At the Web2forDev conference, everyone has been saying that it’s not about the technology – it’s about the people. It’s about what people can do with the technology – and what ‘mash-ups’ of tools and approaches are appropriate and really working.

I came to this conference to find people who are really doing participatory web – not just using the technology, but facilitating real empowerment and positive change. Our plan at IIED is to co-publish with CTA a special issue of the Participatory Learning and Action series on participatory web for development – so I needed to find real examples.

Well, yesterday I was lucky enough to see Ednah Karamagi give her presentation, Enhancing Knowledge Sharing in the Rural Community through Adoption of Web 2.0 tools.  

I felt like I had found a magic bean.  Ednah works for a Ugandan NGO, Busoga Rural Open Source & Development (BROSDI). It’s a not-for-profit organisation that works with government and civil society in improving rural livelihoods. Within BROSDI is a project called Collecting and Exchanging of Local Agriculture Content (CELAC).                       

Both BROSDI and CELAC project make extensive use of Web 2.0 approaches. But it’s a real combination of Web 2.0 and grassroots participation. For example, CELAC is almost entirely populated with locally generated content. As Ednah says, ‘We are sharing information from our great grandfathers that we are losing in our generation.’  

Essentially, it’s a great combination of the online – Blogs, Google Maps, Wikis, online documentation, chatrooms – and the offline – a weekly mobile phone SMS farmers’ information service, village knowledge brokers, monthly farmer forum meetings, village meetings, radio, and hard copy documentation. They are even developing an e-learning tool for primary school children. 

Ednah is candid about the challenges they face. ‘The Internet is expensive, and needs power,’ she says. ‘It’s a problem in a country where access to electricity is intermittent.’ There is also the issue that people need to change their attitudes towards sharing information, rather than ‘hoarding’ it. And sometimes the technology doesn’t work – and is abandoned. ‘We did have a Wiki,’ Ednah says. ‘But the staff rejected it, as it was too complicated. But we plan to have a new Wiki for developing training material so that we can all comment and add to it.’ 

Ednah was a real inspiration. There was a long list of real life examples – not just the different technologies – but how the technology has made a real, positive change to people’s lives. My favourite was Cissy and her turkey farm. Ednah told us, ‘She learnt how to rear turkeys on SMS!’

This morning, I overheard Dr Hansjorg Neun of CTA talking to Ednah Karamagi. He asked Ednah, ‘Why do you think you have been so successful?’

Ednah’s reply was, ‘You have to use as many methods as you can to reach your community.’

Well, BROSDI are doing that in style. Let’s hope they continue to get the support they need to keep this pioneering organisation going from strength to strength.    

Focuss.eu provides a high quality search engine for practitioners, researchers and students in the area of global development studies. Other than generic search engines, like Google and Yahoo, focuss.eu indexes a specific choice of electronic resources, selected by librarians, researchers and practitioners working in participating institutions. The current focuss.eu initiative is based on the personal activities of a limited number of individuals amongst Development organizations and Research Centers or Universities. They use Google Marker and each time they find an interesting wesbite on the Internet, they index it for the benefit of the Dev community.

Interview with Paul Matthews.

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Ismail Fourokwas one of this year Highway Africa award winner for Innovative Use of New Media. Ismail has used web 2.0 techniques on his project www.sowetouprisings.com  to map the historical 1976 Soweto uprisings activities in South Africa that led to the killing young students such as Hector Paterson. The project uses Google map and blogs to allow community and world visitors to understand the route and causes of the 1976 Soweto uprising. The aim of the project is also to allow community in Soweto to start participating by using this Web 20 enabled tools to promote and preserve this historical effort that contributed to the end of apartheid government.

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Interviewee: Ismail Farouk

Interviewer:  Chris Kgadima, Nkgowa Media

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.