Nynke Kruiderink

I recently returned from the Web4Dev conference where Christian Kreutz from GTZ, and I held a workshop titled “Potentials of Web 2.0 for Development”. The conference was hosted by UN-Habitat in Nairobi, Kenya.

I didn’t see “the big five” as I traveled only for the duration of the conference, but here are my personal “big three” encounters of the conference:

Hellene Karamagi: At the web2fordev conference in Rome, the Brosdi project became renown as one of the most exemplary examples of how Web 2.0 can help rural development. When I invited myself to Hellene’s table for lunch, I had no idea that she was Edna’s sister! What a wonderful surprise! And we went on to discuss how you could use web 2.0 tools to increase knowledge of and insight into rural development issues.  Imagine this: A portal on supply chain market information tools, with only a tag cloud on the homepage… inspirational Hellene!

Unicef: Only a couple of sentences exchanged with Christopher Fabian and it becomes clear that here is a champion, in any version of the Web or communication for that matter. The recently launched Innovation Unit at Unicef is doing some exciting things like the global voices, see http://x.mepemepe.com . A space to watch!

WaterWiki: Although I missed Juerg Staudenmann’s presentation, I was excited to hear during the summary in the final plenary that the influence of an enthusiastic intern can go so far as to trigger an institution such as the UNDP to create a thematic wiki.

Modeled on the similar lines to Wikipedia, WaterWiki was conceived as a means of collecting information and systematically documenting the situation on Water Governance in Europe and the CIS. It is a knowledge platform and on-line collaboration tool for water practitioners and experts in Europe and the CIS revolving around a community of Practice (CoP).

Of course each conference has it’s own dynamic, but I couldn’t help being reminded of the enormously high level of energy and enthusiasm that was present at the Web2ForDev conference.

I was asked why the web2fordev conference had been held separate from the web4dev conference… the nature of the topic I think merits a separate event, at least initially. But maybe next year, the two can benefit more closely from each other. In any case, Christian Kreutz and I tried to represent the web2fordev spirit and movement, and bridge the two events. Our presentation (with comments) will be available soon.

But my head is still buzzing. My lunch date today said “everyone who was here was relevant”… and “I learned to my limits”. I have to agree that even I have been fully saturated with participatory web (web2fordev) these past 5 days which is truly amazing. I didn’t think that could happen.

Is this the beginning of a movement, paradigm shift, breaking of silo’s and re-landscaping of the development web? My father worked his whole career in development. I wonder how he will respond when I explain to him how we have set up a facebook group with the IICD local partners and are going to try out the “web to text” functionality, keeping each other up to date on our moods.

Getting back to my lunch date, I was actually working alongside him for almost an hour before I realized who he was! I blame the coffee cup in his picture. Ismael Pena-Lopez from amongst other things the ICTlogy blog. His is a blog high up on my list of blogs I try to follow when I have time. And one whom I wondered if I would ever meet live. I am very grateful I did. Besides the fact that we realized he probably met my father years ago, he reminded me of the importance of reflection.

User generated content is needed, and is good, and is a revolution on the scale and availability that it is now… but I might easily forget how reflection, analysis, and abstraction can help us learn to a higher degree. Especially after days, weeks, months of running… not only for this conference but other activities, it is time to reflect.

On Wednesday September 19^th 2007 I attended the first Dutch Plone users day in Amsterdam. One of the presentations was about the new features of Plone 3.0, which is, amongst other things, OpenID compatible!

The first time I heard about OpenID was about 2,5 years ago. A colleague of mine, who helps keeping me up to date on all sorts of things including web developments, showed this movie during a break in the web2.0 writeshop held at IICD.

OpenID is a sort of online passport. If you’re registered there, any other website which is compatible with OpenID, allows you to sign in with the OpenID profile. You don’t have to create another username and password combination for that specific website! For all the people like me, making use of web services like blogger, flickr, facebook, linkedIn, gmail, surveymonkey, etc. on top of your official accounts like email, network, ftp, cms’es, etc. it is such a hassle to have to remember all of those unique combinations of different usernames and passwords. Thank goodness someone out there is trying to find a solution to this problem, and thank goodness it seems to be catching on!

It was truly a feeling of “the future is here”, sitting there listening to the presentation, and seeing that Plone has now become OpenID compatible, something I had heard about once within the context of “this is what the future will bring”.

Another fun thing of that day was learning that Plone is becoming more Web 2.0. For example, without being a programmer, you can ensure that the content in your website is automatically pushed towards web 2.0 tools like delicious and reddit. Also, users can design their own member profile pages with widget-like portlets filled with content or RSS feeds of their choice. Besides the increased web 2.0 characteristics, Plone 3.0 also has great improvements in user interface functionalities and easing the task of content management through inline editing, OpenID, and link integrity. And of course, all the strengths of 2.5 remain, such as the use of resolveUID, RSS feeds and smart folders remains.

I also learned about Bungeni: “ It is a Parliamentary and Legislative Information System that aims at making Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens ... virtually allowing them "inside Parliament" or "Bungeni"  the Kiswahili word for "inside Parliament". (Source: http://www.bungeni.org/)

It is based on open source standards and applications including Plone and is being developed in collaboration with eight national parliaments in Africa, including three countries IICD works in, namely Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. I hadn’t heard of Plone being applied in such a high profile project in Africa before.

It just goes to show, days like this Plone users day can lead to many unexpected new sources of inspiration and possibilities for finding synergies! Thank you to the “Stichting Zope & Plone” for organizing this day!