January

At first glance Apac town looks like a roundabout surrounded by a few blocks of houses and some dusty tracks, though there is more to it then that.

Over 26 CSOs (Civil Society Organisations) and the district headquarter are established in the village. They tended to have contrary interests, however in the E-Society project they work side by side to promote civil services for the Apac society. After a handover of a day, my colleague left me with the partners to do some hands-on work. The first steps to link CSOs and the district government in a structural way were achieved in the in the first stage of the project. This visit more clearly ironed out the shared roles of the different entities. Through meetings with a couple of CSOs a pool was created, which could provide content for civil services, as for example Child Health Information for women, Market Price Information for farmers or Information on grant possibilities for youth. While at the same time the district would facilitate the process of digitisation of their accounting system and operational processes, so that the civil society will have better access to the district expenditures. It was good to see that despite the differences between the district government and the CSOs there is willingness to create openness and work more closely together.

Web2ForDev 2007 is the first conference devoted to exploring the ways in which international development stakeholders can take advantage of the technical and organizational opportunities provided by Web 2.0 methods, approaches and applications.

I sat in the green room this morning, thinking back to November 2006, our first steering committee meeting organized at and by CTA. Giacomo Rambaldi from CTA had contacted me. He didn’t know that I had sat next to him during the CTA ICT Observatory meeting in 2005 on RSS feeds, being highly impressed about what he knew about the web.

During our first meeting, CTA had prepared a lot, but there was also a lot of brainstorming going on, sharing of ideas, and a growing common interest for this event. We all left that meeting, with the promise to try and mobilize our organizations and fellow staff members to work on this together. It’s pretty amazing how some enthusiasts can get so much done.

Jon Corbett (from the University of British Columbia) joined us during that meeting via skype for a short while, due to the time difference. After almost a year of online remote collaboration, now we’re in Rome and we finally met and had a cup of coffee together.

Via the conference website (www.web2fordev.net) you can find:

• Streaming video of the plenary sessions
• Content being generated on the conference wiki
• Conference blogging
• Pictures on flickr

Feel free to respond to content, topics, posts, the plenary sessions on the conference blog or wiki.

View pictures taken at the conference at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/web2fordev/