On Wednesday 4 August, I will be leading a discussion on speech technologies in the developing world at the SpeechTEK 2010 conference, in New York City.

At the Foundation, we believe that speech technology is crucial for bringing Web access to the 4.8 billion people who have basic mobile phones and/or who are illiterate. Voice access may also prove useful for people communicating in languages that do not work well on the Web. Therefore, SpeechTEK is a great opportunity for us to raise awareness on the use of voice technologies for social development.

IDRC published the following press release about their conference: “Towards a Caribbean Open Institute”, and encouraged participants to share this with our communities.   Many thanks to Federico Burone and Fernando Perini from IDRC; to my co-discussion-leaders Kaia Ambrose and Bruce Girard; and especially to the engaged and experienced participants for making this an interesting and potentially important event. See also my previous post on this conference, as well as my presentation slides.  The Web Foundation has committed to support open data initiatives around the world.  We will talk with IDRC and Caribbean partners in the coming weeks, and will announce another open government data initiative in the coming days.   More soon …

Press Release: A Caribbean Initiative will Promote Open Data for Policy Research
(re-produced with permission from IDRC Web site)

(photo by F. Perini)

Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) brought together international experts and stakeholders in the Caribbean to explore opportunities for strengthening policy-oriented research in the region. The meeting, titled “Towards a Caribbean Open Institute: Data, Communications and Impact” took place June 30 – July 1, 2010 at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica. The meeting was attended by 40 high-level stakeholders in the area of public policy research from across the region. Participants examined international experiences and explored the possibilities of collaborating to drive the process of making more data available online in order to strengthen the collaboration between governments, researchers and the civil society.

This is a very short post to advertise a very interesting initiative driven by two researchers — Jonathan Donner and Kevin Donovan — on the current offer and importance of prepaid mobile data service in Africa.  A draft paper is available online, but the authors are running a crowsourced data gathering to collect as much information as possible from all over the continent.

If you are interested to help and can provide some information about the situation in your country, please go to the Ushahidi instance they are running to collect these data. The final paper is expected in a few weeks/couple of months.

Welcoming participants and outlining vision for workshop

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is currently convening a very interesting workshop entitled, “Toward A Caribbean Open Institute: Data, Communications, and Impact”, being held in Kingston, Jamaica from 20 June – 1 July 2010.  I was invited to give a talk entitled, “Open Government Data”.  About 40 experienced and energetic policy and technical experts from regional and international organizations (including the UN), non-governmental organizations, universities, and the finance and communications sectors are actively engaged in discussion.  A key aim is to explore how open institutional data approaches, Web 2.0 communications, and monitoring and evaluation methods can become forces that increase regional collaboration on issues such as agriculture, fishing, trade, tourism, immigration, ICTs, entrepreneurship, etc.