ICTlogy

One of the recurring debate topics during the Web2forDev Conference was the increasing broadband divide, i.e. the divide that comes not from “those having and those who have not”, but those who can access the web in optimal conditions and those who do it with poor infrastructures and, above all, with poor connectivity. As it can be easily understood, more and more applications demand good connectivity quality, thus creating a (new) barrier to those that still connect to the Internet with lowband connections such as modem over fixed lines.

Even if most Web 2.0 technologies are really low-power demanding ones, one of the promises for knowledge diffusion to developing countries is still quite high-power demanding: teleconferencing and/or audio and video broadcasting. Yes, we’ve seen interesting attempts in this field, but I honestly think that the EyA (Engage your Audience) Automatic Recordings System, developed by the Science Dissemination Unit of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, is one of the most outstanding and promising ones.

I won’t enter the technical details of the project, but just state that EyA helps deliver audio, video and slidecasting with very low demanding requirements:

• low digital literacy required for the user
• low attention (automatic recording) required for the speaker
• low-band required for broadcasting

Thus, in my opinion, the technology is not only good because its technological features, but also because it does not require a highest level of capabilities on the user’s side, another usual downside that is seldom taken into account, making it just perfect for developing countries (and developed ones too!).

More info

• Automatic Recordings via EyA System site
• “EyA System: Automated Audio-Video-Slide Recordings” (66 Kb) – Proceedings Conference: ICL-Interactive Computer Aided Learning, Villach/Austria, Sept 2007.
• “Webcasting of Traditional Chalkboard Lectures: The EyA System” – EURODL European Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Sept 2007
• EyA Recordings of the ICTP Diploma Programme
• EyA Recordings of the Turbulent Mixing and Beyond Conference
• Book: How To Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization using Open Source Software, book by some of the same authors of this project
• Book: Wireless Networking in the Developing World, book by some of the same authors of this project

Thanks, Marco, for the tip.

Last September 25th, 2007, I had the chance to present my paper The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development (paper, presentation) at the Web2forDev Conference in Rome.

The hardest criticism I got was that my presentation was too theoretical and lacked practical evidence or, at least, a real example to illustrate what it was thought to be a good theory. Ironically — for me at least — I did have some of these examples, being the one I new better in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development my own case: ICTlogy. Ironical, I said, because I did not pretend to be immodest by presenting my own site as a good practice, so I “shifted to theory”. After a good time talking about the differences between pretentiousness, humbleness and plain idiocy, I promised Wang Zhong (Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences) to seize the opportunity of yesterday being the 4th Anniversary of ICTlogy, be completely unhumble and picture some of the benefits that scholarly blogging has given myself, most of them about facts that scholars in developing countries, junior scholars or scholars working on marginal subjects — i.e. people out of the mainstream — could perfectly use to leverage their own digital and offline presence and reputation. And I might add, following Olivier Berthoud’s suggestions, that they could be useful for practitioners too.

There’s an added reason to write such a practical — but grounded, I’d dare add — article about research and development: the Council of Science Editors has proposed all science editors to publish a Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development for today. And ICTlogy has committed to join this proposal.

ICTlogy began its way in October 21st, 2003, as the blog of both a practitioner and a researcher in the field of ICT4D. Since then, it has evolved into a Personal Research Portal, covering a wide range of disciplines directly or indicrectly related to ICT4D: the Digital Divide, e-Readiness, e-Inclusion, Digital Literacy, Open Access, Nonprofit Technology, ICT Reglulation, the Information Society, e-Learning…

The information gathered here is organized across the following sections:

• ICT4D Blog (, ), with news, links and reflexions.
• ICT4D Events (), a list/calendar of events (congresses, conferences, symposia, etc.).
• ICT4D Wiki (, ), with all “static” data I gather around: people, institutions, resources…
• ICT4D Bibliography (), a good bunch of authors and works.
• ICT4D learning objects repository (), with courseware in the field of nonprofits and development.

In June 2006, retroactively, an edited version of the blog became ICTlogy, review of ICT4D (ISSN 1886-5208), destilling the best blog posts. The reasons to do so were many, but can be summarize as avoiding establishment allergy.

Quantitative data of the whole site are as follows:

• 550 blog articles
• 70 static pages
• 70 events
• 350 wiki articles
• 760 works references
• 625 authors references
• 100 unique visitors per day
• 200 feed subscribers

All this content is accessible (for me and for each and everyone) everywhere and everywhen. Indeed, it is highly searchable and, hence, findable. The first benefit thus in having such a site is knowledge management: from my notes to my finished and polished articles, from my thoughts to my bibliographical references, from some links to expert dataset sites, everything is here and, at least for my needs, neatly organized.

The second benefit is that from time to time I can extract the essence of some ideas going on and on and feed with it an article, my PhD Thesis, a conference. I (almost) never wrote anything for the blog, but the contrary: the blog helped me in writing something. The story of my Master’s Thesis (e-Learning for Development: a model) or the story of my article The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development are perfect examples of this.

The third benefit comes from this good amount of content gathered around my digital persona, shaping a live CV that automatically gets updated as soon as I upload new content, news, etc. Thus, searches by keywords representing recent subjects dealt with here usually make the site appear on the first or second pages.

The interesting output of it all is not having a happier ego, but finding people, networking being a third, highly valuable, benefit: doing reverse engineering and replicating the searches helps me to find people, institutions, projects working in the same fields that I do. It happens every time. And same applies with visits to the site coming from links (not searches). I’ve noticed that this site belongs to the list of recommended resources of several other sites and, indeed, courses about ICT4D. Again, the good thing is not knowing you’re there… but knowing they are: thanks to this, I now know of courses and scholars interested in the field that otherwise I maybe wouldn’t.

Of course, it is great when, at last, you get to know personally some of these “e-people” and kindred souls can end doing things together: most of the editorial committees and board of reviewers I belong to either (a) began as a formal invitation through the site or (b) took the site as my CV/e-portfolio in which to base their resolutions to accept me in. Same applies to the conferences, speeches, seminars that I have been invited to impart.

My calculations are that half the visitors of this site come from .edu or related domains. The other half come mostly from the practitioner field — leaving just a very narrow margin for lost people and occasional voyeurs: the site is pretty focused and I believe people are seldom mislead here. And this gets me back to networking, closing a virtuous circle where the more you share the more you find interesting people and can access things they know and share. I think it’s way more useful knowing that this site is a reference for some ICT4D courses than having a six digit number of daily visits. More is OK only if it adds to my general purpose: LEARN, or reach people from whom to LEARN.

Summing up:

• this site does serve my purposes of keeping all my knowledge under control
• having all content open, it helps interesting people coming by
• having all content open makes me findable not by myself, by thanks to the content gathered around me
• interesting people leave their tracks behind them, tracks I can explore and find them, their institutions, their resources
• those people sometimes send me feedback
• sometimes I get invited to events, where I find more interesting people
• sometimes I get invited to review papers, from whom I learn from firsthand interesting approaches and information
• sometimes I get invited to review papers, from whom I learn how to write good papers (and how to avoid not-so-good practices)
• being a reviewer puts me, directly or indirectly, in contact with interesting people once more
• the more you know, and share it, the more these issues repeat along time… and the more you can reach new people to learn more and more

Want to step inside the virtuous circle or let it pass by?

Brian Lamb, Department of Emerging Technologies & Digital Content, University of British Columbia (Canada)
Brian Lamb: It’s all coming apart

Originality is overrated: Glenn Gould, William Shakespeare, Rick Prelinger… in one way or another have faced the fact of originality… or if there’s none.

Being open is not a matter of altruism, but a good practice for your self and your own efficiency.

Use information as a flow, not like a thing, Stephen Downes in managing information overload.

The power of positive narcissism: you discover interesting content, people by just tracking back your content, what it’s been told about you, etc.

There’s a problem with that lot of different licenses, confusing the user/creator. And people not using them properly…

As long as you use open formats, they can be reused, or used in several ways/platforms. Also, updating is automatic everywhere that is linking/embedding/feeding from your RSS output. Open APIs is just another way of opening your content, but by opening a function that will retrieve a content.

More than media literacy: data literacy.

Need to solve everything, every schizophrenia now? The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still have the ability to act (F. Scott Fitzgerald). There’re some (lots of them) things that can actually be done just without entering in any contradiction or going against mainstream.

More info

• Slides for the presentation
• A bunch of links (an introdution to Web 2.0 and education), by Brian Lamb
• David Wiley, Openness, Localization, and the Future of Learning Objects (33 minutes)
• Open Content DIY
• OCWinMotion
• Social Networking Technologies: A “Poke” for Campus Services
• Send2Wiki
• MOCSL: Making Open Content Support Learning

Call it synchronicity: in the last 10 days three major events have taken place in the field of Open Access:

• Berlin 5 Open Access: From Practice to Impact: Consequences of Knowledge Dissemination
• Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning
• Web2forDev – Participatory Web for Development

Not surprisingly, people such as Peter Suber or Scott Leslie have already noted that there were some connections between these three conferences, some crossover interests.

After having attended the Web2forDev Conference and being right now preparing my speech for the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fourth International Seminar: Web 2.0 and Education, I can’t help but think on equal terms: open access is — will be… should be — the main axis of Science, Education and Development.

I think that these three fields — or social spaces — have several things in common, and are converging as time goes by and the Knowledge Society settles and becomes more pervasive in our lives:

• It’s about knowledge creation and knowledge diffusion, be it positive or normative, be it basic or applied.
• It’s all about networks of knowledge creation and distribution: scientists, educators, students, nonprofits, development agencies, communities of beneficiaries, counterparts… (I don’t like some of this jargon, but is the best I could find).
• They’re unbalanced networks that are becoming more balanced in account of the contribution made by individual nodes to the whole network: senior vs. junior scientists, teachers vs. students, nonprofits vs. counterparts, donors vs. receivers…
• They are networks challenged by meritocracy: the challenge on scholar networks is evident; but also educational networks, where knowledge expires very quickly and younger generations are proner to learn some things better than older ones; or development networks, where “localization” of strategies, of content, brings relevance to the end user, a passive agent in former development strategies.
• It’s about adding up: standing on ye shoulders of Giants to see further in science; more (and better) educational resources; synergies and best/good practices with scarce resources to achieve efficiency and efficacy in development projects.
• And it’s about adding to remain, contributing to the network not to be send off the network: not just in terms of relevance (i.e. meritocracy) but of pure belonging (i.e. subsistence). What you give is what you get.

Content — data, information, knowledge — is input, capital and output in a knowledge society, and the essence of science, education and development as it is required to draw strategies, to feed knowledge production, to put findings into practice and transfer them. And because it happens in a networked society you’ll be transferring them on and through a network. And my opinion is that this will be more and more difficult to do with undisclosed procedures. Thus why open access.

Two questions launched to the audience. Gathered on the fly, some might be redundant:

The most inspiring thing that you will take home from the conference

• So much going on
• All about people
• Discovered progress achieved in Africa
• Interdisciplinarity, so many people engaged/interested in these issues
• RSS feeds to unlock the information on websites
• The Web 2.0 allows the dissemination of content
• Some people have already implemented some Web 2.0 applications
• But there’s still a lot of work to be done, and you have to work hard
• Even if there are strong barriers to Web 2.0 implementation, most people in developing countries believe that once you have infrastructures (computers, connectivity) the remaining barriers (literacy, change of mind…) will be easily overcome
• These technologies can bring welfare as they are addressed to people, and once the “wall” of the digital divide falls, there’ll be a revolution
• The real and huge possibilities of blending everything together

How will you take what you have learned and apply what you have learned

• The infrastructure needs to catch up with the applications
• Spread the word of Web 2.0
• Start tagging out of the established taxonomies — and adding web2fordev tag to the list of possible tags to be used on own content
• Rethink all strategies
• Think on how to apply those tools in your day-to-day work
• And more especially how to apply them on the field
• Make information circulate in pervasive ways, give it life, deattach it from the source and let if fly

Five things you need to know to get to the Web 2.0

• Write: Blogs
• Store: Wikis
• Categorize: Tagging, keywords
• Spread: Feeds
• Get it all together: mashups

Main challenges

• People centered
• Access
• Participation, motivation
• Content creation, dissemination
• Evaluate and assess: what’s the impact, the change, the progress

More info

• Some reflections at Zarah’s Minor Contributions, some for Day 1 and some for Day 2 including conclusions on the conference
• ICT Journalist, Brenda Zulu’s blog

Last words

On my own side, I cannot but sincerely thank the organization (and the attendants too!) for such a huge effort and for such a brilliant success. I really enjoyed the conference and learned from everyone to my limits. Thank you! :)

Michael Saunby
Climate Change Mashups

Climate change: not a change in the climate but (also) a change in the variability of the climate.

By looking at the map applications, it is easier to see where e.g. there’ll be water stress in the (nearest) future, or human health crisis due to high ozone levels.

Mashups are about e.g. enough people collecting, reusing and distributing public sector information on already existing (commercial) online applications — e.g. Google Earth — so anyone can contribute again and close the loop — and make the scope of diffusion way wider.

It’s possible to mashup news RSS feeds with Google Earth so you can geolocate where the news took place.

To my (provoking) “concern” that you might be putting all your eggs in one basket, and relying too much on third parties’ applications to publish your content, Michael Saunby answers that it is just about tracking those applications as they appear and evolve, and go along with them, not that you invest on them, but just use them — use them for your own purposes and with all the benefits they have.

More info:

• WeMapr
• Lat Long Blog
• Google Code, to find out about the mashup editor (and other Google open API related things)

Patrizia Monteduro
GeoNetwork OpenSource: Geographic data sharing for everyone

Provide a common platform and standards to (online) manage geographic data, improving accessibility while monitoring quality.

Features

• Metadata and data publication and distribution
• Metadata and data search
• Interactive access to maps
• Metadata editing and management
• Different metadata standards
• Different sharing levels

Metadata harvesting and synchronization allows the system to gather metadata from distributed information hosted in other services/servers, done by the user himself.

More info:

• GeoNetwork Community Website