Impressions from Re-publica and Social Innovation Camp

April 14, 2008

The German vs. the British websphere

Well, a week after attending both, the Social Innovation Camp (sicamp08) and re-publica, I finally post my reflections on these events. It was great to visit these two events, listen to numerous interesting presentations at re-publica, and grasp the contagious spirit of social innovation in London. There were interesting differences and similarities on discussions in these two events, but I will just extend on some thoughts I had:

  • There are great projects regarding Edemocracy in both countries, which allow citizens to participate or influence politics and to give more transparency. There is even a German-British cooperation called e-participation.net. On a workshop, full of interesting presentations about this topic, Christoph Dowe said that it is still not easy to get citizens to engage on those platforms. Some websites do not get any attention and others, such as ich-gehe-nicht-hin.de ( “I do not go there”) for nonvoters or abgeordnetenwatch.de (ask the member of Parliament), are successful. Mysociety.org has great projects in this regards, based in the U.K. For example, Fix my Street.
  • On both events free and open source software (FOSS) played an important role. It is clear that FOSS invites for collaboration and allows to build platforms for social innovation, which proprietary software cannot do because it is for commercial purposes. Regarding knowledge sharing, I really like the presentation of deepmehta software, in which knowledge is represented in a semantic network and is handled collaboratively.
  • The whole topic around social change, innovation or entrepreneurs plays are far more a significant role in the U.K. Whereas on the re-publica, social entrepreneurs, e.g. startups for social change, played no role although there were promising projects such as betterplace.org and helpedia.org (will blog soon about them). The social innovation camp was fully devoted to this topic.
  • Whereas at re-publica privacy laws and data protection were high on the agenda, on the social innovation camp they were of no importance. In contrary, I was surprised how openly people took user generated content for granted. The all over camera surveillance (CCT) in London is rather not amusing.

Local vs. global news

republica.jpgAnother interesting development, is the emphasis on the local, as a sicamp08-fellow pointed it out to me during the first evening. The internet is truly global and it is great to connect with people worldwide, but there is this paradox that in the UK or in Germany one often does not even know its home-neighbours. So, there are projects coming up to have social network applications, so that people from an area can find similar interests and engage in community development.

At the re-publica.de, I listened to a presentation by Sean Bonner about “Blogging about local issues, on a global scale.” It dealt with the high relevance of local news in the global web and how metblogs.com tries to cover that. Sean Bonner said:

Before the web local issues did not get as much attention - national and international stuff was more important. Money was made through those kind of news. The Internet changed the distributing and exchange of news specifically on the local level. Blogs play a decisive role. Blog networks are key in local news exchanging.

Back in 2003, Sean Bonner and friends found that there was a lack of local information. Opinions, thoughts and recommendations about local issues. They started working on a local blogging network in L.A, and then opened up a platform called metblogs.com for a overarching network of local bloggers. Nowadays, over 50 cities are participating.

One interesting example is the coup back in 2006 in Bangkok, Thailand. First news appeared 6 hours before CNN on metblogs.com by people equipped with mobile phones. Similarly happened in Pakistan during the web blackout last year. There was also an interesting attempt by AOL to copy their concept, but it did not work out without a community. Sean Bonner said the newspapers rather copy the tools, but forget about the social dimension behind local community blogging.

I did not know about this network before, but it looks interesting. However, it seems often quite individualistic and with random topics. Global Voices Online follows closer developments in countries and translates them in other languages.

An in depth Social Innovation Camp blog post is in process. :-)

Spoil the user? Why are not always the WYSIWYG Editors the right way?

April 11, 2008

Last week, I was at the re-publica.de conference. Often, the most interesting aspect of conferences are the side talks with other visitors. And this one was not the exception. I had a great chat with Martin Koser, an enterprise2.0 expert (with excellent bookmarks) and Andreas Gohr, the head developer of the interesting DokuWiki. We discussed in length the barriers and potentials to start implementing social software in organizations and once again agreed on the importance of the organizational culture. But the technical side is also quite complex and, for example, wikis can be implemented in various ways.

So far, I am amazed about the collaboration potential of wikis, but also disappointed about their usability. Until this discussion, I was kind of convinced that the user shall be in the focus. Participation should be as easy as possible, so no technical barrier hinders users to add or edit content. But Martin and Andreas surprised me at one point by saying that WYSIWYG are not necessarily an advantage. I shared my surprise on twitter, which brought up these reactions, and hence, I decided to write a blog post about it:

wisyis.png

So far, I argued for WYSIWYG editors for these reasons:

  • There are different little barriers one has to bear before one can start editing a wiki page. Most people are used to Word, and WYSIWYG editors are familiar in this regard. Cryptic code might be confusing and needs some experience.
  • WYSIWYG give guidance and integrate nicely other media such as images or table.
  • A wiki is not seldom confusing because of its missing hierarchy. WYSIWYG editors ease to set up new pages or link to existing ones.
  • Many wikis still lack user orientation and are rather confusing (e.g. no hierarchical menu or insufficient linking). The less a user has to think or adapt, the better. Content should matter.

So here it is a list of arguments against WYSIWYG editors. Martin Koser also wrote another excellent post about it.

  • Too much function distracts from content. It is the same problem with Word. Hours spent on elaborating sophisticated tables instead on concentrating on the content.
  • Code editors limit users and let them focus on structured content — what is useful and which structure (e.g. header and bullet point lists) is best for the reader? If used properly, those texts have more clarity.
  • WYSIWYG invite to paste all content completely from word, which is not necessarily conducive for collaboration.
  • Basically, it is a short code list to learn, and then you can write faster and it is more simply to edit codes.
  • No doubt the code created by WYSIWYG is often a mess and does not separate content and formatting.

Does that convince you?
The discussion, once again, showed me how complex the implementation of social software can be, or how easy if you just let the people use it. The question of WYSIWYG editor might be trivial, but in contrary, the lack of those editors are a key argument to decline social software, as Martin pointed out.

Is mobile development repeating ICT4D errors?

March 16, 2008

In the mobile and development list of Dgroups, Prof. Richard Heeks wrote this message recently:

There’s a notion that “m-Development” will be more attuned to the needs and context of users than was the initial round of ICT4D projects (what we might call “ICT4D 1.0″). But I wonder if, in fact, some of the some mistakes aren’t being repeated. I’ve come across a couple of project descriptions in recent days - using mobiles in the health sector in South Africa; using them in the agricultural sector in West Africa - where the projects have been designed and driven by technical staff, and which turned out to be technically well beyond both the technological and human infrastructural readiness of their intended user settings. This techno-centric approach was a characteristic of the first ICT4D projects, and it would be disappointing if the m-development field equally started to get ahead of itself; forgetting that the main uses in poor communities are voice and, to some degree, SMS on basic handsets.

This triggered an interesting discussion among some of the people who were in the list. For example, Steve Song, who has an interesting new blog, wrote:

I think you will always get technocentrics chasing new ideas and applications of technology without a clue about development, just as you will get development people chasing new ideas without a clue about technology.

I think that the difference with m-development is that you stand a) a closer chance of developing something scalable, affordable in developing countries and b) you potentially open the doors to innovation simply by putting tools in play, witness beeping, SMSing, air-time transfers, m-Pesa. Jan Chipchase of Nokia Research points out that Nokia has no idea what the future of mobiles looks like. They are trying to design to enable innovation.

And Patricia Mechael added to the discussion:

Often times, people start with the technology and look for ways to apply it to address development objectives rather than looking at development objectives and then identifying tools (high and low tech) to help leverage their achievement. In relation to mobile phones one area that has not been well studied or documented is the role of basic two-way voice communication within a broad range of development activities.

Anthony Makumbi emphasized the importance of livelihood:

My view is the only way this can be avoided is to build technology on existing livelihood development programs. Technology comes in to enhance particular areas of the livelihood programs. Here you are introducing technology to the end user with a direct meaning unlike projects designed from the blue with different sentiments and imaginations, with no direct fit with the normal livelihoods of communities. With that said, with the mobile phone there is great potential in getting a direct community fit and with the current penetration rates of the Mobile phone in Africa, there is a mass opportunity in the adoption rate within rural communities.

In my opinion, ICT4D had many challenges in the past, but nowadays there are more opportunities to do differently. Two decisive developments are mobile phones and web2.0. One allows finally massive access, sharing information and communication technologies, and the other brings the potentials for collaboration and a multitude of creative applications to its users.

kiwanjalongtail.jpg

Ken Banks from kiwanja.net has an fascinating post about “Social mobile and the long tail“, where he argues the great potential of low cost solutions with mobile phones, and made this excellent graphic. He writes, “Solutions are tantalisingly close, but without the tools and a practical helping hand, most of these NGOs remain passive observers.”
Two interesting events around this event will be held this year. One is a conference organized by W3 called “Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development” and another is the MobileActive08: Unlocking the Potential of Mobiles for Social Impact.

Notes from the web4dev conference

December 3, 2007

Continuing with the web4dev conference in Nairobi, I wanted to add some more personal perspectives. During the conference, on the second day, twenty different workshops were offered. We, Nynke and I, gave a presentation that same day, and as with most other sessions, not many people showed up. We highlighted some lessons we had learnt at the web2fordev conference and showed different examples which will be described further in a future post. From my impressions, many tools of social media were presented, but the philosophy of openness and sharing and the implications for a new era of collaboration had not yet arrived to the web4dev conference. Still, there were promising signs such as the water wiki from UNDP.

There were a lot of interesting people, as well as some examples worth mentioning. One interesting workshop I attended was about the idea for a huge United Nations aggregator, “One Source,” collecting information from all UN organizations. All these agencies such as UNHCR, UNAIDS –just to mention a few– have different IT-systems, content management systems, etc. The idea is to develop common schemes (XML) so all information is available in RSS-Feeds. These feeds would be a independent platform for different devices and can be sorted through all the existing ontologies or taxonomies from the different UN-organisations. Quite an ambitious project, which shall be launched in January 2010. One aspect about it that I liked in particular, is that it will allow to localize feeds, which can be nicely done with mashups through yahoo pipes.

Another session, which was also very interesting, was held by Christopher Fabian from UNICEF, whom I unfortunately missed. But luckily he came to our presentation and told us a bit about his interesting projects. It is all about giving young people a voice in developing countries through the web.

These tools “include using mobile phones to collect data from young people, bootable USB sticks that turn any laptop into a radio station, and technologies to allow people with landlines or mobile phones to record stories onto the Internet.”

For that, one great example is “Our Stories,” which is a “collaborative project that leverages new digital technologies to help capture and preserve individual stories from around the world.” They had a nice video showing to many storytellers a flight around the world; unfortunately it is not on the web. Another tool, which was mainly developed with partner organizations in South Africa, is a poll feature that can be accessed and retrieved via mobile phones. The full list of the tools is here.

The first day of the discussion was very much about connectivity and the great challenges on which especially many countries in African focus in that regard. But from having different conversations with many different participants, I concluded once again that the situation varies from country to country. Whereas in some countries through competition the prices are very high, in others, such as Sudan, there are four providers competing for low prices and offering the mobile web everywhere in Sudan.

I also met Helene Karamagi and beside from exchanging some iphone hacking tips, I asked her about the ICT4D in Uganda. She gave me some interesting insights I would like to share here. From her point of view, Africa is going to face promising times when it comes to ICT4D. Her sister runs the famous Brosdi example presented on the web2fordev conference. The following three points she highlighted for Uganda:

  1. In Uganda, by next year, all local districts will be connected to the Internet. This will enable a new way for information sharing between rural and urban areas.
  2. This means that there will be a high demand for web solutions and all sorts of applications that will lead to a rise on new enterprises in that domain.
  3. Whereas in the beginning it was to NGOs, slowly the private sector is getting involved asking how to contribute to ICT4D. It is entrepreneurs, who try to develop business models for connectivity and web solution, which make profit and are potentially more sustainable.

Once again, it shows that information and communication technologies develop very different on industrialized countries. Whereas in Germany companies watch out for the best ring-tone business model, many essential, valuable and innovative ICT-solution are on the rise in developing countries. David Galipeau, who I met first on the little barcamp kind of event before the conference, underlines this development and says that it is on the eighty per cent of the south where the future innovations will come from and not the 20 per cent of the north. By the way he just started a foundation called eighty20.org.

web2fordev conference impressions (2)

September 30, 2007

Complexity
Another key lesson was the big question of ‘how to best combine all these web2.0 tools to obtain better results.’ Everybody is still experimenting –this might be what web2.0 is all about. Nevertheless, I understood the importance of taking a holistic approach and use a combination of blogs according to the objective. So, flickr nynkekruiderinkexperimenting still needs a strategic approach; in that way users do not fear an information overload. Blogs, for example, can be used for knowledge sharing, but then they may need to be very different when used for a campaign. And how are wikis and blogs linked to preserve transparency? I did not hear about strategies for best combining all the tools using available data and rss feeds. How do I offer all these channels for collaboration and still filter what is important to me? This has to be overcome to prove the benefit and not just use the technology for the sake of it.

I had the feeling everybody shared an enthusiasm for the potential that development can have, but I also only saw a few clear structured projects. A complete contrast to that was Damir Simunic, who talked about Collaboration on the Edge of Network. He basically argued that web2.0 is still too far away from broad usage by presenting a tool relying solely on emails, which has enough capabilities. Even though I find email is often an information overload application, Damir gave an interesting example: at the WHO, a 20.000 people network manages over easy mailing lists and easy features, proving traditional ways can be successful, especially in developing countries.

Networks
Dan McQuillan wrote a powerful wake up post and summarized very good the strategic questions about ‘dealing now with the available possibilities through web2.0.’ To me, it seems the power of web2.0 has been shared by most participants, but what could be done with it now and how to engage it was still unclear. In my panel, I asked therefore, whether organizations are open to sharing, willing to network and engage in such a participative manner. The conference showed how web2.0 brings an unusual mixture of individuals (e.g. activists), organizations, media and companies together. It needs a change in culture towards more openness and trust, which is not always easy –after all, who wants to or can accept that his or her wiki text has suddenly changed?
Collaboration through web2.0 is happening between a diversified landscape of these actors, and I wonder what will be the outcome of that. I liked the way Dan quotes Charles Leadbeater on ‘low-cost, self-organising networks will innovate all kinds of needed solutions.’ I hope that this innovation will be open source driven.

Content
Interestingly, there were few discussions about content. What is the type of content that will be delivered, shared and remixed through web2.0? What kind of content is there and how can it be virtually exchanged in a rather oral culture? Moses Kisembo and Jon Corbett summarized it nicely in a discussion we had. What helps all these new forms of information and technology when one does not know how to use them, and then it does not have any benefit, e.g. for a farmer? The question of relevance of all this user generated content was rarely discussed. Ethan Zuckermann emphasized in his presentation how important filters in this regard are. How to filter the information or voices to a meaningful size to find all that that is important to me. Aggregators can help, and so do social bookmarking sites, which show evaluated ranked webistes. More important are however, people, who sort, comment and translate content and make sense and relevance in the growing sea of information.

However, I imagine too that feeds and tagging can help. And as fast as the web developed, more things are coming up such as rss manipulation. That means, you drag data from different sources and with the sum of it, you make something better. And that is also what Michael Saunby’s presentation showed. With a mix of rss and data, manipulation fascinating new geographical information can be generated. These mashups can be mixed with all kind of freely available information sources, and as with Michael Saunby’s case, allow individual climate change analysis.

web2fordev conference impressions (1)

September 29, 2007

flickr nynkekruiderink Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to blog during the web2fordev conference. Organization work was more than what I expected, and of course there were so many interesting people to talk to around, I just couldn’t let go. Favourably, we got about 50 blog posts mainly from our journalists, who came from different African countries, and who of course did a great job reporting. Now some sessions can be watched completely over video (unfortunately only Internet explorer though). The week started with an interesting web taster day, and went through many more topics ending the week, yesterday, with a farmer led documentation workshop from Dorine Rüter. Interesting cases were presented, of how farmers in Africa use digital cameras to document and create awareness of their problems in order to help each other. Let me now summarize impressions from theses days at the FAO in Rome.

Inclusion
Seen by many people just as a technology, the web2fordev conference proved to me -once again- that people are more minded and complying when gathered together for so-called web2.0. The conference–even with the official and formal character it has within the FAO headquarter–got a neat unconference character; as the the director of FAO communication said at the end, “This halls have not seen this kind of event before.” It was a good mixture of people from many different backgrounds. There could have been more activists and pioneers in my opinion, but the conference fortunately attracted many people from all around the world.

Patience
Through the days, I felt again that we are still at the bottom or ground work of the using web2.0 for development. Many participants had just started experimenting with blogs, etc. by themselves, and had an understandable difficulty to grasp web2.0 in all its dimensions. Therefore, some discussions went not as deep as I wished, but the different perspectives were valuable. There was often a mixture of scepticism and enthusiasm. Will wikis make sense one day? How much trust do we need to place on wikis , and can we even establish that only virtually? Where is the audience for blogs and how can I filter all that information? That way, on one side, participants helped each other to make sense of all these tools, and on the other, sophisticated database RSS models were presented by Thierry Helmer or Thomas Metz. I wonder how can we cope with the challenge of having so many tools developed in such a short time? Many people are certainly not disposed or cannot follow.

Web2.0 in the field
The conference showed me clearly that a lot has been done in and between organizations. That is where the potential and the easiest implementation lies. There are a few projects in developing countries that have not yet implemented web2.0, but unless obvious challenges are not bridged, it will be difficult to implement more. It was, therefore, helpful and quite realistic to hear from Moses Kisembo and Kado Muir that blogs and wikis are not seldom light-years away from what is needed in Uganda or Nigeria. Nevertheless, bloggers such as Prince Deh from Ginks show how important this pioneer work can be. One high hope at the conference, which was often mentioned, was the mobile phone. Some presentations had in my opinion more of traditional web approach, but there were also many exceptional interesting cases such as Brosdi .org, which is supported by Bellanet. Market information systems and knowledge sharing via questions and answers (e.g. audioblogging from India) were the strongest examples in terms of rural development. One major success factor was that it has a benefit for the community, and in that way they are willing to contribute.

Please check the web2fordev blog for more information. There have been 50 posts written around the conference. Nynke Kruiderink and I give a little interview on tagging.


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