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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For the past months I have been trying to make the most out of information, therefore I have been experimenting with feeds. No doubt the information power one gains through feeds is great, but the time needed to digest all that information is too long. Unfortunately, there are only a few well working filter mechanisms to get the right information. Clay Shirky talks about it, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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During last days I have been going trough different ICT4D papers, and then again I have been astonished to see that their focus was mainly limited to the issue of access although access to a computer or Internet is just a first step and does not mean you can fully engage in the web. Some time ago, while introducing a laptop to a relative, I observed how it is to move a mouse for the first time and how much more their is to learn and the complex steps that have to be taken before you master to browse the web and send your first email. There are many steps to be taken to use ICT as a mean for more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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One great way for information hunting feeds, is to grasp whatever is out there on the web concerning one topic. This way, you can get news, discussions and great links right on your desktop. But what about filtering them in order to get the best out of the mass? Especially, in the Information and communication technology field (ICT4D), I find there is lack of combined effort to share information. I know of many people working in the ICT4D, who directly or indirectly share links and news, so I thought, why don’t we combine the efforts into one feed. There are many exceptions such as Ismael Peña-López, whose resources and blog posts are greatly helpful.

Therefore, I would like to initiate, together with you, a common effort to get an ultimate ICT4D feed, which combines all interesting ICT4D resources. There are amazing tools (e.g. yahoo pipes, dapper, aiderss) out there to make the search for information so much easier, as well as great people writing free tutorials about it. The open and jointly collection of feeds could be the first step to build a ICT4D news ticker. The second step could be to filter the feed, so it brings the most interesting stories (e.g. most discussed) or links out.

I make a start here offering my OPML file, which is a list of 40 feeds, which can be imported in any feedreader. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a nice post on how (and why) to create an OPML file.

• My ict4d-opml.zip

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You can also subscribe directly to the main feed that contains a lot of resources (40 feeds), and which is a combination of my ICT4D feeds. It already erases duplications.

• ICT4Dfeed 2.0

Please let me know if you have any suggestions to filter the feed or want to work on it with me in yahoo pipes. I will further develop the feed in the next weeks and report about the progress. Please contribute to the feed by either sending links or commenting on interesting websites or feeds. You can also tag your links in Delicious or Technorati ICT4D and it will be automatically included. I will always update the opml file (all available feeds).

Thank you very much in advance!

First learning experiences:

1. To filter better ICT4D related content it would be helpful to have a list of key words for ICT4D such as “digital divide”. Do you know of any other words? If so, please comment or send them to me.
2. For example apc.org has no RSS, but with dapper.net, I could build a feed.

UPDATE (03/11/2008)

• There are currently ten subscribers to the feed. Thanks!
• Thanks to Ella Roman I got some more interesting feeds.
• It seems that the feed is growing by size and entries, so I try to filter not relevant stuff out. For example the key word “digital divide” also shows entries from European cases.  But is this interesting in the ICT4Dfeed?
• One way to filter is to subscribe only to a category of a blog.  For example next billion for example has the category “Telecommunications and IT or Ethan Zuckerman has one on ICT4D.
• I added the respective source where the link is from e.g. Delicious, blog search, blog posts, ICT4D organization, media and ICT4D community.

ICT4Dfeed

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I am at the Web4Dev conference in Nairobi, Kenya. The conference brings together people from all over the world to discuss how the web can contribute to development. One overarching topic are the Millennium Development Goals and how information and communication technologies (ICT) can help to achieve them.

I will give a presentation tomorrow together with Nynke Kruiderink from IICD the lessons learnt from the web2fordev conference and some thesis about its implications for development aid. Here is a bit of background information from the official conference website:

Since its inception at a conference organized by the World Bank in 2003, the Web for Development meetings are now well established as a forum for the web community of UN agencies, and international development civil society organizations interested in using their expertise to show how the Internet can promote development.

The fourth conference, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, under the theme Driving economic and social development with the Internet, will focus on helping developing countries bridge the digital divide. As the seat of the UN headquarters in the developing world, the Kenyan capital offers participants a first-hand experience of what is involved in coming up with new ideas and solutions customised for an environment with limited computer skills, inadequate telecommunications and other infrastructure that still lags behind that of wealthier nations.

The first day started with some welcome speeches and this was followed by a panel discussion with the following participants:

• Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information and Communication, Kenya
• Dr. Shem Ochuodho, Expert on Internet and Information and Communication Technologies in Kenya, Rwanda and Sub-Sahara Africa
• Mr. Gajanan Kasbekar, Vice President, TATA Interactive, India
• Ms. Ashima Bhardwaj, Vice President, One World Youth Project
• Ms. Njeri Rionge, Founder of Kenya’s ISP Wananchi.com
• Mr. Adrian Wooster, Community Broadband Network (CBN)

The discussion started with some general statements and then focused mainly on the issue of connectivity. The debate highlighted the different dimensions of the digital divide. This included economic, technological, social and political aspects. Especially rural areas face difficulties to gain Internet access compare to urban areas. The gap widens when it comes to broadband. One concern, according to Bitango Ndemo, is whether it is feasible to implement broadband and to prove the benefit for the investment.

Another challenge are high illiteracy rates in many developing countries. One participants demanded that the digital divide is only bridged when the most vulnerable communities are reached.

According to Adrian Wooster it is more challenging to give access in many urban areas from a technological point of view. With wireless technology it is fairly easy to give access to rural areas. Especially in informal settlements it technically challenging.

The debate continued with contributions from the audience. One remark was that policy makers are the “gatekeepers” to slow down or accelerate the use of ICT. The technology is there, mobile phone, personal computer and the Internet will merge soon, so it is up to policy makers to create a framework to flourish.

One other key challenge to connectivity is the lack of energy. The prices are still very high and with power cuts it is a challenge to run for example servers. In rural areas car batteries are often used to charge mobile phones.

Another issue raised was about language, for example in Rwanda over ninety per cent of the people do not speak English, but so far most content is offered in English (e.g. scientific research). A participant raised his concern about the missing competition in Sudan, so that costs of Internet access are often higher than in Europe. In many cases the quality of the connection is not sufficient.

A fundamental problem is the fast developing Internet offers a lot of great features, which often need a broadband connection. Whereas email and RSS feeds can be accessed with low bandwidth, many other features such as social networks and other web2.0 tools need broadband and instant or continuous access. One example mentioned are students at Kenyan universities, who quite easily read their emails, but they want to surf on Facebook, which takes a lot of bandwidth.

“It is not that we do not have ideas.” There are a lot of practical examples especially from the youth, said Gajanan Kasbekar, but a major obstacle remains. How to commercialize these ideas to make them work in the long run. Njeri Rionge added a similar remark. She recommended that ICT-solutions shall be orientated on the market to make them successful. In my opinion businesses play a key role in achieving better connectivity, but many solution such as social media and its implication has nothing to do with markets. Tomorrow is workshop day and I hope to find time to blog more.

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Here in Germany, Web2.0 is in everybody’s mouth. Newspapers have been reporting about it lately, and some things are around the buzz word–blogs, wikis, social networks, wikipedia, facebook or youtube, get more and more attention. Whereas in the first wave most people wondered where and when will the next cool start-up spring up. The debate went on whether blogs are a threat to media or not. The wikipedia phenomenon brought finally the knowledge and collaboration dimension of web2.0 to the spotlight.

Ironically, in my opinion, the IT departments–responsible still–have often not taken the participative web as a top priority. And I wonder whether this is different elsewhere. By the way, a similar phenomenon is seen in the knowledge management arena. In relevant magazines, web2.0 and its potential for knowledge sharing and learning has hit the headlines this Summer. However, not many blogs are even around (Please notify me if you know some). One exception is Martin Röll, who wrote very early, albeit he stopped his blog, about knowledge sharing through blogs. Three other nice blogs are zungu.net, frogpond.de and Wissensmanagement2.0.

Going back to the topic, I wonder why many IT-specialists do not show a wider interest in web2.0 and share some enthusiasm. Here are some assumptions:

• IT-experts know by own experience that web2.0 is just another approach, and doubt the hype around it.
• IT-experts are bored of the triviality of this kind of software such as blogs and wikis.
• IT-departments completely underestimate the effects for web2.0 software.
• Web2.0 is seen secondary as technological and it is much more about culture, communication and commitment (3C)

“Like it or not, Web 2.0 is coming,” says Lisa Hoover in the context of enterprise2.0, and this different tools will be used in organizations. Euan agrees by stating: The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0? DO NOTHING. It strikes me to see how many people individually already use web2.0 tools such as blogs or wikis, or they arrange meetings with doodle, use their own desktop sharing and collaborate over google docs. And this all goes easily around the firewall because it is all browser-based. Nevertheless, some obstacles remain as Bev Trayner describes in her blog post Web2.0 is a long way from people at work.

I think it is important to grasp the potential of collaboration and to prove it can be a reduction of information overload and leverage new forms of collaboration. However, from a knowledge management perspective, it is also critical because of how can we share information, when it is distributed over the web. How can it be linked and searched from the intranet? Nevertheless, I am still puzzled about the reluctance towards web2.0 even though it can become a decisive and comparative advantage, being it internally for communication or externally to flourish cooperation.

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