Background and Context
The developmental paradigm has been dominated for at least half a century by the idea that the role of state or civil society is to provide the poor with material resources, and opportunities for skill or income augmentation and employment. Strategies have never been built upon a resource in which poor people often are rich, i.e., their knowledge. Indeed developmental lexicon in the last decade adopted a term with great alacrity - 'resource poor people', assuming that 'knowledge' is not a resource.
Information and communication technology (ICT) can be harnessed to generate incentives for knowledge rich but economically poor people to share their knowledge without exhausting their Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and creating fear of being robbed of their only resource. It can do so by providing a global registration system.
ICT can either help bridge or widen the gaps between haves and have-nots. What is encouraging about the new possibilities that ICT trends offer is the scope for democratizing knowledge. The multimedia database conceptualized by SRISTI and the Honey Bee Network demystifies the technology to empower local communities and innovators in rural areas. In the process it also democratizes knowledge through horizontal networking.
Project Description
The Honey Bee Network promotes the concept that a network connecting innovators, enterprises and investors in an institutional context is the most viable approach for sustainable development. The Honey Bee Network has been in operation for ten years and is based on the premise that when knowledge is collected from people they should not become poorer in the process.
The Honey Bee Network not only allows the poor to share their knowledge with other communities, it allows them to learn from others, amassing a database in their own language that will be accessible from generation to generation, assuring that knowledge and innovations generated at the individual or community level will not be lost. The emphasis is on sharing findings in local languages and using various media to encourage the cross-pollination of knowledge. As a consequence the Honey Bee database and network grow organically. Since the printed word would reach only literate communities, use of multimedia and multilanguage technology became an essential part of the Honey Bee Network.
Implementation Strategy
A voluntary organization, SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions) was set up in 1993 to strengthen the Honey Bee Network in different parts of India. SRISTI supports the Honey Bee Network by linking six E's, i.e., ethics, equity, excellence, environment, education and efficiency in enterprise.
The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (IIMA) has played a significant role in the evolution of the Honey Bee Network. Policy mediation, networking, conceptual development and many other activities have been developed here. The role of SRISTI is to help pursue those efforts where action at the grassroots level becomes useful and where advocacy positions have to be taken. In addition, support to innovators, particularly financial and/or technological, is provided through SRISTI and a large number of volunteers.
Three examples of policy breakthroughs through the collaborative program between the IIMA, SRISTI and the Honey Bee Network are illustrative:
There are already 10,000 innovations documented in the Honey Bee database. Honey Bee Network relies on grassroots activism in order to build a database of innovations and knowledge developed in poor communities. The database includes empirical illustrations of how small farmer men and women have developed innovative solutions to local problems through their own genius without any outside help. The database also contains examples of outside experts who have used traditional knowledge with relevant modifications for solving problems.
Through presentations to local communities, word of mouth, and other grassroots initiatives, the Honey Bee Network seeks to attract other innovators to register their ideas and knowledge in the network, where it can be stored, protected, and shared. The database is designed to be user friendly and to demystify the technology.
The first screen one sees provides entry to the database as well as a window on SRISTI. The database is in three languages, English, French and Gujarati. The French language was chosen to demonstrate global implications of the database. The second screen introduces the viewer to various categories of innovations. In each category there are several innovators whose names and innovations are profiled. The viewer can press a button on any of these to reach the page of that innovator. The first page of every innovation has a photograph of the innovator, the innovation and a brief profile of both. If there is more than one innovation, these are displayed through additional buttons. The language button is available on every page so that the viewer can switch between languages.
The Honey Bee database with thousands of innovations has been upgraded to multimedia capabilities so that barriers of language, literacy and localism are overcome to connect innovators, potential entrepreneurs and investors across regions. The immediate impact of a multimedia database is that it is quicker and more apparent than textual databases.
Obstacles
Overcoming inertia among potential innovators:
"In some of the villages, when we showed the database to large number of people with the help of an overhead projector, we asked the farmers and artisans to share their own experiences. Occasions when there was total silence were overcome on our insisting that we would show our next card only when they will reciprocate by sharing some of their own innovations.
One of the unfortunate impacts has been that, with the exception of some villages, women generally sit in the rear or farther from the place where we display the database. We must acknowledge that our database is much weaker in terms of women's innovations--something we are trying to overcome in the next phase of our action research.
We can help strengthen people to people learning only when we ensure communication in local languages and media.
One of the problems that remain is the protection of intellectual property rights. It will be impossible for traditional knowledge experts and contemporary innovators to pursue standard patent protection where the average cost is about $15 -20,000 per international patent. The cost of validating the patent in each country every year is extra. In a recent paper, Gupta argued that the publication of local knowledge exhausts IPRs on one hand, and on the other, may deprive the knowledge provider any benefit that may arise from value addition in local knowledge to the individual or community or nation concerned. At the same time, local language publications make it possible for people struggling with similar problems to learn from it. This happens through publication in local languages as attempted by the Honey Bee Network. However, the challenge is to marry the two goals of easy and quick opportunity for lateral learning (through local language publication), and sharing of benefits through value addition in the same knowledge.
Impact
When farmers see the faces of people like them doing extraordinary things, they certainly get inspired. The impact of the innovators is even more profound in the village. The entire community seems to take pride in the fact that one of them is profiled in the database and that people see them in other parts of the country as well as around the world. Exposure to the Honey Bee database has been shown to generates a desire to experiment and to develop innovations to traditional methods.
Scaling Up
The Honey Bee registry can serve to prevent any firm or individual from seeking to patent community knowledge as well as knowledge and innovations produced by individuals without some kind of cross licensing.
The next step in scaling the Honey Bee Network is to create interactive opportunities for local innovators so that they get comments from their peers, seek intellectual property rights protection, generate demand for their services or products, or receive enquiries from potential investors.
For more information contact:
Vijay Pratap Singh
Email: vijayp@sristi.org