Difference between revisions of "Talk:Student Projects:IT Abroad EastAsia"

Revision as of 22:30, 2 November 2004

Introductions

Walker

Basic Background: I am enrolled in the Professional Masters Program at UW, and during the day I am a Software Design Engineer in Test for the Windows Server team.

Background on Topic: My knowledge of East Asia consists mostly of what I've read in English books/magazines/newspapers and seen in movies. Other than that I spent a couple of weeks vacation time in Thailand (and went on the airport sponsored afternoon tour of Singapore). That being said one of my hobbies on the side is to read policy books and the last few months or so I have been reading a lot on East Asia. I find the region interesting because it seems clear to me that the world's economic and cultural center of gravity is shifting to it, and I don't think many westerners have taken a good look at the implications.

Tentative Project Interests:

• IT interrelationships in East Asia -- Focusing specifically on the growing intercooperation of East Asian nations in IT. In particular, there seems to be an interesting story to tell regarding the growing ties between China, Japan, and South Korea... IPV6, mobiles, Linux; what are the implications for Open Source, and the broader structure of the software industry? What are the economic motivations for increasing ties?

• IT Ecosystem in Japan -- How does IT fit into Japan's overall industrial policy? How does Japan's ecosystem compare to that of the United States? What is Japan's role in the growing cooperation between Japan, China, and South Korea in IT?

EimanZ

Basic Background: Hello, I'm a Microsoft Software Developer in the TabletPC/MobilePC test team. I did my undergrad at UC Berkeley. I was born in Iran and lived there until I was 6, and moved to CA with my family after that.

Background on Topic: As I was looking around the Wiki and saw the topic of IT Abroad, i immediatly started wondering how the IT industry functions in a country like Iran. Iran, as you all may know, is under sanctions from the U.S., and its relations with other countries have only recently been getting better. I've taken courses on Iran and read up all the time on news about Iran. Focusing on Iran's IT industry is new to me, however, because i only recently realized how much was going on over there.

The IT industry seems to be heavily regulated (as with most other industries in Iran) yet there is a revolution going on with the youth of Iran and their expansive use of the Internet. Thus, i really want to focus on Iran's IT, and i think that, if we wanted to, we can take all the different profiles of countries and try to create a main thesis around the paper. My thoughts are that we'll see in all these countries a tendency for government to want to control the industry (and some succeeding), and yet the population's tendency to promote freedom of information, and the corporations playing in between, attempting to please both customer and the government.

Avichal Hi EimanZ, I think integrating Iran into our Course topic would be extremely difficult. We have started with the scope of 'East Asia' (China, Japan, South Korea & maybe ASEAN countires) but intend to narrow down the scope quite a bit. We will most likely end up working on a particular IT/Public Policy factor for a single country or that limited region (most likely only covering Japan/China/South Korea). Fitting Iran into this equation would not be possible, as it has no interaction/corelation with East Asian countries.

I myself am from India, but find the dyanmics of IT sector in East Asian region fascinating. I welcome you to join our group in that scope, in what I think, will be an exciting project.

EimanZ How exactly will incorporating Iran in be any more difficult that dicussing China and Japan in the same paper? China and Japan have vastly different governments, and I imagined vastly different ways of dealing with IT. I thought the idea was for each person to contribute a profile of a single country, then at one point we get together and tie our findings together. I'm not sure if the prof will allow for me to work on my own paper and I don't know if anyone else is intereted in looking at the IT indsutry in Iran with me. I'll e-mail him and ask.

Lars

Basic Background: I'm a Microsoft Dev Lead in the Developer Tools division, and went to Northwestern for my undergrad.

Background on Topic: I'm fascinated with the industry in the west's desire to treat China as if it was an extension of the United States or another Mexico, despite the amazing cultural differences. I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with all of the legal and social differences, and I'm interested in helping map out what they are and how they impact us.

Avichal

Basic Background: I am in the Technology group at Washington Mutual(in Seattle, downtown). Enrolled in the PMP Program at UW. I am originally from India.

Background on Topic: I am fascinated by how the cultural and social precepts differ in East Asian countries (esp. Japan) and how they affect the work culture. I'm afraid that our topic would have to pick an IT/Public Policy angle, but I am hoping during the course of working on the project, I'll get to learn more about the culture of these nations.

Tentative Projects:

• What steps Japanese goverment has tried and is trying to boost their IT industry - they have never really recovered from the crash in 1989/90. Ofcourse it's industry wide but we can cover it from an IT perspective. Also we could draw some important conclucsions on steps US government should take (or not) in the current sluggish economy.
• Co-operation in IT between China/Japan/South Korea :- cover how these countries are setting aside their differences and working together to revolutionaize IT in that region.

Hyojoo

Basic Background: I do software design and development at Wavelink, Kirkland. PMP,UW. I did my undergrad at 'Ewha' in S. Korea. (When the 520 bridge traffic does not look too bad, I take the class at the UW campus. Otherwise, I go to the Microsoft campus.)

Background on Topic: I read about East Asian IT industry from newspapers, magazines and online. I haven't had a chance to extensively look into the dynamics of technology between the region and the US or the dynamics among the region yet, but I am familiar with the trend that IT advanced countries in the region are helping other countries in the region (South North issue) to build IT infrastructures (i.e. networks), that the region has many relationships with US consulting companies such as Accenture. Also, there are national scale US technology adoption like S. Korea adopting the Qualcomm's CDMA in 1993, etc. I remember this was a big issue socially (various problems with Qualcomm), and the implementation of the CDMA technology is still playing a big role in S. Korea's IT industry. I think such phenomenon is notable and we/rest of the world can learn about such examples and make better policies.

Tentative Project Interests: See below. To focus on the objective of the project, one of my thoughts is to look at various problems/troubles/issues relating to IT relations/IT cultures between US and east Asia and come up with possible policies for fairness and prosperities on all parties.

(introduce yourself here)

IT Abroad: East Asia - Discussion

Avichal Hi, I read this project page and Talk:IT Abroad and would be interested in joining your group, if it’s ok with you.
We do need some work on finalizing a topic out of the ones suggested and defining it’s scope. As to selecting a country, my vote would be for Japan, it’ll be a great opportunity to compare and contrast with the US public policies regarding IT.

Covering a region would be interesting too. Particularly if we focus on Inter-cooperation amongst the countries mentioned, covering how policy has shifted over the years, and how it has impacted the IT environment, what policies need to be adopted to move the region into an IT leadership position…etc

Between the 2 (One nation, or a Region), it’s a tossup. If covering a region we could each cover one nation to start with, and then ofcourse exhange notes. If we are covering a single nation, we could divide by areas:-

• Nation’s policy relating to Workforce
• Government Sponsor/Aid/Funding
• IT Environment: University/Government/Industry
• Collaboration with other countries on IT…etc.

I am not sure if you attend class at UW or Microsoft. If at UW, then we can discuss before/after the class. We could also discuss with Professor Ed Lazowska in order to narrow down and select a final topic scope

IT in S. Korea and East Asia

Hyojoo

Hi, I am a software engineer in Wavelink, Kirkland enrolled in the PMP at UW. After comtemplating on the various interesting topics, I have decided to look into the "IT abroad" topic, especially in S. Korea and the surrounding region.

South Korea's IT industry has been an unusual case in that the country has experienced rapid growth in the past 10 years. The country exports IT to ASEAN countries and cooperates with Japan and China especially in the open source projects.

I am interested in focusing on the comparison of the driving force and the IT environment - computer gaming industry driving the broadband network services, or densly populated area for wiring the nation in a short amount of time, etc. I am interested in looking into how these countries are different from that of the US, and how the cooperation of the east Asian IT will affect international IT trends and policies.

I can read Korean text and provide how the Korean press is viewing their IT prospects in regards to the rest of the world.

Avichal Hi Hyojoo, we'll be glad for you to join this project. I'd suggest listing your name on Project Teams and CSEP590TU:UW. And I suppose on Student_Projects:IT_Abroad_EastAsia as well :-)

Hyojoo Hi Avichal, Thanks! I'm looking forward to working with all of you.

Discussion to finalize Project Topic/Scope

Avichal Firstly can I request that we primarily use the Wiki for communication. This is also suggested by the professors as per Project Schedule

Next, we do need to work on finalizing the project topic/scope. To quickly summarize the emails: Canpham: presented 2 options (paraphrased)

1. Cover all selected countries
2. Focus on Southeast Asia

Votes were:
Option 1: Canpham, EimanZ, Walker, Lars, Hbui, Hyoojoo Option 2: Avichal :-) (but I'll go with 1, Ha ha)

But we still need to decide the scope/focus of the project, by selecting a set of subtopics which resonates with all the countries selected, and forming a template, as per Ed Lazowska's suggestion. For convenience I place this excerpt from his email - "...Come up with a "template" that you can use to compare and contrast policies in the various countries -- in other words, your project would consist of a set of "chapters" each of which focused on one country, had one or two authors, and had the same approximate structure as the other chapters...".

So unless someone has a better idea to do this, let's throw out subtopics of interest here on the wiki, and then we could chose the ones to work on from that. Vote for the subtopics of your choise by adding your signature at the end of the line (~~~ is the shortcut for it). Ofcourse you can add any subtopic you like.

(Some borrowed from discussions above, feel free to edit language. But keep it brief, if lengthy discussions are warranted, feel free to put a link to a seprate page)

• What government is doing to bridge the Digital Divide Votes: Avichal
• Intellectual Property - how thinking/policy differs from US Votes:
• Open Source and it's adoption Votes:
• IT Ties with US Votes:
• How the Country's Culture has affected it's IT Development Votes:
  (not a public policy issue, but interesting)
• Freedom of Speech(Information)/Government Regulations and Internet Votes:
  (defintely applies to Iran, China, not sure about others)

Walker 19:13, 1 Nov 2004 (PST) Avichal, the sub-topics above are good, but I think we should consider a little more open-ended approach. Instead of fixing one above sub-topic that we can then evaluate in all countries, we could take a broader angle -- for example evaluating each countries IT Ecosystem as a whole, but give special attention to those aspects that are different or interesting from a US perspective. This might make sense because some sub-topics are interesting with respect to some countries but not others -- for example Intellectual Property in China is relatively more interesting that IP in Japan, also if the focus were just IP then a lot of what is really interesting about IT in Iran would be left out.

Given this, we could have a very simple template that gives room for each sub-team to fill in the most interesting stuff about the nation's IT Ecosystem. A RAND study I just read on IT in East Asia basically divided the overall presentation into two broad categories: IT Usage, IT Production. Under IT Usage they talked about how many people are connected to the internet and with what devices, what applications are typically in use, etc. Under IT Production they talked about the structure of the software industry, the R&D structure, government assistance, intercooperation with neighbors etc.

I don't think we should duplicate the RAND study's structure, but we need something about as open-ended to make sure the most interesting aspects of each countries IT Ecosystem are examined, particularly since the range of countries has now broadened.

Avichal 14:30, 2 Nov 2004 (PST) Walker, I completely like your suggestion. The idea was to get this kick-started. Besides the categories you mentioned maybe we can cover 'IT Relations' (in that we can cover ties with US, or with surrounding region)