4 examples for innovative mobile phone use in Africa

August 29, 2007 | comment6 Comments

According to the latest statistics from the New York Times and the World Bank, the African continent is lagging behind in mobile phone subscribers and Internet users. However, African countries have one of the highest quota of mobile phone subscribers. The rate of subscribers varies a lot –between 724 in South Africa to 32 in Rwanda per 1. 000 inhabitants. But what do these figures say when so little is known about the creative use of mobile phones? Let alone the business sprung up through a single mobile phone in a village.

Recently, some interesting published blog posts and articles showed the innovative use of mobile phones and their “communication breakthrough” for economical boost and social change.

Mobile reporters in Africa
Ben, from Voices of Africa, has already hinted me about this initiative, while White African has also posted about it. Mobile reporters can now potentially report from all corners of Africa. The project is a cooperation between skoeps.com (a Dutch mobile reporting portal) and the Africa Interactive Media Foundation. Most articles have a “blogging character,” deliver intriguing stories, and report about all kinds of topics. Mobile phones are used to write the articles by using an additional keyboard, to film material, and lastly to send from every GPRS available. It is amazing to see how mobile phones are used to film interviews, give the impressions through photos, and write stories. One example is Kenya: Clean water is luxury for slums.

Mobile financing in Zimbabwe
The pioneering concept of mobile financing came first from Kenya. But for awhile now, Mukuru.com has been bridging the diaspora with its friends and family in Zimbabwe. Under scarce circumstances in Zimbabwe, Mukuru.com allows to transfer money over mobile phones. For instance, gas fuelling can be paid over the Internet from anywhere to anybody with a mobile phone in Zimbabwe, then the petrol station owner gets his money back through vouchers. “Africans in general have pioneered the use of cellphones to transfer value by using airtime as a virtual currency.”

Rwanda health sector
Mobile phones to tackle HIV in Rwanda. An interesting citation of how mobile phones can be used for reliable data transfer in the health sector.

Healthcare facilities often lack the appropriate supplies, reliable Internet connections, and have a limited ability to track patients or the spread of HIV across the country. With Phones-for-Health, health workers in the field can use software on their mobile phones to submit critical health information directly into central computer systems, allowing health officials and service providers to view, analyse and respond to this vital data immediately writes Manasee Wagh in Biotech360.

Critical health data and information can be delivered throughout the country in no other way more efficient than this. From the New York Times, “In Rwanda, the system started being used to track H.I.V./AIDS patients two years ago and now connects 75 percent of the country’s 340 clinics, covering a total of 32,000 patients.” All Africa and Herald Tribune also wrote about it. Starting in Rwanda in 2008, the project shall be extended to six more countries.

West Africa Agric Trade Network
This network, also called TradeNet, is a sophisticated market information system for efficient trading. It connects sellers and buyers over the mobile phone via sms with necessary information about prices and crops, and offers new markets in four different languages.

“Users can request prices which are provided in real-time on the network from many market enumerators that are active throughout 380 markets spread across the continent.” (Mobile Africa)

This gives farmers a better income while production is more orientated on demand. The Economist talks already of a Pan-African market based on mobile phones, and first hand experiences can be seen by Prince Deh from GINKS, who did a video interview about the usage for that portal. Ethan Zuckermann discusses in his post the further research being done to forecast prices and needs for commodities.

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Weekly links: About Twitter and the future of the social web

August 27, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment
  • Who owns web2.0?
    Amy Webb made an interesting listing on the latest acquisition of media and web companies. A rather spooky video shows the outcome of too much media concentration: Prometeus - The Media Revolution
  • Thinking about Twitter
    Nancy White wrote two excellent posts about the use of Twitter to share knowledge and its different effects on communication, networking and learning (First post / Second post).
    I wrote a rather critical article about it, but I will give Twitter a try now.
  • Collaborative and collective intelligence
    An interesting post that describes the differences between wisdom of crowds and collaborative work. Wisdom of crowds, where the collective is used to generate average data such as a tag cloud or to get the most interesting articles. Collaborative work is different in which people write together, for example, wikipedia entries or a book.
  • Did you know2.0?
    A very nice video that points some of the changes of our knowledge society and the effects of the social web for the future. A quote from the video: “The amount of technical information is doubling every two years. By 2010 it is predicted to double every 72 hours.” Karl Fisch did the video and invites for further discussions.

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Why to blog? What difference does blogging make?

August 26, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

There are many different types of blogging. Rohit Bhargava shows us 25 different ones in his presentation, starting from insight over piggyback to bridge blogging. What fascinates me the most, it is the reasons why people blog. Throughout the last months bloggers tagged each other: Why Do You Blog? These are some examples showing how different but also how similar the reason’s for blogging are:

Way more down-to-earth is a Pew Internet study which summarizes the following top reasons of why people blog:

  1. to express yourself creatively
  2. to document your personal experiences or share them with others
  3. to stay in touch with friends and family
  4. to share practical knowledge or skills with others
  5. to motivate other people to action
  6. to entertain people
  7. to store resources or information important to you
  8. to influence the way other people think
  9. to network or to meet new people
  10. to make money

Personally, I find much more inspiring what Esra from Bahrain writes about:

In this new age of information technology, not only are blogs used to inform, but to help us network with other like-minded individuals from across the globe. In the Arab world, political activism through blogging is becoming more common, and is actually influencing a lot of the mainstream media outlets, pressuring them to cover human rights violations.

Blogging can be used for cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, and there are more and more pan-Arab group blogs emerging. Personally, I share a group blog with other young writers from Mauritania, Tunisia, and Morocco; something which helps me understand their cultures better. Had it not been for blogging, I would be embarrassingly ignorant about them and their societies, even though these are fellow Arabs I am talking about.

The web and particularly personal stories from people in blogs make us aware of how it is to live in different places. Blogging bridges cultures, opens unlimited network potential, and helps us to overcome strangeness. But I see one problem, to bridge countries, cultures and communication, we need a common language such as English. However, when we are writing in one only common foreign language, we will eventually limit ourselves to not be able to express fully our thoughts. To be continued …

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Open public relation - a contradiction?

August 23, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

The authors of the book wikinomics left the last chapter open to be written by the interested community. This experiment worked very good and proved the authors main thesis: we are entering the era of mass collaboration. With great results, their experiment got extended. Now various authors write together on different themes. Recently, they wrote about open public relations, and the result was quite interesting.

Traditionally the role of the public relations department was to control the flow and angle of information that went to company stakeholders. Making that process open and transparent involves rethinking the relationships with all your stakeholders, including the companies own employees.

Traditional approaches are grounded in the assumptions of a broadcast world: that the media environment can be controlled and that corporate messages can be pushed out to consumers who will believe and internalize them. In a pervasive computing environment, these one-way conversations fail to build credibility.

The premise of open PR is that information will leak out eventually so it’s better to join the conversation early than to put out fires after the fact.

Other interesting points discussed in the article are about the important benefit of feedback through openness. But, it is also clear that such a change needs a certain culture within the organization, otherwise there is a risk of failing. It would be interesting to discuss about what are the conditions for such an open approach. Examples showed that second mover have an advantage. Personally, I find very interesting that with this open approach, public relation and knowledge management overlap more and more.

Next week they are going to write about collaboration for culture…

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Local blogs for politics, media and activism

August 22, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

I found two very interesting articles recently which describe how politics, activism and media are influenced by the web.

Joe Garofoli from the San Fransisco Chronicle wrote the article “Local blogs are key to future of politics,” reporting from the Yearly Kos convention. He describes how local politics are already influenced by a mixture of citizen journalism, activism and blogging:

Here’s how: A blogger writes about something going on in his community, say plans for a local development to be built on toxic ground - the kind of story many large newspapers rarely break nowadays. Residents start complaining about the issue at local meetings. Soon, the buzz generated causes the local press and perhaps other larger bloggers to pick up on the issue, and the government is forced to respond to their inquiries.

So websites, such as saveoceanbeach.org, are used for local activism because they offer a forum otherwise not available and provide tools to network and advocate for an issue. Blogs jump into the gap that US newspapers leave open: “as more newspapers cut staff and can’t cover many of the stories they used to, bloggers who cover local politics have become the de facto watchdog in some communities and over some areas of government.”

Scott Karp argues in his blog post “Should Newspapers Become Local Blog Networks?” that the traditional media transforms itself into blogs that consist of three types of contributors: full-time reporters and editors, paid freelancers, and witness reporters. “What’s becoming clear is that blogs are now the organizing principle for newspapers’ original online content.”

As I am living in Germany at the moment, I have to state, unfortunately, that not a single German city is mentioned in the worldwide top 30 blogging cities according to a Forrester study. Anyhow, we have cities such as Stuttgart which has a town blog, and cities like Karlsruhe have a wiki for all kinds of topics.

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Feed Mashups: RSS 1 + RSS 2 = RSS unlimited

August 20, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

Dana Gardner’s article “RSS feeds begin to bleed into enterprise applications” talks about mashups of RSS feeds or “feed bleeds,” how he calls them. Although his article is quite technological, it still has interesting insights and goes in the same direction as my recent post about the hidden potential of RSS feeds.

What’s newly powerful is that nearly any kind of content can be driven through these feeds — from documents, spreadsheets, and data to video, blogs, podcasts and online HTML instruction manuals.

In another point, he argues that feed mashups can be easily remixed or fine-tuned, or they can be combined to powerful mashups with all kinds of different sources such as location, language, etc. Basically, as in the old way, you will not have a database that is accessed through a search engine. Now, instead, you will have various sources of information from inside and outside an organization, which you can combine as needed. The potential mashups are unlimited.

First example:
I want to have new information on my field of interest also in other languages. I would take the feed from certain news (e.g. intranet, blog) and deliver it to a translation service. With automatic feed, certain selected websites are monitored. Then, if a key word corresponds, the respective source would be delivered in my feed reader.

Second example:
I assume comments of blogs always have valuable information. So I combine different comment feeds from my colleagues’ blogs I find interesting. With that RSS feed I include a search of a database to add projects and documents of the commenters to my feed.

Is this going to happen? Gardner finishes, “As Web 2.0 empowers younger workers to manage content online in new ways, they will want to use similar approaches on the job. Should this be done via an end-run around IT?”

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Does Twitter make sense?

August 19, 2007 | comment3 Comments

To begin with, I have to say, I am not a Twitter user. I have signed up for an account but have not used it at all. I, personally, prefer tools such as Skype. But still, I am willing to be convinced that it does bring an advantage for personal use. I imagine it can be very useful, though, so far, it seems to me another ‘great time consuming application.’ I wonder whether it is really an advantage to be hyperconnected. “Like any good pusher, services like Twitter don’t answer existing needs; they create new ones and then fill them. (Times)” I sense it speeds up the anyway fast communication and information sharing through the web. However, I also imagine it can be an application for new senseful forms of communication, activism and networking, especially with its connection to the mobile phone.
Given that assumption, I collected the following links about twitter:

These articles show how Twitter can be used in all sorts of ways, such as to allow fast messaging and alert a network. It seems good to give notice and to feel connected. It can be an important tool for activism because it pings every member of a network and it is more personal and directed than blogs. I imagine also twittervision version for human rights worldwide or environmental violations in a region.

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Weekly links: Advocacy2.0, development2.0, knowledge worker2.0 and office2.0

August 18, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment
  • Advocacy2.0: Network-centric advocacy
    A nice presentation about new potentials for activism over the web.
  • GlobalGiving Decision Markets
    GlobalGiving is a platform to initiate projects and find partners for them. In August, they started a kind of stock-market experiment to speculate about which project has the greatest chance of succeeding on GlobalGiving.com (via Giulio)
  • How wiki software is changing communication
    Although I think it is the people and not the software who change communication, this great articles describes how the United Nations use wikis, internally and worldwide, to discuss on development. “Imagine millions of people connecting with world leaders and thinkers to discuss, debate and collaborate on everything from global politics to climate change.”
  • Focuss: Search engine for the development field and international cooperation
    Focuss is an effort to collect different information sources over social bookmarking and google custom search. I tested the search engine and the results were okay. However, I am, in general, not convinced about the advantage of google custom search. Does it really give better search results than a conventional google search?
  • Knowledge worker2.0
    “Knowledge management (and therefore knowledge work) is largely stuck in the past, with a focus on process and tools.” A great presentation about the social and technological shift of knowledge management.
  • Office 2.0 Database
    I have not seen yet anywhere else such a comprehensive list of web2.0 software for the office: From bookmarks, over group manager and presentations, to web conference.

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E-democracy: participation next? (2) Germany

August 13, 2007 | comment4 Comments

Overview
First of all, I would like to thank Jan Amos and and Rolf Lührs for their comments. Yes, I agree that in Germany some initiatives around e-democracy have been taken (e.g. e-petition in the German parliament), however, in comparison to German’s vibrant political life, its web is politically inactive. In that regard, politik-digital.de is a lighthouse for many years and a think tank that discusses and analyzes politics and the net. The European counterpart, Europa-digital.de, has done a lot for independent coverage. Their latest initiative, e-participation.net, is great but it also shows how only so little has arisen. Another website is abgeordnetenwatch.de, where citizens can address politicians directly, leading to direct pressure, as Jan nicely pointed out. It is this kind of approach which opens a two-way-conversation.

Politik2.0 and campaigns
However, taking a look at the German political activism in the web or initiatives for e-democracy you get the impression that web2.0 has not arrived in Germany. For example, if you look at the blogosphere, you will hardly see any political blog and rarely grassroot activism. This was also regretted on a discussion called “Politik2.0” last Spring on the ‘Re-Publica‘ conference. Only few blogs are different, such is the case of netzpolitik.org, which works as a watchdog dealing with all sorts of topics around the Internet and liberty rights. Right now they are part of a campaign against the Minister of Interior’s latest idea of Stoppt die Vorratsdatenspeicherung“Vorratsdatenspeicherung“. The current government initiated a law that will allow the saving of all personal web traffic including email, etc. for half a year. The minister of interior also elaborates the wrong idea to allow private investigation through hacking software. Another interesting recent campaign was the one of flickr and censorship in Germany.

Some challenges
The challenges that keep e-democracy from moving much further in Germany are multifold. Markus Beckedahl said on the Politik2.0 discussion, that the political arena has still not yet embraced or even understood the web. Best prove is a an interview on German television given by kids, who asked Germans such as the Minister of Justice about different browsers. She replied: “Browsers? What are browsers again?” Another problem is surely the missing transparency of the German political system in some regards. For example, information about politician salaries have been made public just recently. But shouldn’t that missing transparency make the web more political?
Most surprising is the fact that civil society has not embraced the recent web developments and has not even started to use web2.0 potential.

Web2.0 and politics
But what strikes me the most is that web2.0 is purely seen as a business topic. It surely is a buzz word, but it does offer a new form of participation. For example, on bar camps blogger, politics and activism play no role. In the realm of web2.0, German blogger focus mainly on start-ups. The great potential for participation, being it political or for knowledge sharing and social change, is not been seen here in Germany in the wide blogosphere. The best example of this development is trupoli.com, a new political web2.0 platform which offers “true politics” that can be experienced free from media show. What really occurs to me is that trupoli.de is a corporation! Will participation and political discourse be now a part of demand and supply? I am looking forward to see a maplight.org application analyzing trupoli in the future.

Nevertheless, I am optimistic, especially right now, that an unconference about e-democracy takes place in Berlin. I am eager to hear about the outcome.

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An Email alternative: four dimension of feeds (RSS) in organizations

August 10, 2007 | comment2 Comments

To continue with my post “What is enterprise2.0,” I wrote a case study for organizational blogging. Inspired by the posts from EnterpriseRSS, Paul Dunay and Splash Cast, rss.jpgI want to focus this time on RSS and feeds. In my opinion feeds can make a decisive difference in getting the right information at the right time in the right place, and can also reduce the email overload. As we still have to wait for the semantic web, RSS offers great potential for organizations in the following four dimensions:

  1. Transmitter: Don’t email it. RSS it. Feeds deliver the latest information from themes and projects: Discussions in group blogs, solutions for problems in personal blogs, the status of documentation in wiki, interesting website through subscribed links feed, etc. This information is transparently available, showing organization wide activities otherwise hidden in email boxes. It is possible to get information from all kinds of projects inside an organization, and knowledge creation can be seen through news tickers from everybody’s browser.
  2. Filter: Contrary to email push technology, feeds are a pull technology. One can decide by himself what to follow and escape the email flood. Some feeds are binding, such is the case of the department protocol or the follow-up of a milestone for a project; but most feeds can be subscribed by interest. Project steps can be easily monitored, links in a specific community of practice exchanged, or discussions can be followed. With evaluation tools such as AideRSS, valuable and most discussed content can be filtered.
  3. Overview: Imagine that an intranet homepage would be like a feed aggregator. A look on the page shows exactly what is happening right in that moment in the whole organization. A feed aggregator would present all kind of feeds sorted by topic, projects, departments, date etc. Each topic or bigger projects have their own aggregator and can be browsed through tagclouds in every direction to find quickly a topic. Knowledge creation and information exchange can be followed from anywhere in the organization. Information does not have to be pushed into singly categories and limited databases.
  4. Mashup: Like Yahoo pipes presented a while ago, these feeds can be easily combinable. Project developments are connected to a map application so one can see geographically where about and who it’s own organization is dealing with or discuss about it. In a multilingual organization, feeds can be redirected through translation services. Every employee can build his own aggregator and can mix data for his individual purpose.

No doubt this approach cannot be implemented easily. The problem is not technological, but it does need an open organizational culture. It does shift vertical to horizontal communication. Clearly, there can be numerous obstacles listed. The transparency must not always be in the interest of the management. It demands from the staff a great capacity to absorb all this feeds, sort, process, and digest them. Or how David Weiberger says it: “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex.” Another obstacle are feed-readers, which are until now very basic and have to be further developed to easy sorting, archiving (tagging) and so forth.

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Weekly links: ICT4D, TED in Africa and enterprise2.0

August 6, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

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10 lessons learnt from ICT4D

August 5, 2007 | commentLeave a Comment

Thanks to netnotwired on flickrInformation and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) is still a fairly new theme in the development arena. Throughout the years ICT4D has diversified in many different sub-themes such as e-governance, e-agriculture, e-health, education, etc. Although there have been successful stories, the high hopes had often not been realized in many projects. Many initiatives did not work out and so many projects failed to establish a solid and sustainable approach for ICT4D. The reasons are multifold and some learnt lessons are the following:

  1. ICT4D has been and still is narrowly focused on infrastructure.
  2. Underestimation for the importance of training, qualification, and the different dimensions of connectivity.
  3. ICT4D can only successful if it is a mean and not the end itself.
  4. Many projects were not orientated on the needs. The benefit of ICT output remained often unclear.
  5. ICT4D projects were often not seen from a holistic perspective. Many projects lacked a sustainable concept.
  6. Just to offer information (e.g. websites or databases) leads to nothing when people do not see a benefit in it.
  7. ICT4D has social, cultural, political and economical dimensions. In that regard technology is only one part.
  8. Many experiments could have been avoided if previous experiences were considered (e.g. rural radios).
  9. ICT4D works most successfully when its users take over it, creating and changing technology to their needs.
  10. Lastly the ICT4D has only a fragmenting approach of sharing knowledge and learning experiences. Ironically, most ICT4D initiatives are not linked together - the potential of the web has not been bailed.

A major challenge, however, is the lack of proven impact for ICT in development. That’s why the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development devoted, lately, an own website to this challenge. The business sector has achieved significantly more, as the success of mobile phones shows. The grameen phone campaign has proven its impact to tackle poverty; which computers, networks and the Internet did not achieve in a decade. A tragic example are telecentres or Internet cafes, which in Africa now often go bankrupt because people rather spend money on their mobile phones.

The market-driven mobile phone phenomenon stood out amidst many donor-driven ‘pilot’ projects that had either collapsed or never delivered the promise, says Nalaka Gunawardene therefore in a critical summary of the first years of ICT4D.

But is it that critical when the web shows every day what is possible, and how sheer connectedness has its impact on development? Many countries have achieved important steps such as India’s approach to e-governance or Venezuela’s results of switching to free and open source software. However, very decisive, from my point of view, will be web2.0, the social web, or the collaborative web. Why is that; I will answer on my next post.

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