Interview with Dirk Koehler, Head of Publishing Department World Bank

Let me quote to introduce our topic a blogger from the Web2forDev community:” The real, revolutionary change from “Web 1.0″ to “2.0″ is the direction of communication. In the “old web” publisher was pushing content down to the audience, treating the audience as consumers, faceless statistics that you can visualize in traffic numbers. The great thing in the new web is that the communication is two-way, now. There is not necessarily a “central”, almighty publisher. The community around the 2.0 websites is both the creator and the consumers of the information. In this regard, Web 2.0 is, indeed, the most beneficial for the developing countries where people more diverse opinions and greater need to share the grassroots information.”

You joined the World Bank in 1996 and have been working in the Development publishing world for many years; do you see the new Web2 tools as an opportunity for International Organizations such as the World Bank to publish Electronic content?
It’s rather difficult to talk about web2.0 because it is so poorly defined. Everybody means something different with it. But there are new exciting ideas and technologies each day on the web. And I indeed see the web as a huge opportunity for international organizations to communicate with a broader public. If you’d asked me for trends I see on the web, my answer would be:  from distributing finished products to communicating, to “social networking” and from reaching target groups (”marketing”) to “facilitating to be discovered”. Of course, new things are happening in addition to the old ones, they’re not replacing them.
What would be the strengths and weaknesses according your experiences to use these tools to generate and disseminate content?
As I just said, the new “services” on the net, the new technologies don’t replace the old functions. There are still research reports that can’t be written as wikis by an open crowd. So the art will be to carefully select the appropriate technology for each application/purpose. As a former STM publisher my concern in general is quality control. While it certainly is true that many eyes see more and can make a text better understandable, with fewer errors etc., it is also true that scientific truth can’t be reached by voting, ranking, or other “social networking technologies.
Do you think that in a short future Institutional Publishers start to use these tools? How do you think that web2 “processes” might complement Development Epublishing sector?
I think many of us have started long ago to use these technologies, from blogging to wikis etc. However, we have a few serious challenges:

• Almost all new web applications make money from ads while the”core” service/product is for free. This is a feasible model for commercial publishers, but ads are a taboo for many institutional publishers. So, how can we fund these epublishing activities?

• While there’s a lot of talk about improved connectivity in the developing countries, much of this is true only for institutions. I just returned from a long trip through several African countries. The reality for many individuals there is still that they have no access to a computer and the internet. For those people we still need a solution. And for quite a while, I’m afraid, this solution still is paper. Of course, we might be able to combine electronic and paper by transmitting files to a connected institution in a poor country and then print on-demand locally from these files. But we should not assume that having something on the web means that we reach the population in those countries.

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