ICTlogy

Notes from the II Encuentro Internacional TIC para la Cooperación al Desarrollo (Development Cooperation 2.0: II International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation) held in Gijón, Spain, on February 10-12th, 2009. More notes on this event: cooperacion2.0_2009. More notes on this series of events: cooperacion2.0.

Using web 2.0 in ICT4D organizations
Florian Sturm. ICT4D.at

ICT4D.at: raise awareness about ICT4D, inform about news, projects, run own projects…

Work only with web 2.0 tools in the cloud, coding anything at all. Mainly use of WordPress and Mediawiki. These are used for the institutional site.

Intensive use also of social networks like Facebook, XING, twitter, LinkedIn or Orkut. Through social networks you can directly address people anytime.

Content sharing platforms: Flickr, Youtube, Slideshare

Tools for analyzing: Feedburner, Google Analytics

Other: Delicious, Digg, Paypal

Not much effort to set up, enhanced reach of information, easy approach to a large user base, reused content (CC-licensed)… though not everythign works.

Q & A

Q: what are the criteria to choose one social networking site or another one? A: Already existing networks is a good place to start.

CEDUCAR network, a horizontal cooperation model through ICTs
Fernando Fajardo, AECID/CECC-SICA

To leverage the Central America education system.

By using Joomla, virtual communities have been built for educators to network and meet each other. A Moodle paltform has also been set up to train trainers/educators in ICTs for education.

Besides technology (FLOSS), all content is also licensed freely (CC). This way, there’s not only a platform but a course bank to be used in any educational initiative.

One of the strengths of this project is that is regional: there’s eight countries (+ Spain) in Central America and the Caribbean taking part in it. It’s also multi-stakeholder: NGOs, universities, enterprises, national agencies…

Digital Democratization in Guatemala
Ramon Bartomeus, Iwith.org

It’s a coordination project: each organization does their own projects, but in the same place (i.e. Guatemala) so it makes a lot of sense to coordinate some resources, findings, problems…

Learnings:

• Communities do not come after technology, but the opposite
• Find who the early adopters are and rely on them
• Begin with simple, successful things. Do not deploy the whole set of things

Viva, the voice of the people
Arturo Enzo, Viva

Public radio, set on telecenters, and used by citizens to ask their governments for several civic issues.

Telecenters are placed in several places, including jails, where they have weekly broadcasts.

But the problem of the digital divide remains. Why did not the project improved this issue? You don’t teach guitar without the instrument. If people just have computers an hour a day (or an hour a week), people are not empowered at all. So, the project succeeded in digital literacy, but not in bridging the digital divide.

But, notwithstanding, it is a seed for a change of reality.

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