ICTlogy

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.

The OECD has released its Communications Outlook for year 2007

The main conclusions are as follows:

• Voice continues to be the key driver in OECD telecommunication markets
• Mobile subscribers outnumber fixed subscribers by a
  ratio of 3 to 1
• Rise of importance of Voice over Internet Protocolo (VoIP), mainly due to rise of broadband adoption, and pressing down prizes on voice services
• Blurring of market barriers: e.g. voice no more tied to fixed analogue lines, but can be accessed through fixed analogue lines, but also through broadband, mobile lines, etc.
• Blurring of market barriers, multiplicity of offers, blurring of regulation.
• Rise of local wireless networks fostered by local administrations.
• Shift from paying for voice to paying for data; shift from paying for data to flat-rate pricing based on bandwidth quality instead of data traffic.
• Trend to lower broadband prizes for better quality.
• Shift of subscription of communication services provided outside the boundaries of a citizen’s country and delivered over the Internet: more pressure on regulation changes.
• Telecommunication trade continues to grow in the OECD area
  and now accounts for 2.2% of all trade.
• China is one of the five emerging countries in the group known as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia,
  India, China and South Africa). ICT spending in the BRICS economies increased by more than 19% a year

Summing up:

• The importance of broadband — the new leading factor of the digital divide.
• The pressure on sector and international regulation — the new arena of the debate to achieve harmonization, inside and outside boundaries.

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

Giacomo Rambaldi
The Story of Web2ForDev

Used DGroups, Website, Google Analytics, Blog, Wiki, Social Bookmarking, Google Coop, Facebook… and many more.

We were technologically not ready when the whole thing began, not even had proper microphones for skype conferences, but they’ve caught up at tremendous speed. Keeping up-to-date with fast changing technologies.

Different work style and attitudes required by innovative appraoch and “new” technologies.

Rules and regulations within institutions, such as security concerns.

Getting to the minimum level of equipment (low investment)

Main outputs of the online effort:

• Trust and respect
• A virtual community based on DGroups
• ITrainonline
• Blog, Wiki, Social bookmarks, RSS
• Participatory Learning Action and EJISDC articles
• A network

Enrico Bertacchini
The Creative Commons Project: Sharing Knowledge in the Digital Age

What happens with databases? Are they covered by CC licenses? Do they suppose creativity? In Europe, they are not covered by copyright (but the content they hold do)

Creative Commons International: launched in 2003, adapts CC licenses to national jurisdictions (License Porting), creates an international netework of copyright experts.

Science Commons (launched 2006) to help scholars publish and disseminate their knowledge, scientific findings, etc. See their projects for further and up-to-date details:

• Scholar’s copyrights, freedom to archive and reuse scholarly works on the Internet
• Biological materials transfer, building the clearinghouse for research tools
• The Neurocommons, open source knowledge management.

Stephan Dohrn, Peter Shelton
Using Web 2.0 to Reduce Data Input and Maximize Output: A Case Study of the CAPRi Web Site

The Collective Action and Property Rights is a website hosted by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) that went recently renewed to join new trends of the Web: RSS feeds, database integration by means of XML broadcasting, resource lists in del.icio.us, blogs.

The search box is powered by Google Custom Search, which features plenty of built-in features such as filtering by presentations, documents… besides the intelligent filtering of a custom search.

The blog was created to keep track of the listserve mails.

Lessons learned

• Think and learn about the user.
• How to use Web 2.0 services behind a Web 1.0 interface: use the institutional website as a portal that gathers or hubs other external services/applications were your content is also hosted. The important thing is to spread content, to make it accessible, wherever it is.
• Be willing to experiment and take risks.
• Links, links, links. Search engines love links.
• See what others are doing and get inspired
• Content and technology folks work best together

More info:

• Full presentation at Google Docs
• CAPRi Wiki

Ethan Zuckerman
Web 2.0: Simple Tools & Smart People

It’s not about technology — which, by the way, is quite old —, it’s about people. People have always found ways to communicate through the Internet by using features of applications that were not designed to do so, e.g. chating by using an online chess game.

The mobile phone is the biggest revolution in telecommunications — not laptops, not handhelds… — because it changes all the rules of the game. e.g. in Kenya you can pay a taxi with your mobile phone… but you can’t in the United States.

Interactive Radio for Justice: radio + mobile phone project.

Mobilemonitors.org, to make elections more transparent thanks to mobile enhanced monitoring.

Manal and Alaa’s bit bucket, using blogs as a newsroom.

Blogs for advocacy: Free Alaa!

If you are an activist there’s a great benefit in using Web 2.0 tools. Ironically, the more crap there’s on the Internet, the better: noone will ban a site full of funny, boring, trivial things. Indeed, there’s no need to create a “development site”: you can be banned and you have to develop it and maintain it, so just use what’s out there, the tools that already exist. Forget the notion that you have to build everything from scratch.

Think on who do you want to reach. Second Life? Cool, shiny, but how many users?

Participation, engagement, add content.

The reason to blog: search engines love blogs, because they link and are linked, and search engines do rely a lot on linking.

When 100 million people speak, you need a filter. With 100 million people talking, it’s really hard to listen: Buzzmonitor.

Selection, translation, context: Global Voices

The best tools are those that amplify a message and do it very selective.

One of the problems of the web in general is that is written, so it needs some level of literacy: if we can develop applications for mobile phones, and apply voice recognition on them, you’d be able to talk to the phone — instead of having to type —, get the information you asked for (e.g. price of crops) and have it read for you on your phone by another application — instead of having to read it.

More info:

• Mobile Telephony in Developing Countries by Ethan Zuckerman
• The connection between cute cats and web censorship by Ethan Zuckerman

Thomas Metz
Open Collaboration in an Institutional Context

The Generation Challenge Programme was created to bridge the gap between health and hunger, by using advances in molecular biology and harnessing the rich global stocks of crop genetic resources to create and provide a new generation of plants that meet these farmers’ needs.

CropForge is a collaborative software development site, providing tools and a centralized workspace for developers to control and manage software development, the difference being with SourceForge is that it hosts all kind of information about projects and software related to development, food and food security, hunger, etc., including fora and communication spaces where collaboration, support takes place.

The site also uses mediawiki to run a the GCPWiki to gather information, notes, impressions on workshops, presentations, etc.

Some lessons learned:

• At the institutional level, it is important to be careful with the intellectual property policy, the code of conduct; the publication and quality control procedures; the reward and recognition system.
• It is important to preserve transparency and history (of edits, of changes). The sytem must be easy to join, meritocratic and based on a non anonymous use.
• Concerning content scope and quality, you have to keep in mind that there’ll be uneven quality, coverage and maintenance. But it’s good to make world-wide visible your work-in-progress under a clear disclaimer, where you explain very clearly what this content is about, what’s its quality, what the procedures or content creation and quality monitoring are, the release policy.
• The major barrier usually are institutional constraints, the (already existing) organizational design, which are not necessarily compatible with how the Web 2.0 works.

Kwami Ahiabenu
Empowering Journalists with Online Tools: Making a Case for Online Training

Journalists need constant training in online tools to ride the tide with the information revolution.

Online tools offer free to low cost options for training. So, set up an online course on Web 2.0 tools for journalists, based on real practice through weekly assignments.

Connectivity not really an issue as most journalists already have connexion to the Internet at their work places.

Learning by doing makes a difference in information and knowledge sharing experience, and skills transfer processes.

Tools used

• e-mail
• Yahoo Groups
• DGroups
• Google Groups, divided by subgroups (some students didn’t understand the difference between the main group and the subgroups)
• Blogs, on a weekly basis: classroom blog and students’ blogs
• Class wiki, as a newsroom where stories where created
• Flickr, to “put faces to names”
• Podcasts
• del.icio.us
• Skype, though it did not succeed

Challenges

• Lack of access to affordable and reliable Internet: hence, focus on e-mail, keep it simple, no Moodle, e-Learning for dummies
• Sometimes, high bandwidth demanding Web 2.0 applications
• Time commitment issues
• Challenge of change: develop an “online” mindset
• Online collaboration and communication difficulties
• Information overload issues

More info:

• Peña-López, Ismael (2005). e-Learning for Development: a model