Storm Clouds
a plug to read a newspaper but you do to run most computers. In Ethiopia less than one per cent of the rural population has access to electricity and only 13 per cent of households have regular electricity supply. More important still, only half the population can read.56 When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world, they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. Most of the protocols, software and platforms will have been created by organisations from the rich world, especially the US. For cloud culture to genuinely promote global cultural relations, rather than more intense interactions among highly connected people in the developed world, we should focus on: ·· developing open source tools that will allow local solutions to emerge and develop capabilities outside the dominant regions ·· creating more initiatives like Wikipedia, a model with many different applications in different cultures and languages. Wikipedia is public, shared and diverse ·· promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva, which allows resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another. Kiva was established in October 2005 and in its first four years it enabled more than 517,000 lenders to provide loans worth more than £79 million to more than 100 field partners in 46 countries who have invested the money in thousands of entrepreneurs.57 There is huge potential to create more of these social exchanges, not just to allow people to invest in entrepreneurs, but to exchange cultural resources as well. This could create new ways to fund grassroots cultural development just as Kiva is funding grass roots entrepreneurial development.
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