Pete Cranston

From Pete Cranston's profile on e-agriculture.org: ' I'm an independent consultant, specialist in IT, Knowledge, Communications and Management working in Development and other Social Change fields. I have an eclectic background: a long time in UK public education; two spells in Oxfam GB - one as an IT manager and recently advising on interactive media engagement, social networking and blogging; director at OneWorld International, including managing a lot of OneWorld's ICT4D programme and an indendent for the last 3.5 years. In terms of mobile phones, OneWorld International and, latterly, OneWorld UK has been one of the pioneers in developing phone and mobile applications. I managed the team supporting the set-up of http://www.kazi560.co.ke/ and played a smaller role in supporting the Indian end of the development of the BT Lifelines project. Since then I have been following the plot, as it were, tracking to see how this latest technology surge would track and develop. I think it was the Reuters MoJo project, that finally moved me to action. I bought their recomended Nokia N95, using it to support my advocacy in Oxfam for direct communications from staff and partners. Since then I have been looking specifically at mobiles and Knowledge Sharing - of which more later, and attended MobileActive 08 this year to learn more (There were some, but not many, e-agricultural examples). That event persuaded me that we have reached a point that we can look back on what's possibly a first wave of mobile experimentation and review what the next will bring. I share the general concern about band-wagons, but do think that the convergence of function in modern devices such as the N95 and later, or the iPhone (computers with radios attached [John Naughten]), represent something different than we have had before. I also think that ubiquitous access - albeit still expensive - is a mould-breaker in Africa especially, but also in other places.'