The age of the typewriter: Data exchange in developing organizations

Information exchange is a major activity between development organizations, but unfortunately it is still done manually – typing up data from different sources or, even more advanced, copying figures from an Excel sheet to a Word document. Such is the case of reports, where a great amount of information is gathered. These reports have valuable and high-quality content, but they need huge efforts to be done and time tends to be lost between writing and publishing. This is just one example of how in many cases data is exchanged or used. Each time the wheel is reinvented.

Simulating a project content in real-time

A website can be a report simulated in real-time, which combines data sources across organizations and research institutions. On it, you cannot only see the latest status, but also the latest developments and updates seen from different perspectives depending on various indicators. So, in a health project, a survey taken with nurses from one region is fitted into the system, as well as new results from a scientific research about the latest drop rate of vaccinations. All project actors involved contribute to a common database for better transparency, real-time reporting and potentially better decision-making.

Is that all future music? No.

• AKVO is experimenting with Really Simple Reporting. Gathering data and using mobile phones for real-time (live) reporting.

• Also, you can check my post on open API at the web2fordev gateway with the example of the world bank. A key role can be played by open API (Application Programming Interfaces). A good example is the API of the World Bank, where you can access 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos. But of course photos can only be the beginning. Project data is way more important to enable different actors in the same field to benefit from data.

• An Open development camp is taking place in July in Washington.
  “There are a number of emerging activities focusing on improving the transparency of aid and allowing organizations, projects, researchers, practitioners, and clients in developing countries to have improved access to aid information, data on outcomes, knowledge, and tools.  We are getting closer to the day when anyone can easily determine who is doing what, where they are doing it, what they have learned, and who is funding them.”

• Check out data.gov with extensive data from the USA government or the projects of the sunlight foundation.

What is hindering an opening?

• Focus on proprietary closed software environments, which have just discovered open standards. The Sharepoint invasion, thanks to many IT departments, underlines this one way road.
• Internal websites from development organizations are focused on top-down communication. The Intranet represents information silos, where little data is combined.
• There are many playing fields from different departments using all kinds of solutions with little focus on interoperability. Many databases with different standards are often incompatible to work together.
• Development organizations focus more on securing confidential information than looking at the majority of data, which can be offered publicly.
• The disappointment after the hype of the 90’s where information management was a great solution. But things have changed during the last few years in terms of open standards, mashups and API’s.

Consequence: There are huge amounts of valuable data which has been little exploited. Data cannot be exchanged between development organizations and each organization collects its own data and reinvents the data wheel over and over again.

Surely, data alone does not make a project or an organization succeed and does not guarantee transparency. But open data could improve project work and planning a lot. It can certainly improve aid effectiveness. In older times, databases were often difficult to deal with and offered little output. Nowadays, potential for mashing data are different. A first step to take can be easy: Persistently work on offering data openly and work with simple common standards such as RSS. Sometimes it just needs one person: UN Democracy is an effort to give better access for UN Security council data.

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I have been reading so much euphoria about the new tool, which leads me to write this piece and mention a few enthusiasts, whom blogs I have continuously read and which I always enjoy.

“The Wave is not just another application, it’s a whole new way of using online information…  The Wave takes collaboration to a whole new level,” says Maish R Nichani. while Martin Koser writes, “Google Wave is poised to reshape (rewires I say) the nature of communication (yes, more face-to-face real-timelineness communication), improving the web experience.”

Real-time collaboration – what a nightmare!

Most excited was Lars Rasmussen, the developer of Google Wave, about the real-time collaboration. You can see changes made on a page within seconds. I have heard for the first time that the online collaboration’s biggest challenge was real-time changes, but on the contrary, that is the smallest problem. Bringing people to collaborate online is a huge challenge because of trust and the habit of a meeting culture, just to name a few. More importantly, I would argue that the growing speed of the Internet through life streams and tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed is made for a minority. Isn’t collaboration a process over hours, days and weeks?

We are witnessing more and more divides on the web

Who can and wants to master all this information every minute. How can you possible still work productively, on top of the ringing telephone and colleagues interrupting you. So, real-time collaboration can be great in a session, but if that is the future of collaboration, then it means that one has to collaborate 24/7. We have to ask us if instant communication really makes us more productive. Typing quickly a message in a smart phone in a go is perhaps not the greatest contribution. I argue that online collaboration, exchange and creativity needs time and breaks. I also doubt that this is a will change with the younger generation.

People, unlike tools, bring change

I wrote many posts about how different tools, such as blogs and RSS, can make a difference for information sharing and lead to more productivity and creativity. No doubt, Google Wave, combines here in an innovative way previous tools.

But all my experiences in online collaboration showed me that when a certain need has to exist. If that is the case even trivial mailing lists or a forum from the post web2.0 times can work dynamically. A fancy tool alone will not convince colleagues to share more information online. The tool can help and support interaction, but does not deliver interaction per se. Google Wave combines in an intelligent way many different streams knowledge worker have to deal with every day. But email is still seen as a core way to communicate and it will take many more years before this will change at large. Will new tools make it easier for that change to happen? I doubt it.

Lee Bryant makes a good point in this regard: “There is an echo chamber of voices confirming each other in the newest tool. “When they switch tools, the previous tools are “dead” and the new tool is “the future”. Meanwhile, millions of people continue using Outlook as a primary interface to their work, just as they did a decade ago.”

Luckily at least Google Wave is open source, which allows to be runned on an own server. Online collaboration takes a culture shift towards openness and trust to work online. In most organizations that takes a long road – even firms, who are the frontrunners such as IBM, face the same internal struggles, a colleague has recently told me.

A tool for one part of the world

Lars Rasmussen pointed out rightly that email is already forty years old and it is time for something new. But I am not sure that is the way forward because of one other reason: bandwidth!

Jon Goshier outlines this point nicely: “Of course, I have to point out that all this real-time communication stuff only matters to the fraction of people on the planet with good bandwidth. Here in Uganda, I’m so glad when an email actually makes it out of the queue that I don’t even bother to think about ‘rewinding’ conversations and dragging and dropping video! In all seriousness, it’s this reduction in basic utility for all users that worries me. Most Google’ products are by-in-large accessible no matter what kind of computer you’re on (except maybe Google Earth). With Wave they seem to be going down a path that might be a little more exclusive in nature. Not a deal-breaker but a concern none-the-less.”

Related posts:

1. From A-Z to Organization2.0: F – Flexible staff and members A B C D E
2. 9 Examples of innovative tools for the mobile phone One of the
3. From A-Z to Organization2.0: Q – Quality takes time A B C D E

Online Mapping for Development: Opportunities and Challenges

Maps are an effective medium which can be used for development projects. They help visualise the spatial distribution of complex problems their inter-relationships and promote awareness. In recent years the availability of free or low-cost digital maps and remote sensed images has unleashed unprecedented ways to make use of spatial information for a variety of purposes. Last week we analysed the potential of open data sources for development. Open maps are an excellent example illustrating the many ways to use and link information in creative ways. In almost any development project, maps can assist in the interpretation of spatial issues, foster awareness and support transparency. Le Monde Diplomatique, offers interesting examples on using maps to visualize complex conflict situations. Unfortunately in developing countries large scale maps are not always easy to obtain, data are often outdated or inaccurate or too expensive. Free digital maps offer an alternative.
Potentials and Opportunities

Here are a few examples:

• The Harvard university runs the AfricaMap project, where one can view the African continent through different data layers. It is a good place to experiment a bit. For example in turning layers on and off for display and adjusting their transparency allows users to superimpose data sets. Resulting thematic maps can be linked from other sites. .

• Back at the 2007 Web2forDev International Conference Paul Saunby presented some great simulations on maps using open data around the issue of climate change. That way he could simulate future forecasts for a specific coast. “Such maps could provide planners with valuable information on where to build new roads or houses. They could also give farmers a better idea of where to plant next season’s crops or how best to irrigate their fields.”

• UNEP offers the Atlas of the Changing Environment: “Through illustrations, satellite images, ground photographs and powered by Google Maps, this interactive media depicts and describes humanity’s past and present impact on the environment.”

• A renouned example for putting maps to work is Ushahidi which means “testimony” in Swahili, where human rights activists offers a platform that crowdsources crisis information. It allows anyone to submit information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form. Resulting data are visualised on thematic maps. Recent initiatives covered the Swine Flu Epidemic and the elections in India. The same free and open source application has been used to spatially document the Gaza war and Eastern Congo conflict.

• The AGCommons project combines mapping with mobile phones and aims to equip “Africa’s farmers with location-specific information to reduce uncertainty and increase returns“. AGCommons was one of the organizers behind the WhereCamp in Nairobi, entirely devoted to mapping.

• Another ambitious project is done by scientists from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), who want to create the first detailed digital soil map of sub-Saharan Africa. “African soils are among the poorest in the world, and many farmers suffer from chronically low-yielding crops. With accurate soil maps, we find farmers can increase their yields by around 60%, and sometimes double.” (BBC)

But whoever plans to make use of online maps in Africa should have a look at Google maps and Open Street Maps. Both services offer already some impressive maps for some parts of Africa. Google Maps introduced lately a massive update of maps for Western Africa and Open Street Maps (OSM) added more then hundred thousand miles of roads lately.

Google Maps acquires map material and offers to combine it with third party data and on your own website. Open Street Maps goes a step further offers its complete data with all geo reference for free under the creative commons license. The license is currently changed to a an Open Database License Agreement. OSM relies completely on volunteer work. Thousand of GPS equipped mapers go through streets or parks worldwide and contribute to maps. The result are impressive and in some place the same as good as Google maps or even better. Check out how Mikel Maron initiated some detail mapping for Palestine.

Aidworker shows how OSM maps are even much better in developing countries on the example of Kabul and Tiblis. So in the case of OSM you can download entire geodata, whereas in Google you somehow are bind to their digital maps, which allow impressive presentations.

Challenges

There are undoubtedly also some challenges. In the context only some parts and mainly urban areas have been mapped and there is a need for a critical mass of mappers to enter and cross-validate data in order to achieve a satisfactory degree of accuracy. The dilemma is that where maps are needed most, not enough volunteers are available and in other countries such as in Europe, maps have been developed the furthest. The transparency of maps can also be used for critical issues and lead to discrimination as the Times report from Japan.

Nevertheless digital maps have catapulted cartography into new dimensions in recent years. As a most information is location-specific, mapping offers great opportunities to support communication in development. In the past mapmaking was the realm of a few. Today mapmaking has become a widespread activity accessible to experts and non-experts, well minded and otherwise. Collaborative mapmaking offers great opportunities for development organizations to share and collect data.

Words of Caution

Said that a few words of caution are necessary: Users of online mapping facilities should have a close look at the terms of service they sign up before submitting their contributions. In the case of Google Map Maker upon submission of the data, the service provider acquires “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, distribute, and create derivative works.

Further, the frenzy of geo-tagging and online publishing of images, videos and other type of information without obtaining prior informed consent from the concerned parties may result in the infringement of privacy and intellectual property rights. With Open Street Maps in the old and new license, the contributed data is free for reuse and can be used for commercial purposes as well.

At WhereCampAfrica, a gathering which brought together geographers, cartographers and mobile mapping specialists to discuss the potential – and difficulties – of the ‘geographic web’ in Africa, participants expressed their concern that indiscriminate online mapping could feed tensions over land ownership and resource use and control (BBC).

The Inportance of Good Practice

In times where online mapmaking has reached exponential growth rates, there is the need to be increasingly aware of the implications and impact of making geo-located information publicly available and on the need to adhere to the ethical principles of privacy, confidentiality, of obtaining prior informed consent and avoiding exposing knowledge holders at risk.  Practical ethics in the context of participatory mapmaking are discussed on an article published on Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) in 2006. The article is available in 12 languages.

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I tried answering these questions two weeks ago at the Medien Jour Fix,  an interesting German network around communication and development, organized by MICT. I presented the latest developments around mobile phones in Africa, which did not seem to have been that much noticed in Germany. In most of presentations the radio played a key role as an instrument for media work.

I had mused before about potential future trends of mobile activism, but this time I highlighted the differences between the all-purpose-tool, its different uses and its implications. I was curious to do such a presentation on ICT for development in front of a German audience, which was widely mixed with delegates from media, NGOs and scientists.

I uploaded my presentation here and thanks to Creative Commons License I found some great photos.



I began my presentation with the well known satellite image of the world at night. On it one can see how dark Africa is and it seems as if not much is happening there. But because it is always difficult to generalize about the continent as a whole, I chose some examples:

• Mobile innovation even comes from Africa such as mobile finances.
• The highest growth rate is on the African continent.
• 99%
 of 
Tanzanians 
are 
in

 direct
 reach
 of 
a 
mobile 
phone.
• The highest traffic to the BBC mobile website comes from Africa.

But what makes mobile phone so special?

It is so especial because it combines all former media, such as telephone, Internet, and even radio and television, and because one can:

1. Communicate and receive information (radio, television and Internet)
2. Document and collect information
3. Publish information in text, audio and video
4. Can network in different ways on a peer-to-peer basis

So a passive recipient can become an active user or citizen.

The excellent Pomise of Ubiquity report from Internews has some fascinating statistics such as the different media access. In most countries, 2008 signified a turning point as more people owned mobile phones than televisions. So, the mobile phone becomes a key instrument to receive information via Internet, listen to radio (FM mobile phone) and watch videos although the latter has not worked yet and is unrealistic due to high costs. Location-based services will be very promising.

“A world in which nearly everyone owns a mobile linked into networks advanced enough to offer video and location-based services is years, not decades, away.” Internews

Different spheres of mobile activism

I looked, during my presentation, at political activism and focused on four different spheres and examples even though there is still a lot more happening (and much more in many African countries than in Europe).

1. Public sphere
   The mobile phone will become an important tool to shape the public sphere. Two examples are Voices of Africa and mobile African reporters. I showed a great footage from Cameroon about a Guiness factory polluting water sources. This example shows the potential to report better from the local context. But I also wonder when will there be a critical mass of an audience for such reports?
2. Participation
   The radio still plays a decisive role, because it reaches many more groups of people and particularly illiterate listeners. Combining a mobile campaign with the radio can be a great package. The organisation AZUR in Congo launched a while ago an SMS campaign, where they asked women to report about cases of domestic violence. The answeres were then portrayed and discussed in a radio show.
3. Transparency
   For some years now, the monitoring of elections has been happening in different African countries such as Zimbabwe or Nigeria. Digiactive has a great comparative case study analysis. In Barcelona, I followed an insightful presentation by Ethan Zuckerman, where he describes a great example from last year’s election in Zimbabwe:
   “SMS is an effective tool for monitoring all sorts of large, dangerous mammals. You can make the argument that Morgan Tsvanagarai was able to challenge the first round of Zimbabwe’s presidential elections in no small part due to SMS. A change in polling law meant that every local polling station in Zimbabwe was required to post local voting results publicly. Zimbabwe’s opposition party, MDC, organized an effort to collect these results via SMS. As a result, the MDC knew, within a few hours after the close of polls, that they’d received more votes than ZANU-PF.” By the way, an organization called Sokwanele has also been doing some pioneering work in Zimbabwe for mobile activism. Another one is Kubatana, which developed the Freedom fone.
4. Networking
   A bit more than a year ago cotton-workers in the Nile delta striked for a higher salary. They went into strike for a few weeks long because of the inflation, which took most of what little was left. Unrecognized by media in Egypt and internationally, an Egyptian woman, who did not use to be an activist, decided to set up a Facebook group to solidarize with the strikers. The group grew in a few weeks to more than 70,000 members (Egypt has about around 700,000 Facebook members). There is an enormous potential to use social networks for campaigns and protests. I think these networks will be working over the mobile phone in the future as I described here. Nevertheless in this case the protest could not made it to the the street, as the Egyptian authorities hardly allowed any protests on their streets. But mobile phones play a decisive role in protest coordination. Patrick Meier, also from Digiactive, did a great presentation about Mobile for Advocacy and Activism.

Challenges

Unfortunately, there are numerous challenges to mobile activism in Africa and, therefore, it is even more incredible how many initiatives are happening.  Just to name a few:

• Usage
  The costs of mobile communication or SMS are still very high. Although rural areas a now much better connected, there is a disparity between rural and urban areas, where one part becomes only passive recipients of information.
• Government
  Mobile networks can be even easier controlled such as the Internet, because they belong to one provider. Recently, it came out that half state owned Vodafone in Egypt gave out its customers data about the above described strike to the Egyptian police.
• Mobile Provider
  As much as mobile providers have done positive for the dissemination of mobile phones , they have their own business interests, which do not necessarily fit and promote activism. Such are walled gardens, where companies can and want to control what is offered and exchanged.
• Activism
  Although mobile activism is at least 8 years old, since the Estrada campaign in the Philippines, it has just started and a lot of experimenting is happening. It is also clear that it can also be a tool for a mean and cannot be useful for any form of activism. A theatre group might have more impact on the issue of HIV/Aids than an SMS campaign.

The presentation lead to a discussion around the quality of information, which is a typical debate in Germany, where journalists and bloggers continuously battle over who is better. Ironically, a journalist from the Deutsche Welle, who hosts the annual Blog Awards, asked me how the information from mobile reporters could be verified or controlled. Luckily, that was an exception, as there were many interesting examples for media communication work presented from Laos and Cambodia.

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3. My take on the state of mobile phones for developments As an outc

Reality Check – Computers and Rural Development

Back at the Web4dev conference in February, Grant Cambridge made a very interesting presentation called: Access to Information. Challenges and Obstacles – a Rural African Perspective. Cambridge describes in his presentation the situation in rural South Africa, where:

• There is virtually no access to computers
• There is limited access to knowledge and information
• A child’s potential to learn is directly proportional to the knowledge of the teacher
• Many people have never even typed their names on a keyboard
• Where the edge of your world is as far as you can walk in a day

He describes that even the much better accessible mobile phone involves multiple challenges, such as “People walking up to 3 miles several times per week to recharge battery.” Cambridge works on a robust single or multi-terminal system for rural areas, and concludes in his presentation that access does not imply inclusion.  Check also the others presentations from the web4dev conference.

In an article for APC, which asks, “Is there still a need for telecentres now that there are mobile phones?” Ian Howard argues by highlighting the huge challenges for access in rural areas and the problems leaving it all up to mobile providers.

“The development of autonomous infrastructure is still required in order to meet the needs of rural communities. These new mobile-phone infrastructures are largely poised as oligopolies, protected from the threat of new entrants by high licensing fees and reserved frequency allotments.”

Ednah Karamagi underlines in her article Web 2.0 in rural areas – myth or practical? That “connectivity in many of the districts is very limited or even non-existent,” and continues, “In fact, most people in these areas [rural areas] don’t even know how to use it [Internet], let alone how it can be applied to improve their livelihoods. Computers are still perceived as white elephants – they are for the literate.”

But the importance and possibilities of ICT has drastically changed with mobile phones as Ben White shows in his research in Uganda, where, for example, a student spends around 40% of his income on mobile phone credit.

Steve Song also makes an observation about the usage of mobile phones in Kenya, from the latest findings of the ResearchICTAfrica initiative:

Recent research from ResearchICTAfrica reveals that Kenyans are spending incredible amounts on mobile communication as a proportion of income. Here’s how it breaks down. The average Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile communication. For the bottom 75% of the population, that figure goes up to 63.6%. In terms of total individual income, the average Kenyan spends 16.7% of their income on mobile communication. That figure rises to 26.6% when looking at the bottom 75% of the population. These figures are astounding. It highlights the fact that Africans are paying for mobile communication in spite of how expensive it is, not because of how affordable it is.

Song concluded that it “emphasises how critical access to mobile communication is for people,” but Kathleen Diga shows in her study about Mobile Cell Phones and Poverty Reduction that mobile phone usages can lead also to more poverty and create new divides:

According to the findings, the challenges which rural households face include making sacrifices such as travel expenses and store-bought food budgets in order to pay the costs of mobile phone services.  Findings also show that gender inequality through exacerbated asset control and mobile phone inexperience drive further digital divide in Katote, Uganda.

Crystal Watley, from Voices of Africa, highlighted some more challenges around women and mobile usage on the mobile active mailing list:

Here in Kenya, mobile phones have added great value to the lives of the citizens from the deep villages to the urban centers. But there are a few negative consequences in family relationships. 1) Cell phones make it easier to cheat on your spouse 2) Cell phones GIVE away the secrets of the spouses that were already cheating thus causing household tension and domestic violence. 3) African men tend to be very jealous and often use mobile phones as a way to control their women monitoring every message and call. 4) Violence and jealousy is also caused between those who own phones and those who do not. Or between those with different model phones. Theft is rampant. 5) Kenyans do not understand calling courtesy and can sometimes call at all sorts of hours.

Unfortunately, there are only few studies on the concrete benefit of ICTs and, for example, in the case of mobile phones, the fishery example is often recited, where one can read many pros and cons. However, the mobile phone has an impact, as Watley points out, on the positive and negative.  Another interesting attempt to portray the changes of mobile phones in daily life was done by a new documentary from my friends at ICT4D.at.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Forum: Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas Next week
2. My take on the state of mobile phones for developments As an outc
3. Mobile phone innovation may not happen where you think it does The first

Some examples

• Checking up a profile on Facebook or at least access the log in page, which has alone almost 800kb! In a cybercafe, where you have to pay fees per minute, it may take up to 3 minutes with a dial up modem connection.

• Video or audio upload is almost impossible with a low bandwidth connection and can cost you a lot when your tariff is measured in volume instead of time.

• This blog is based on Wordpress, which is a great open source tool, but unfortunately not made for a dial up connections. If you want to publish a new post on Wordpress (2.7.1), you have to download over 750kb first.

Unfortunately even the free and open source community has little activity around low bandwidth solutions.

Where are the low bandwidth solutions?
One really great initiative is Maneno, which not only tries to provide a low bandwidth blogging solution in Africa, but also focuses on offering multilingual options emphasising on various African languages such as Bamanankan and Swahili, beside French, English, Arabic and Portuguese. I got in contact with Maneno recently and their team ensured me that their system is designed as low as 13 kb without images and 33 kb including images.

Another one is Dgroups, a community platform based on emails. I am currently working on a project for IICD, which has over 50.000 members worldwide. Dgroups has just been newly launched and it now offers the administration of groups solely by email.

Twitter can make a difference as it lets you send and receive messages via mobile phone. But, unfortunately, Twitter gave up its free SMS service a while ago. I asked one of the Twitter founders, Jack Dorsey, at the e-stats conference when the free service is coming back, to which he replied ‘on mid year.’ This leaves the question, ‘what can be said in 140 characters?’ Quite a lot when you look at the Mobile Voices project just featured by the Netsquared N2Y2 challenge.

But one thing is for sure, just because you only have low bandwidth connection, does not mean you want to see dull, text based websites. There are various ways to make websites look appealing and still reduce the data size considerable. Aptivate has excellent Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth.

What is the difference with mobile phones?
Low-bandwidth is a big topic for mobile phones as 3G is not everywhere available; in Africa it is only available in big cities.  In many cases all information exchange is limited to SMS exchange solutions. There are  different solutions that need to deal with the heavy loaded web. One such is the Opera mini browser, which  tries to compress data as much as possible, compressing up to 90% according to a presentation at the W3C Maputo meeting.

UPDATE

There was an interesting discussion on the KM4DEV mailing list and here is a summary of key points.

UPDATE 2

Jonathan Goshier has a great and critical blog post around this topic and emphasis the importance of local services: Web 2.0 Services Shutting Out Developing Countries

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2. The participatory web – new potentials for ICT in rural areas I had the
3. The race to map Africa and ethical issues around online mapping I started

This has changed quite a lot, with fascinating new ways to individually engage on a peer to peer basis. Nowadays you can not only choose your donor, but also get yourself involved and follow the whole project and its outcome (e.g. Globalgiving or Kiva). There are also many more ways to engage such as the global neighbourhood Nabuur, where not everything is just about money, but also about the expertise that thousands of volunteers worldwide bring to the community. The social web has unleashed a huge wave of massive collaboration for social good already difficult to oversee. Being it science without borders, or working jointly on the first open source ecological village, or individually start their own little fundraising project, a small Facebook group, and ask for further action.

That brings up the questions: What organization will and can play in the future? We are slowly moving into ad-hoc peer-to-peer voluntarism independent from organizations. A nightmare for a classical fundraising approach. Certainly, organizations which depend on personal donations and mobilization of members will have a tough time if they do not include their audience.

But lets come back to new ways of volunteering. No doubt it is and will always be difficult to come up with new projects to fund, but there are now many existing projects which developed around all types of volunteer work efficiently. In many of this cases, costs are minimal and the output much higher thanks to all the expertise from participants. This is the case for a project outline not only written by two experts, but in a Wikipedia kind of fashion by numerous volunteers, which highlights all kinds of experiences. Will the chances of success be higher, or is the complexity of the project setting overwhelming? I imagine the more expertise there is, the better the project can be implemented. Look at the Katine project by the Guardian, where suddenly a project is portrayed from all different angles.

Another promising aspect of micro-volunteering can be seen on pages such as microvoluntarios.org and extraordinaries.org. In the first, volunteers can contribute with small tasks, which seems also attractive to companies, who donate the time of their employees. In the second, you can even donate through your mobile phone from wherever you are. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote a nice blog post about it.

Waiting for the bus and have nothing better to do than play around with your phone? Games are no longer the only options – now you can volunteer. The Extraordinaries (hat tip: Chris Kreutz) “delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.” Here’s some examples of what you could do while waiting for your doctor’s appointment: translate micro-finance loan applications (Kiva); transcribe subtitles for human rights videos (Witness) or help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL). A nice example of tapping into the collective “cognitive surplus” for social innovation purposes.

So, not mass, but micro-collaboration might be next big thing. There are many examples which show that this could have working results even though, so far, only a minority knows about these new ways of engaging. Donating was yesterday, engaging yourself is next.

Related posts:

1. Web2fordev one year after – a critical review Most of my
2. From A-Z to Organization2.0: F – Flexible staff and members A B C D E
3. From A-Z to Organization2.0: U – Usability = Higher Motiviation A B C D E

“A world in which nearly everyone owns a mobile linked into networks advanced enough to offer video and location-based services is years, not decades, away.” (Internews report)

The potentials are various and if we want to understand them and think out-of-the-box, we have to exclude the traditional approaches through personal computers and the Internet. But the difficulty is to find out how mobile phones will be used in the future. Nathan Eagle points it out rightly: “people are going to do work on their mobile phones in Africa, we just don’t know what it is yet.”

Examples

To come a step closer, I have listed some innovative examples for mobile phones from around the world.

• Join Us! A mobile phone software management for enthusiasts (PDF) around ”flash mobs” interested in Performing Social Tasks. This application is developed on Android, an open source system introduced by Google, where you can find networks through your mobile for different causes like environment and interact solely through your mobile phone.
• From Britt Bravo, a nice list of nonprofit applications for iPhones:
  The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Guide to help you make sustainable seafood choices.
• GoodGuide provides iPhone users access to the world’s largest and most reliable sources of information on health, environmental and social performance of everyday products and companies.
• Fixmystreet.com offers also an iPhone version, where you can now record a problem by using its camera and GPS, ready for checking and submitting to the council.
• WideNoise is an iPhone and iPod Touch application that samples decibel noise levels, and displays them on a worldwide interactive map (noise pollution).
• Escorio is on of the winners of the Google Android developer challenge that tracks your mobile carbon footprint. “Reduce and offset it. Inspire others to do the same.“
• Ushahidi “a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline”, is (will be) also developed for an iPhone for complete access.
• Scientists from the University of California hacked a mobile phone to analyze blood, detect disease.
• GeoChat: Emergent Group Communication at the Edge of the Network
  The application is developed by Instedd. They also have a great news service around health and humanitarian work and technology.

Does it happen everywhere?

But is it really happening everywhere? Isn’t the iPhone just a tool for the northern hemisphere? Yes, and even faster in Asia and it might be even adopted sooner in developing countries. Opera has some interesting monthly statistics in this regard. For example  Jamaican access via mobile web, has already exceeded the access via PCs. Would you have guessed that 80% of mobile web traffic to the BBC comes form Africa? Also, in China students save their money to share a smart phone with flat-rate to do  their research. Now, there is even an sms based browser for mobile phones.

Lastly, I wonder how different innovations around the mobile phone will be? I think it will be even faster than on PCs, because mobile allow far more ways to hack it.

Related posts:

1. Mobile phone innovation may not happen where you think it does The first
2. Mobile Activism in Africa Why and ho
3. Future trends of mobile activism The simple

Campaign: Storytelling and social media
Beth Kanter has an excellent presentation on storytelling & social media. First of all, she emphasizes that counting metrics alone makes little sense as they need to be part of a bigger framework. She takes the case of a campaign, which might have some good analogies to single social network platforms or communities of practice.

“Return on Investment is a much broader concept that doing math. If you lay it step-by-step, it includes these:

• Smart Objective
• Defined Audience
• Clearly articulated benefits statement that looks at tangible and intangible
• Use of metrics to measure your results
• Results translated into dollar value (donations or time saved)
• Financial calculations: net gain, opportunity cost, or comparison to other method
• Communicating the results”

Social network: Knowledge sharing and learning
If I translate that to my case, I have not got the smartest goal in terms of quantifiable results: A high value and share of knowledge. Lets say it is quite generic. But as Richard Dennison writes here, that is exactly a problem:

If you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. We are driving quality, innovation and creativity out of our businesses and institutions in favour of quantity. It has been shown again and again that our obsession with targets simply perverts activities to meet those targets at the expense of doing something useful or meaningful.

Nevertheless, I think there are at least some metrics that let you see how intensive or broad your interaction is. A while ago I collected already some metrics thanks to Rachel Happe.

I tried to approach this issue the following clusters and example metrics:

Representation
If you really want to achieve a high value you need a diverse representation.

• A good platform has a certain mix of representations: e.g. countries, organizations or departments, etc.
• The representation can be measured by visitors, members, contributions.
• You can set a criteria raster. For example, an own organization is less important and external stakeholders are more valuable.

Contributions
The percentage of contribution is a key indicator of the willingness to engage, and whether your website is attractive or not. For example, if more than 10% of your network is regularly participative (i.e. contributing), you have then achieved quite something.

• Frequency of new resources and the average percentage of member contributions.
• Mix of contributions, e.g. links are not as valuable as blog posts through a ranking.

Interaction

• Ratio of comments vs. resources: Average percentage of comments on each contribution such as blog posts, links, etc.
• The ratio of comments towards members.
• The amount of blog posts linking to other blog posts in the network.

Content (quality)

• The bounce rate of your website says how much people were interested to click further.
• Average time spent on pages.
• Page views. The more people browse pages – the more interest they have.
• The average amount of tags used by each contributor.

Outreach of website

• Growth of members or newsletter subscriber
• The amount of invitations sent from your platform.
• The amount of links to your platform.

Of course these metrics do not bring you much further in terms of quality, but I guess that could be solved by analysing the sample content or making a survey. But, who can say what content has higher quality for learning? It is not that easy. What do you think? Do you maybe have more metrics?

I checked in the past days external statistic systems such as Google Analytics and they only offer a few from the above metrics. So it is important to choose a platform which offers you more statistics. Measuring this by mailing is much simpler. In a next step I will try to get this information out of a Drupal platform and then contemplate more about Beth’s point to not only leave it on counting.

Two interesting attempts of calculators are here:

• The PBwiki ROI Calculator
• Calculator for social network campaigns

Related posts:

1. Reach your audience – don’t talk about Web 2.0 or social media Is it enou
2. Mobile phone innovation may not happen where you think it does The first
3. From A-Z to Organization2.0: Q – Quality takes time A B C D E

Will organizations and companies still be running in the future by 9-5 working schemes? Can the members’ or stakeholders’ relationship still be organized in formal or even hierarchical patterns? I doubt it. But what are the potentially different ways for organizations to work independently from time and space? The Internet will pay an increasing role on it, whether we like it or not.

In a PEW Internet study, where a survey about the future of the Internet was made, 56% of the partakers agreed with this statement:

2020, well-connected knowledge workers in more-developed nations have willingly eliminated the industrial-age boundaries between work hours and personal time. Outside of formally scheduled activities, work and play are  seamlessly integrated in most of these workers’ lives. This is a net-positive for npeople. They blend personal/professional duties wherever they happen to be when they are called upon to perform them—from their homes, the gym, the mall, a library, and possibly even their company’s communal meeting space, which may exist in a new virtual-reality format.

So far most organizations have not realized yet the pervasiveness of the Internet in the everyday work life. It is still seen as the thing (the PC) on the desk, from which one can access information. There information exchange is limited to emails and intranet. Most organizations reside still in an old model of one place at a  time, where soon a important large percentage of daily project management will be online. Some organizations do that already and work completely decentralized.

Some organizations went already further and work more decentralized. Such organizations are Euforic (presentation) or, completely remotely, the founder of the Wordpress blog software Automatic or Socialtext.
These companies organize themselves almost completely over the web: 1) to collaborate in teams and 2) to engage with the outside world (clients or stakeholders).

What are the consequences of organization and staff?

• The location of the staff’s office plays a decreasing role.
• The separation between private and work life blurs even more.
• Working online needs more discipline and transparency because of the limited face-to-face exchange.
• Knowledge sharing and learning has to be organized very differently to compensate the little time of direct contact.
• Project management needs much more self-determined on clearer project results.
• Organizations need to rely much more on external knowledge – a key would be: How to include external knowledge into processes from members, stakeholder or consultants.

Why are small organizations much stronger?
Small organizations will have major advantages as they become more flexible, but at the same time they can compete much easier with bigger organizations because:

1. Big organizations used to have an information advantage. They could often gather the expertise that small organizations cannot offer. Nowadays, a lot of expertise is available on the web offered by more and more people.
2. Strong membership organizations used to have more political bargain power. Nowadays, small organizations shape ad-hoc alliances with other organizations and are potentially stronger.
3. Small organizations can keep the transaction cost much lower than bigger organizations, but still can network globally as only big organizations used to do in earlier times.

So how will organizations address these potentials and challenges?
This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Related posts:

1. From A-Z to Organization2.0: U – Usability = Higher Motiviation A B C D E
2. From A-Z to Organization2.0: Q – Quality takes time A B C D E
3. Web2fordev one year after – a critical review Most of my

Describe to us the programme on ICTs, especially the use of mobile phones for rural development, which you are working for. Why do you find mobile phones to be particularly interesting in your line of work?
C.K.: I worked for a project on “knowledge systems in rural areas” for GTZ. I look at the topic from different angles such as knowledge sharing, networking and social change and try to identify new potentials. I don’t glance at mobile phones from an economical point of view only, but consider them as means for different areas in social development. For example activists around human rights are the most innovative users of mobile telephone technology for their causes. The interesting thing about mobile phones is that they are so different from all the other ICTs. First of all this all-purpose tool is in the ownership by a majority of Africans across the continent and its users have created creative extra usages for mobile phones. Second it is a different approach compared to conventional ICT4D projects, which relied often on huge funding and did not focus enough on the users’ perspective. But Mobiles are available for low costs and already are adapted for many purposes.

What positive impacts could you achieve for agriculture, food security and/or rural development? How, in your opinion, can we empower local farmers to really benefit from this application?
C.K.: Mobile phones are such a powerful tool because they fill a gap of prior limited means of communication. We have just started to use the various potential of mobile phones. At first, mobile phones have particularly connected rural with urban areas. Nowadays we witness new forms of information delivery and exchange particular with rural areas for agriculture or health, never before possible like that. There are great examples in Africa of local adapted mobile software solutions (e.g. EPROM) orientated on community needs and dealing with technical constraints. Promising is also the formation of own language spaces and innovative voice recognition solutions to address the illiteracy challenge.

Did it also cause a change in working or living habits or even of the whole culture for the locals? Could you give examples, please?
C.K.: Mobile phones are a communication break through. The interesting question is: What will people make out of it? There are already fascinating examples, how mobile phone users invent on forms to use it particular for business. But the impact of mobile phone usage is not analyzed well enough so far. Studies only focus on some areas such as the famous fishery example. Although it is obvious that the mobile phone has changed a lot in societies, therefore an analysis of local adaptation in different cultural contexts is necessary. Apart from all the possible characteristics of mobile phones for rural development they are still strongest with ordinary communication. Like in Europe in the beginning of integrating mobiles into the everyday life, people want to call their family and friends to talk to them in the first run. Very promising are social mobile applications, which will be very interesting in the next future. What happens if you can deliver information to each mobile phone, but also let users interact in networks or with the web. There are fascinating examples such as Ushahidi or the Freedom Fone. But also money transfers via mobiles are revolutionary. In countries where less than 10% of the people have bank accounts using air time as a way of paying and transferring money has a huge impact on society.

What are the challenges you are facing in your projects? Technically, socially, economically, …
C.K.: Everybody is so enthusiastic about mobile phones for development and, of course, I am too, but you also have to be a little bit critical. There is quite a hype around mobile phones. There is a lot of experimentation happening and too little exchange of experiences. The technology itself can’t solve problems. Mobile phones are only the means that you can use to improve rural peoples livelihoods through the best fit for each situation. I do believe that there is also the danger of forgetting some important lessons learnt from many ICT4D projects, which failed for a lot of reasons. One was the lack of sustainability, and another, that mobile phones can only be a mean to an end. And of course, there are many challenges that the use of mobile phone faces: high costs, illiteracy and in many cases, mobile phones projects still have to prove the benefit for users. There are for example problems concerning gender. In some countries women have difficulties to get access to mobile phones or can’t communicate independently. Also the tremendous costs have an impact on the people. Some substitute a whole meal for mobile phone credit. In study in Africa some mobile phone users became even poorer.

What are your predictions for the future?
C.K.: We have only started to tap upon the potential of this all-purpose tool. It will be interesting to see the role of development organization. There are potentials to use it in different approaches in development projects, but also to improve their own work. The open source water and sanitation initiative lets mobile African reporters evaluate their projects. It is obvious that access to the Internet will happen in Africa in the future mainly through mobile phones. But it will be a challenge to deal with the constraints of little mobile phone screen. Nevertheless the ubiquitous connection through mobile phones has many advantages and particular in rural areas offer a linkage with urban areas not possible before. It will be interesting to analyze these implications. Rural areas suddenly have new instruments to broadcast from or analyze their environment. The mobile phone can be already a sensor rich tool with GPS, to measure the velocity or to analyze blood and detect diseases. It will empower mobile phone users to embrace it for all kind daily needed purposes and for social change. The mobile becomes a research tool to give its user the capacity to collect and share information. Open information repositories can be created for development work. One outcome is increasing transparency. Mobile phones can be the key for collectively contributing to new information systems and receiving all sorts of information. The future for mobile phones will be in this kind of data exchange or network exchange to empower people with knowledge, like Nokia’s weather updates in local languages. Surely, some form of data exchange has to work for that, which still inhibits several challenges. But this form of information exchange and networking will happen – whatever technology is behind it. Tools for information exchange solely relying on SMS prove this is possible for all phones.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Forum: Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas Next week
2. Mobile phones for development = grassroots innovations Recently,
3. Mobile phone innovation may not happen where you think it does The first

Web 2.0 solutions offer people in rural areas a platform for networking and knowledge exchange. This brochure provides a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It serves as a practice-oriented introduction to the theme and discusses both the potentials and the possible limits to the participatory web.

Download publication

Table of Content

• Participatory Web – New Potentials for ICT in Rural Areas (Annemarie Matthess, Christian Kreutz)
• NABUUR: Effective Online Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer (Rolf Kleef, Raul Caceres)
• Innovation, Interaction, Information: Using the Social Web (Peter Ballantyne)
  in Agricultural Development
• Empowering Farmers in India Using the Kisan Blog (Runa Sarkar, Debahsis Pattanaik)
• Web 2.0 in Ecuador: Enhancing Citizenship (Paula Carrión)
• Farmer-led Documentation (Dorine Rüter, Anne Piepenstock)
• Potential of Mobile: Cambodian Farmers Turn to their Phones (Ken Banks, Christian Kreutz)
• The Knowledge Sharing Kit: CGIAR’s Wiki Approach (Gerry Toomey)

Rural areas in developing countries are confronted by many challenges when it comes to information access and participation in knowledge networks. Since its beginnings, the potential of knowledge sharing throughout the Internet has had high hopes, but it has not fulfilled its promises yet. Obvious challenges are low connectivity particularly in rural areas, low literacy rate, lack of media competence to use the web and well function models to provide and target information. Newer technologies such as interactive web tools and the mobile phone offer promising ways to achieve a more inclusive Internet and use the web to learn from each other. Throughout the last years organisations and projects have started experimenting with the “read and write web” and achieved new approaches to use information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). Different to traditional ICT projects, this approach focuses on the users, it is their engagement and creativity that makes the networking and learning effort vibrant.

Two major questions persist: Where and under which conditions can these ICT’s be best used for highest impact? And, how can ICT’s really be used for a more effectively knowledge sharing and learning? One key lessons learnt of the sector project “knowledge systems in rural areas” was that ICT is one of many instruments to share knowledge particularly in the local context. There are various ways to exchange local or indigenous knowledge, so the instrument of selection has to be best fit in the respective local context. ICT might often not be the best choice and certainly can only be a mean and not the end itself, ideally embedded into an existent system of knowledge transfer according to identified needs and opportunities. In September 2007 GTZ held together with IICD, CTA, CGIAR and FAO the web2fordev conference to explore the potential of the participatory web and bring together some of these experiences. This publication attempts to describe these latest trends and experiences around newest technologies and the network effects for a new ingenuity to improve living conditions.

One such example is Nabuur, a global neighbourhood, which shows new grassroots networks for development presenting innovative models of cooperation worldwide. Rolf Kleef and Raul Caceres describe how solely webbased collaboration can work even with remotely villages in Africa and how they achieved an effective online peer-to-peer knowledge transfer impact. Peter Ballantyne takes in his article a greater look at new emerging forms of cooperation between development institutions worldwide. The social web helps to transcend organisations’ boundaries, makes information resources transparent and gives spaces for innovation for better agricultural development. The social web can be described as people interlinked and interacting with engaging content in a conversational and participatory manner via the Internet (Wikipedia). Ballantyne also compiles a list of all the different examples from a number of organisations’ developments using these interactive web tool impacts.

That is followed by pioneering examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America to use ICT’s for rural development. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur describes its many year experiences to empower farmers through blogging. Debashis Pattanaik and Runa Sarkar describe their efforts to bridge the agriculture research in India with daily needs of farmers. The Kisan Blog has contributed in restoring experiences of rural farmers in India. Another such example is Radio La Luna, which uses different media forms to strengthen the collective memory of Ecuadorian society on key moments in its social struggle through rescuing, digitising, systematising and disseminating documents of various types about main events in recent Ecuadorian history. This engaging approach makes them one of the most visited websites in the country.

But not in any case the implementation and usage of Web 2.0 tools work that easily and might not be the appropriate solution. Dorine Rüter and Anne Piepenstock present a project around farmer-led documentation (FLD), which highlights an alternative way of sharing cultivation practices through digital media. FLD extends existing knowledge sharing forms through digital media to highlight local knowledge and make it explicit for a larger audience.

The last practical examples present the increasing potential of mobile phones on the example of decentralized SMS based information exchange. It shows how Cambodian farmers can benefit from such a free and open source solution to make their mobile tools for better transparency and, lastly, improve their incomes. Ken Banks also shows how local software and hardware solutions are particularly for mobile phones’ key in the future, because theirs are developed around real needs and made to work in environments with little or no connectivity.

Related posts:

1. Virtual Forum: Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas Next week
2. My take on the state of mobile phones for developments As an outc
3. Web2fordev one year after – a critical review Most of my

Writing blog posts, commenting on them and adding Wiki-pages does take time if you want to achieve good quality – meaning writing consistent, easy to understand articles about even complex topics, linking to other resources and sharing valuable experiences. But good quality takes time, where little time is available for the work overload and dedication rarely appreciated by management in many organizations.

Paradoxical resistance to social media
There is often a strong resistance against blogging or introducing a Wiki (e.g. for a glossary) because either people are afraid of facing even more work or management wonders the benefit of such efforts. But paradoxically, a lot of time is invested on exchanging information and experiences through email. But these emails are, in most cases, sunken in mailboxes and often just read by a few or even only one person. But these exchanges could be all openly available and part of an organizational archive of wisdom through social media tools.

The dilemma of time vs. quality
If, however, you want to make such content available to everybody, it needs sufficient information and a certain quality to be easily understood by colleagues. The better the quality, the wider the audience who can make sense of it. Particularly, if one thinks of a longer perspective, experiences must be provided in such way that colleagues can get the best out of it. But how much time is left in a daily hectic work to write a great wiki article? Often not much, and even worst, it has less priority than another urgent email.

But isn’t a certain quality needed because otherwise there is simply too much information? For instance, a post linking to other sources might be helpful and interesting, but such a post has a not very long time value. Imagine you want to find information later on. It is either over the search engine or through tags. It would be of little help if you find just posts with outdated links.

Nevertheless, the time spent on formulating emails outweighs often the simplicity of blogging. For an organization, it is time to get over their shared folder system and find other ways to preserve knowledge over time.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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1. From A-Z to Organization2.0: F – Flexible staff and members A B C D E
2. From A-Z to Organization2.0: U – Usability = Higher Motiviation A B C D E
3. Reach your audience – don’t talk about Web 2.0 or social media Is it enou

Different to older times when you went to your PC to search for information such as a definition on Wikipedia, in the future you can access it anywhere, and you also: a) get real time information about what happens around you and b) you get to participate collectively to refine information, for example through mobile crisis mapping. So imagine mobile phone users engaging in such a collective information gathering for all kinds of purposes. But who will own the information and could it be guaranteed to be open and reliable?

In the case of the flu alert, the company “will say, for instance, that 8 percent to 14 percent of the people in your ZIP code have respiratory illnesses, representing a “Moderate” risk level.” Personally, it would not influence my decision to leave the house or not. To me, the case of the flu alert highlights the potential to use such services for other purposes also in other areas.  I find the use of widely available valuable information for the public very interesting. All sorts of available intelligence is broad to you on your mobile phone. So is the case of fixmystreet.com, from which I can report damages in my neighbourhood and report it to the responsible person; or I can check product information through a common source written by consumers in the supermarket. More importantly, I could have access to environmental data on the corner I am standing at? I can foresee a lot of potential, but also I am worried about locked information, no clarity of ownership and too little access to information.

In the flu alert example, the company “gets the information on disease levels from Surveillance Data Inc. — which gets its data from polling health care providers and pharmacies.” It sounds almost as a mashup, where you combine different data sources. I imagine the future lies in combining intelligently different open available data resources, for example through RSS/feeds or API to provide open intelligence.  Such steps are some interesting startups around climate change, which offer API (Application Programming Interface) for different sorts of environmental data – it simply means, that you can use their data for your own purposes or services and combine different data streams. For example, the World Bank offers “114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos” and AMEE, the climate change startup,  offers an “open platform for measuring the energy consumption of everything” (Check www.openeco.org/ for more on sharing data to measure climate change).

Google found a much easier way to publish the flu intensity in an area by simply analyzing and mapping search request for flu related issues. So Google will not only make revenue by advertisement, but through offering various of these kinds of services in the future. But frankly, I am a bit concerned about it since a lot of information resides within companies and it is in many cases not publicly available or cannot be used by nonprofits. In the case of Google, the potential to analyze society behaviour is unlimited. If they focus, for example, on the local level, all kinds of patterns and differences can be found out (e.g. politics, consumerism or health).  It seems to me that the future asset will be this sort of information power. The challenge can be easily seen when you compare OpenstreetMap and Google maps for the cities of Kabul, Afghanistan (Google – Openstreetmap) and Luanda, Angola (Google – Openstreetmap). In both cases the open source approach for maps offers better maps done by volunteers. (Thanks to aidworkerdaily.com for the inspiration!)

I think we have just started to tap on the potential of these rich resources, but also will need a lot of further discussion on what type of information needs to be openly available.

Related posts:

1. Future trends of mobile activism The simple
2. The race to map Africa and ethical issues around online mapping I started
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The first trend is disruptive innovation around mobile phones especially in Africa. If it is hardware or software, the creativity and ingenuity is happening – through adapting or hacking, new means and uses are developed right where they are needed. Open operation systems allow to create various needed features for the local context in the respective language. Mobile software examples from Kenya show the potential that exists even in low-cost and older models.

The second trend is around the local context, where increasing mobile features such as videos, photos, sooner or later GPS or sensors allow to analyse and document the environment. The mobile becomes a research tool to give its user the capacity to collect and share information. Open information repositories can be created for advocacy work. One outcome is increasing transparency. Mobile phones can be key for collectivity contributing to new information systems and receiving all sorts of information. The example of Ushahidi shows strength in linking the collected information to geodata.

The third trend is the mobile as a publishing and broadcasting tool. Text, audio and video is already possible – its contributions can support own communication channels and coincide with existing forms of citizen journalism. Here we already witness overlapping with other information and communication technologies such as radio. Surely, some form of data exchange has to work for that, which still inhibits several challenges. But that form of information exchange will happen, whatever technology is behind it. Tools for information exchange solely relying on SMS prove this is possible for all phones.

The fourth trend is about the potential for peer-to-peer networking. Mxit in South Africa, a mobile social network application with more than 5 million members lets one engage in an own community independently from location and time. Engaging in a ubiquitous network is promising for activism: coordination, mobilization and collective action. “It is not about mobile any more. It is the convergence from the social web with the mobile. The mobile let you interact within a network in a highly contextual way.” (Teemu Arina) Or as anthropologist Jan Chipchase asks: “So what does it mean when people’s identity is mobile?”

Nevertheless, a lot of challenges still remain, such as high costs or illiteracy. The control of mobile phone networks can become a security risk, also there is the potential that activists have to compete with private sector and the government in these new channels, and it might become an echo chamber residing with the essential challenges of activism: the lack of participation.

What do you think? Do you agree with the four trends or do you think there are additional ones? I will investigate this topic further in the next weeks for an article in a book about mobile activism in Africa. Thanks in advance for any remarks, links and critic!

Related posts:

1. Mobile Activism in Africa Why and ho
2. My take on the state of mobile phones for developments As an outc
3. Mobile phone innovation may not happen where you think it does The first

Tools to present take too long
A presentation leaves you definitely not enough time to explain a tool sufficiently enough. Alone del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool,  can take up to an hour to train and discuss its different angles. I have had fascinating discussions just about tagging that could have continued for hours.

So is the case of the example of the invention of the desktop and folder system – the PC desktop was developed in the seventies portraying a normal desk with papers and folders on it. The problem about it is that in the digital space, as tagging proves,  relevance and links are in a three dimensional space and go potentially in every direction. So we still use our computer in a very primitive way one could say. I blogged about the connection to hierarchy here.

Constraints you encounter
In most cases there is little time to show the audience the potential for the social web for knowledge sharing – 20 minutes if you are lucky. Not only time is a challenge, but also the difference resistance you might face – listeners are overwhelmed by information, the amount of tools, or simply bored of listing to words such as “social media”, web 2.0, Blog, Podcast, Twitter and so on. Instead, it is important to address the audience demand or talk about their biggest problems and catch them by the strength of examples. Sometimes I like to ask if somebody wants to play the devil advocate, which often triggers interesting discussions and shows how little we focus on how we work and so much on what we work.

How to approach your audience?
From the knowledge management perspective not much has changed and the deficits are the same: Finding the right information and the person behind it when needed; how to tackle the information overload; create spaces of creative exchange.
During a presentation I try focusing on these basic questions and showing the audience examples and approaches to use different tools to tackle some challenges. My key lesson learnt throughout the year is to focus on scenarios and leave out tools and all the fancy new words. In addition, I like to leave it up to the audience how and what they actually like to pick up. In most cases, I assume, anyway, the wrong tool as the one to get the most attention. The context and the different ways of personal work styles vary just too much.

Examples of approaches

I gave a presentation at the European Commission last Monday and did not know exactly what kind of an audience to expect. So I started with the usual challenges of  a knowledge worker such as information overload, difficult to find first hand experiences, exhausting complex team collaborations and problems about how often we reinvent the wheel. In the next slide I presented different approaches of companies and organizations tackling these problems with social web applications.

I talked about how Hewlett Packard wants to untap the experiences “lost” in email boxes and encourage employees to post their answers in forums. By the way Luis Suarez has a great experience going on working with as little email as possible.  Explaining email as a challenge for knowledge management triggers quite interesting dicussions. Then I explained the example of Sun Microsystem and the one I did internally myself with GTZ. I ended with an older study around the use of Wikis in Dresdner Bank, where they have reduced emails considerably (unfortunately the study is not anymore available on the social-text website). Having alone documents at a central place open to everyone is quite convincing. For the rest of the presentation I went on quite different topics such as networks for development cooperations, which triggered different attention. When I was talking about wiki, I simply recited the example of Wikipedia, which in most cases works perfectly.

For another presentation I tried encountering it from the well known knowledge management circle.  It goes as follows (1) start and orientation, (2) research, (3) strengthen competencies, (4) apply learning, (5) store knowledge, (6) exchange knowledge and (7) evaluate knowledge. The circle can vary in many ways, but it helps to present the concept of knowledge management relatively easy and then attach to each point some potential scenarios, where you can use social software. (1) RSS/Feeds – subscribe the web, (2) social bookmarking, (3) blogging, (4) outside the web, (5) tagging, (6) social networks and (7) easy engagement through rating and commenting. This circle can be applied of course to all kinds of purposes but can be focused on the personal knowledge management of each person. I was inspired by a presentation by Dirk Röhrborn (German).

Related posts:

1. From A-Z to Organization2.0: Q – Quality takes time A B C D E
2. Metrics for Social networks: What does really happen? If the soc
3. From A-Z to Organization2.0: U – Usability = Higher Motiviation A B C D E

Looking at Europe during its last years many offers have not been taken up. Sure blackberries are all over the place pushing for email interaction on your phone, or at the most, to buy a train ticket via mobile phone. But how further has the mobile been used for other purposes? Not much. Interestingly, users seem to have not been able to grasp all its advantages for the past years – with the exception of ring-tones, maybe. I believe that the multiple options for communication channels can make a difference; European users are to some extend saturated and do not see a big benefit in most offers. For example, during European Championships (soccer), the games were offered via mobile phones, but only a minority were interested.

This happens completely differently in developing countries, where people with a mobile phone are reachable in the remotest areas, where not even sufficient electricity might exist. Mobile phones, with their offer to communicate from anywhere and send short messages, are a big jump forward. Fascinating to see, it does not stop there, particularly in Africa mobile phones unleash various innovations. Many of them show, how they can fill the gap, where nothing was existing before and that’s why they work more successfuly than in Europe. Here are some examples:

• Cell Bazaar (Market in your pocket), where you can send and receive small advertisements for selling and buying stuff. All needed is just an SMS function.
• The EPROM project in Kenya coaches programmers who come up with promising applications such as  mobile mapping in Kenya.
• Afrigadget reports about a mobile phone based auto security system
• SMS and Web 2.0 for Mumbai Early Warning/Response Project
• SMS based news and information service in Sri Lanka for human rights monitoring, reporting and advocacy

However, in my opinion, a new phase is starting with the iPhone. For the first time people in masses download applications to use their phones for all kinds of purposes, such as a pocket personal computer. As I wrote here, the mobile social network is in this regard very promising, because it extends potential collaborations to many more people, who do not have PC based access to the web. Some interesting applications are already out there: Tatango, Jyngle or Radioactive. Hat tip to Drew Cogbill.

I imagine GPS will become another key future, but also the mobile phone as a broadcasting tool and a sensor-rich device. By the way the Egyptian government just forbid GPS to cut down grassroot usage of it. Not every government seems happy about their citizens having such a powerful tool in their hands.

I anticipate that mobile phones will unleash a lot more disruptive innovations than the PC because since its beginnings has been mostly based on open operations systems and has been much more user-centred, and allows for more options to adapt, hack and apply it. “These innovations will only increase in the future, as mobile phones become the linchpin for greater economic development.“

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I am glad to be able to participate in this interesting forum on mobile phone topics. From the ICT4D perspective, I believe mobile phones have a great potential for various reasons. However, I think mobile phones for development are in the midst of a hype, and some enthusiasts hope mobiles would be the solution to everything. But I do believe that there is also the danger of forgetting some important lessons learnt from many ICT4D projects, which failed for a lot of reasons. One was the lack of sustainability, and another, that mobile phones can only be a mean to an end. And of course, there are many challenges that the use of mobile phone faces: high costs, illiteracy and in many cases, mobile phones projects still have to prove the benefit for users. Do not get me wrong, I am very enthusiastic about the contributions of mobile phones to social change, but mainly because equally to the social web, it is the users themselves who drive the innovation. They apply, hack and adapt existing technologies for their own needs.

Here is a little descriptive text for the virtual forum. I am sure many interesting topics around mobile phones will be discussed. Particularly, rural areas are in my opinion interesting because mobile phones make them reachable like never before, being it for communication or data exhange.

Mobile phones are the success story of bridging the rural digital divide, bringing tangible economic benefits and acting as agents of social mobilization through improved communication. But what are the real challenges that face reaching rural areas, and what are some of today’s most beneficial applications that can help these rural communities, specifically regarding agriculture development?

This Forum will examine the challenges that rural communities face in enhancing the benefits of mobile telephony, and look at some examples of interesting initiatives and good outcomes from around the globe.

Virtual forums website

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ICT4Dfeed experiment
I can best describe my experiences with my small feed experiment around ICT4D themes (ICT4Dfeed). I experimented with Yahoo pipes, Aiderss, Feedhub and many other tools, but I could not reduce the 30 daily resources to less top resources. The only way it worked out was through my own pre-selection which will be published in a twitter ICT4D account. By the way, this has triggered quite some more attention – 80 followers, – whereas the ICT4D feed has around 25 followers. In the case of twitter, there is also the social network factor. But, let me describe my lessons learnt…

Potentials
The ICT4D feed has 60 resources such as search engines, social bookmark sites, selected and influential blogs, community websites and organizations. In theory, the reader has to invest around 5 minutes to simply scan the feed or half an hour daily to read the most important articles. In the first case, one is up to date of what is happening, and in the second case, one can even get to know in detail about the latest developments. The 60 feeds fetch a majority of news happening in this particular sector. So, if you are willing to invest the time you can compete with every organization. The old times of information unbalance are over, where only paid service subscribers have an advantage. 

Challenges
As Chris Brogan would nicely put it in this post, all the interesting comments filters are still to weak. The only chance is to scan all these sources and find the golden nuggets in between them. Automatic filtering is not working efficiently yet. I have tried filtering by certain key words but have not been successful at getting better results, although pulling certain tags – for example, in del.ico.us – can be key for a good feed. I also tried services such as Aiderss, which ranks feeds by the amount of comments or links (technorati and delicious). But this works fine in any well connected social media network, for instance in the US, but not on niche topics with valuable content but few links.

Conclusion
There is a gain in subscribing to a lot of resources on the Internet and having a well researched and filtered selection of feeds. It surely takes time to find the best feeds, but the results can bring you a lot of value. I am building up such a feed for a magazine publisher at the moment and it is surprising to see how even the old media does not know about the potential of feeds and RSS technology. A draft selection showed me how easily one can monitor the web for interesting topics. But the potential to me really lies in collective filtering. Therefore, in my further experiment I decided to test buzzmonitor to collectively filter resources. Drop me a line if you would like to join me in in that experiment.

If people with the same interests come together, they could share the burden of filtering. Like the nptech tagging experiment of in delicious proves it – by reading the feed you already know about the latest non-profit technology developments. The problems remain, who summarizes this information? This is being done mainly through “Hub” bloggers digesting all the information. In this regard, friendfeed is not helping because it multiplies feeds and does nothing about filtering.

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The limited materialistic view
The limited view of poverty can be seen particularly in western Europe, where the media tends to focus its discussions in most cases solely around materialistic issues. Basically, anyone who earns less of half the average income is considered poor. The discussion often stops there, instead of taking factors such as environment, health and education into consideration. Lately, there was even a proposal going on in Germany about whether people could live with about 100 Euro a month. Do not get me wrong, I am aware of how important a welfare state is, but poverty cannot be tackled alone by monetary redistribution. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and Nobel prizewinner, stresses that the importance of a more holistic view on poverty is necessary, which at the same time stresses the need of equality and freedom:

The poor generally lack a number of elements, such as education, access to land, health and longevity, justice, family and community support, credit and other productive resources, a voice in institutions, and access to opportunity. According to Sen, being poor does not mean living below an imaginary poverty line, such as an income of two dollars a day or less. It means having an income level that does not allow an individual to cover certain basic necessities, taking into account the circumstances and social requirements of the environment. Furthermore, many of the factors are interconnected. (GlobalPolicy)

Social equality – it is not north vs. south but all around the world
Coming back to Ulrich Beck, he argues in his article that (1) social justice becomes a worldwide phenomena and (2) that we cannot address social injustice within a country alone. In the old days there was an imaginary border between the poor in the north and the south, but, nowadays, social equality is becoming universal as particularly western countries put it on their flags. And he adds: Many immigrants take the right for social equality and mobility for granted, but for most western countries this equality stops at their borders. These were some random thoughts for the blog action day on poverty.

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