David Wilcox asked me on Quora this question, which I also want to publish as a response here to discuss the topic further. Would be great to get some more thoughts on that topic from you. I imagine we can learn a lot from digital inclusion in Africa. Here are some points:

The art of improvisation

When it comes to access, the innovation under constraints is amazing in Africa. Look, for example, how the challenge of energy supply has been greatly mastered. I think that in Europe we address inclusion only from few angles and should be more creative. We could focus a lot more on mobile phones and offer real needed services even through SMS. Suddenly, we can potentially reach over 90% of people, but most important, we need to play a lot more with technology and hack it where we can. A lot is happening in this regard in the UK, on the contrary Germany, where technological skepticism is still hampering innovations, or where one faces legal implications when offering open wifi.

I like these to posts very much:

• Innovation from Constraint by Ethan Zuckerman
• If It Works in Africa, It Will Work Anywhere by Erik Hersman

However, to me one of the biggest challenges is media competency, and not only in Germany but in the rest of the world.

Service models

If we have not reached enough people through the Internet, it might be that most services do not address a real need and do not offer sufficient help. Isn’t the Internet in Europe largely focused towards the middle class? Where are web solutions or services focused on marginal groups? Here information literacy is the key: “… empower people in all walks of life to seek, evaluate, use and create information effectively to achieve their personal, social, occupational and educational goals” UNESCO

I wish there would be more solutions such as “Rate my Prison“ from the first social innovation camp or or “My Police“. Unfortunately “Rate my Prison” seem not to have been developed further.

Look at the public sector for example and see how little is offered here in Germany. There is a city website, but hardly any online services. On the other hand, Fixmystreet is still a rare exception. The whole world of apps unleashes here a new creativity, but if you really want to get inspired for future mobile services, you need to look at Africa. In Africa solutions such as Farmer’s friend (SMS price information) attempt to reach also poor people in remote areas. Where are such business models in Europe?

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iPhone app to check the place of origin of eggs. Photo by Barcoo.com

As open data becomes more popular, I wonder where are the nonprofit and business models for open data? It is clear that somehow open data needs to generate revenues, because it will not only work with voluntary efforts. I did a little research to find interesting approaches to do more with open data.

A good starting point are existing open data initiatives, such as London or San Fransisco. One area of applications are all types of visualizations, which can help to highlight hidden information behind the data. A nice example is Betterflux, which offers a nice visualization tool for the open data World Bank API. Carolyn Mellor desribes in her post “Mining World Bank Data” how to offer paid analysis services using the World Bank API.

Fireworkers

Lorenz Matzat, a fellow blogger from the open data blog of the ZEIT magazine in Germany, wrote about an intriguing case to use open data at the Amsterdam fire brigade. Once a fire alarm starts, all sorts of data is collected about the location and the route to the emergency: Constructions on the way, latest updates from Openstreetmap, the type of house and if possible more data such as construction dates, materials, people living there, etc. A great case of how open public institutions themselves can benefit from open data. However, it is an example of how open data can easily collide with privacy. How many data should be freed for the sake of emergency.

Public transport

Everybody who has a smart phone might have already benefitted from a location-based public transport application, which gives you for example information on bus or train lines close to you. These applications would not have been possible without access to public transport information. In Germany, from my experience, in almost all cases the private applications are superior to the ones from public transport companies. An interesting example of what can be done with such data is the London Live Tube.

Also, ICommute takes the available data from the San Fransisco open data store and offers a mobility check tool. “ICommute SF helps you locate, organize and access route information and real-time arrival predictions for San Francisco’s Muni system. Get the most of public transit and improve your daily commute.” The app costs $2,99 dollars. I would be curious to know how many sales it takes to get at least the development costs back or even make a profit.

Kids life

Again, in San Fransisco an idea came up to provide better information for kids’ lives. “What choices are there as kids travelling to & from school”. After School provides a map for specific locations: Schools, libraries and playgrounds. It also offers places to eat – questionable places such as McDonalds. A commercial approach, again through an Iphone app, is done by MomMaps – It seems they do not offer a “Dadmaps.” Mommaps offers places such as parks, playgrounds, restaurants, museums in over a dozen cities in the USA. The app is for free, but I could not identify the business model.

Food

Nutrition is another interesting sector to use open data, which I discovered lately. Everyblock has for years food inspection data on their website and in the UK there is an Iphone app by the Lichfield district council: Ratemyplace. “Every time a council in the Ratemyplace scheme carries out an inspection of a food business’s kitchen, it’s listed on the Ratemyplace app.”

Another really interesting approach is Food Sprout. It combines different data sets to make transparent how the food is produced, up and down the supply chain. And they also come up with various revenue models. Check out the interview at the great Food and Tech blog. Interestingly companies seem to have growing interest to make their supply chain transparent in their corporate social responsibility efforts. These are the data sources of Food Sprout:

A last example for food is the whole potential behind barcode scanning – you take your mobile phone to the supermarket and scan products to get the information behind the fair trade certificate or behind the company. In the recent dioxin scandal in Germany, the company Barcoo took information from the ministry of agriculture in Germany, of which farms have intoxicated eggs and offer the info in their app. So, you can check in the supermarket the eggs that are fine and not with your mobile phone.

Conclusion

There are still very few business models for open data. Maybe because there is still little open data available and that might be hampering the development. Although if you look at Openstreetmap or CKAN, there are  large data sets offered. Besides Iphone apps, there is also no revenue model and any other is more of an experiment still. It seems way easier to start with open data as a nonprofit project.

Related posts:

1. Open Aid Data conference and Hackday Berlin The past year I have written on many occasions about...
2. Results of the Open Aid Data Hackday Around 150 participants joined the Open Aid Data Conference in...
3. Who to feed? The open vs. the commercial race for data Google Maps has been an incredible service in the past...

There is often that notion that once you have access to the Internet or to other information and communication technologies (ICT), the whole world of information lies rights at your feet, so you only need to pick the best of it. But in contrary, it can become incredibly time consuming to verify information and to make yourself a trusted source. In the field of ICT4D, this issue is particularly important. In many cases people do not have years of experience working with ICTs and have actually learnt them just the auto-didactic way – using the Internet for their own benefit. Let’s take the case of farmers in rural areas of Africa.

Kenya. Photo: © Curt Carnemark / World Bank

Farmers in developing countries

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a colleague, who has been working already for decades in the rural development and agriculture field around the world. We talked about the potentials for ICT in agriculture and in specific farmers. One of the major challenges is neither access nor literacy, but simply trust. Why should a farmer trust an information coming from somewhere as an SMS? Farmers make careful elaborations, before they change certain practices. Information from a website can help, but at the end of the day what counts is the advice of trusted colleagues. So, we have to realize that information through ICTs often have only a small impact.

ICT and agriculture

In the case of agriculture, behavioural change through extension advice is even more difficult to happen through ICTs. For decades, it has been well known that advise has no effect if simply some guides and brochures are sent to farmers. More effective is a participatory process, where farmers learn from each other directly. So why should farmers change practices they have done for years when they get advice through SMS or any other channel? “It needs a lot more than ICTs,” pointed my colleague.

In contrast, market information particularly through mobile phones is more successful because of the price information, which are much easier to trust than a particular advice for the next cultivation. But even in this case, they had to be introduced in groups of trusted people. Otherwise, who would trust a SMS from anywhere? Would you? There have been cases where rumors spread through SMS have even led to violence.

Demystify the Internet in Rural Africa

Take yourself as an example, how many sources do you really read or how many people do you speak to before you can take the information for granted? ICTs allow for incredibly easy publishing and disseminating of information; but the information is still not worth a penny if it is not trusted. Linda Raftree has a great post, where she describes her experiences during ICT training courses in Ghana.

“Another question that surfaced was ‘Is the internet true?’” This led to a great discussion on how information comes from all sides, and that anyone can actually put information online. It’s truth, and anyone can’t believe everything one reads, it’s not regulated, you need to find a few sources and make some judgment calls.”

Although all this information is not new at all, so many ICT approaches forgot exactly about that challenge. The information has to only be delivered somewhere and that should bring change. The problem is that trust is built slowly through social relations and these take a lot longer to grow online.

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Mobile phones have tiny screens and keyboards, and need an agile finger to handle them. Yet some pioners believe mobile phones might be a key learning device for the future, and have even come up with smart ideas to make learning on the go a motivating and interactive approach. No doubts that if mobile learning (mlearning) works, it can potentially reach millions of people, who have difficulties to get access to learning materials, otherwise.

Moodle for the Iphone

For Steve Vosloo “…The cellphone is the kindle of Africa, until the prices of ebook readers come down…” (Tweet) Steve Vosloo from the M4Lit programm at the Shuttlewoth Foundation in South Africa sees here a potential for youth education. He experiments with an interactive mobile novel (www.kontax.mobi). “We want reading to be social (community) and engaging (interactivity). We’re reaching teens where they are — on their mobile phones”. He points out, “Teens don’t write enough”, but “teens love their phones.” So, could technology be an incentive to make youngsters learn?

My friend Inge de Waard is working on another interesting mlearning project around health. In her case, physicians working on HIV/AIDS care, in remote locations, are offered to learn through mobile phones about the latest medical information. “The didactic material consists of 3D animations simulating interactive clinical cases which are adapted to mobile devices.” The project is currently developing a mobile version of the well known learning plattform “moodle.” This way doctors not only get the course material to their mobile phone, but potentially can interact with colleagues around practice experiences.

For Robert Hawkins of the World Bank the future of education is around ubiquitous learning. “With the emergence of increasingly robust connectivity infrastructure and cheaper computers, school systems around the world are developing the ability to provide learning opportunities to students “anytime, anywhere”.

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The new opportunity to have activism through mobile phones is fascinating. I  have already often written about it. A while ago Sokari Enkine asked me to write a chapter for a recent published book funded by Hivos. I wrote about future trends and software developments, and then blogged about some possible trends and got some interesting feedback to use in the article.

I have also had some inspiring discussions with Ken Banks and Patrick Meier, resulting these in the coming up of some scenarios such as a growth in local mobile innovation in Africa. If we look at the topics and the discussion of the latest Mobile Web East Africa conference, we are witnessing a fascinating rise of creative mobile programming.

The Guardian wrote a nice review of the book and, although I also wrote about different types challenges too, the author Anne Perkins rated me as an optimist – I can live with that.

The trouble with people who know about mobile phone technology is that they are a lot better at good ideas than they are at explaining to non-techies what their good ideas are for. So I fell upon SMS Uprising: Mobile activism in Africa, a collection of essays by people who either write mobile applications or transfer them to the field, hoping that at last I would understand not so much what’s going on as how.

SMS doesn’t always work (sometimes texts are just too slow). But this is a handbook for the small NGO or social change activist who is daunted by technology. Help is at hand, and SMS Uprising will help you find it.

I hope the little introduction has made you enough curious by now! You can order the book directly at Fahamu or at other book sellers for around 15$.

Table of content:

• Introduction
  Sokari Ekine

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There are over one billion Internet users worldwide according to a list from Wikipedia. Every day thousand of people joining social networks such as Facebook. How can these social networks be used to boost business? Are there differences between countries or regions how such social networks work? Mark Davies from Esoko, explains intriguing thoughts from his work in Ghana on market information systems through mobile phones.

The next billion

It is not easy to get figures, but the ones existing might come as a surprise to some. The largest social network in China, QQ has over 300 million active members. According to Appfrica, South Africa has 1.1 million Facebook members, Morocco 369,000, Tunisia 279,000, Nigeria 220,000, Kenya 150,000,and Mauritius 60,000.  Here are more details on social networks worldwide. The key role will be around mobile phones as the main way to access and interact in online social networks. According to research from Frost & Sullivan and Colibria, mobile social networks will grow ten fold to over 500 million users in Latin America and Africa in the next five years.

Culture and impact

But what happens in this social networks is what we know little about. What are the impact of such networks and their potentials beyond pure leisure exchange? This question has made me thought for a while and wonder what is the role of different cultures in such communities. For Anand Giridharadas, Facebook becomes an Indian village. Back at the ICT observatory I had an interesting discussion with Mark Davies around these questions, which I have recorded and transcribed below.

Christian: Hello Mark. We attended the last day of the ICT Observatory. We’ve had very interesting discussions the past days, and I would like to ask you, or discuss with you, the topic about social networks in Africa. Especially, you already mentioned that in your project, you really want to go in that direction using mobiles and the web for farmers, and to bring farmers and traders together. What do you think is the role of these networks and their potentials for the future?

Mark Davies: Well, I think it’s really interesting that we’ve been through a period of three or four years, where networks seem to be one of the most compelling and interesting uses of the web, or the web 2.0. We’ve experience FaceBook, Twitter, and these other, MySpace.

Sitting in Africa, where we’re working in Africa, and we’re working in commerce and trade, it’s all about social networks. You’re trading with individuals that you know, this is perhaps a friends, or an associate, or somebody within your village. There is some identity that you can associate with them, and there is an element of trust.

So it’s just intriguing to consider, if we took some of those principals of FaceBook, of Twitter, of MySpace, and we used it in a environment where, actually, social networks are even stringer. Does that mean that they are more or less appropriate? I think that’s what’s fascinating us.

Certainly in the case of European trade, or me as a businessman in America, I didn’t need to know the person that I was trading with. I working within legislative framework I was working where standards and grades existed, and we knew who and what we were trading.

In Africa, if you’re trading something, how do you insure that you get paid? How do you insure that the item that you’re trading is what you’ve agreed upon? How do you insure that these things are what they say they are? You use networks as a way to reinforce, in this informal sector, that kind of commence and trade.

I think that’s where we’re looking at using technology to reinforce those networks, and make it easier for you to extend your networks beyond, perhaps, the geography or immediate linkages that you currently experience.

Christian: So that would mean the physical presence, the face-to-face exchange, is very important. To which extent do you think it is possible to do something over the Internet, when it comes to something as serious as trader and business-to-business solutions through mobile phones?

Mark Davies: Well I don’t think you do trade over the web, I don’t think that’s what happens. But I think it’s about “how do you exploit some of your social capitol using the web?” I don’t think that means everything suddenly happens on the web, I don’t think that we’re going to see e-commerce anytime soon.

But how do I connect to somebody who might be in a different village, further away? If somebody has said that they have a product that I’m interested in, how can I use some networking tool to get closer to that person, to establish some identity or some reputation?

Perhaps I might find somebody that I already know in their community. And I can ask them “do you know so-and-so? Are they trustworthy? Can I send them the money before they send me the product?” I think that’s the way.

It’s a little more complex, it’s about minimizing risk. You’re using social networking, you’re using technology to minimize your risk. Not to replace complete transactional activities, which will still be, if not face-to-face, it will be mouth-to-mouth. You will be negotiating, you will be arguing, you will be qualifying the deal.

But you can certainly use technology to use society, and used linkages as ways of minimizing your risk. In the same way how Grameen, with finance and loans, has leveraged your community, your network to create social pressure on you to pay back during certain periods, or on certain dates. In the same way, we can use social networks to create peer pressure so that you’re not abusing a trade or commerce relationship, in a similar way, with a stranger.

Christian: Very interesting. You also told me that you, for implementation, that you think about reputation. The keyword is reputation. Can you imagine something like eBay for rating and reputation? To which extent could that work? Especially, also, what could be the role of mobile phones then?

Mark Davies: Well, I think that people trade in Africa based on reputation. They know that “I may not even get the best price from this person, but I know that I will get paid, and I know that I will paid quickly.” These are the sorts of reputations that are important when you are choosing “who might I trade with?”

So the fact is that I think people in Africa, more or less, are simply not digitized. They don’t exist in a database. They have have a SIM card. Do they have a phone number? Yes. Do they have a postal address, or in they in a electoral register? These thing are beginning, but in effect, they aren’t accessible. You can’t find a profile to find out whether this person has abused previous trading relationships or not.

So I think, that as we profile people and put them into these databases, and digitize communities, we can associate content, observations, and commentary about them that can help other people interact with them. And again, reduce their risk. Now whether, in the simplest form, that might mean “are you allowing that community to rank and rate an individual?” We don’t know.

It’s, I think, a very dangerous games to be in. Because people may have all kinds of reasons why they might want to rank you and rate you, that are not particularly objective. So I think we need to think very carefully about who can rank who, under what circumstances. How can we keep it objective? Do we have particular agents, or brokers, that have greater weighting, or ranking, to their own ranking of other individuals?

But very simply, you could see a system whereby I, on a mobile phone, could enter the could enter the mobile phone of the person I’m trading with, and just establish “does the person exist? Are they on a system somewhere? How long have they been on that system? If they’ve been on it for three weeks, can I trust them? And if they’ve been on for three years, maybe there’s some more credibility there. And can you tell me how many complaints have been approved by brokers within that platforms, so that I can see that there is quite some risk with doing a trade with this person?”

So very much like eBay. 73 percent score, because 300 people have ranked this person and had a positive experience. That introduction of reputation into markets in Africa, will have a profound impact on expanding circles of trade.

Christian: That means, of course, more sales for products, and more…

Mark Davies: Yes, I think it’s not only about trying to push product our of Africa, to the rest of the world. It’s within Africa, it’s within the sub-regions. It’s between Ghana and Burkina, that we find trade breaking down because there are barriers of language, barriers of trust, barriers of regulation.

A great deal of thinking is being emphasized on “how do we create inter-regional trade, so that the wealth can be rationed within these African communities? That we can increase production, that we can increase demand within national consumer populations?”

As such, I think these tools, and these technologies, can play a very important role in facilitating that, and allowing cross-border trade with people that you might not have traded with before. Even if it just means “how do I convert a price into my currency?” In northern regions of Ghana, where you’re trying to understand what the price is in Burkina, it’s in French and it’s in CFR, in their currency.

So it’s very difficult to kind of compare. “Should I go a few extra kilometer, and buy or sell that product.” Technology can be used, and it will be on the mobile, to breakdown those kinds of barriers or language and currency, so that you can judge for you self what is the opportunity that is presented.

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Location, mobile phones and the Internet, combined together, are becoming an attractive amalgam for new opportunities. There is a fascinating trend to see the convergence of mobile technologies connected to the Internet and the rising importance of location. This is not just another hype, but could really be interesting for the non-profit arena.

I have already written about the potential renaissance of the Internet of Things – how low-cost technology can be used for better transparency. In a recent paper Tim O’Reilly calls it the information shadow, which simply means “offline” things and their information are increasingly connected to the web. “All of these breakthroughs are reflections of the fact – noted by Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM – that real world objects have “information shadows” in cyberspace.”

At the recent KM4DEV conference, I tried to summarize my thoughts on these developments and their potential implications on development work and activism. I have uploaded the presentation, which is hopefully as self-explanatory as possible and, in this blog post, I would like to add some more remarks:

My initial attempt for the presentation was my reflections on “what would happen if the Internet becomes locational aware? What are the implications of the boost in geo-data? And, what are the consequences of the ubiquitousness of mobile phones?”

Presentation

I start with two interesting quotes:

“It is estimated that as much as 80% of data contains geo-referenced information.” (Liping Di)

“It is not about mobile any more. It is the convergence from the social web with the mobile. The mobile let you interact within a network in a highly contextual way.” (Teemu Arina)

A jump to Uganda, where Google, Grameen, MTN and Brosdi have established an SMS service for health and agriculture tips. It has attracted over a million in the first months. I have heard that it was free in the beginning and maybe that was also a reason for such high use. Interestingly Google needed local institutions to get the content as it is not as easy to collect in the African context. For example, statistical data is not widely collected and, in particular, local content rarely digitalized. That might be a reason why Google has sponsored the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge.

Citizen journalism (action) from anywhere

The famous initiative around the mobile African reporters is just one way to use the mobile phone and report from everywhere. “Fix my Street” in Great Britain shows how citizens can report on street damages through their mobile phones and emails are send to public institutions. “Stop stockouts,” a recent project running with the Ushahidi software, allows citizens to report medical stockouts in pharamcies, which are obliged by law for a certain stock in Southern African countries. I have wondered for a while how these efforts can help to monitor and evaluate development projects in a different way?

What makes digital maps different?

I was recently invited to moderate an online dialogue on human rights and geo-mapping. It is fascinating to see how mapping can help to advocate human rights and also empower local communities to share their environment. One such project is Green Maps with projects all around the world or a Google Earth project with indigenous communities in the Amazon. Maps can reflect different perspectives, interests, constraints and demands for change. What are the implications of people worldwide mapping their environment and having access to these in any place through their mobile phone?

To get a further understanding of digital maps, we need to forget about the usual paper maps with typical street information. Digital maps can offer all kinds of information, but different to paper maps, they have all the underlying geo-data, which can be used in many other contexts.
There are countless things that can be mapped and might help others in the local context:

• Surveillance cameras in my neighborhood
• Accessibility of facilities
• Bike tracks in my city, etc.
• Environmental pollution
• Cheapest shoe stores

So we have:

1. Increasing geo-data available
2. Access to these data through maps or other applications on mobile phones wherever we are, and
3. Increasing contributions to this information base.

Such efforts can lead to all sorts of services such as the traffic information or to find public bus connections in Chennai, India, for instance, which I highlighted in my post on Maptivism.

Explosion of location-based services

There is an “explosion” in location-based services these days, and all big players have been buying map services. Apple has just bought a mapping company and Google has announced that they will offer free navigation services for Android phones.

The geospatial web

In recent years we have been able to see huge efforts to offer maps and geo-data. Big names such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft offer maps. OpenStreetMaps offers the geo-data behind it even for free because it is a worldwide voluntarily run project. Although Google has done some remarkable efforts to offer maps also in developing countries, I believe it is very important that such maps and the data behind them are a public good. A nice example is Kabul, which is only accurately mapped through the voluntarily run OpenStreetMap, and it is much better.

The geospatial web for development work

It is striking to see that so many development organizations seem to be sleeping when one looks at the potential for geo-referenced information. The World Bank is heading in this direction and the humanitarian and relief sector is doing a lot, as the recent crisis mapping conference showed. But many development organizations are still overwhelmed to offer their data in universal standards such as RSS or offer Application Progamming Interfaces to mix data.

We are struggling daily for better filters, particularly in development organization, but location could be a decisive third filter:
Information

• Filter 1: Topic
• Filter 2: Person
• Filter 3: Location

I finish with a great image by Andrew Turner, who has an inspiring, albeit rather technical presentation about the geospatial web. From global to local – lets get the Internet location aware.

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There is a wide variety of information and communication technologies, but even more ways to use them to deliver content. Particularly in constraint environments such as rural areas, a whole range of channels are offered to get information to a person needed. In preparation for next week’s ICT observatory 2009 by CTA, Pete Cranston and I came up with examples of such different channels used in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

They can probably be categorized in a different way and more easily. They should show that if one wants to deliver service models around ICTs, they do not necessarily need to be around mobile phones, as the exchange of video CD of farmers shows (Interview of Louise Clark below), although the latter is oundoubtly the most promising tool. I have followed the tweets from the Mobile Web Africa conference and read these fascinating statistics:

• The recently launched SMS service by Google, Grameen, MTN and BROSDI in Uganda for agriculture and tips received over a million queries in the first few weeks although the service charges premium SMS rates. The service offers answers out of search results from specific databases via SMS.
• Google mobile traffic has increased 5 fold since 2007 in Africa. Google search results on mobile use in Africa are the highest in Nigeria, followed by Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire
• It is estimated that South Africa will have 10.1 million mobile web users by the end of 2009.  The popular mobile social network application MXit has already over 5 million users in South Africa.

So here are some categories to differentiate between all the possible different channels. I am sure there are many missing or overlapping. Please add more in the comments.

Channels

Radio

• Broadcasting
• Community Radio
• Feedback through mobile phone: SMS to radio

Basic mobile phones

• Voice
• Voice to text / Text to voice
• Short Message (SMS)

Mid-range mobile phones

• Mobile phones with additional features such as cameras and data transfers.
• Data Transfer through GPRS
• Mobile Application (e.g. Java software)
• Mobile WAP
• Additional features such as camera or bluetooth

Smart phones

• Sensor Rich Application (All Purpose Tool)
• Location based services through Global position system (GPS)
• Social Network Features
• Mobile Web
• Video and Audio recording and sharing

Direct sharing
Many different informal forms of content shared through different technologies.

• CD, USB or IPod (Video, Audio, Text, Image)
• Mobile (Video, Audio, Text, Image)

Indirect access
For people who do not have direct access to mobile phones, computers or the Internet.

• Infopreneur (Use of intermediary to access information)
• Village phone (rent a mobile phone)
• Village Area Networks (VAN)

Rural access
Specific approaches to offer access in rural and remote areas

• Internet Cafe
• Telecentre
• Rural kiosk
• Local networks through Wifi and WiMax

Back at the last KM4DEV conference, I had the chance to interview Louise Clark, who talks about an interesting alternative way of sharing digital content in Nigeria.

Transcription

Hello, Louise. We’re here at the KM4DEV meeting in Brussels, and you have just brought some very interesting experiences from Africa about local content in rural areas.

Yes. I went last month to Benin and Nigeria to work with the African Rice Center. They have a very interesting project of using videos to share information around rice processing technology. The history to this project is that it started in Bangladesh, so the first of the series of videos were made in Bangladesh and showed technologies of how Bangladeshi families were selecting rice and storing their rice seeds.

These videos were brought to Africa to look at the kind of South/South knowledge exchange, and then some videos were made with African farmers in the African context and we distributed the six videos together. I went to Nigeria with some staff from Africa Rice to look at how farmers were using the videos and what was their experience of video for processing. And their experience was great. The feedback that we got was very, very positive.

Farmers, much to our great surprise, has access to video playing equipment. They were using VCD formats. So the extension service had transferred it from DVD to a VCD format. And the farmers were using the videos as part of their group meetings. So when they would get together in one of the farmer’s houses, they would sit down and watch the video together, which we found to be really an innovation in itself, regardless of the innovations that the videos were promoting in terms of better rice processing techniques.

One of the great surprises was the accessibility of this equipment. There was one group that didn’t have its own VCR player, or VCD player, and had bought a laptop to watch the video. I asked them about what else they used the laptop for, but they said just for the video. And they didn’t think that was a waste of money because they now sell their rice for twice the price as they did before.

So that was a really great experience. Now Africa Rice have just released a new video looking more at Pproduction, soil management, crop management, different techniques, which is now being distributed across Africa.

You also told me that they are shared, in Nigeria in your case, these videos are shared between farmers all over the country.

In the Nigerian case, the farmers, there was a really high demand amongst the farmers for their own copy of the video. And that was one of the issues that we discussed, was how we could get better dissemination of the video, creating linkages with small enterprise in terms of making copies of the video for sale. Because all of the farmers reported that they would buy a copy for themselves and watch it in their homes. So we discussed the advantages and the disadvantages. They said the real advantage was that they could watch the videos over and over again. The disadvantage being that there was no extension agent on hand to ask questions.

So this is an interesting new challenge for us as knowledge management people, in terms of how we can improve the two-way flow of communication using a media like video. So the visual impact and the audio impact combined with farmers was very effective, but how can we use this to really encourage communication from the research institute like Africa Rice to the field and the farmers.

So if I have any more, I’ll keep you posted.

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Imagine we do not only use our mobile phones to make phones calls and SMS, but to contribute to science. How does that work? We can directly engage in micro-voluntarism or contribute valuable information without doing much more than carrying our mobile phone with us. Just as volunteers share computer processing power or look out for new galaxies, so can mobile phones become tools that collect valuable data.

Cairo traffic jam by tronics on flickr (CC)

How does that work?

Newest mobiles phones have global position system (GPS), which shows on a map where you are at the moment. Google and TomTom have developed – independently from each other – an initiative to use location-based data to gather real time traffic information. It is quite simple and genial. GPS can determine whether you move fast or slow, so if you are probably in a car or walking.  So, if feedbacks are sent from an area of slow or non movement where the map indicates a highway, then it is much likely that there is a traffic jam.

The Swiss datenvisualization.ch blog has a nice image to show how it works. (By the way a great resource!)

Location services through all devices

By the way Google offers location position system also for non-GPS enabled phones and browsers (Firefox). How? They have a huge database of mobile tower locations. Computers have an IP address, and a wifi access point delivers another proximity. A bit scary if you think of privacy.

Mobile phones sensors

But that is just the beginning. Nokia has developed a mobile phone with sensors to gather results from your environment, such as noise level, pollution, personal health, weather monitoring, etc. Scientists from MIT call it “Reality Mining” and “provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior.” The Economist has an interesting article called Mobile Phones: Sensors and Sensitivity.

“Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism,… Dr Paulos has already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh.“

This information can then be offered again for mobile phone users through applications with augmented reality, the latest hype around mobile phones. Tim Boucher has post, where he outlines a critical way augmented reality can lead to:

Privacy and surveillance

The flip side of the coin is privacy and potentially larger surveillance of citizens. Iphone owners already can get a taste of it. Pinch Media Spyware can be implemented by any Iphone-application-developer and can send your location and much more to the developer. Potentially, a programmer can develop profiles of movements. As long as a mobile is not really turned off, it continuously sends information and therefore can be located. In countries with authoritarian governments one can imagine, how easy it is to monitor exactly where dissidents are moving if they do not protect themselves.

Technology driven volunteerism?

Step by step mobile phones develop to a much broader instrument. It can help to valuable data for development such as another project described in the Economist article:  “A good example is the study of well-water contamination in Bangladesh conducted by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. His project combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones.“

In particular in development projects a sufficient data base is often not giving. Ushahidi has shown the potential for mobile crowdsourcing. Eric Paulos “foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park.” However, it has to secure that this information guarantee privacy and are a free public good.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

But what makes mobile phone so special?

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

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

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

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

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

Different spheres of mobile activism

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

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

Challenges

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

• Usage
  The costs of mobile communication or SMS are still very high. Although rural areas a now much better connected, there is a disparity between rural and urban areas, where one part becomes only passive recipients of information.
• Government
  Mobile networks can be even easier controlled such as the Internet, because they belong to one provider. Recently, it came out that half state owned Vodafone in Egypt gave out its customers data about the above described strike to the Egyptian police.
• Mobile Provider
  As much as mobile providers have done positive for the dissemination of mobile phones , they have their own business interests, which do not necessarily fit and promote activism. Such are walled gardens, where companies can and want to control what is offered and exchanged.
• Activism
  Although mobile activism is at least 8 years old, since the Estrada campaign in the Philippines, it has just started and a lot of experimenting is happening. It is also clear that it can also be a tool for a mean and cannot be useful for any form of activism. A theatre group might have more impact on the issue of HIV/Aids than an SMS campaign.

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

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

Reality Check – Computers and Rural Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples

• Checking up a profile on Facebook or at least access the log in page, which has alone almost 800kb! In a cybercafe, where you have to pay fees per minute, it may take up to 3 minutes with a dial up modem connection.

• Video or audio upload is almost impossible with a low bandwidth connection and can cost you a lot when your tariff is measured in volume instead of time.

• This blog is based on WordPress, which is a great open source tool, but unfortunately not made for a dial up connections. If you want to publish a new post on WordPress (2.7.1), you have to download over 750kb first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE

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

UPDATE 2

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

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

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

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

Examples

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

• Join Us! A mobile phone software management for enthusiasts (PDF) around ”flash mobs” interested in Performing Social Tasks. This application is developed on Android, an open source system introduced by Google, where you can find networks through your mobile for different causes like environment and interact solely through your mobile phone.
• From Britt Bravo, a nice list of nonprofit applications for iPhones:
  The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Guide to help you make sustainable seafood choices.
• GoodGuide provides iPhone users access to the world’s largest and most reliable sources of information on health, environmental and social performance of everyday products and companies.
• Fixmystreet.com offers also an iPhone version, where you can now record a problem by using its camera and GPS, ready for checking and submitting to the council.
• WideNoise is an iPhone and iPod Touch application that samples decibel noise levels, and displays them on a worldwide interactive map (noise pollution).
• Escorio is on of the winners of the Google Android developer challenge that tracks your mobile carbon footprint. “Reduce and offset it. Inspire others to do the same.“
• Ushahidi “a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline”, is (will be) also developed for an iPhone for complete access.
• Scientists from the University of California hacked a mobile phone to analyze blood, detect disease.
• GeoChat: Emergent Group Communication at the Edge of the Network
  The application is developed by Instedd. They also have a great news service around health and humanitarian work and technology.

Does it happen everywhere?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download publication

Table of Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The other day I stumbled over this news piece: “The phone that feels the flu before you do” – a company offers a service, where one can find out how intensive the level of flu is in their area. So, basically, you can get “Open Source Intelligence” via mobile phone. I find this quite fascinating because of the potential it entails for other usages and it also says a lot about the future power of information.

Different to older times when you went to your PC to search for information such as a definition on Wikipedia, in the future you can access it anywhere, and you also: a) get real time information about what happens around you and b) you get to participate collectively to refine information, for example through mobile crisis mapping. So imagine mobile phone users engaging in such a collective information gathering for all kinds of purposes. But who will own the information and could it be guaranteed to be open and reliable?

In the case of the flu alert, the company “will say, for instance, that 8 percent to 14 percent of the people in your ZIP code have respiratory illnesses, representing a “Moderate” risk level.” Personally, it would not influence my decision to leave the house or not. To me, the case of the flu alert highlights the potential to use such services for other purposes also in other areas.  I find the use of widely available valuable information for the public very interesting. All sorts of available intelligence is broad to you on your mobile phone. So is the case of fixmystreet.com, from which I can report damages in my neighbourhood and report it to the responsible person; or I can check product information through a common source written by consumers in the supermarket. More importantly, I could have access to environmental data on the corner I am standing at? I can foresee a lot of potential, but also I am worried about locked information, no clarity of ownership and too little access to information.

In the flu alert example, the company “gets the information on disease levels from Surveillance Data Inc. — which gets its data from polling health care providers and pharmacies.” It sounds almost as a mashup, where you combine different data sources. I imagine the future lies in combining intelligently different open available data resources, for example through RSS/feeds or API to provide open intelligence.  Such steps are some interesting startups around climate change, which offer API (Application Programming Interface) for different sorts of environmental data – it simply means, that you can use their data for your own purposes or services and combine different data streams. For example, the World Bank offers “114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos” and AMEE, the climate change startup,  offers an “open platform for measuring the energy consumption of everything” (Check www.openeco.org/ for more on sharing data to measure climate change).

Google found a much easier way to publish the flu intensity in an area by simply analyzing and mapping search request for flu related issues. So Google will not only make revenue by advertisement, but through offering various of these kinds of services in the future. But frankly, I am a bit concerned about it since a lot of information resides within companies and it is in many cases not publicly available or cannot be used by nonprofits. In the case of Google, the potential to analyze society behaviour is unlimited. If they focus, for example, on the local level, all kinds of patterns and differences can be found out (e.g. politics, consumerism or health).  It seems to me that the future asset will be this sort of information power. The challenge can be easily seen when you compare OpenstreetMap and Google maps for the cities of Kabul, Afghanistan (Google – Openstreetmap) and Luanda, Angola (Google – Openstreetmap). In both cases the open source approach for maps offers better maps done by volunteers. (Thanks to aidworkerdaily.com for the inspiration!)

I think we have just started to tap on the potential of these rich resources, but also will need a lot of further discussion on what type of information needs to be openly available.

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The simplest and most powerful form of mobile activism in the future will probably still be ordinary communication. However, in all fields of activism such as advocacy, awareness, research and protest, the mobile phone can be a strategic tool for communication, collaboration, coordination and collective action. In this regard we have only started to tap upon the potential of this all-purpose tool, being it in ownership by a majority of Africans across the continent.
However if one wants to look at some likely future scenarios and potentials for advanced mobile usage, then 4 trends could be particularly promising for mobile activism.

The first trend is disruptive innovation around mobile phones especially in Africa. If it is hardware or software, the creativity and ingenuity is happening – through adapting or hacking, new means and uses are developed right where they are needed. Open operation systems allow to create various needed features for the local context in the respective language. Mobile software examples from Kenya show the potential that exists even in low-cost and older models.

The second trend is around the local context, where increasing mobile features such as videos, photos, sooner or later GPS or sensors allow to analyse and document the environment. The mobile becomes a research tool to give its user the capacity to collect and share information. Open information repositories can be created for advocacy work. One outcome is increasing transparency. Mobile phones can be key for collectivity contributing to new information systems and receiving all sorts of information. The example of Ushahidi shows strength in linking the collected information to geodata.

The third trend is the mobile as a publishing and broadcasting tool. Text, audio and video is already possible – its contributions can support own communication channels and coincide with existing forms of citizen journalism. Here we already witness overlapping with other information and communication technologies such as radio. Surely, some form of data exchange has to work for that, which still inhibits several challenges. But that form of information exchange will happen, whatever technology is behind it. Tools for information exchange solely relying on SMS prove this is possible for all phones.

The fourth trend is about the potential for peer-to-peer networking. Mxit in South Africa, a mobile social network application with more than 5 million members lets one engage in an own community independently from location and time. Engaging in a ubiquitous network is promising for activism: coordination, mobilization and collective action. “It is not about mobile any more. It is the convergence from the social web with the mobile. The mobile let you interact within a network in a highly contextual way.” (Teemu Arina) Or as anthropologist Jan Chipchase asks: “So what does it mean when people’s identity is mobile?”

Nevertheless, a lot of challenges still remain, such as high costs or illiteracy. The control of mobile phone networks can become a security risk, also there is the potential that activists have to compete with private sector and the government in these new channels, and it might become an echo chamber residing with the essential challenges of activism: the lack of participation.

What do you think? Do you agree with the four trends or do you think there are additional ones? I will investigate this topic further in the next weeks for an article in a book about mobile activism in Africa. Thanks in advance for any remarks, links and critic!

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The first days have passed by at the the Virtual Forum “Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas” and it has triggered some interesting discussions. One thread is around innovations and mobile phones. Being it software or ideas to extend the usage of the all purpose tools, cutting edge innovations are not coming from high income countries, where the high promises of further usage of mobile phones were not taken by its users.

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.“

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Next week starts a two-week-long virtual forum on mobile telephony in rural areas, put together by the FAO through the e-agriculture initiative. The forum brings together people from all around the world to dicuss the potential of mobile phones particularly for rural development, but probably also various other topics around this all-purpose tool. I have been invited to join as one of the subject matters experts – not so sure what exactly this means, but I am looking forward to discussing the topic during the next two weeks on the virtual forum. If you are interested please join the dicussion.

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

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Recently, there seems to be a hype around mobile phones in developing countries. It is great to see the investments being made in mobile technology and communication. At the KM4DEV unconference Pete Cranston, Luca Servo  and I organized a little session around the potential of mobile phones for knowledge sharing. Obviously, mobile communication happens on a daily basis and already has a huge impact particularly in developing countries. Therefore, I am still eager to see what else will come in the foreseeable future.

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.

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