Kentaro Toyama from MS Research India at the ischool

Last Friday, the head of Microsoft Research India, Kentaro Toyama, spoke at the ischool about his group's ICTD work.

You can read more about his talk at Nick's ICTD weblog.

This is the blog of one of our students; we asked all of them to keep a blog throughout the semester to share their thoughts about the class, readings, speakers and their projects. We will feature some of them in this blog.

As far as Kentaro's talk went, he seemed quite willing to consider some of the limits of ICT in development. What never came up in the discussion was that he is working for Microsoft, which has a definite business interest in the work of the lab. What would happen if this work did not, at least in the long run, contribute to MS' bottom line?

Paul Aoki from the Intel Research Lab in Berkeley asked an important question about the ethics of actionable research, as Kentaro defined ICTD. This is one of the things we have learned from our research into corporate ICTD programs, that they are often not aware of, or do not take into sufficient account, the effects they have one people's lives when they get involved in development work, which by definition means getting involved in people's lives in a way that is different from a standard corporation - paying client relationship. There are implications and obligations that come with such an involvement that corporations need to acknowledge but might be ill-equipped to do. This is one of the tensions of Corporate Social Responsibility programs that never really gets addressed.