Looking at Europe during its last years many offers have not been taken up. Sure blackberries are all over the place pushing for email interaction on your phone, or at the most, to buy a train ticket via mobile phone. But how further has the mobile been used for other purposes? Not much. Interestingly, users seem to have not been able to grasp all its advantages for the past years – with the exception of ring-tones, maybe. I believe that the multiple options for communication channels can make a difference; European users are to some extend saturated and do not see a big benefit in most offers. For example, during European Championships (soccer), the games were offered via mobile phones, but only a minority were interested.

This happens completely differently in developing countries, where people with a mobile phone are reachable in the remotest areas, where not even sufficient electricity might exist. Mobile phones, with their offer to communicate from anywhere and send short messages, are a big jump forward. Fascinating to see, it does not stop there, particularly in Africa mobile phones unleash various innovations. Many of them show, how they can fill the gap, where nothing was existing before and that’s why they work more successfuly than in Europe. Here are some examples:

• Cell Bazaar (Market in your pocket), where you can send and receive small advertisements for selling and buying stuff. All needed is just an SMS function.
• The EPROM project in Kenya coaches programmers who come up with promising applications such as  mobile mapping in Kenya.
• Afrigadget reports about a mobile phone based auto security system
• SMS and Web 2.0 for Mumbai Early Warning/Response Project
• SMS based news and information service in Sri Lanka for human rights monitoring, reporting and advocacy

However, in my opinion, a new phase is starting with the iPhone. For the first time people in masses download applications to use their phones for all kinds of purposes, such as a pocket personal computer. As I wrote here, the mobile social network is in this regard very promising, because it extends potential collaborations to many more people, who do not have PC based access to the web. Some interesting applications are already out there: Tatango, Jyngle or Radioactive. Hat tip to Drew Cogbill.

I imagine GPS will become another key future, but also the mobile phone as a broadcasting tool and a sensor-rich device. By the way the Egyptian government just forbid GPS to cut down grassroot usage of it. Not every government seems happy about their citizens having such a powerful tool in their hands.

I anticipate that mobile phones will unleash a lot more disruptive innovations than the PC because since its beginnings has been mostly based on open operations systems and has been much more user-centred, and allows for more options to adapt, hack and apply it. “These innovations will only increase in the future, as mobile phones become the linchpin for greater economic development.“

I am glad to be able to participate in this interesting forum on mobile phone topics. From the ICT4D perspective, I believe mobile phones have a great potential for various reasons. However, I think mobile phones for development are in the midst of a hype, and some enthusiasts hope mobiles would be the solution to everything. But 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. Do not get me wrong, I am very enthusiastic about the contributions of mobile phones to social change, but mainly because equally to the social web, it is the users themselves who drive the innovation. They apply, hack and adapt existing technologies for their own needs.

Here is a little descriptive text for the virtual forum. I am sure many interesting topics around mobile phones will be discussed. Particularly, rural areas are in my opinion interesting because mobile phones make them reachable like never before, being it for communication or data exhange.

Mobile phones are the success story of bridging the rural digital divide, bringing tangible economic benefits and acting as agents of social mobilization through improved communication. But what are the real challenges that face reaching rural areas, and what are some of today’s most beneficial applications that can help these rural communities, specifically regarding agriculture development?

This Forum will examine the challenges that rural communities face in enhancing the benefits of mobile telephony, and look at some examples of interesting initiatives and good outcomes from around the globe.

Virtual forums website

ICT4Dfeed experiment
I can best describe my experiences with my small feed experiment around ICT4D themes (ICT4Dfeed). I experimented with Yahoo pipes, Aiderss, Feedhub and many other tools, but I could not reduce the 30 daily resources to less top resources. The only way it worked out was through my own pre-selection which will be published in a twitter ICT4D account. By the way, this has triggered quite some more attention – 80 followers, – whereas the ICT4D feed has around 25 followers. In the case of twitter, there is also the social network factor. But, let me describe my lessons learnt…

Potentials
The ICT4D feed has 60 resources such as search engines, social bookmark sites, selected and influential blogs, community websites and organizations. In theory, the reader has to invest around 5 minutes to simply scan the feed or half an hour daily to read the most important articles. In the first case, one is up to date of what is happening, and in the second case, one can even get to know in detail about the latest developments. The 60 feeds fetch a majority of news happening in this particular sector. So, if you are willing to invest the time you can compete with every organization. The old times of information unbalance are over, where only paid service subscribers have an advantage. 

Challenges
As Chris Brogan would nicely put it in this post, all the interesting comments filters are still to weak. The only chance is to scan all these sources and find the golden nuggets in between them. Automatic filtering is not working efficiently yet. I have tried filtering by certain key words but have not been successful at getting better results, although pulling certain tags – for example, in del.ico.us – can be key for a good feed. I also tried services such as Aiderss, which ranks feeds by the amount of comments or links (technorati and delicious). But this works fine in any well connected social media network, for instance in the US, but not on niche topics with valuable content but few links.

Conclusion
There is a gain in subscribing to a lot of resources on the Internet and having a well researched and filtered selection of feeds. It surely takes time to find the best feeds, but the results can bring you a lot of value. I am building up such a feed for a magazine publisher at the moment and it is surprising to see how even the old media does not know about the potential of feeds and RSS technology. A draft selection showed me how easily one can monitor the web for interesting topics. But the potential to me really lies in collective filtering. Therefore, in my further experiment I decided to test buzzmonitor to collectively filter resources. Drop me a line if you would like to join me in in that experiment.

If people with the same interests come together, they could share the burden of filtering. Like the nptech tagging experiment of in delicious proves it – by reading the feed you already know about the latest non-profit technology developments. The problems remain, who summarizes this information? This is being done mainly through “Hub” bloggers digesting all the information. In this regard, friendfeed is not helping because it multiplies feeds and does nothing about filtering.

The limited materialistic view
The limited view of poverty can be seen particularly in western Europe, where the media tends to focus its discussions in most cases solely around materialistic issues. Basically, anyone who earns less of half the average income is considered poor. The discussion often stops there, instead of taking factors such as environment, health and education into consideration. Lately, there was even a proposal going on in Germany about whether people could live with about 100 Euro a month. Do not get me wrong, I am aware of how important a welfare state is, but poverty cannot be tackled alone by monetary redistribution. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and Nobel prizewinner, stresses that the importance of a more holistic view on poverty is necessary, which at the same time stresses the need of equality and freedom:

The poor generally lack a number of elements, such as education, access to land, health and longevity, justice, family and community support, credit and other productive resources, a voice in institutions, and access to opportunity. According to Sen, being poor does not mean living below an imaginary poverty line, such as an income of two dollars a day or less. It means having an income level that does not allow an individual to cover certain basic necessities, taking into account the circumstances and social requirements of the environment. Furthermore, many of the factors are interconnected. (GlobalPolicy)

Social equality – it is not north vs. south but all around the world
Coming back to Ulrich Beck, he argues in his article that (1) social justice becomes a worldwide phenomena and (2) that we cannot address social injustice within a country alone. In the old days there was an imaginary border between the poor in the north and the south, but, nowadays, social equality is becoming universal as particularly western countries put it on their flags. And he adds: Many immigrants take the right for social equality and mobility for granted, but for most western countries this equality stops at their borders. These were some random thoughts for the blog action day on poverty.

Here I list some interesting things I have come across with during the past months. Please let me know if you know of more.

• Info-Activism Camp next year in February in India. Great initiative by Tactical Tech, who also did a seminar last year on mobile and activism. They are running a competition:
  Struggling to make an impact on your target audience? Are issues unresolved despite your best efforts? Do the internet, mobile phones or information design present exciting possibilities in advocacy but difficult to take advantage of? The Info Activism camp, to be held in Bangalore, India from February 19 to 25, offers rights advocates the chance to make a greater impact in their work.
•  In the UK a lot of different events have happened lately such as UKcatalyst awards, 2gether08 (a festival of ideas, popular technologies and progress). And soon to come, the Social Innovation Camp, which goes for its second round from 5th-7th December 2008. David Wilcox reflects nicely about the process behind the Social Innovation Camp.
• Africa Barcamps are taking place all over Africa – Uganda, Kenya and Madagascar. Erik Hersman has a detailed list of events. Their primary purpose is on technology and software development, but here and there already overlap with social action. Another initiative is Barcamp Africa, which takes place in Silicon Valley to bridge all the innovative minds in both continents.
• Mobileactive08 is happening next week. Over the years it has grown in size of participants, ideas and engagement. Particularly, mobile activism has been spreading lately with lots of fascinating projects. Check out the sessions. I need another post to develop more on the topic.
• In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, there was a Barcamp recently with topics such as free and open source software, localization and social development and citizen journalists.  From one participant, Thomas Wannhof,  I have heard there is another one already planned in Saigon, Vietnam.
• Here, in Germany, I have already blogged about the Social Camp and now there are regular meetings called Social Bar.

What I find intriguing is that all those events take full potential of the social web. The majority of people involved do not even know each other from before, so they coordinate mainly over the web to meet face to face. Not overall huge activities, but nice to see how it flourishes all around the globe.

It seems like a wide diversity of people want to make a difference. It is also quite amazing the transnational dimension, that creative minds connect worldwide for interdisciplinary approaches and new concepts to use information and communication technologies for change. One can say that the technological side of the web and ICT4D becomes finally a more social face or movement.

Little innovation from development organizations
I remember the participants’ enthusiasm during last year’s web2fordev conference in Rome and I have also seen some interesting initiatives since, but the strong push towards taking advantage of the potential is not there. Critically, you can say that yes, the world bank has been playing a little bit around with blogs, UNHCR celebrates itself with Google map for fundraising, and Eldis has now a community, as well as Development Gateway has now ratings for articles, but here, in Germany, I cannot even find one convincing example from dozens of organizations working in the development field. But I know these are at least some first steps.

What are the reasons?
I think the challenges especially within the organizational context are multi fold. Just to name a few:

• Technical challenges: Almost all development organizations rely on software systems, which do not offer social media tools. Sharepoint is just one example of how it will never work to have an open knowledge sharing environment.
• Being it the communication department, the IT or any other departments - many share their refusal to a participative web. Staff should be offered to decision themselves what to published and which tools to use. No way! – for some people the social web scenario is still a nightmare.
• It is not on their screens! Most key players or management teams have not yet understood the potential of the web in total, although development organizations work internationally and engage in numerous networks. The Internet is still seen as a necessary evil. Generation gap?
• No real commitment for donor harmonization. One key pillar of aid effectiveness should be to exchange knowledge as open and transparent as possible. There are hardly any attempts to open data resources between organizations and for the public domain. Most content is still copyright, although it is for non-profit.
• Adaptation: It simply takes much more time. The learning curve of organization all together is simply really slow. The slower the bigger the organizations are.
• Open knowledge sharing is still not high on the agenda. Information silos are common and knowledge is kept closed north and south of the development field.
• The fear and distress to engage online, plus information overload and too little training for staff to show the potential to publish and exchange knowledge in networks.
• Too little interest to engage in dialogue and recognize the importance of local knowledge. User-generated content means that I also am able to listen as an organization.

What could be different?
A will to go public with the work, knowledge and problems of development organizations. Instead, they sat around in Ghana for aid effectiveness and have achieved so little. One step would be to acknowledge that problems are too complex, open channels of organization and use new ways to work together. Being it a Wikipedia for development or different sub themes such as Water wiki. But knowledge is preserved and kept in organizations. Information sources should be combined from different perspectives, instead, each organizations has its own websites. There is not even an attempt to combine data resources between bigger organizations. If you look for instance, the wisdom of crowd potential is not yet exploited. For project development or problem solution, hardly anything has been tested or experimented. In recent years amazing market and exchange places in all kinds of fields have been established, but the development sector still offers very little.  I will elaborate that further in another post.

An explanation
In my opinion the easiest explanation is that the social innovation within or through the web flourishes best in open autonomous environments. This can be rarely offered in an organizational context. If you look at the most fascinating projects and initiatives of the last year, since the web2fordev conference, you will see that they are all grass root driven – mobile phones in Africa, human rights issues, citizen journalism, mashups or networks for development. So I wonder what could then be the role of development organizations to participate in the social innovation? How do you think web2.0 in development organizations will progress? Do you agree with the above statement or was I too critical?

No doubt in recent years web application has been improving significantly in terms of usability. Particularly, the beta mode approach often involves users to bring in their feedback. But still, unfortunately, I have not heard from any beta mode website in an corporate or organizational setting yet. In this blog post I want to argue that the engagement through social software often happens because of a lack of usability.

When do wikis become mature?
Let me start with the harshest examples: Wikis. To be provocative, I would say there is hardly any wiki solution in the web, which entails the basic rules of usability. Navigation is somewhere, extra features fly around and orientation within a wiki is often a catastrophe. Yes, sure, Wikipedia is successful and many people participate, but the software behind it, mediawiki, is rather confusing. But also hosting models such as pbwiki and wetpaint lack usability. I’ve myself trained people to use it and realised that many of them (of all ages) struggle.

Good Usability = Higher Motivation
If you want normal internet or intranet users to engage in social software, it has to be dead simple. If you do not give enough orientation it will be hard and you can only overcome that because your content is so thrilling. But in which cases is it a content so thrilling in an organizational setting? That is one reason why in private people engage much more in the social web - because it isabout topics that matter to them; to make it more interesting. So in an organizational context the barrier to engage is even higher.

The easiness of blogs
Contrary to that are blogs, where applications such as Moveabletype or Wordpress can be downsized to the limit. Login, click for post, write a post and publish. That is easy. The difference is then also the wayit is published. Frontpage first post. I have done a blog post! In my experience blogs versus wikis have a much more intuitive approach. Contrary to this is for example Ning - a nice social network application.

Pick up the users
We have to understand that the majority of internet users focus in email and google search. All the fancy web2.0 tools are just at the beginning. Stories and experiences about the difficulty to implement content management systems say a lot about that. Most websites in my opinion are still overloaded for the average user and give too many offers and too little orientation. Not without a reason critics saythat these tools are a waste of time. In terms of efficiency, social software has to go a long way.

Small is beautiful
Social software in an organization can also simply mean that I can rate content or leave a comment on every intranet page. Not common in most organizational systems. A classical structured website with options to edit here and there might be easier to understand and to engage than a whole new wiki. Small gradual steps might be often abetter choice then to come with something completely new. This way one can experiment with options to interact and to offer what thecommunity really wants.

Do not underestimate complexity of social software
One last example is delicious, a social bookmarking platform, which I really like. I presented this form of knowledge sharing many times and gave trainings. I thought it is so clear and easy. But although the design is quite simple, I had to realize how long it took me to understand this application yet alone tagging and all the features. So in essence we seem to expect too much from users and easily overwhelm them with new tools and features. Although the motivation to participate is anyway low. If we want to achieve and end through social software we have to focus on its users first of all.

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

In a recent article the New York Times went further by asking, “Can the cellphone help end global poverty?” It also described what a big difference a mobile phone could make:

“It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.” Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

During the session we also collected various examples, which I categorized as the following:

• Data transfer (mobile banking, market information system)
• Communication (community radios to connect with listeners)
• Coordination (Twitter or Frontline SMS for election monitoring)
• Collaboration (crowdsourcing such as ushahidi.com or check out this participatory sensing video)
• Knowledge sharing and learning (StoryBank: digital storytelling example below)
• Collective action (Activism)

I find mobile communications particularly promising because most ideas can and will be developed by the users themeselves, as well as being embedded in the local context. The NYT article also gives some nice examples:

 One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

Projects, such as Android, promised to have an open operation system on mobile phones, so own applications for specific needs can be developed and in a free open source fashion developed worldwide jointly by programmers. Twitter is a good example to show the ubiquitous of future web applications connected to mobile phones. Benedikt Foit writes about a new report from the W3C’s (World Wide Web Consortium) Mobile Web Initiative and Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D). Two findings are particular interesting:

• Mobile phones should be considered as an access mechanism, where mobile browsing is one way to access the content, but using Voice applications (through e.g. voiceXML) is another way, and SMS could be a third option. All of these options should be considered as different delivery channels of Web content. Using the Web as a repository of information could leverage replication and cross-fertilization between different projects by offering visibility.
• Key barrier for having useful and relevant content is lack of local expertise to develop these. Empower local actors to become mobile service providers (technical knowledge, entrepreneurship and business models).

We also discussed during the session the different challenges such as equality, prices, the interface, energy, language and illiteracy rate among others. In that concern, an interesting project in India shows “while village textual literacy rates are low, visual and oral expression thrive.” The StoryBank project uses mobiles to share stories in an Indian village and underlines the potential for knowledge sharing through digital storytelling.

A village committee decides what kind of programmes to make and volunteers from the village, mainly women, undertake to research and record news items on health, education, farming and other topics that are broadcast alongside devotional music and public service announcements.

Lastly, Dr. Gary Marsden describes the changes through mobile social networking from South Africa with a fascinating example from collaborating children:

Most school-children in South Africa use a system called “MXit” MXit is a basic Internet chat application for the mobile phone, and five million people use it; because in South Africa, the cost of sending a single character via MXit is one ten-thousandth of the cost of sending a single character via SMS.  For two rand a day, less than 20p, these kids can stay all day on MXit, despite the fact that it has a terrible user interface that the likes of us wouldn’t put up with.

Many of the schools have banned use of MXit.  But Gary and his colleagues discovered that the kids use MXit to do their homework collaboratively.  Therefore, they added functionality to the MXit system, having reverse-engineered the protocol, and added these features and functions into some of the chatrooms. The kids loved it.  Remember, they have no Internet access.  They added an equation-solver, for solving quadratic and linear equations, and an interface to Wikipedia.

No surprise the MIT started an initiative called for the next billion mobile phone users:

Within the next three years, another billion people will begin to make regular use of cell phones, continuing the fastest adoption of a new technology in history. Soon, this next billion will make their voice heard—and connect to the global information network.

Blogging, next to Wikis, is the most popular instrument of new social software in an organization. A blog itself is quite a simple application. The value of blogging comes by the engagement of its authors and readers. Implementing blogs in an organization is not an easy task and needs time, resources and patience. I have worked with blogs within an organization for over three years and this pretty much summarizes my key experiences (I previously posted this on one blogging project).

Blogging examples
Blogs can be used in different contexts and for different purposes. Once again, they are just a tool, which has to be embedded in the organizational culture. So, for example, if a blog is just an add-on to existing tools, then will you quickly hear the information overload argument. These are some ways to use blogs:

• Project management: A project history with milestones, document references and discussions.
• Public relations: An external blog to engage to different audiences.
• Stakeholder management: A blog to keep a network together and communicate on transparent on peer-to-peer basis.
• Employee: Let the experts in your organization speak on their behalf and create their own audiences or spheres of interests.
• Department: A channel to communicate relevant information. A supply for all those emails and a forum to get together. Who knows what is happening three doors away?
• Thematic: An overlapping blog for specific theme. It involves all employees who are interested or working on that particular theme.
• Process: Use it for quality control to involve all employees in certain processes, to highlight problems and elaborate solutions.
• Customer-relationship-management: Let your internal customers, for example of the accountancy department, engage openly, to send feedback and discuss with them potential improvements.
• Do you know of any others? I am sure there are more additional examples.

Blogging success factors
Each of the above listed examples need a slightly different approach, but I want to highlight general success factors, which I separated into four different phases: preparation, marketing, engagement, sustainability. I have put in some vague percentage to show the kind of effort (time and resources), which have to be taken into consideration. Do you agree with this figures?

Preparation (30%)

• In essence, to set up a blog is technically easy.
• Emphasis on design: It is important that your authors and readers like the look of the blog.
• Do not use the standard blog templates. Blogs are flexible applications, so design or adapt them to your specific needs. Embed carefully additional widgets (different information boxes).
• The front-page is key to set incentives for engagement: Focus on well elaborated categories for orientation or offer tagging, highlight the recent comments, offer a search field and different ways for subscription.
• Do not plan too much and wait too long! I know it is a contradiction to the points above. Most things shall be changed through feedback from your audience. Blogging is an ongoing experiment.
• Think about a policy or some points for motivation to set a framework. IBM and Sun have some good examples.
• From the start up leave the blog open to as many authors as possible and of course for any reader to comment.
• Calculate long term resources (at least two years) for bloggers and to facilitate the endeavour.
• Do not be afraid of user administration. It is very easy to do.
• Elaborate how you can reduce other communication channels such as email for blogging.
• Discuss with the management, what could be the incentives and obligations to engage.

Marketing (20%)

• Get together a critical mass of motivated bloggers. These are the ones that bring your blog alive, particularly in the starting phase — best are multipliers. You should have at least 5 dedicated bloggers.
• Create a little vision or story about why you create this blog and focus on the benefit for its users. For example, highlight synergy effects and public personal knowledge sharing.
• Do a little road show in your organization to bring employees on board. Although word by mouth propaganda is in my experience the strongest success factor for this community driven endeavour.
• Include, when possible, short trainings. We often use already existing frequent meetings for a half hour presentation. That was in most cases enough to start.
• Establish a little help section with frequently asked questions and if possible a screencast of how to use the blog.

Engagement (30%)

• Particularly in the beginning, it is important to motivate people to join. Comment on blog posts. Propose to publish content only sent by email.
• Practice an open style of writing and set incentives for different writing styles to lower the barrier for participation. For example, formal announcement next to personal stories.
• Think about the best way to let readers be notified about a blog post. Best would be a RSS (feed) option, but consider also classical email notification.
• Give answers in blog post through emails instead and send only links to the post.
• Encourage for discussions and pick up interesting developments happening on other communication channels.
• Leave the blog content development open to discussion and the audience as an incentive.
• Technical difficulties were mostly around missing tags or categories, file upload and large size photos.

Sustainability (20%)

• Do not underestimate the facilitation throughout the blog life span.
• Think about regular evaluation to get detail feedback. Why are users participation and why not?
• Fluctuation is often high, so scheduled regular presentations or trainings are necessary.
• Answer user requests and registrations as quickly as possible.
• Integrate your blog into other existing web tools (e.g. Intranet) for example, though feeds.
• Include other wanted features such as document folder, event calendar, etc.

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

Examples

It was insightful to see how much is happening and inspiring to see the engagement of people. It showed me once again the value of face to face networking and that most things are happening around Berlin. There were a lot of interesting initiatives presented such as:

• oneaim.org - a global participation feed
• wikiwoods.org (plant a tree)

Also some promising platforms have been established, such as:

• betterplace.org (international peer-to-peer aid)
• helpedia.org (German nonprofit portal, NGO-listing)
• pfandtastisch-helfen.de (using refund for charity)
• weltretter.org (voluntarily work)
• elargio.de (fundraising and charity)
• mensch.coop (social network for social movements)

The academic view
There is also a newspaper article in the TAZ where Dieter Rucht, a German professor and expert of social movements, says: “My general opinion is that the means of the Internet to mobilize are greatly overrated. This is not a new form of egalitarian social movement. He sees no qualitative jump though the Internet and just hopes and expectations.” Surely one can easily be enthusiastic — so far a lot of initiatives and experiments have to prove their results, but it says a lot when a German professor still share his degree of  skepticism. One reason might be that especially in Germany the potential for transnational networking has not yet been acknowledge nor tested.

Funding challenge
One big challenge to most projects is of course funding. There are limited ways to get funding. Funders are the “Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth” (official name!!) or foundations. But there is not such a foundation culture as in the USA, where people are even less willing to invest in web based projects. Another option is company funding, but in here, it is, according to a discussion, not too easy to accept all kinds of corporate money because that might “damage” the reputation within the community.  So, some project offers consultancy and advise for corporate social responsibility on the side. The above mentioned TAZ article mentions that 2-3 billion privately donated money in Germany were spent by people older than 60 and those have not yet an interest in such initiatives.

The openness challenge
To me it was particularly interesting that NGOs face (almost) the same difficulties to open themselves up as regular companies. Although they are non-profited and should not have something to hide such as valuable patents. But they are moving in a political arena, which often makes them reluctant to go public, for example, with blogs and openness for feedback. “The willingness to engage more openly in networks with members and stakeholders is low”, said many representatives from organizations. Nevertheless, I think that the event showed that openness and cooperation are key to work on pressuring social issues.

Thanks for the interesting comments on my blog post on local knowledge. Meryn Stol wrote a nice comment: “Every person can be a problem solver.” The challenge, however, is to succeed in complex projects. Unfortunately, many development projects are still rather planned than developed within the context. Or as William Easterly puts it, “The development field is still dominated by planers.” Although the best way to solve this problem is to be a “Seeker” rather than a “Planner” and look for small, sustainable programs. To set up projects in a relevant context is a key and means to include as much expertise (actors?) as possible. But here comes quickly the dilemma of how to find consensus and include all the different aspects and get lost in complexity.

I wonder if the social web can offer ways to potentially bring more transparency, collect more, particularly local, wisdom and gain better ways to cope with complexity and lastly achieve better results. Maybe social media, especially in the local context, open new ways for problem solutions in a collaborative manner such as wikipedia. Peter Ballantyne wrote it nicely in a comment:

“I think the newer social media have a huge potential to strengthen the local basis and focus of much development work, by creating and sustaining demands, maybe even small ones, for information expertise and knowledge that is local, for local purposes, by local people.”

However, there is still a lack of knowledge — the importance of local knowledge for problem solving. Alberto Masetti-Zannini approaches this very appealing on his paper “Web 2.0 and International Development NGOs”, in which he argues that “most NGOs still suffer from a deep-seated inability to develop two-way communication systems with those whom they seek to represent, and are still favouring top-down, centralised knowledge-management practices.”

He argues that participation mechanisms are key: “NGOs have struggled for a long time to build effective participation mechanisms in the developing world. Relevant and correct information from the bottom of the development pyramid is necessary to make knowledgeable decisions about their work.”

And is optimistic: “Indeed, Web 2.0 tools are beginning to change this situation, by generating and disseminating local content and knowledge in an open, shared structure. But are NGOs adopting these new technologies in their knowledge management practices?”

I am also sharing this optimism, but I am also fearing for the wide gap to participate in the social web. Thenmozhi Soundararajan had an interesting example back on a re-publica conference presentation, which underlines my concern: In the USA 25 % out of twelve graders graduate without necessary skills in writing - so 75% have not the capabilities to profoundly write and therefore engage in social media.

Let’s face it, when you deal with knowledge sharing in an organization, it becomes quickly obvious that most knowledge is shared personally, face-to-face over the telephone or in the cafeteria. In a personal conversation people can describe issues in length, reply to questions and tell the “real” story. Formal meetings often do not give space for vibrant discussions and are often not the forum to describe the pros and cons. Although by listening to the experiences of others, best learning can be achieved.

An ordinary organization has usually a top-down controlled Intranet, where the different departments add their contributions. Sometimes there is even a forum, but in many cases hardly used at all — it is somewhere hidden or a hassle to access. The organizational life is happening somewhere else and employees on a business trip or in a different branch are cut off.

Social software offers at least three new ways for organization to benefit from:

1. To get a picture of what is really happening in an organization. What are the major topics? What is it what staff discusses and cares about? Not all is going to be public, but a lot more than a top-down Intranet or internal communication by the corporate communication department. Is your organization ready for that?
2. To bring people with same interests together without typing with your numb finger over the telephone. Personal employee’s pages, such as yellow pages, can be easily linked through common key words (tags) by interests, competencies, blog posts, projects on wiki pages etc. Check your del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site) or this video and browse through it and see yourself how quickly you find like-minded people. On delicious it is often anonymous, but in an organization it is all linked to employees and their expertise, their projects and questions. Check out 20 things to do on a social network in the office.
3. To increase productivity and emphasize innovation. To imagine employees to network on a peer-to-peer basis. A transparent open network will not only brings synergies and avoids to reinvention of the wheel, but also offers innovations. Like-minded people collaborate on their preferred topics. Staff with similar ideas find each other or new ideas arose out of discussions between people who have different departments.

Why should they do it? It certainly needs transparency and trust but the benefit and mutual gain can come quickly. But this is of course a nightmare scenario to all those employees, who treat knowledge as power. Because in this kind of open horizontal community you are what you share!

How to start?

Here are some rather bottom-up approaches:

• Start a collaborative tagging experiment over del.icio.us with colleagues to see how easy the sharing of valuable information can be, or open up a room on friendfeed to discuss right away resources.
• Use external tools for your team to make project management easier. One example could be a blog for your project’s history, milestones and other management tasks.
• Connect with colleagues through existing social networks such as Xing, Linkedin or Facebook and use it for exchange.
• Extend informal activities on the web and make other colleagues be aware of it: bulletin board, liftsharing etc.
• As Joitske commented on my first blog post, you can address a specific problem and use social media for an open transparent discussion.

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

The UNESCO has an interesting paper called Understanding information literacy: a primer, which highlights very accurate those different dimension for the higher goal of life long learning.

What is Information Literacy, where did it come from, how is it related to lifelong learning, and to other kinds of literacies, and why is it critically important to every nation, its institutions, and its citizens, in order for them to perform competitively and productively in a Digital World and a 21st Century Global Information Society, as well as to promote greater social inclusion, and freedom of expression and opinion

I summarized here the different steps of literacy necessary to fully leverage the potential of the Internet:

1. Basic or core literacies
   This term still applies to the core or foundation literacies of learning how to read, how to write and how to perform simple numeracy tasks necessary in everyday life.
2. Computer literacy
   Computer literacy means the efficient ability to know how to use and operate computers as information processing machine
   • a. Hardware Literacy
     Hardware literacy refers to the set of basic operations you need to know in order to use a computer such as a Personal Computer (PC) or Laptop, or perhaps a combination hand-held device such as BlackBerry efficiently.
   • b. Software Literacy.
     Software literacy refers to the “invisible” set of general-purpose procedures and instructions that the computer or telecommunications hardware requires in order to perform its functions properly.
3. Media Literacy
   Media literacy embraces everything from having the knowledge needed to use old and new media technology to having a critical relationship to media content in a time when the media constitute one of the most powerful forces in society.
4. Distance Education and E-Learning
5. Cultural Literacy
   Cultural literacy means a knowledge of, and understanding, of how a country’s, a religion’s, an ethnic group’s, or a tribe’s traditions, beliefs, symbols and icons, celebrations, and traditional means of communication (e.g. orally) impact the creation, storage, handling, communication, preservation and archiving of data, information and
   knowledge, using technologies.
6. Information Literacy
   … empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information
   effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals.

Going through these steps one can imagine how long it can take and how much more there is to come once you have access. It is quite obvious that those steps or dimension for knowledge sharing and learning are an essential benefit getting through information and communication technology. But ICT’s are only means and access itself does not necessarily get you anywhere. This shows that the real challenge is to help people acquire these literacy skills. For example think back how long it took you to understand the basis and logic of an operation system, its folders, files etc.

Luckily, software is nowadays developed more intuitively as the “beta mode” websites show. Also, hardware is getting more user centered as the “iphone” shows. One imagine then the time it can take to engage through the web, to interact and collaborate. Social media opens new venues to engage in many of the above listed literacy. But all those nice fancy tools out there on the web have still to prove that they really improve literacy for all.

Therefore, I decided to share the different experiences and challenges we have encountered and try to identify success factors, hoping this can help others who are also dealing with social media at an organization and encouraging them to implement it. I will write about this in a series of blog-posts over the coming months.

It is not the tools

To begin with, being a bit critical, I think there is a risk to believe just tools such as wikis or blogs can achieve something that was not there before. Because it touches quickly the core of an organization, namely its culture. If the organizational setting is based upon strict hierarchy, information silos and a very formalistic approach, then clearly open sharing and a horizontal communication is difficult to be implemented, with or without web2.0. Some would argue that new forums for this kind of transparency and openness can have an impact on the organizational culture, though.

What is the character of your organization?

Identify the right scenarios!

However, before implementing web2.0 tools in an organization, it is very important to analyze the already existing instruments, the organization communication behaviours, the degree of openness and trust of knowledge sharing, and the social setting. Most important web2.0 is best used where the quickest win is possible particular at the beginning.

So what are the usual scenarios where employees exchange knowledge?

• Is it mainly in the cafeteria, on the telephone or mainly through email?
• Does the organization rely on a dense meeting culture and direct contact?
• How many different tools for communication already exist, other than telephone, meetings, emails, etc.?
• So far, how have interactive web based applications worked? What went well and what wrong?

This list could be easily extended, please write me if you have some other points.

To find the right tools for the existing work scenarios

The challenge is that there are not only many different tools for online communication, but also they can be used so differently. The trick is to identify a deficit in a typical scenario of work context and find the right tool for it. Particularly, in the beginning, it is very helpful
to target a need and gain a quick win.

For instance, a wiki can be used for very different purposes and are best adapted to the organizational need.

• Use it to write the protocol each week and to have a central place to follow up tasks. It can be written during the meeting and everybody can add it instantly or edit it later on.
  Advantage: It is a small start, implemented in a existing process and you can learn on the fly.
  Disadvantage: Only a small area of work or project management.
• A glossary for a department to collect precise information for standard processes.
  Advantage: The benefit of sharing can be shown quickly when a critical mass of employees contribute. Writing together what already exists.
  Disadvantage: Needs support from the whole department. cannot easily be established if staff does not want to share and it needs trainingfor each one who is involved.
• To organize the next company party or trip and use it for logistics.
  Advantage: For a temporary time and involves a small team. Shows transparency of the planning process to other colleagues.
  Disadvantage: Needs dedicated people and proper gardening of the wiki structure. Wikis can become easily confusing in larger projects (logistics).

These are, of course, only a few examples, but they shall show the variety of different implementation options. To analyze first what are normal work scenarios and then adapt a tool to it, it is therefore a key success factor.

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

When is the two way conversation coming then?

He made a great point — ‘blogs could provide a dialogue between headquarters of development organizations directly with projects and particular beneficiaries.’ A conversation could start about what has happened, what was accomplished and what do both sides think about it. I asked him how long does he think this could take to become reality, to which he replied, “ten years.”

I disagree and think it could take less time. Why? Because I think the potentials of the web will sooner or later unfold peer pressure. Don’t get me wrong. I do not mean by some small tools such as blogs alone, but the ease of engagement and the new potentials for collective action. The following example show possible implications for the development sector.

The power of mapping

Inspired from a post by Erik Hersman called Activist Mapping I came up with another thought or better explanation for this kind of pressure towards development organization, for example, looking at development results — the impact of foreign aid. Easterly describes it as a key challenge for development aid and monitoring results is high on the agenda of development organizations. Another example is the discussion around aid effectiveness and the Paris declaration.

The great potential of collective action for transparency

So, back to my thoughts. Check out first a project by Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Daudi Were called Ushahidi and take a look at how they made it possible by all challenges that people in Kenya, during the post-election conflict, reported through their mobile phone about the critical situation. This way they collected information from all over Kenya and documented incidents such as riots, deaths, property loss, looting, rape etc. This degree of transparency was hardly achieved by the media and certainly not intended to be publicised by the government.

Bottom up measuring of development results

Now imagine the potential to measure development projects from a grassroot level. Or to collect information about how many governmental services have arrived in villages. This could be possible by harnessing the wisdom of crowd.

• Using mobile phones to collect information.
• Present all information on a website with maps and databases.
• Use the website to connect the people who send information and aim to get more accurate information.

Beneficiaries of projects could collect information in teams, send feedbacks to the platform and create their own map of development projects or their timeline with accurate information on how government services are fulfilling their duties. This kind of transparency should be an all-win-situation.

Some might think this will never happen, but I think it will. It is already happening and to my understanding we are just at the beginning of this kind of collective action. What do you think?

The German professor Dietrich Dörner describes it accurately in his book the “The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations.” Problems are seen logic to tackle, but are, in contrary, far more complex than firstly thought.

Faced with problems that exceed our grasp, we pile small error upon small error to arrive at spectacularly wrong conclusions. We too often ignore the big picture and seek refuge in what we know how to do - fiddling while Rome burns. (Book review)

In a simulation for a development project, Dörner proves how this can lead to failure, and in many cases, efforts have no sustainable impact. One key challenge is to solely rely on global knowledge and state of the art expertise and disregard the local knowledge.

Local knowledge is a collection of facts and relates to the entire system of concepts, beliefs and perceptions that people hold about the world around them. This includes the way people observe and measure their surroundings, how they solve problems and validate new information. It includes the processes whereby knowledge is generated, stored, applied and transmitted to others. (Source: FAO)

Indigenous knowledge are traditions and practices of certain regional, indigenous, or local communities. The growing importance of indigenous knowledge and technologies can be seen, for example, for biodiversity conservation.

Therefore, efforts towards knowledge sharing are a key to make projects work. Kingo Mchombu, author of the Sharing Knowledge Handbook has an interesting point in that regard:

credit: angela7dreams

In most cases, the information needs of the urban and rural poor are seldom taken into account when they are supplied with information to solve their problem of poverty. The assumption being that they know very little and that is why they are poor, thus the knowledge system of the urban and rural poor is totally ignored when supplying them with external information.

It is puzzling to see how often a well intended transfer of knowledge is seen as the right way. As Joseph Stiglitz suggested, most learning initiatives in the development sector have tried to scan globally and apply locally. Also Ben Ramalingam argues: “This ‘pipeline’ approach to learning seriously underestimates the complexity of aid work.”

To my understanding, there is a growing need to link the local with the global in development work. Sharing and mixing knowledge is as important as relying on an interdisciplinary approach. To have people and organizations going this path and linking theses spaces are becoming even more important in the future. My hope is that the social web provides a framework for this broad knowledge sharing and collaboration, but this I will describe in my next post.

Paul Currions points it out well in his post that the UNHCR map “is useful because it starts to give people an idea of one of the key issues for refugee management and the complexity of running a refugee camp. The first thing I notice is that every time I click on a link for more information, it tells me how much it costs to buy school or farm equipment, and gives me a link to UNHCR fundraising so I can cough up right there. I think we should be doing better. Much, much better.”

I agree with Paul Currion and wonder why these services do not offer the following:

• Integrating other available sources of information to offer a broader perspectives on the given context. There are many other potentially valuable resources, which could enrich the visualization.
• There should be ways to contribute information, for example, by refugees themselves or beneficiaries of World Bank projects. Couldn’t mashups used to get feedback and to monitor projects and their impact?
• Gapminder.org illustrates nicely what further ways are possible to simplify complex data.

Interestingly, there are a lot of grassroot initiatives offered, which are often developed and maintained by a few people and sometimes even one person who accomplishes much more.

1. Tunesia Prison Map
   Sami Ben Gharbia put up together, already a while ago, the frightening Tunesia prison map, in which he has been using google maps. It shows where political dissidents have been locked up by the Tunisian government.
2. Theyworkforyou
   They work for you was developed by Rob McKinnon, whom I had the change to meet back in London. This inspiring project has a sister in the UK “that aims to make it easy for people to track the activity of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament.” Basically, this site aggregates information already available in a form that makes it more transparent to follow the engagement of parliamentarians and topics. I am really impressed about his work and looking forward to see more of his ideas realized in the future.
3. UNdemocracy
   This is again a website which aggregates available information and offers it in a transparent way. It focuses on an easy access to the transcripts of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations. The same people also did the Public Whip, a page tracking the voting record and attendance of parliamentarians in the UK.
4. Ushahidi
   This website was quickly realized through the recent Kenya crisis and maps the reports of the post-election crisis with all its different incidents such as riots, deaths, property loss, government forces etc. Kenyians can report such cases through their mobile phones by sms. This truly is a bottom up mashup.
5. Mapping the election conditions in Zimbabwe
   
   This is a similar initiative, which documents all types of manipulation during the latest Zimbabweans election. The map is a valauble resource and Sokwanele has been doing an impressive work for human rights throughout the the last years. Ethan Zuckerman wrote an in depth post about this project.
6. Healthcarethatworks
   Another Google map mashup, which shows the New York City wide status for hospitals and its disproportionate impact that recent hospital closures have on low-income communities.

Some more mashups in the enviroment field are summarised on Global Voices by Juliana Rotich. Lastly, Netsquared has on this year’s conference a mashup event, where promising new initiatives are presented.

Always online

There is a slow shift when the web loses its physical limitation. Although the web is all around the world, in most of the cases you have to go somewhere to be connected. The mobile phone, because it is easier to connect to the web, changes that — you are always online. The web is a constant follower that might be frightening to some. But a “blackberry for activism” lets activists get involved instantly. On a peer to peer basis, people are connected = protected. A recent case underlines the potential: “Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice.” Jan Chipchase wrote in a recent New York Times article, “the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.”

Interacting from everywhere

Some years ago I read Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs” and I could not really see these mobile peer-to-peer networks happening on a massive scale, but, nowadays, a connection to the web allows people to be part of social networks. There are many worldwide experiences for sms campaigns for political change. The New York Times recently wrote, “50 million people, or about 2.3 percent of all mobile users, already use the cellphone for social networking.” This is particularly important in developing countries, where mobile phones are the communication tool. The real benefit is not in the northern hemisphere, where through the recent years most mobile business models have been failing. It is in Africa or Asia where the mobile phone is the main communication technology. If this is connected through the web, it then allows interaction, coordination and organization on a peer to peer basis. The cvberactivism in the aftermath of political violence in Kenya is one example and another is the mobile social blogging network vipera.com.

Broadcast from everywhere

In re-publica.de I watched a fascinating session on video citizen journalism. Brian Conley presented a project in which people from Iraq broadcast from Baghdad over the web (Alive in Baghdad), and there is no media team around. This presentation reminded me of a recent new development: live video broadcasting. Two new services are very interesting: Qik and Mogulus. Yes, more new tools, but these ones represent a shift — with Qik you can broadcast alive from your mobile phone wherever you are. I first got introduced to it when David Wilcox interviewed me through his mobile phone at the Social Innovation Camp. And the other tool, Mogulus.com, can be set up easily in your own television station to be online, letting you broadcast on daily basis from it. Eduardo Avila writes a fascinating story from Ecuador:  My Mobile Voice and Citizen Journalism.

Citizen video broadcasting has two interesting facets: First, videos often have a stronger impact compared to texts. Second, citizen journalists, such as mobile reporters in Africa, go themselves to demonstrations and make interviews or film directly from areas where no media outlet goes.

On Friday we went to a get-together and later to a pub. During this few hours, I got to know somebody from the open source movement in Brazil, a PHD student about social media, some great folks who try to change the British local government from inside out, and a lot of people with great ideas - many more than the six chosen for the Social Innovation Camp. But also, the Young foundation premises were a great location and the organization was excellent. Before I tell more about the different projects and the weekend, I would like to wrap up the highlights:

• It works! The concept of bringing people together to collaborate for social innovation through the web worked excellent. Almost a hundred people showed up, who were all eager to collaborate and offered their expertise.
• Inside out. It is amazing to see the spirit of the participative alive and be able to meet all these open people. In contrast to Barcamps, it goes a step further and people work on a project and by that, you share experiences and learn from each other. Both represent a great passion for exchange and a desire for creativity.
• Scale it up! I can so imagine how this approach could be scaled up. Bringing people with ideas together an d forming something together exhilarating and contagious. The web has become a playground to rethink or we-think (Charles Leadbeater) the potential of social change and overcome traditional barriers. Therefore I am eager to participate at the Social Camp in Berlin next June.
• Unlimited ideas. It was really amazing, in brainstorm sessions, to listen and discuss so many ideas that the attendees have. There are many impressive ways to empower citizens, to engage in social or injustice or help to change a community. To me, it is clear that we are just at the start of this development. Business start-ups were the beginning and social innovation start-ups are the future.
• Richness of data. During the last year, I was often overwhelmed, suspicious or frustrated about all this available information and data in the net. But now, there is a great potential to get much more out of all these data. Make it relevant, use it for transparency or advocacy. This kind of information power will change a lot: Being it “rate my prison” or the potential of aggregation.
• It is the mobile phone. Once again the mobile will make a big difference because of one simple reason. Whereas in the past I went to the computer to do something with the web, in the future my life and the web are closely connected. I can engage when I want or consult a friend or contribute to the wiki bar-code or I switch off.

There is a backnetwork page to see all people involved and all six chosen projects are described at the Social Innovation Camp website:

• Wibi.it
  Formerly bar-code Wikipedia. A site for storing user-generated information – such as carbon footprint, manufacturing conditions and reviews - against a product, identified by its barcode number. It enables buyers to check product information through their mobile phone right in the supermarket, for example, whether it really is fair trade.
• Enabled by Design
  A resource for anyone looking to make adjustments to their lives, be it as a result of disability, injury or impairment. Enabled by Design won £2,000 as our judges’ favourite idea at Show and Tell.
  
• On The Up
  Formerly Personal Development Reports. An online system that supports young people to identify their personal skills and qualities. That is the project I worked with. It is about personal development to help young people get a perspective, become peer learners and fulfil their dreams. In the first hour, I did not know whether it would work but suddenly a great visionary idea came together. I am curious to see how it will go on.
• Rate Your Prison
  Formerly Prison Visits. A tool to support the families of prisoners coping with the experience of being apart from a loved one. Rate Your Prison won £1,000 as the runner-up project at Show and Tell. There is little information about how prisoners feel in prison. A voice for the voiceless
• CVLifeLine
  Formerly Rate my CV. A site for helping jobseekers using Web 2.0 tools. Young people can help each other to improve their CVs.
• Stuffshare
  Freecycle meets Street Car: a stuff club.

Most projects even had prototype websites finished in those two days, which it was amazing to see they were done with the help of coders and designers. And the winners were “enabled by design” and “rate my prison!” For more information and all other blog posts check the list by Aleksi Aaltonen.

Well, a week after attending both, the Social Innovation Camp