technology, Government of India. Shri Mahajan has been very active in Indian politics. He has been the President, All India BJYM, Chairman, Committee on Transport and Tourism, General Secretary, (i) B.J.P.State unit of Maharashtra, 1978-83 and (ii) All India B.J.P.; Member, Lok Sabha, 1996-97; Defence Minister, 1996; Political Advisor to the Prime Minister of India, 1998; elected to the Rajya Sabha in July, 1986, re-elected in July, 1992 and again in July, 1998.
	Satyan Mishra is the CEO of Drishtee.com. Drishtee is a platform for rural networking and marketing services for enabling e-governance, education and health services. Recently Drishtee has won the Infodev/ IICD organised ICT stories competition. The project was also recognised as the "Most Promising Social Enterprise for 2002" by Digital Partners. Satyan has an MBA in International Business & Administration from Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.
	Vasee Nesiah is founder and CEO of MediaSolv, a company that develops software and solutions for the 'Internet Everywhere' user experience. MediaSolv's most recent innovation is the development of the VillagePDA solution, an online end to end communications solution built on MediaSolv's low cost ETHERchip platform. His past experience also includes work with the United Nations Population Fund in New York. Nesiah holds a master's degree in communication management from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
	Shri Sharad Pawar, Minister of Parliament, Government of India, elected from Baramati. Previously served as the Union Defense Minister from 1991-93. He has been thrice the chief minister of Maharashtra, from 1978-80 and 1988-91. His political career began in the 1967, when he became the member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly. He was also the General Secretary of the Pradesh Congress Committee, Maharashtra. From the year 1974-78, he remained the Cabinet Minister of Education, Agriculture, Industries, Home, Labor and Youth Welfare in Maharashtra.
	Robert Schware is currently Task Manager of the World Bank Group's Information and Communications Sector Strategy Paper. He has fifteen years of experience in public and private sector information technology applications. He joined the World Bank in 1987 and has since then worked on several telecommunications and information technology-related projects in East and South Asia, Africa, Caribbean, and the Middle East. Before joining the World Bank, Dr. Schware consulted for UNIDO, the UN Software Technology Institute in Macau, UNRISD, and USAID.
	John Sherry works for the People and Practices Research Group in Intel Labs. His academic training is in anthropology, and thus his research focus at Intel Labs is on the relationship between people and technology. His interest in technology as a tool for empowering people comes from his dissertation research among a group of activists from the Navajo Nation, and indigenous tribe in the Southwestern United States. He has recently published an account of this group and their work in a book called Land, Wind and Hard Words (University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
Conference Sponsors: Digital Partners Vidya Pratishthan's Institute of Information Technology Unilever Research Datamation Ministry of Information Technology, India Why Baramati Baramati serves as a testament to the potential of ICT to reach and serve people anywhere. In the middle of sugar fields in a poor rural community of Western India, rises a state-of-the-art institute serving to bring the benefits on the Digital Age to a subsistence agrarian economy. What better place to bring the best minds in the world together to debate how best to ensure that the tremendous opportunities of the Digital Economy to alleviate poverty are not squandered. One might just as easily ask, "Why Davos?"