It’s quite exciting to be part of a process that is causing a buzz in the ICT4Development circles. When I came on board more actively as part of the IICD team working on the upcoming Web2forDev conference (www.web2fordev.net), I was keen and curious to see what the conference would bring. But now, with still more than a month to go before the conference, I am already very excited – by the discussions going on online among participants and interested parties, by the diverse use of web 2.0 tools for exchanging and collaborating, by the stats!

Launched in March of this year by the collective of organisations working to harness the potential of Web 2.0 (or Social Networking) tools to support networking, collaborating and exchanging knowledge in agriculture, rural development and natural resources management, the acronym ‘Web2forDev’ has taken on a life of its own.  If you searched for the term Web2forDev in Google 5 months ago, it returned a few relevant pages and information. Three months later when I searched again, it returned 39,000 results of pages that referred to the conference or the concept, people that were discussing the conference on their blogs, people that were critically assessing the potential and limitations of Web 2.0 tools for development, people that were passing information about the conference on to other networks and so on. Googling the term today returned 102,000 results!

Working with the collaborating partners and IICD-associated participants is equally as exciting. Representative members from the National ICT4D Networks IICD-supported countries are excited and gearing up to go. Bringing the stories, experiences and information needs from the members of their respective networks to the conference, and bringing the newly generated and collected knowledge and experiences back to their networks, they have a big job ahead of them! With 250 participants projected to attend the conference, and topics for discussion as varied as virtual spaces, (remote) collaboration, knowledge sharing, online publishing, and information retrieval and access, the potential for new knowledge creation is enormous. Already we as organisers have been using a vast array of tools to make possible the coordination of this event, including discussion groups, skype, wiki’s, Sharepoint, and more. Organisers and participants have been sharing their thoughts, suggestions and critiques using Dgroups, have been adding stories and experiences to the conference blogs, have been using a common tag to share relevant readings and resources and participants (social bookmarking), and have been disseminating information using RSS feeds. Relatively new online social networking sites are being used to network participants and get a sense for Who is Who before we all meet in person at the conference itself.

As one of the IICD staff working on the conference and coordination, I increasingly feel that we are part of a larger movement. A movement that combines concern for and belief in development, passion for the potential of technology, and wisdom gained from practical application and experience.  And that I find exciting!

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.

Mr. Paul is running a telecentre in Katesh, in the north-east of Tanzania. His telecentre provides computer training, the only one in the region. His customers need information from the internet, like market price information. But the internet has not yet reached Katesh. Mr. Paul is planning to have an internet connection and an email address soon, but he needs information on how to go about it. 

I met Mr. Paul last week in Mwanza. He was one of the participants of the first Tanzanian Telecentre Network workshop. Together with many others, I have been planning this workshop for months. Meeting Mr. Paul made again clear to me why a telecentre network is needed. All participants came with questions and all came with answers on: How to improve their services to the community?. Where to get ICT support? Telecentre puzzles were solved in the workshop and its grapevines. Still many need to be solved. By sharing and by joining forces. 

In a speed geek session, every telecentre presented its approach to provide services to the community in a sustainable way. Some provide market price information to farmers; others provide computer courses to students, women, elderly, disabled, helping them to get a job. Some provide a community radio to inform the villages on burning issues like HIV-AIDS prevention, others provide library services. Some are entirely financed by the community; others share their internet connection with nearby schools. Some use VSAT connections; others have switched to recently available broadband. The telecentre leaders advised Mr Paul on all the available options. 

Through a mapping exercise, the telecentres present were indicated on a Google Earth map. Mr. Paul found out that other telecentres actually were not that far away from him! He now knows who he can contact for support. 

Then, after two days of workshopping, it is 4pm. It has been an exhausting day; participants discussed a vision, mission, objectives and organisational structure of their network, and made extensive use of the left part of their brains.

Would there still be anything wise to do, apart from calling it a day? Yes. Let’s use the right part of the brain and create a logo for the network! I was amazed by the sudden energy and creativity burst and tried to grasp it in a picture: the designers, including Mr. Paul standing in the middle, present the winning logo. 

Mr. Paul went back to Katesh, connected to a whole new network of colleagues through his mobile. With confidence he told me that the internet connection will soon follow.

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.

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/

What I actually expected on forehand I do not recall, but to act as one of the main presenters and main resource person at a workshop and present in French on how to write for the web was not as hard as I expected it to be. Maybe it was the people who participated; maybe it was the heat that makes you automatically slow down and become more relaxed. We simply kicked off and the workshop immediately took its own course.

The workshop ‘Ecrire pour le site web’ was organised to meet the demand of the members of the thematic network group on ICT and agriculture. The members, all project partners of IICD in Mali who had started to use ICT to improve and strengthen the activities of their own organisation, wanted to improve their writing skills to better document and share their experiences with others. Some of the participants had some experience with writing, others not: but all were eager to learn more.

Though I had proposed to hold this workshop, it was not completely without self-interest. As a member of the communications team my constant concern is how to get interesting stories about IICD’s work on the ground. Stories that give our stakeholders a better idea of how ICT can help to overcome the shortfalls of basic public services like health care, education, but also the lack of good governance and the obstacles that prevent small entrepreneurs from earning a decent income. Not an easy job if you are miles away from the place where everything happens. It is even more difficult as we do not know all the people who work on these projects in person. Hopefully, giving the project partners and members of the thematic network group some experience with writing would result in a growing number of interesting stories published on their organisation’s website or on www.mali-ntic.com, which could feed into IICD’s website.

Full of good spirit I had started my preparations, but the closer I came to the date of departure to Mali and Burkina Faso, the more nervous I got. It was years ago since I had spoken French and how much experience did I have anyway with workshops? And what about cultural differences: would they respond to what I was saying and ask if something was not clear? And if they attacked me with questions, would it be possible for me to answer them all? Or would there be no interaction at all: me being the only one talking, trying to encourage people to come forward with their ideas? My colleague Bénédicte Marcilly reassured me: yes, the participants were used to people who were not at ease in speaking French, and no, I did not need to be afraid of silent intervals. Still, I had my doubts whether I would withstand or fall.

What discouraged me a little was the fact that there was unfortunately no opportunity to discuss the programme of the workshop with the other resource person of the workshop, Filifing Diakité, in advance. His role was quite essential: not only would he explain about the sort of content on ICT and agriculture he was focussing, he also had to keep the fire burning directly after the workshop by following up on the articles participants of the workshop were supposed to finalise for the website. But Filifing Diakité was not able to arrive before 10 am on the day of the workshop itself due to other pressing matters.

But then on the day itself: all my worries and foreseen problems disappeared one by one. The people showed up, and on time. Filifing Diakité arrived during my own presentation. He showed his flexibility by changing his presentation on the spot; he presented some very interesting showcases of how to write articles. My French was of course lacking, but somehow with the help of Bénédicte Marcilly and the participants themselves, we were able to understand each other. The attaque of difficulties turned out to be nothing more than an introduction to an article, my downfall - the chute - was nothing more than a round-up of the whole article. It was a good learning experience: not only for our partners, who participated in the workshop, but also for myself. Never be afraid of something what you do not know.