Telecon!

People say telecommunications will be the way of the future of business in our global economy. No more high costs to entry at meetings for developing countries! No more carbon emissions wasted on airplane flights!

Today some colleagues and I tried to attend a teleconference out of Oxford, UK. The host was Oxfam Great Britain and the subject was Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation.

My computer and internet hookup were moving too slow to ever load the conference page. But my colleague managed to get his working, and put the volume on high, so the rest of us in the office could hear what was being said.

I heard a man with a British accent talking about how climates are changing. He referenced evidence from Bangladesh, country were for a large portion of the year, a number of people are regularly flooded out of their homes.

I was looking at rainfall data collected about Tamil Nadu by the DHAN foundation's local partners. It showed the rainfall patterns shifting over the last 40 years, and demonstrated why certain crops were failing and would fail in the future. The study also offered farmers alternative crop suggestions.

It would have been great it we could have shared some of this information in that teleconference. But alas, we found out about it too late, and our internet was too slow. Eventually our one colleague who was streaming the meeting lost his connection too. We all washed our hands of it, and attended to the mountains of work we have... due yesterday.

Someday the theory of good globalization - telecomms and a worldwide marketplace of ideas, and developing countries charting the path to their own development - and the practice of good globalization will align.

But today was not that day.