Taking On The Myth of a Local Silicon Valley

November 5, 2009 by Taran Rampersad

Ace Suares, a friend of mine in the Netherlands Antilles, has been hearing a lot about Trinidad and Tobago's IT initiatives through a group called iGovTT. Frankly, without Ace I wouldn't have been able to write this because I've been busy with other things over the last few days.

Apparently iGovTT been quite busy in Curacao telling people about their big plans while they don't even have a functional website.

Honestly, I had not even heard of iGovTT before. It was mentioned before in the newspapers, but only briefly and never anything of worth. From this document (PDF), mined through Google, their mission is: We are the first choice for ICT services globally through the exploitation of Trinidad and
Tobago’s knowledge-based society.

Seriously, they need to work on that vision statement. 'Exploitation' screams for a replacement word. Actually, the whole vision statement should probably be ground up and fed to stray dogs as a matter of saving the world from yet another idiotic vision statement.

Because of all of this, Ace has been pointing me at things within Trinidad and Tobago's local media - something that I truly appreciate - and this requires me to get to writing about what is wrong with what they're doing. The list of what they are doing right, in my opinion, is much shorter. Perhaps that's why they're trying to sell that short list in Curacao.

Ace, over in Netherlands Antilles, has been keeping track of Trinidad and Tobago's media while I've been juggling other fragments of reality. He was kind enough to point me to the Trinidad and Tobago Express article, Coming soon: T&T's own Silicon Valley:

Trinidad and Tobago is embarking on a thrust to fund and develop an Information Technology and Communications (ICT) cluster, much like a local, scaled-down version of the United States’s Silicon Valley.

While the research done here is not expected to be for space travel, quantum computing or artificial intelligence, the software developers, web page designers and encoders will aim for their research to fuel development and sectoral capacity building, in all facets of the local economy...

Wait a minute. Are we talking about things like the E-Teck initiative that is panhandling for a budget? The Trinidad Guardian published the article ICT Sector Needs Funding For Growth just under a month ago. I am not sure how E-Teck and iGovTT are connected, but if they're not working together then they're working toward the same goals in parallel - with at least the same Chinapoo fellow involved in both. Who is doing what? Why all these fancy names? What's going on? It's apparent that the Trinidad and Tobago media doesn't have a cohesive understanding of what is going on. So why is it that these same initiatives are being highlighted in Curacao when they have not yet accomplished a single thing? There has been no return. A lot of money has been spent, but... nothing of substance.

So now we get to the Myth of a T&T Silicon Valley. Don't get me wrong, there has been and continues to be potential for a local 'Silicon Valley', but I don't agree with what they believe they are going to accomplish. In fact, the only difference between these groups (or group) and myself are that we have conflicting opinions and they found a budget to get themselves paid whereas I haven't needed a budget. And the fact that myself and others like me haven't had the need of a budget to do things is the very core of my opinion and argument against such initiatives.

Silicon Valley Reality.

But first, lets look at Silicon Valley. As of 1998, Silicon Valley's population was 2.3 million people. While the census is over 10 years old, it's just as good as the Trinidad and Tobago local census that was published from data at about the same time. So, roughly speaking, the population of Silicon Valley is twice that of Trinidad and Tobago. And the entire Santa Clara Valley, which Silicon Valley is only a part of, is 30 miles by 15 miles. 450 square miles. Trinidad is roughly 60 miles by 40 miles. 2400 square miles.

There's a big difference in population density - Trinidad, by itself, has half the population in Silicon Valley while having a little less than 3 times the surface area.

This is important because the population density possible within Silicon Valley is only possible with the level of infrastructure that Silicon Valley has. Trinidad and Tobago's infrastructure is choking development at this point - and the answer that some came up with was to develop infrastructure in a small part of the country with a lot of money - when the reality is that money put into infrastructure would have gone a lot further toward development goals. $500 million dollars, half of which is already spent, hasn't really done anything for the country and certainly hasn't done anything.

We won't get into the fact that the money spent hasn't helped a single startup company in Trinidad and Tobago - and that all the initiatives have been biased toward large business instead of small and medium enterprises that could grow into large businesses. There's a reason you don't have full grown chickens in incubators - yet for some reason, the allegedly intelligent people behind these initiatives are building incubators for full grown chickens. That's a bit peculiar, isn't it? It's almost as if they're being controlled by big business - bypassing lobbyism and going straight for direct control.

It's borderline corruption in my thoughts - in fact, I'd love to see someone do some auditing on these initiatives.

The sad truth is that the money that has been spent has done nothing and the future expenditures are unlikely to produce anything of worth. The reality is that Trinidad and Tobago needs to retain the smart people who leave. The reality is that the education system needs to accomodate and foster innovation and creativity - something Thomas Friedman wrote about only a few weeks ago in The New Untouchables:

...Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

And that's Friedman writing about... the same country that Silicon Valley exists in. If Trinidad and Tobago is planning to be a global competitor in ICT, it needs to stop spending money on the carrion of failed ideas of yesteryear and get competitive from the bottom up. Doing it from the top down has consistently wasted money and given no results.

But then... those in power don't want to relinquish their power. They are the dinosaurs, the present global economy is the tar pit... and with the right infrastructure, anyone can do anything that is supposed to be done in the money pit that they're creating... without the budget.

Unfortunately, having bad ideas isn't a criminal act... and implementing bad ideas, the same. Even so, it deserves more attention. Too bad Calder Hart and UDECOTT have everyone so busy. Or maybe there are a few people smiling because of it.

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