2 Responses to “What are your questions about web2.0 and development?”

1. on 23 Jun 2007 at 1:43 pm   Michael Saunby

   Here’s my first thoughts.

   “What are the key challenges to be tackled for web2.0 for rural development?”

   It depends who is doing the development. I suspect that where established institutions are concerned the first challenge will be accepting web2.0 as something that really exists and is genuinely different and new. For most senior managers and bureaucrats things like blogs, wikis and mashups are still largely unknown and even most IT professionals didn’t have these things in their business strategies. Though we know that shows the strategies are broken, I suspect that for them this doesn’t seem like an option. Even for those following develoments on the web it’s more likely they had visions of a semantic web and software agents automatically carrying out transactions between large corporations and will continue to work on those plans.

   Perhaps this is for the best. There is now a real window of opportunity for new, small and agile firms and even individuals to forge new tools for development that bring ordinary people together.

2. on 25 Jun 2007 at 9:25 pm   Peter Ballantyne

   Hello Christian … interesting questions.

   One of the really exciting aspects of web 2.0 lies beyond the applications, beyond the tools. It relates to the changing mindsets and approaches to development challenges that seem to me to be embedded in web 2.0. Here’s a couple of examples:

   Take ‘user-generated content’ … quite scary for organisations that base their efforts on knowledge that has passed through several layers of review, validation and authentication. The whole notion that lots of ‘users’ have their own valuable and valued content - that is worth sharing and which they can share (without expert mediation) - is potentially very empowering, for the new content generators. It implies a shift in all of our mindsets: a greater need to ‘listen’ for the knowledge generated in unexpected places instead of relying on the established knowledge pools and services. A recognition that innovation can come from many sources; that ‘expertise’ and teh power of ideas is not just to be found a few well-resources places … For me, web 2.0 implies use of a much wider angle lens, as well as a willingness and capacities to look across our familiar boundaries, outside of our ‘comfort’ zones.

   Take ‘RSS feeds’ … many organisations are busy building beautiful portals and websites designed to be ’sticky’, intended to keep people inside, designed to build ‘loyalty’ (defined as length of time ’stuck’ on a web page or returing visits). RSS breaks through this. Once I’ve found a good feed, I never need to re-visit the site; any amount of cosmetics in useless. I can aggregate and package content from the site, mix it with content from other sites, finding my own patterns, embedding it all in my personal ‘portal’. I, as visitor, have much more choice what I read or listen to, and when. For me, giving people choices and the ability and possibility to make good ones is close to what development is about. The mindset change implied in RSS is that instead of trying to ‘attract’ visitors to our choice of the ’sticky’ services they need, we will search for ways our content can get ‘up close and personal’ to people. Using RSS and other approaches (licensing for example) to promote and enable ‘user-remixed content’ is not about getting visitors to our, and only our, web site. It’s about making it possible, and easy, for people out there to mix and blend our content into their own information using strategies. Fundamentally different approaches.

   Like Michael, I think these tools and approaches are perfectly suited to the small, the agile, and the brave … and they will pose many challenges for established actors in rural development. Users generating their own content and remixing others’ content is not always quite what they have in mind.

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