Information silos vs. open data in development organizations

June 30, 2009 | comment13 Comments

Accurate data is key for development work. Opening data sources can enhance transparency and improve collaboration between development projects. Surprisingly, development organizations show few signs of opening up data to create new channels to link information across organizations.

The age of the typewriter: Data exchange in developing organizations

Information exchange is a major activity between development organizations, but unfortunately it is still done manually – typing up data from different sources or, even more advanced, copying figures from an Excel sheet to a Word document. Such is the case of reports, where a great amount of information is gathered. These reports have valuable and high-quality content, but they need huge efforts to be done and time tends to be lost between writing and publishing. This is just one example of how in many cases data is exchanged or used. Each time the wheel is reinvented.

Simulating a project content in real-time

A website can be a report simulated in real-time, which combines data sources across organizations and research institutions. On it, you cannot only see the latest status, but also the latest developments and updates seen from different perspectives depending on various indicators. So, in a health project, a survey taken with nurses from one region is fitted into the system, as well as new results from a scientific research about the latest drop rate of vaccinations. All project actors involved contribute to a common database for better transparency, real-time reporting and potentially better decision-making.

Is that all future music? No.

  • Also, you can check my post on open API at the web2fordev gateway with the example of the world bank. A key role can be played by open API (Application Programming Interfaces). A good example is the API of the World Bank, where you can access 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos. But of course photos can only be the beginning. Project data is way more important to enable different actors in the same field to benefit from data.
  • An Open development camp is taking place in July in Washington.
    “There are a number of emerging activities focusing on improving the transparency of aid and allowing organizations, projects, researchers, practitioners, and clients in developing countries to have improved access to aid information, data on outcomes, knowledge, and tools.  We are getting closer to the day when anyone can easily determine who is doing what, where they are doing it, what they have learned, and who is funding them.”

What is hindering an opening?

  • Focus on proprietary closed software environments, which have just discovered open standards. The Sharepoint invasion, thanks to many IT departments, underlines this one way road.
  • Internal websites from development organizations are focused on top-down communication. The Intranet represents information silos, where little data is combined.
  • There are many playing fields from different departments using all kinds of solutions with little focus on interoperability. Many databases with different standards are often incompatible to work together.
  • Development organizations focus more on securing confidential information than looking at the majority of data, which can be offered publicly.
  • The disappointment after the hype of the 90’s where information management was a great solution. But things have changed during the last few years in terms of open standards, mashups and API’s.

Consequence: There are huge amounts of valuable data which has been little exploited. Data cannot be exchanged between development organizations and each organization collects its own data and reinvents the data wheel over and over again.

Surely, data alone does not make a project or an organization succeed and does not guarantee transparency. But open data could improve project work and planning a lot. It can certainly improve aid effectiveness. In older times, databases were often difficult to deal with and offered little output. Nowadays, potential for mashing data are different. A first step to take can be easy: Persistently work on offering data openly and work with simple common standards such as RSS. Sometimes it just needs one person: UN Democracy is an effort to give better access for UN Security council data.

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Google Wave: Real-time trouble and the persistent belief in tools

June 17, 2009 | comment10 Comments

Google presents a new tool and a new hype is born. This time it is about online collaboration and promises nothing less than the end of email. Although the tool has clearly some great innovations, I cannot share the great enthusiasm and again the belief that a tool can change things for better. We are moving from one hype and tool to the next, but still, we do too little to drive the necessary core changes within organizations make it even possible to use tools such as Google Wave.

I have been reading so much euphoria about the new tool, which leads me to write this piece and mention a few enthusiasts, whom blogs I have continuously read and which I always enjoy.

“The Wave is not just another application, it’s a whole new way of using online information…  The Wave takes collaboration to a whole new level,” says Maish R Nichani. while Martin Koser writes, “Google Wave is poised to reshape (rewires I say) the nature of communication (yes, more face-to-face real-timelineness communication), improving the web experience.”

Real-time collaboration – what a nightmare!

Most excited was Lars Rasmussen, the developer of Google Wave, about the real-time collaboration. You can see changes made on a page within seconds. I have heard for the first time that the online collaboration’s biggest challenge was real-time changes, but on the contrary, that is the smallest problem. Bringing people to collaborate online is a huge challenge because of trust and the habit of a meeting culture, just to name a few. More importantly, I would argue that the growing speed of the Internet through life streams and tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed is made for a minority. Isn’t collaboration a process over hours, days and weeks?

We are witnessing more and more divides on the web

Who can and wants to master all this information every minute. How can you possible still work productively, on top of the ringing telephone and colleagues interrupting you. So, real-time collaboration can be great in a session, but if that is the future of collaboration, then it means that one has to collaborate 24/7. We have to ask us if instant communication really makes us more productive. Typing quickly a message in a smart phone in a go is perhaps not the greatest contribution. I argue that online collaboration, exchange and creativity needs time and breaks. I also doubt that this is a will change with the younger generation.

People, unlike tools, bring change

I wrote many posts about how different tools, such as blogs and RSS, can make a difference for information sharing and lead to more productivity and creativity. No doubt, Google Wave, combines here in an innovative way previous tools.

But all my experiences in online collaboration showed me that when a certain need has to exist. If that is the case even trivial mailing lists or a forum from the post web2.0 times can work dynamically. A fancy tool alone will not convince colleagues to share more information online. The tool can help and support interaction, but does not deliver interaction per se. Google Wave combines in an intelligent way many different streams knowledge worker have to deal with every day. But email is still seen as a core way to communicate and it will take many more years before this will change at large. Will new tools make it easier for that change to happen? I doubt it.

Lee Bryant makes a good point in this regard: “There is an echo chamber of voices confirming each other in the newest tool. “When they switch tools, the previous tools are “dead” and the new tool is “the future”. Meanwhile, millions of people continue using Outlook as a primary interface to their work, just as they did a decade ago.”

Luckily at least Google Wave is open source, which allows to be runned on an own server. Online collaboration takes a culture shift towards openness and trust to work online. In most organizations that takes a long road – even firms, who are the frontrunners such as IBM, face the same internal struggles, a colleague has recently told me.

A tool for one part of the world

Lars Rasmussen pointed out rightly that email is already forty years old and it is time for something new. But I am not sure that is the way forward because of one other reason: bandwidth!

Jon Goshier outlines this point nicely: “Of course, I have to point out that all this real-time communication stuff only matters to the fraction of people on the planet with good bandwidth. Here in Uganda, I’m so glad when an email actually makes it out of the queue that I don’t even bother to think about ‘rewinding’ conversations and dragging and dropping video! In all seriousness, it’s this reduction in basic utility for all users that worries me. Most Google’ products are by-in-large accessible no matter what kind of computer you’re on (except maybe Google Earth). With Wave they seem to be going down a path that might be a little more exclusive in nature. Not a deal-breaker but a concern none-the-less.”

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The race to map Africa and ethical issues around online mapping

June 3, 2009 | comment9 Comments

I started blogging at the Web2fordev gateway, from which I will crosspost some articles here from time to time to get some further discussions on web2fordev. I wrote the following piece together with Giacomo Rambaldi, the initiator of PPgis (Open Forum on Participatory Geographic Information Systems and Technologies).

Online Mapping for Development: Opportunities and Challenges

Maps are an effective medium which can be used for development projects. They help visualise the spatial distribution of complex problems their inter-relationships and promote awareness. In recent years the availability of free or low-cost digital maps and remote sensed images has unleashed unprecedented ways to make use of spatial information for a variety of purposes. Last week we analysed the potential of open data sources for development. Open maps are an excellent example illustrating the many ways to use and link information in creative ways. In almost any development project, maps can assist in the interpretation of spatial issues, foster awareness and support transparency. Le Monde Diplomatique, offers interesting examples on using maps to visualize complex conflict situations. Unfortunately in developing countries large scale maps are not always easy to obtain, data are often outdated or inaccurate or too expensive. Free digital maps offer an alternative.
Potentials and Opportunities

Here are a few examples:

  • The Harvard university runs the AfricaMap project, where one can view the African continent through different data layers. It is a good place to experiment a bit. For example in turning layers on and off for display and adjusting their transparency allows users to superimpose data sets. Resulting thematic maps can be linked from other sites. .
  • Back at the 2007 Web2forDev International Conference Paul Saunby presented some great simulations on maps using open data around the issue of climate change. That way he could simulate future forecasts for a specific coast. “Such maps could provide planners with valuable information on where to build new roads or houses. They could also give farmers a better idea of where to plant next season’s crops or how best to irrigate their fields.”
  • UNEP offers the Atlas of the Changing Environment: “Through illustrations, satellite images, ground photographs and powered by Google Maps, this interactive media depicts and describes humanity’s past and present impact on the environment.”
  • A renouned example for putting maps to work is Ushahidi which means “testimony” in Swahili, where human rights activists offers a platform that crowdsources crisis information. It allows anyone to submit information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form. Resulting data are visualised on thematic maps. Recent initiatives covered the Swine Flu Epidemic and the elections in India. The same free and open source application has been used to spatially document the Gaza war and Eastern Congo conflict.
  • Another ambitious project is done by scientists from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), who want to create the first detailed digital soil map of sub-Saharan Africa. “African soils are among the poorest in the world, and many farmers suffer from chronically low-yielding crops. With accurate soil maps, we find farmers can increase their yields by around 60%, and sometimes double.” (BBC)

But whoever plans to make use of online maps in Africa should have a look at Google maps and Open Street Maps. Both services offer already some impressive maps for some parts of Africa. Google Maps introduced lately a massive update of maps for Western Africa and Open Street Maps (OSM) added more then hundred thousand miles of roads lately.

Google Maps acquires map material and offers to combine it with third party data and on your own website. Open Street Maps goes a step further offers its complete data with all geo reference for free under the creative commons license. The license is currently changed to a an Open Database License Agreement. OSM relies completely on volunteer work. Thousand of GPS equipped mapers go through streets or parks worldwide and contribute to maps. The result are impressive and in some place the same as good as Google maps or even better. Check out how Mikel Maron initiated some detail mapping for Palestine.

OpenStreetMap in Palestine

View more Microsoft Word documents from mikel_maron.

Aidworker shows how OSM maps are even much better in developing countries on the example of Kabul and Tiblis. So in the case of OSM you can download entire geodata, whereas in Google you somehow are bind to their digital maps, which allow impressive presentations.

Challenges

There are undoubtedly also some challenges. In the context only some parts and mainly urban areas have been mapped and there is a need for a critical mass of mappers to enter and cross-validate data in order to achieve a satisfactory degree of accuracy. The dilemma is that where maps are needed most, not enough volunteers are available and in other countries such as in Europe, maps have been developed the furthest. The transparency of maps can also be used for critical issues and lead to discrimination as the Times report from Japan.

Nevertheless digital maps have catapulted cartography into new dimensions in recent years. As a most information is location-specific, mapping offers great opportunities to support communication in development. In the past mapmaking was the realm of a few. Today mapmaking has become a widespread activity accessible to experts and non-experts, well minded and otherwise. Collaborative mapmaking offers great opportunities for development organizations to share and collect data.

Words of Caution

Said that a few words of caution are necessary: Users of online mapping facilities should have a close look at the terms of service they sign up before submitting their contributions. In the case of Google Map Maker upon submission of the data, the service provider acquires “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, distribute, and create derivative works.

Further, the frenzy of geo-tagging and online publishing of images, videos and other type of information without obtaining prior informed consent from the concerned parties may result in the infringement of privacy and intellectual property rights. With Open Street Maps in the old and new license, the contributed data is free for reuse and can be used for commercial purposes as well.

At WhereCampAfrica, a gathering which brought together geographers, cartographers and mobile mapping specialists to discuss the potential – and difficulties – of the ‘geographic web’ in Africa, participants expressed their concern that indiscriminate online mapping could feed tensions over land ownership and resource use and control (BBC).

The Inportance of Good Practice

In times where online mapmaking has reached exponential growth rates, there is the need to be increasingly aware of the implications and impact of making geo-located information publicly available and on the need to adhere to the ethical principles of privacy, confidentiality, of obtaining prior informed consent and avoiding exposing knowledge holders at risk.  Practical ethics in the context of participatory mapmaking are discussed on an article published on Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) in 2006. The article is available in 12 languages.

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Mobile Activism in Africa

May 11, 2009 | comment8 Comments

Why and how does the mobile phone play a role in activism in Africa? What makes it be different from other forms of activism? And what are the potentials and challenges behind it?

I tried answering these questions two weeks ago at the Medien Jour Fix,  an interesting German network around communication and development, organized by MICT. I presented the latest developments around mobile phones in Africa, which did not seem to have been that much noticed in Germany. In most of presentations the radio played a key role as an instrument for media work.

I had mused before about potential future trends of mobile activism, but this time I highlighted the differences between the all-purpose-tool, its different uses and its implications. I was curious to do such a presentation on ICT for development in front of a German audience, which was widely mixed with delegates from media, NGOs and scientists.

I uploaded my presentation here and thanks to Creative Commons License I found some great photos.

Mobile Activism in Africa

View more presentations from Christian Kreutz.

I began my presentation with the well known satellite image of the world at night. On it one can see how dark Africa is and it seems as if not much is happening there. But because it is always difficult to generalize about the continent as a whole, I chose some examples:

  • Mobile innovation even comes from Africa such as mobile finances.
  • The highest growth rate is on the African continent.
  • 99%
 of 
Tanzanians 
are 
in

 direct
 reach
 of 
a 
mobile 
phone.
  • The highest traffic to the BBC mobile website comes from Africa.

But what makes mobile phone so special?

It is so especial because it combines all former media, such as telephone, Internet, and even radio and television, and because one can:

  1. Communicate and receive information (radio, television and Internet)
  2. Document and collect information
  3. Publish information in text, audio and video
  4. Can network in different ways on a peer-to-peer basis

So a passive recipient can become an active user or citizen.

The excellent Pomise of Ubiquity report from Internews has some fascinating statistics such as the different media access. In most countries, 2008 signified a turning point as more people owned mobile phones than televisions. So, the mobile phone becomes a key instrument to receive information via Internet, listen to radio (FM mobile phone) and watch videos although the latter has not worked yet and is unrealistic due to high costs. Location-based services will be very promising.

“A world in which nearly everyone owns a mobile linked into networks advanced enough to offer video and location-based services is years, not decades, away.” Internews

Different spheres of mobile activism

I looked, during my presentation, at political activism and focused on four different spheres and examples even though there is still a lot more happening (and much more in many African countries than in Europe).

  1. Public sphere
    The mobile phone will become an important tool to shape the public sphere. Two examples are Voices of Africa and mobile African reporters. I showed a great footage from Cameroon about a Guiness factory polluting water sources. This example shows the potential to report better from the local context. But I also wonder when will there be a critical mass of an audience for such reports?
  2. Participation
    The radio still plays a decisive role, because it reaches many more groups of people and particularly illiterate listeners. Combining a mobile campaign with the radio can be a great package. The organisation AZUR in Congo launched a while ago an SMS campaign, where they asked women to report about cases of domestic violence. The answeres were then portrayed and discussed in a radio show.
  3. Transparency
    For some years now, the monitoring of elections has been happening in different African countries such as Zimbabwe or Nigeria. Digiactive has a great comparative case study analysis. In Barcelona, I followed an insightful presentation by Ethan Zuckerman, where he describes a great example from last year’s election in Zimbabwe:
    “SMS is an effective tool for monitoring all sorts of large, dangerous mammals. You can make the argument that Morgan Tsvanagarai was able to challenge the first round of Zimbabwe’s presidential elections in no small part due to SMS. A change in polling law meant that every local polling station in Zimbabwe was required to post local voting results publicly. Zimbabwe’s opposition party, MDC, organized an effort to collect these results via SMS. As a result, the MDC knew, within a few hours after the close of polls, that they’d received more votes than ZANU-PF.” By the way, an organization called Sokwanele has also been doing some pioneering work in Zimbabwe for mobile activism. Another one is Kubatana, which developed the Freedom fone.
  4. Networking
    A bit more than a year ago cotton-workers in the Nile delta striked for a higher salary. They went into strike for a few weeks long because of the inflation, which took most of what little was left. Unrecognized by media in Egypt and internationally, an Egyptian woman, who did not use to be an activist, decided to set up a Facebook group to solidarize with the strikers. The group grew in a few weeks to more than 70,000 members (Egypt has about around 700,000 Facebook members). There is an enormous potential to use social networks for campaigns and protests. I think these networks will be working over the mobile phone in the future as I described here. Nevertheless in this case the protest could not made it to the the street, as the Egyptian authorities hardly allowed any protests on their streets. But mobile phones play a decisive role in protest coordination. Patrick Meier, also from Digiactive, did a great presentation about Mobile for Advocacy and Activism.

Challenges

Unfortunately, there are numerous challenges to mobile activism in Africa and, therefore, it is even more incredible how many initiatives are happening.  Just to name a few:

The presentation lead to a discussion around the quality of information, which is a typical debate in Germany, where journalists and bloggers continuously battle over who is better. Ironically, a journalist from the Deutsche Welle, who hosts the annual Blog Awards, asked me how the information from mobile reporters could be verified or controlled. Luckily, that was an exception, as there were many interesting examples for media communication work presented from Laos and Cambodia.

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Perspectives on constraints of ICT in Africa

May 8, 2009 | comment2 Comments

Despite the exciting potentials about new technologies for development and, particularly, the latest hype on mobile phones, it is necessary not to loose out sight of the incredible challenges towards Internet access or extended mobile usage. I have collected over the past months some interesting facts and figures from a variety of people, which show that ICT is still an incredibly scarce resource and can also have contrary effects leading to more poverty.

Reality Check – Computers and Rural Development

Back at the Web4dev conference in February, Grant Cambridge made a very interesting presentation called: Access to Information. Challenges and Obstacles – a Rural African Perspective. Cambridge describes in his presentation the situation in rural South Africa, where:

  • There is virtually no access to computers
  • There is limited access to knowledge and information
  • A child’s potential to learn is directly proportional to the knowledge of the teacher
  • Many people have never even typed their names on a keyboard
  • Where the edge of your world is as far as you can walk in a day

He describes that even the much better accessible mobile phone involves multiple challenges, such as “People walking up to 3 miles several times per week to recharge battery.” Cambridge works on a robust single or multi-terminal system for rural areas, and concludes in his presentation that access does not imply inclusion.  Check also the others presentations from the web4dev conference.

In an article for APC, which asks, “Is there still a need for telecentres now that there are mobile phones?” Ian Howard argues by highlighting the huge challenges for access in rural areas and the problems leaving it all up to mobile providers.

“The development of autonomous infrastructure is still required in order to meet the needs of rural communities. These new mobile-phone infrastructures are largely poised as oligopolies, protected from the threat of new entrants by high licensing fees and reserved frequency allotments.”

Ednah Karamagi underlines in her article Web 2.0 in rural areas – myth or practical? That “connectivity in many of the districts is very limited or even non-existent,” and continues, “In fact, most people in these areas [rural areas] don’t even know how to use it [Internet], let alone how it can be applied to improve their livelihoods. Computers are still perceived as white elephants – they are for the literate.”

But the importance and possibilities of ICT has drastically changed with mobile phones as Ben White shows in his research in Uganda, where, for example, a student spends around 40% of his income on mobile phone credit.

Steve Song also makes an observation about the usage of mobile phones in Kenya, from the latest findings of the ResearchICTAfrica initiative:

Recent research from ResearchICTAfrica reveals that Kenyans are spending incredible amounts on mobile communication as a proportion of income. Here’s how it breaks down. The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication. For the bottom 75% of the population, that figure goes up to 63.6%. In terms of total individual income, the average Kenyan spends 16.7% of their income on mobile communication. That figure rises to 26.6% when looking at the bottom 75% of the population. These figures are astounding. It highlights the fact that Africans are paying for mobile communication in spite of how expensive it is, not because of how affordable it is.

Song concluded that it “emphasises how critical access to mobile communication is for people,” but Kathleen Diga shows in her study about Mobile Cell Phones and Poverty Reduction that mobile phone usages can lead also to more poverty and create new divides:

According to the findings, the challenges which rural households face include making sacrifices such as travel expenses and store-bought food budgets in order to pay the costs of mobile phone services.  Findings also show that gender inequality through exacerbated asset control and mobile phone inexperience drive further digital divide in Katote, Uganda.

Crystal Watley, from Voices of Africa, highlighted some more challenges around women and mobile usage on the mobile active mailing list:

Here in Kenya, mobile phones have added great value to the lives of the citizens from the deep villages to the urban centers. But there are a few negative consequences in family relationships. 1) Cell phones make it easier to cheat on your spouse 2) Cell phones GIVE away the secrets of the spouses that were already cheating thus causing household tension and domestic violence. 3) African men tend to be very jealous and often use mobile phones as a way to control their women monitoring every message and call. 4) Violence and jealousy is also caused between those who own phones and those who do not. Or between those with different model phones. Theft is rampant. 5) Kenyans do not understand calling courtesy and can sometimes call at all sorts of hours.

Unfortunately, there are only few studies on the concrete benefit of ICTs and, for example, in the case of mobile phones, the fishery example is often recited, where one can read many pros and cons. However, the mobile phone has an impact, as Watley points out, on the positive and negative.  Another interesting attempt to portray the changes of mobile phones in daily life was done by a new documentary from my friends at ICT4D.at.

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What does local content have to do with low-bandwidth applications?

April 14, 2009 | comment7 Comments

High bandwidth access expands worldwide, finally in Africa too, but in many places the connectivity does not allow for an easy Internet usability, let alone the use of many tools for publishing own content and interacting easily with other users. Aside from many other challenges, one important to remark is the lack of low bandwidth application. This might be one of the reasons of why particular localization of many languages is progressing slowly. More importantly, the need for high bandwidth access for most current websites creates new divides.

Some examples

  • Checking up a profile on Facebook or at least access the log in page, which has alone almost 800kb! In a cybercafe, where you have to pay fees per minute, it may take up to 3 minutes with a dial up modem connection.
  • Video or audio upload is almost impossible with a low bandwidth connection and can cost you a lot when your tariff is measured in volume instead of time.
  • This blog is based on Wordpress, which is a great open source tool, but unfortunately not made for a dial up connections. If you want to publish a new post on Wordpress (2.7.1), you have to download over 750kb first.

Unfortunately even the free and open source community has little activity around low bandwidth solutions.

Where are the low bandwidth solutions?
One really great initiative is Maneno, which not only tries to provide a low bandwidth blogging solution in Africa, but also focuses on offering multilingual options emphasising on various African languages such as Bamanankan and Swahili, beside French, English, Arabic and Portuguese. I got in contact with Maneno recently and their team ensured me that their system is designed as low as 13 kb without images and 33 kb including images.

Another one is Dgroups, a community platform based on emails. I am currently working on a project for IICD, which has over 50.000 members worldwide. Dgroups has just been newly launched and it now offers the administration of groups solely by email.

Twitter can make a difference as it lets you send and receive messages via mobile phone. But, unfortunately, Twitter gave up its free SMS service a while ago. I asked one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey, at the e-stats conference when the free service is coming back, to which he replied ‘on mid year.’ This leaves the question, ‘what can be said in 140 characters?’ Quite a lot when you look at the Mobile Voices project just featured by the Netsquared N2Y2 challenge.

But one thing is for sure, just because you only have low bandwidth connection, does not mean you want to see dull, text based websites. There are various ways to make websites look appealing and still reduce the data size considerable. Aptivate has excellent Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth.

What is the difference with mobile phones?
Low-bandwidth is a big topic for mobile phones as 3G is not everywhere available; in Africa it is only available in big cities.  In many cases all information exchange is limited to SMS exchange solutions. There are  different solutions that need to deal with the heavy loaded web. One such is the Opera mini browser, which  tries to compress data as much as possible, compressing up to 90% according to a presentation at the W3C Maputo meeting.

UPDATE

There was an interesting discussion on the KM4DEV mailing list and here is a summary of key points.

UPDATE 2

Jonathan Goshier has a great and critical blog post around this topic and emphasis the importance of local services: Web 2.0 Services Shutting Out Developing Countries

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Micro-voluntarism a new form of international cooperation

April 2, 2009 | comment2 Comments

One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can get in touch with people worldwide. I remember that back on the day I chatted for the first time and read from bluemoon11 that the sun was shining in Sidney. Twelve years ago that seemed breathtaking, but today it is rather amusing. Simultaneously, in the past, time volunteer engagement in other countries was a job quite difficult to tackle. You either knew someone or had friends from within, who were involved in a project, or got convinced by the volunteer in the pedestrian walk to donate money to their organization.

This has changed quite a lot, with fascinating new ways to individually engage on a peer to peer basis. Nowadays you can not only choose your donor, but also get yourself involved and follow the whole project and its outcome (e.g. Globalgiving or Kiva). There are also many more ways to engage such as the global neighbourhood Nabuur, where not everything is just about money, but also about the expertise that thousands of volunteers worldwide bring to the community. The social web has unleashed a huge wave of massive collaboration for social good already difficult to oversee. Being it science without borders, or working jointly on the first open source ecological village, or individually start their own little fundraising project, a small Facebook group, and ask for further action.

That brings up the questions: What organization will and can play in the future? We are slowly moving into ad-hoc peer-to-peer voluntarism independent from organizations. A nightmare for a classical fundraising approach. Certainly, organizations which depend on personal donations and mobilization of members will have a tough time if they do not include their audience.

But lets come back to new ways of volunteering. No doubt it is and will always be difficult to come up with new projects to fund, but there are now many existing projects which developed around all types of volunteer work efficiently. In many of this cases, costs are minimal and the output much higher thanks to all the expertise from participants. This is the case for a project outline not only written by two experts, but in a Wikipedia kind of fashion by numerous volunteers, which highlights all kinds of experiences. Will the chances of success be higher, or is the complexity of the project setting overwhelming? I imagine the more expertise there is, the better the project can be implemented. Look at the Katine project by the Guardian, where suddenly a project is portrayed from all different angles.

Another promising aspect of micro-volunteering can be seen on pages such as microvoluntarios.org and extraordinaries.org. In the first, volunteers can contribute with small tasks, which seems also attractive to companies, who donate the time of their employees. In the second, you can even donate through your mobile phone from wherever you are. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote a nice blog post about it.

Waiting for the bus and have nothing better to do than play around with your phone? Games are no longer the only options – now you can volunteer. The Extraordinaries (hat tip: Chris Kreutz) “delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.” Here’s some examples of what you could do while waiting for your doctor’s appointment: translate micro-finance loan applications (Kiva); transcribe subtitles for human rights videos (Witness) or help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL). A nice example of tapping into the collective “cognitive surplus” for social innovation purposes.

So, not mass, but micro-collaboration might be next big thing. There are many examples which show that this could have working results even though, so far, only a minority knows about these new ways of engaging. Donating was yesterday, engaging yourself is next.

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9 Examples of innovative tools for the mobile phone

March 5, 2009 | comment3 Comments

One of the major shift is not the growth of mobile phones, but its transformations to a multi-purpose tool and its ubiquitous nature. Being it a calculator, a translator or a broadcasting, sensing or analyzing medium – the mobile phone will affect much more daily life than personal computers did. Antonella Pastore looks at the latest ITU-report and asks “It’s a mobile world… and the end of the Web as we know it?”

“A world in which nearly everyone owns a mobile linked into networks advanced enough to offer video and location-based services is years, not decades, away.” (Internews report)

The potentials are various and if we want to understand them and think out-of-the-box, we have to exclude the traditional approaches through personal computers and the Internet. But the difficulty is to find out how mobile phones will be used in the future. Nathan Eagle points it out rightly: “people are going to do work on their mobile phones in Africa, we just don’t know what it is yet.”

Examples

To come a step closer, I have listed some innovative examples for mobile phones from around the world.

Does it happen everywhere?

But is it really happening everywhere? Isn’t the iPhone just a tool for the northern hemisphere? Yes, and even faster in Asia and it might be even adopted sooner in developing countries. Opera has some interesting monthly statistics in this regard. For example  Jamaican access via mobile web, has already exceeded the access via PCs. Would you have guessed that 80% of mobile web traffic to the BBC comes form Africa? Also, in China students save their money to share a smart phone with flat-rate to do  their research. Now, there is even an sms based browser for mobile phones.

Lastly, I wonder how different innovations around the mobile phone will be? I think it will be even faster than on PCs, because mobile allow far more ways to hack it.

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Metrics for Social networks: What does really happen?

February 26, 2009 | comment4 Comments

If the social web and social media can make such a difference, then their impact should be measurable. Certainly, the question is: How much can or shall be measured? A gut feeling alone might not be enough, particularly when one needs to convince others to engage in social media. Nevertheless, I think there are some ways to get better metrics to at least measure interaction, which go beyond tools such as Google Analytics. So this is an attempt to measure interaction in social networks and the success or value of knowledge sharing?

Campaign: Storytelling and social media
Beth Kanter has an excellent presentation on storytelling & social media. First of all, she emphasizes that counting metrics alone makes little sense as they need to be part of a bigger framework. She takes the case of a campaign, which might have some good analogies to single social network platforms or communities of practice.

“Return on Investment is a much broader concept that doing math. If you lay it step-by-step, it includes these:

  • Smart Objective
  • Defined Audience
  • Clearly articulated benefits statement that looks at tangible and intangible
  • Use of metrics to measure your results
  • Results translated into dollar value (donations or time saved)
  • Financial calculations: net gain, opportunity cost, or comparison to other method
  • Communicating the results”

Social network: Knowledge sharing and learning
If I translate that to my case, I have not got the smartest goal in terms of quantifiable results: A high value and share of knowledge. Lets say it is quite generic. But as Richard Dennison writes here, that is exactly a problem:

If you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. We are driving quality, innovation and creativity out of our businesses and institutions in favour of quantity. It has been shown again and again that our obsession with targets simply perverts activities to meet those targets at the expense of doing something useful or meaningful.

Nevertheless, I think there are at least some metrics that let you see how intensive or broad your interaction is. A while ago I collected already some metrics thanks to Rachel Happe.

I tried to approach this issue the following clusters and example metrics:

Representation
If you really want to achieve a high value you need a diverse representation.

  • A good platform has a certain mix of representations: e.g. countries, organizations or departments, etc.
  • The representation can be measured by visitors, members, contributions.
  • You can set a criteria raster. For example, an own organization is less important and external stakeholders are more valuable.

Contributions
The percentage of contribution is a key indicator of the willingness to engage, and whether your website is attractive or not. For example, if more than 10% of your network is regularly participative (i.e. contributing), you have then achieved quite something.

  • Frequency of new resources and the average percentage of member contributions.
  • Mix of contributions, e.g. links are not as valuable as blog posts through a ranking.

Interaction

  • Ratio of comments vs. resources: Average percentage of comments on each contribution such as blog posts, links, etc.
  • The ratio of comments towards members.
  • The amount of blog posts linking to other blog posts in the network.

Content (quality)

  • The bounce rate of your website says how much people were interested to click further.
  • Average time spent on pages.
  • Page views. The more people browse pages – the more interest they have.
  • The average amount of tags used by each contributor.

Outreach of website

  • Growth of members or newsletter subscriber
  • The amount of invitations sent from your platform.
  • The amount of links to your platform.

Of course these metrics do not bring you much further in terms of quality, but I guess that could be solved by analysing the sample content or making a survey. But, who can say what content has higher quality for learning? It is not that easy. What do you think? Do you maybe have more metrics?

I checked in the past days external statistic systems such as Google Analytics and they only offer a few from the above metrics. So it is important to choose a platform which offers you more statistics. Measuring this by mailing is much simpler. In a next step I will try to get this information out of a Drupal platform and then contemplate more about Beth’s point to not only leave it on counting.

Two interesting attempts of calculators are here:

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From A-Z to Organization2.0: F – Flexible staff and members

February 20, 2009 | commentLeave a Comment

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Will organizations and companies still be running in the future by 9-5 working schemes? Can the members’ or stakeholders’ relationship still be organized in formal or even hierarchical patterns? I doubt it. But what are the potentially different ways for organizations to work independently from time and space? The Internet will pay an increasing role on it, whether we like it or not.

In a PEW Internet study, where a survey about the future of the Internet was made, 56% of the partakers agreed with this statement:

2020, well-connected knowledge workers in more-developed nations have willingly eliminated the industrial-age boundaries between work hours and personal time. Outside of formally scheduled activities, work and play are  seamlessly integrated in most of these workers’ lives. This is a net-positive for npeople. They blend personal/professional duties wherever they happen to be when they are called upon to perform them—from their homes, the gym, the mall, a library, and possibly even their company’s communal meeting space, which may exist in a new virtual-reality format.

So far most organizations have not realized yet the pervasiveness of the Internet in the everyday work life. It is still seen as the thing (the PC) on the desk, from which one can access information. There information exchange is limited to emails and intranet. Most organizations reside still in an old model of one place at a  time, where soon a important large percentage of daily project management will be online. Some organizations do that already and work completely decentralized.

Some organizations went already further and work more decentralized. Such organizations are Euforic (presentation) or, completely remotely, the founder of the Wordpress blog software Automatic or Socialtext.
These companies organize themselves almost completely over the web: 1) to collaborate in teams and 2) to engage with the outside world (clients or stakeholders).

What are the consequences of organization and staff?

  • The location of the staff’s office plays a decreasing role.
  • The separation between private and work life blurs even more.
  • Working online needs more discipline and transparency because of the limited face-to-face exchange.
  • Knowledge sharing and learning has to be organized very differently to compensate the little time of direct contact.
  • Project management needs much more self-determined on clearer project results.
  • Organizations need to rely much more on external knowledge – a key would be: How to include external knowledge into processes from members, stakeholder or consultants.

Why are small organizations much stronger?
Small organizations will have major advantages as they become more flexible, but at the same time they can compete much easier with bigger organizations because:

  1. Big organizations used to have an information advantage. They could often gather the expertise that small organizations cannot offer. Nowadays, a lot of expertise is available on the web offered by more and more people.
  2. Strong membership organizations used to have more political bargain power. Nowadays, small organizations shape ad-hoc alliances with other organizations and are potentially stronger.
  3. Small organizations can keep the transaction cost much lower than bigger organizations, but still can network globally as only big organizations used to do in earlier times.

So how will organizations address these potentials and challenges?
This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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My take on the state of mobile phones for developments

January 25, 2009 | comment3 Comments

As an outcome from the virtual forum on mobile phones by FAO – where I experienced a great exchange with mobile phone practitioners worldwide – I was interviewed by the e-agriculture.org forum. During the interview, I tried to summarize my observations and discussions around mobile  phones for development from the recent months. I have published the interview below:

Describe to us the programme on ICTs, especially the use of mobile phones for rural development, which you are working for. Why do you find mobile phones to be particularly interesting in your line of work?
C.K.: I worked for a project on “knowledge systems in rural areas” for GTZ. I look at the topic from different angles such as knowledge sharing, networking and social change and try to identify new potentials. I don’t glance at mobile phones from an economical point of view only, but consider them as means for different areas in social development. For example activists around human rights are the most innovative users of mobile telephone technology for their causes. The interesting thing about mobile phones is that they are so different from all the other ICTs. First of all this all-purpose tool is in the ownership by a majority of Africans across the continent and its users have created creative extra usages for mobile phones. Second it is a different approach compared to conventional ICT4D projects, which relied often on huge funding and did not focus enough on the users’ perspective. But Mobiles are available for low costs and already are adapted for many purposes.

What positive impacts could you achieve for agriculture, food security and/or rural development? How, in your opinion, can we empower local farmers to really benefit from this application?
C.K.: Mobile phones are such a powerful tool because they fill a gap of prior limited means of communication. We have just started to use the various potential of mobile phones. At first, mobile phones have particularly connected rural with urban areas. Nowadays we witness new forms of information delivery and exchange particular with rural areas for agriculture or health, never before possible like that. There are great examples in Africa of local adapted mobile software solutions (e.g. EPROM) orientated on community needs and dealing with technical constraints. Promising is also the formation of own language spaces and innovative voice recognition solutions to address the illiteracy challenge.

Did it also cause a change in working or living habits or even of the whole culture for the locals? Could you give examples, please?
C.K.: Mobile phones are a communication break through. The interesting question is: What will people make out of it? There are already fascinating examples, how mobile phone users invent on forms to use it particular for business. But the impact of mobile phone usage is not analyzed well enough so far. Studies only focus on some areas such as the famous fishery example. Although it is obvious that the mobile phone has changed a lot in societies, therefore an analysis of local adaptation in different cultural contexts is necessary. Apart from all the possible characteristics of mobile phones for rural development they are still strongest with ordinary communication. Like in Europe in the beginning of integrating mobiles into the everyday life, people want to call their family and friends to talk to them in the first run. Very promising are social mobile applications, which will be very interesting in the next future. What happens if you can deliver information to each mobile phone, but also let users interact in networks or with the web. There are fascinating examples such as Ushahidi or the Freedom Fone. But also money transfers via mobiles are revolutionary. In countries where less than 10% of the people have bank accounts using air time as a way of paying and transferring money has a huge impact on society.

What are the challenges you are facing in your projects? Technically, socially, economically, …
C.K.: Everybody is so enthusiastic about mobile phones for development and, of course, I am too, but you also have to be a little bit critical. There is quite a hype around mobile phones. There is a lot of experimentation happening and too little exchange of experiences. The technology itself can’t solve problems. Mobile phones are only the means that you can use to improve rural peoples livelihoods through the best fit for each situation. I do believe that there is also the danger of forgetting some important lessons learnt from many ICT4D projects, which failed for a lot of reasons. One was the lack of sustainability, and another, that mobile phones can only be a mean to an end. And of course, there are many challenges that the use of mobile phone faces: high costs, illiteracy and in many cases, mobile phones projects still have to prove the benefit for users. There are for example problems concerning gender. In some countries women have difficulties to get access to mobile phones or can’t communicate independently. Also the tremendous costs have an impact on the people. Some substitute a whole meal for mobile phone credit. In study in Africa some mobile phone users became even poorer.

What are your predictions for the future?
C.K.: We have only started to tap upon the potential of this all-purpose tool. It will be interesting to see the role of development organization. There are potentials to use it in different approaches in development projects, but also to improve their own work. The open source water and sanitation initiative lets mobile African reporters evaluate their projects. It is obvious that access to the Internet will happen in Africa in the future mainly through mobile phones. But it will be a challenge to deal with the constraints of little mobile phone screen. Nevertheless the ubiquitous connection through mobile phones has many advantages and particular in rural areas offer a linkage with urban areas not possible before. It will be interesting to analyze these implications. Rural areas suddenly have new instruments to broadcast from or analyze their environment. The mobile phone can be already a sensor rich tool with GPS, to measure the velocity or to analyze blood and detect diseases. It will empower mobile phone users to embrace it for all kind daily needed purposes and for social change. The mobile becomes a research tool to give its user the capacity to collect and share information. Open information repositories can be created for development work. One outcome is increasing transparency. Mobile phones can be the key for collectively contributing to new information systems and receiving all sorts of information. The future for mobile phones will be in this kind of data exchange or network exchange to empower people with knowledge, like Nokia’s weather updates in local languages. Surely, some form of data exchange has to work for that, which still inhibits several challenges. But this form of information exchange and networking will happen – whatever technology is behind it. Tools for information exchange solely relying on SMS prove this is possible for all phones.

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The participatory web – new potentials for ICT in rural areas

January 11, 2009 | comment5 Comments

Cover publicationI had the honour to be the editor of a new cover publication by the Deutsche Gesellschaft for Technische Zusammenarbeit (German Technical Cooperation). This is one of many pieces the sector project “Knowledge System in Rural Areas” has published in recent years, which I can highly recommend. One is a bulletin on knowledge management in developing institutions and projects. With the recent publication we tried to summarize latest developments and what has happened since the web2fordev conference. We tried to get very different perspectives on the topic and I am glad we could win great authors. Once again thank you for your contributions!

Web 2.0 solutions offer people in rural areas a platform for networking and knowledge exchange. This brochure provides a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It serves as a practice-oriented introduction to the theme and discusses both the potentials and the possible limits to the participatory web.

Download publication

Table of Content

  • Participatory Web – New Potentials for ICT in Rural Areas (Annemarie Matthess, Christian Kreutz)
  • NABUUR: Effective Online Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer (Rolf Kleef, Raul Caceres)
  • Innovation, Interaction, Information: Using the Social Web (Peter Ballantyne)
    in Agricultural Development
  • Empowering Farmers in India Using the Kisan Blog (Runa Sarkar, Debahsis Pattanaik)
  • Web 2.0 in Ecuador: Enhancing Citizenship (Paula Carrión)
  • Farmer-led Documentation (Dorine Rüter, Anne Piepenstock)
  • Potential of Mobile: Cambodian Farmers Turn to their Phones (Ken Banks, Christian Kreutz)
  • The Knowledge Sharing Kit: CGIAR’s Wiki Approach (Gerry Toomey)

Rural areas in developing countries are confronted by many challenges when it comes to information access and participation in knowledge networks. Since its beginnings, the potential of knowledge sharing throughout the Internet has had high hopes, but it has not fulfilled its promises yet. Obvious challenges are low connectivity particularly in rural areas, low literacy rate, lack of media competence to use the web and well function models to provide and target information. Newer technologies such as interactive web tools and the mobile phone offer promising ways to achieve a more inclusive Internet and use the web to learn from each other. Throughout the last years organisations and projects have started experimenting with the “read and write web” and achieved new approaches to use information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). Different to traditional ICT projects, this approach focuses on the users, it is their engagement and creativity that makes the networking and learning effort vibrant.

Two major questions persist: Where and under which conditions can these ICT’s be best used for highest impact? And, how can ICT’s really be used for a more effectively knowledge sharing and learning? One key lessons learnt of the sector project “knowledge systems in rural areas” was that ICT is one of many instruments to share knowledge particularly in the local context. There are various ways to exchange local or indigenous knowledge, so the instrument of selection has to be best fit in the respective local context. ICT might often not be the best choice and certainly can only be a mean and not the end itself, ideally embedded into an existent system of knowledge transfer according to identified needs and opportunities. In September 2007 GTZ held together with IICD, CTA, CGIAR and FAO the web2fordev conference to explore the potential of the participatory web and bring together some of these experiences. This publication attempts to describe these latest trends and experiences around newest technologies and the network effects for a new ingenuity to improve living conditions.

One such example is Nabuur, a global neighbourhood, which shows new grassroots networks for development presenting innovative models of cooperation worldwide. Rolf Kleef and Raul Caceres describe how solely webbased collaboration can work even with remotely villages in Africa and how they achieved an effective online peer-to-peer knowledge transfer impact. Peter Ballantyne takes in his article a greater look at new emerging forms of cooperation between development institutions worldwide. The social web helps to transcend organisations’ boundaries, makes information resources transparent and gives spaces for innovation for better agricultural development. The social web can be described as people interlinked and interacting with engaging content in a conversational and participatory manner via the Internet (Wikipedia). Ballantyne also compiles a list of all the different examples from a number of organisations’ developments using these interactive web tool impacts.

That is followed by pioneering examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America to use ICT’s for rural development. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur describes its many year experiences to empower farmers through blogging. Debashis Pattanaik and Runa Sarkar describe their efforts to bridge the agriculture research in India with daily needs of farmers. The Kisan Blog has contributed in restoring experiences of rural farmers in India. Another such example is Radio La Luna, which uses different media forms to strengthen the collective memory of Ecuadorian society on key moments in its social struggle through rescuing, digitising, systematising and disseminating documents of various types about main events in recent Ecuadorian history. This engaging approach makes them one of the most visited websites in the country.

But not in any case the implementation and usage of Web 2.0 tools work that easily and might not be the appropriate solution. Dorine Rüter and Anne Piepenstock present a project around farmer-led documentation (FLD), which highlights an alternative way of sharing cultivation practices through digital media. FLD extends existing knowledge sharing forms through digital media to highlight local knowledge and make it explicit for a larger audience.

The last practical examples present the increasing potential of mobile phones on the example of decentralized SMS based information exchange. It shows how Cambodian farmers can benefit from such a free and open source solution to make their mobile tools for better transparency and, lastly, improve their incomes. Ken Banks also shows how local software and hardware solutions are particularly for mobile phones’ key in the future, because theirs are developed around real needs and made to work in environments with little or no connectivity.

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