ICT Update (http://ictupdate.cta.int) magazine is producing a special issue to coincide with the Web2forDev conference. We would like to hear from established projects already using web 2.0, particularly when applied to agricultural and rural development in African, Caribbean or Pacific countries. We are especially interested in initiatives using:

• wiki technology
• social bookmarking
• podcasting, RSS or web feeds.

We want to hear why you decided to use web 2.0, about the challenges you met, how you overcame them, what are the benefits of this technology and how you have succeeded.

ICT Update explores innovative uses of ICTs in developing countries. There’s no policy-speak or techno-dreams, the focus is on field reports from projects actually using ICTs. For more information send an email to Jim Dempsey (jim@contactivity.com) including brief details of your project and the relevant web addresses.

Hey Folks. Here are some interesting information and discussions that are going on in the English web2fordev Dgroup which should not be held back from the broader audience. Have some insides into web 2.0 and low bandwidth! Cheers Anja.

Steve Cisler:

I’m running an online project called KnowledeX whose members include social entrepreneurs around the world. It runs on JotSpot a full-featured wiki now owned by Google. I have a number of participants in Africa who have some difficulty connecting. I think the problems that arise are not just due to local low bandwidth (or electricity problems) but the number of hops from the user in Northern Nigeria and the server in California. He reported a two hour wait to get on, but later it dropped to a mere then minutes–more than most of us would wait, I think. If there is a lot of negotiation between the user and the site, common to apps written in Ajax, I think that the online experience will be frustrating for some. This may limit the usefulness of some of the more promising apps. And that does not include large files of video or static images, both of which can be a barrier.

Tobias Eigen:

Hi Steve. [..] I agree very much with your assessment, and really from my point of view the answer is the same as it has always been. When developing Internet tools and services for people in “low-bandwidth countries” it is important to offer a range of options for participating that include offline tools and “low bandwidth” access to content. If we do, in the end everyone will benefit - even those in rich countries with always on internet connections.

Web 2.0 encourages developers and providers of services to rely on “web applications” and to create “rich internet applications” using AJAX etc. It’s great to use java to avoid making people install software on their computers in order to participate - and to make it easier to upgrade applications iteratively. Here’s a good link to Youtube video explaining the technical background.

This is all well and good, but in the process we shouldn’t forget those that need the service and don’t have fast or reliable internet connections, and we shouldn’t assume that we all will always have access to the Internet. [..] The answers for providing many options for participating in Web 2.0 sites seem to be in RSS feeds and “open APIs”. Feeds allow us to subscribe to websites via a number of means including email and newsreaders, which both can be downloaded using offline tools. [..]

“Low bandwidth” pages are also facilitated by Web 2.0, and are being rapidly developed mainly because people in rich countries want to access the same information on their mobile phones. Part of the opportunity of web2fordev I think will be to inquire into the barriers that people (and in particular civil society organizations) in low bandwidth countries still face to making the most of their limited Internet connectivity, and to investigate how they can harness Web 2.0 technology to overcome those barriers.

If you have read this far, then you might be interested in learning more about Kabissa’s “African Web 2.0 Ambassadors” proposal which we pitched at the Netsquared conference last month.

Steve Cisler:

Tobias, Many thanks for a very informative post. That explained a lot and makes it seem like the barriers are not as great as I had imagined, though I have had an experience with a whiteboard/conferencing system called ‘elluminate’ where the participant in Ecuador had to spend a long time just downloading the java file over a slow line but was able to make use of the advanced features once installed.

Tobias Eigen:

Hi Steve. [..] Strictly speaking, though, the most powerful benefits of Web 2.0 for our purposes seem to be more in asynchronous communications - where people communicate and collaborate by posting content to websites and are reading it and using it in creative ways. They can do this on their own time and in a combination of online/offline strategies.
Synchronous communications with tools like elluminate, skype, text messaging, SMS, VOIP etc etc are a different beast altogether and the frustrations of low bandwidth are more painfully apparent to everyone involved!
However sometimes they do seem to be merging into Web 2.0, resulting in meaningful opportunities. Take for example the recent integration of Skype and Evoca.

I use a personalized Google homepage (iGoogle) which has a lot of web 2.0 elements in it and which has made my “information seeking” challenges a lot easier!

It is very easy to set up, no technical knowledge needed at all, and the result is a page filled with new resources coming right to me, instead of me having to remember to visit these useful sources of information every time I open my browser. It also saves me a lot of online time.

First of all, in the upper left hand corner (so in a very prominent place!) I have my Wikipedia search field. I used to use Google if I had any question like “what is Web 2.0” or “what is a mashup” but nowadays I use Wikipedia. In some sense I misuse it because it is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. However the results I get are much more relevant than those I get from Google, and they are very trustworthy. Wikipedia rivals the mainstream encyclopedia’s in its quality, so you know you can trust what you read. As you may know this is quite revolutionary because Wikipedia’s content relies solely on the input of volunteers! It is in some sense an icon of Web 2.0. If you haven’t yet, try editing a page. It is quite an experience to do so. And you can make sure that your organization, topics of interest, etc. are represented in Wikipedia by adding this content yourself.

For personal use I had included a “countdown” which showed me how many days left until my vacation! This always made me very cheerful! Now that my vacation has passed I use it to remind me when my next deadline is for work.

But the bulk of my iGoogle page is filled with feeds from ICT4D relevant blog/news/resources feeds. For example, I keep an eye on the BBC’s technology news because often there is ICT4D relevant information. When I added this feed to my homepage, Google provided me with other related feeds, which led me to other sources I hadn’t thought of myself.

I also have the iConnect newsfeed, the Eldis ICT for development newsfeed and many more. These links above will lead you directly to the feed itself, which will display a lot of code in older browsers. If you want to see the content of these feeds in a legible way, and don’t want to use iGoogle, you can choose to use a news aggregator . I personally also use the add-on for Firefox called Sage but many people I know also use Bloglines. This may also be the more sensible choice than Sage if you do not always use the same computer. This is because Sage is part of your browser settings on your PC and Bloglines can be accessed from any computer you are working on with internet access. Of course the same is true for your iGoogle. There are many news aggregators out there, each with a slightly different interface, but the basics are the same. They provide you with a single entry point where content (via RSS feeds) from other websites are all displayed in one single place.

I’m interested to hear how other people are using RSS feeds to help them in the information seeking/filtering challenge we face today.