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.

Recently I met Toni Eliasz from Ungana-Afrika in Pretoria. We discussed over web2.0 in the context of development. His thoughts were interesting on that of the potential and challenges of the collaborative web, given his experiences in South Africa and the region. Ungana is a NGO which devotes its work to find solutions for the capacity crisis.

A ‘capacity crisis’ is a mild expression to describe the skill levels and understanding of information and communications technologies (ICTs) within non-profits and small-to-medium enterprises in Africa. It will take a decade before the young, technologically literate generation can address these challenges.”

No surprise Toni highlighted first, challenges regarding web2.0 for rural development:

• The general problems of connectivity, such as the lack or high price for access. For example, a 3 GB ADSL connection costs up to a hundred dollars in South Africa, which is 15 times the price compared to Germany.
• Web2.0 requires often bandwidth or instant access for videos, podcasts or tools such as google docs.
• Before investing time and resources into web2.0, there is a question to be answered, ‘How do these tools benefit local communities and how can they contribute to development?’
• The computer and its appliances are complex and often need to be demystified for beginners, and like everywhere else, training is needed and that can also take quite some time.
• To use web2.0 tools such as wiki, blogs etc., requires well written documentation and training.
• The lack of technical expertise, which is often required, is currently very expensive and very limited outside of urban areas.
• Like many other ICT4D projects, the question for sustainability is important and yet not proven for concepts based on these new tools.

For Toni many challenges have to be overcome first before web2.0 can be adapted in rural communities or small organizations. I stated that there are examples such as the the Nata Village Blog, which shows how communities communicate their messages and interact with a worldwide audience. However, we both agreed, that it is the know-how, which at this stage it is mostly limited to intermediate organizations, who nevertheless have already a real benefit from the opportunities to interact and collaborate over the web. Ungana is on the APC network and will be sharing documented work experiences and toolkits, especially from their eRider project, to local technology service providers and networks to make quality support and capacity-building programs a reality.

We both agreed, in terms of connectivity, that the mobile phone is very promising. Whereas widely distributed and affordable Internet access will still take many years to arrive in Africa, first, interesting applications to link the mobile phone and web have to be offered. In South Africa for example Mixit is a big web driven mobile chatting portal. It got so far over 4 million subscribers. Toni concluded that ideas and its implementation have to be localized. As an example, two weeks ago a workshop in Kenya launched the development of a mobile advocacy toolkit, which is focusing on the needs of the organizations from the developing world. Homegrown approaches, which emphasizes the
sustainable need, are decisive.

On June 5 and 6, Euforic and CONCORD, two European networks for NGOs, organised a conference about ‘Communicating European Development Efforts’, in Brussels. The conference experimented with a weblog, as the central online space where information can be found. Several blogposts are written about the sessions, including short video clips, and photos and the presentations are uploaded using blip.tv for videos, a flickr group for photos and slideshare for presentations. You can have a look at the blog here. Though a small team was specifically responsible for the blog, participants could blog about the conference too, and could upload their pictures too (and were stimulated to do so).

If we would not use web2.0 tools, the information would probably not be available till much later. Now, the conversations and atmosphere of the conference is accessible for anybody with access to the net. Some conferences remain a black hole for people who have not been there, but for this case, the information is out there for all to access. This, in my opinion, gives a huge opportunity to, for instance, sister NGOs and NGO networks in the south and in other continents to learn from the conversations in this conference. They will definitely encounter similar challenges. On the other hand, people are not yet used to reading blogs and writing on blogs, so we can still make a big step in introducing these web2.0 tools and changing the habits of people, so that they can activity look for the information that’s interesting for their daily work.

This has been some of the main questions on the minds of many internet users. The issues of whether Web 2.0 is a new development or a reparkaged set of already existing tools is not relevant to many people in the catagory if “the world’s poor”. To these people, the most important thing is whether these tools can realy help alleviate their poverty. Many of these people are themselves not interested in the tools, but how these tools can be used to help them out of their poverty. From my own point of view, working with the rural poor and exploring how ICT could be used to reduce their poverty, I think we should be exploring the possibilities of using these tools to effectively raise the livelihoods of the poor farmers and traders who are in the majority. Issues of poor connectivity in major towns and communities in developing countries bring up a serious challenge to the promoters of any new technological advancement in the world which in most cases are targeted at reducing poverty. Can we look again at the issue of connectivity, especially in areas where dial-up is even a problem. How can these people effectively use the wonderful features that Web 2.0 offers?

Food for thought

Net2Con: Surfing the rolling cloud of connectivity: ICT and the developing world

Partha Sarker has inspriring thoughts in his presentation about web2.0 for development:

Does web 2.0 is completely irrelevant to the majority of the world ? No! Both have common underlying principles- sharing, collaboration, harnessing collective intelligence, peer to peer communication etc..

Podcast from this presentation
Presentation for download

Internationalization of the Social Web: An Interview with Teresa Crawford
Crawford’s view on the web2.0 for civil society and activism.

Everything You Need to Know About Web 2.0
A nice collection around the buzzword and what it means.

The Power of the Social Web for African Civil Society
A listing about the promises and pitfalls of web2.0.

Development 2.0: A New Paradigm for the Non-Profit Sector?
Very interesting article about web.2.0 and its implication on development aid.

I was curious when an article titled Web 2.0 can benefit the world’s poor appeared on Scidev.net. The authors Waleed al-Shobakky and Jack Imsdahl see in new web applications, such as Google docs, a great potential for developing countries. They write, “Web 2.0 can help these students create documents, track their families’ or villages’ business affairs in spreadsheets and save and store data online. Users only need access to the Internet to benefit from these applications.”

No doubt these applications will change the old concept of purchasing software for each computer. But what is the real benefit of having documents online? I think these applications have great potential to collaborate. But the article doesn’t stress enough the “capacity crisis” that developing countries are facing in the context of information and communication technologies. In Africa problems of simple training to use computers, affordable access, and having enough bandwidth, need to be solved. Furthermore, these online applications need instant access to the Internet which is only available to a minority.

A more helpful approach is open office, so people can work without an Internet connection. Another one is Jahazi, which has developed a USB flash stick full of applications. Also, Google wants to bridge this connectivity challenge with its latest tool called Gear, which will allow to work with online content while being offline.

But what strikes me the most about the article is that it leaves out the biggest opportunities about web2.0 and development. The potential lies in its users and what they do with these tools to communicate, share knowledge and create social media. New social networks are established online, which facilitate interaction and collaboration in an unprecedented way. Blogs, wikis or free sources are the drivers of web2.0.

The authors see language as an obstacle, but on the contrary, I believe that web2.0 with its open source dimension offers software in all kinds of languages (e.g. wordpress and drupal). This is a key factor to create own communities in local or regional contexts (e.g. the union of the Urban Poor from Indonesia, Afrigator, Egypt blog review). However, to which extent this can benefit the poor, will be further discussed on the web2fordev conference.

Crossposted: www.crisscrossed.net