Accra, Ghana

This is a quick post to announce the publication of the report on our visit in Accra from June 2- till July 3 2010, as part of the Mobile Entrepreneur in Africa project. I wrote a couple of posts (see 1,2,3) on this trip, and this report (see the html report or the pdf version) is the output of this visit.

In this report, we develop the outlines of our plan for the next few months, and we underline the findings coming out of the different meetings we had.
Obviously, we are publishing this report to get as much feedback as possible. So if you disagree with what’s written, or if you want to provide more details, or another point of view, you are very welcome to comment or send a mail to me or Max, who is the project lead.

Stephane

Ebenezer, Nienke, George, TESA member, TESA member, Franco, Dom, Steve (and behind the camera Steph)

Our visit of Accra and with stakeholders continues. After our first day, we went on and met a couple of very interesting people.

The Tuesday started with a meeting with three representatives from a student association of the Ghana Telecom University College. The university has a few student associations focusing on different topics. The one we met is called TESA (TEchnology Students Association) and as its name tells, is focused on technology. Not all students of the world are so forward thinking and pro-active. The three people we met, including the president Ebenezer Kwaku Ofori Atiapa, contacted us after reading our blog posts on the launch of the project. They understand clearly the potential of mobile technologies for the future, and the added-value for their members. Very impressive.

NCS old Satellite Bandwidth

We then meet with Kafui Prebbie from iVillage. I knew Kafui from a past EU project (DigitalWorld Forum) on which we worked together. We had a very fruitful discussion about who we should target, how to outreach to potential entrepreneurs that are out of the university system (e.g. public competition), how to build a local community focused on mobile content and services, and what are the barriers and potential incentives for entrepreneurs to jump on our targeted training, and on the mobile ICT wave.

The third meeting of the day was with Nii Okai, a freelance developer, with mobile competencies and experience. Nii gave us a good overview of existing local ICT-related networks (Linux group, Google group, etc.), and challenges he faced as an individual to build and deliver mobile services. We then visited the Ghana Telecom University College (GTUC) and met its president, Dr. Dakwa who gave us an overview of the university as well as expressed his interests in the initiative, and the interest of GTUC to include mobile training in its student and professional courses.

Finally, we met with Kofi Worlanyo, CEO of Gasscomm, the Ghana Association of Software and IT Services Companies who presented his association, and the list of his member who are active in the mobile content and applications front. This gave us a good overview of the Accra ICT business landscape, and enabled us to arrange a set of meetings with the most relevant players. The day ended with our participation to the ISOC Ghana meeting which gathered around 30 people. I had the opportunity to present our project, and we got feedback from the different participants pointing the most recurrent points: skill gaps, hard access to shortcodes, etc. (the complete output and findings of the visit will be gathered in a public report in the next few weeks).

That was a full day starting meeting at around 8am and returning to the hotel at around 10pm!

Isoc Meeting

Wednesday was not more relaxing! Most of the day was focused on meeting with industry. We started with Bsystems, then Network Computer System (NCS) ran by our close friend Dr Nii Quaynor, who was instrumental in the organization of the week. We then met with Ashesi University, which is a private university considered by most of the people we met as one of the top ones in IT training. Ashesi already has a course on mobile programming based on the MIT EPROM content and a dozen of students are following it. Ashesi is also looking at launching a Mobile Monday Accra. This would nicely fit with our work. They are also interested to expand their current courses to integrate more technologies and mobile business aspects.

In the afternoon, we continued our tour of IT companies, meeting with Sisco (Somuah Information Systems) a company offering mobile solutions to their customers, Rancard, the leading local mobile aggregator, and Soft Tribes.
All these meetings were critical for us to capture the challenges and issues IT companies are facing when investing in mobile content and applications. Almost none of them are currently focusing on end-user products, but only on customer solutions (B2B instead of B2C). The case of Rancard is different. They are by far those who understands best the mobile market, and the opportunities that are currently missed. While they don’t have entrepreneurs as part of their current customers, they believe that the market can expand in that direction.

Like Tuesday, the last meeting ended up at 9pm, and we were back at the hotel, for a final dinner meeting with Yaovi Atohoum, working for the Association of African University located in Accra. yet another full day!

Stephane

Our first objective is to meet and discuss with Vodafone Ghana, with who we are going to work closely. Then, obviously, it is essential to know better developers, and developer networks, the entrepreneurs community, and see what are their analysis of the current situation. Why aren’t there more mobile applications?  Why aren’t there more social and business entrepreneurs going mobile?  How can this capacity building initiative in mobile technologies and business lead to a vibrant ecosystem? What kinds of other initiatives (regular meeting ala Mobile Monday) might attract attention among the most brilliant potential entrepreneurs and help them to enter the mobile world as a way to access the Web.

Practically, we also want to understand what type of structure for the training program (length, localization, etc.) would fit well within the Ghanaian context.

So lots of questions to answer during this trip!  Stay tuned, as we will report a couple of times while there, and bring back results of our investigations, and nice pictures and video.

PS: Obviously, any idea or feedback on the questions above are welcome, through this blog or privately to us

Steph

“Technology … has created the means by which voices, often anonymous, can be heard saying things they would not be brave enough to say with their lips. With power comes responsibility.  But too often the Internet has divorced the two. Now anyone can say anything with impunity. …  May your generation be the one to stand up to reflexive extremism and on-line hyperbole … and say enough — this will not stand”.

What do you think?  For context, first listen to his entire address, which was eloquent and succinct.  You can find the entire speech starting at 49 minutes 50 seconds of the clip below (select the play arrow at the bottom (not middle), then drag the progress bar at the bottom to the desired time).  The quote above starts around 51:40.  Sometimes that video feed is slow…  so you can also see a large fraction of the speech on YouTube (with the quote above starting around 1:46).

Mr. Meacham suggests that the Internet is partially to blame for a loss of professionalism, authenticity, and attribution within the media, and within human discourse in general.  This is not a new or baseless assertion.  The 3 elements of his words that bothered me most were:

• Mr. Meacham did not acknowledge that there might be some virtue in providing more people on the planet with a voice –  distributing a power once possessed by a relative small, educated and largely-responsible minority in traditional media (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio)
• He did not acknowledge that many of the problems he cites have been with us for years through traditional media (but on a smaller scale): “anonymous” assertions, lack of responsibly-exercised power, people saying things in print “they would not be brave enough to say with their lips”, etc.
• Most importantly, I was disappointed that he could not envision the possibility of giving more people a global voice through the Web, while leveraging that technology to address more complete the problems cited in the previous bullet.  Perhaps the Web could be leveraged to improve our ability to assert and assess truth, to encourage and find quality, to skim the surface and dig deeper, to couple power to responsibility; and do these things in ways impossible through traditional media.

If I could re-write — with impunity — the tail end of Mr. Meacham’s above remarks, and do so for graduates of “Web University”, I would say:

“May your generation see a time when all people on the planet have the power to write, read and and collaborate on the Web, and that this collective power fosters an age of growing understanding and compassion, of improving lives and communities, and of solutions to this world’s greatest challenges.  May your generation, not fear or blame technology, but harness it to help each person make their own (or collective) judgments about what is true or false, right or wrong, good or bad, and safe or dangerous.”

OK, that was really geeky — but this is Web U.  Let us know your thoughts.

The Web has the potential to increase access to educational materials in Africa, and make it easier for people in Africa to contribute new materials to the world.

This is a belated post on the World Economic Forum on Africa, held last month in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  First, this event has been in Cape Town, South Africa in past years, and it is critical that WEF moved it closer to the locus of matters of greatest importance to the continent.  Second, the gathering of leaders and practitioners from government, industry, and philanthropy provided the perfect mix for gaining feedback on the programs and plans of the World Wide Web Foundation.

I was invited to talk in the session, Higher Education in Africa, with a focus on the use of the Web to empower educators and students to access content from around the world, and, ultimately, to contribute educational materials for the benefit of the rest of the world.  The format of my talk, Web-Empowered Education in Africa — was the Pecha Kucha style — in this case 15 slides with a fixed 20 seconds per slide.  This was a fun challenge.  Following the presenters’ talks, the audience broke into groups to discuss in more depth each speaker’s topic.  I was honored that the Minister of Science and Technology of South Africa and the Minister of Education of Tanzania joined my group and provided very valuable input.

There were many other  incredible sessions at WEFA.  Please check out the official videos.  Given the Web Foundation’s initial work within the Web-alliance for Regreening in Africa, I found the session on A New Vision for Africa’s Agriculture particularly interesting.  However, I was surprised that access to information (techniques, weather, diseases, market prices, government regulations, etc.) for farmers and agriculture extension agents was not really mentioned.

I am already following up with most of the fine people I met in Dar es Salaam, and I look forward to participating in future WEF events.

I’m starting to investigate the business side of ICT4D projects. Identifying the business model is (or should be!) obviously a critical dimension for most ICT4D projects. Indeed, that’s the study of how to make services at least self-sustainable, or to provide revenue to the provider.

Identifying the cost is the easier part. There are different kinds of costs.  Globally you can split them in two major categories, related to the development, deployment and bootstrapping costs, and to the operation of the services. IMHO, it is also relatively easy to find donors funds and grants to cover the development/bootstrapping costs, as far as the proposal identifies the operation costs, and provide a model to cover them. Evaluating these costs is not the issue and there are some hints in the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development roadmap, but how to cover them is the right question. There are two sides to consider, the business side, and the technological side, which is the implementation of the business side through the technology used in the project.

Concerning the business side, i believe we can split the investigation in two parts:

• Commercial Models
• Non-commercial Models

Commercial Models

What I call a commercial model is a model which has the goal to get money, directly and indirectly, out of the service operation. Direct models are those where users pay for the service directly. Indirect models are those where the money comes from a third party (not the users).

Concerning the direct model case, the tricky questions are to know first if people are willing to pay for the service. Does the service, in essence, provide a real, valuable impact to people so that they are willing to pay for it? Then how much does the service help them or save in terms of time/money? Identifying the net gain, and thus defining the right price, related also to the disposable income is critical.

Concerning the indirect model case, there are different options. The most common one is advertisement. They are all kinds of possible options for ads, in all technologies: ring back tones, SMS banners, Web banners, etc. But who is paying for these ads? How? Is there  risk of collusion between the ads and the service itself? Is there an example of someone successfully or unsuccessfully implementing such a model in an ICT4D project? There are options other than ads such as using the customers’ network to make surveys, or to sell information about e.g. customers interests and search terms and so on. Here again, for me, this is more intellectual discussions than concrete examples.

Non-Commercial Models

What I call a non-commercial model is a model where the integration of an ICT service has the objective to increase the efficiency or the coverage of a particular non-ICT activity, typically the provision of a public service such as agriculture extension or education. In such case, the principle is to demonstrate how the operational costs can produce more efficient services based on similar costs already existing. These non-commercial models are the ones that have to be considered when developing pilots which aims is to be adopted by public authorities, and which goal is to deliver public services. How to measure efficiency of a particular service, how to measure the impact per $ invested in two different cases are not easy questions.

User Costs and technical implementations

In all cases, it is critical to take also into account the costs induced at the user level. Typically, the cost of sending SMS, or placing a phone call, or using data services. In case of non-commercial models, where the aim is to provide public services, there are technical solutions to cover these costs for some technologies (a free phone number, call-back…) and some regulatory solutions too.

On another side, it is also critical to understand how the technological choices impact the relevance of the different business models. In direct commercial models, it should be transparent, or at least very easy for the user to pay for the service. In indirect models, it should also be easy for entrepreneurs to get the money back, without too much hurdles, and requirements for advanced business deals with big companies (like e.g. mobile operator).

Here again, these aspects (user costs, technical implementations) are partly covered in the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development roadmap.

To summarize, I’m realizing these days that while this is topic that is discussed in all the conferences and discussions I’m participating in, I cannot find valuable literature references, or project examples that could help me compiling a list of options with cases to illustrate them. In this post, i tried to develop a skeleton of a resource that could be helpful, lots of questions, and ideas, but no real meat, no methodology or examples. It is for now an empty skeleton, and it is at a level where all the discussions are happening today IMHO. What’s needed is illustration, cases, studies. I’m sure some of you have done studies in this scope, or are running projects in which you considered this question. I would be happy to get feedback, either publicly here, or privately (boyera[at]webfoundation.org), and start developing this work from field experience.

Steph

This day was a second day dedicated to field visit. Leaving Bushenyi early in the day, as usual, at 8:00 we headed to Queen Elizabeth National Park. Unfortunately this was not for enjoying nice bird or wildlife watching or for some game drives, but to meet with our host of the day, Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), directed by my friend Lawrence Zikusoka and his wife Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka.

Tim, Lawrence, and CTPH staff in QENP

We visited the nice telecenter ran jointly by CTPH and the UWA (Uganda Wildlife Authority) , and then had a very interesting meeting with representatives from the local communities, Lawrence, and some CTPH staff. Here again, the potential and barriers for accessing the Web are quite similar to those we heard in other places:

• Having local content in local language is a critical aspect for the community to benefit from the Web. CTPH is maintaining a community portal in local language and this is considered as a very important resource by the community
• CTPH is also involved in linking schools in the community from schools in the United States. See a summary of the experience. Here again the potential of the Web to enable exchanges between students and kids from different cultures is seen as a great opportunity.
• Web and IT skills in general are seen as a great value to improve employability of people, and CTPH offers training and certificates on Web and IT technologies for people in the community

Working Session with Tim, John, Rosemary, a park ranger, and people from the local community

The meeting was also attended by John Silco from Rwenzori Consortium (RWECO)-RICNET. See their blog post about the meeting. John is running a project on e-governance and transparency. The project, called e-society, is running in the Kasese district and helps, on one side, the local government to put online its data and news (see the Kasese local government site, and also helps NGOs, citizens to access and exploit these information, and send feedback. See a more detailed description of the project . This new initiative is very interesting, and inline with one of the topic the Web Foundation is interested in. It will be interesting to see in the future the impact of this project.

People participating in the QENP meeting

The last part of the day was a loooonnnnggggg drive till bwindi. I think it was like a 4 hours journey, but on a very rough track! We were completely exhausted at the end, but we had a chance to visit CTPH current and future facilities in Bwindi, and to meet with local staff. We learnt about the story of the CTPH telecenter in Bwindi which was training people on IT technologies, and giving them minimal experience to use the Web. Unfortunately, the telecenter had to close because the offices they were renting were called back by the owner. The community protested against the close, and expressed their needs. Hopefully beginning of January, it will reopen in the new facilities. It was good to know that people really feel the needs for the telecenter, and give and important value to accessing the Web.

Stephane

CTPH facilities in Bwindi

En route to visit Grameen Foundation project

November 25 2009: Third day, beginning of the field visit. As always, heavy day ! we left Kampala at 7:30am en route to Bushenyi, to meet with Eric Cantor, and visit Grameen Foundation AppLab . Normal driving time is 5 hours… with car failure, water leaks… more than 7 hours! Fortunately, Uganda is a beautiful country, and we enjoyed the scenery, the villages and so on. We finally met Eric around and started our field visit around 3:00pm.

Without a doubt, this was for me one of the highlights of the whole trip. Grameen Foundation developed a set of applications on mobile to provide farmers with health and agriculture information, the ability to buy and sell  commodities and produce, general Q&A service and weather forecasts. Some of these applications are SMS based, some are java-based.

Grameen Community Knowledge Workers doing surveys

As many rural farmers are not literate, and do not own a phone, they also developed a concept called Community Knowledge Workers (CKW) which serves as intermediaries between farmers and the service. CKW serve also as a relay to send feedback to Grameen Foundation and local authorities. They are filling surveys from time to time to give information on the community, or if a particular plant disease is affecting the region.

CKW are usually a kind of champions within the community.  They generally are better educated, and speak English. During the afternoon we visited a place where CKWs were following a training session on the new set of applications just released. Then we visited a community and interacted with farmers directly to get their opinion about CKW and the services provided. Some interesting facts:

• Few farmers have a phone (around 15-20% of the community), and this is due to the cost


Grameen Community Knowledge Workers with a farmer

• Almost no farmer has ever heard about the Internet or the Web
• Lots of people in the community have asked help from the CKW particularly to fight plant disease
• People are eager to get more services/information (like e.g. child nutrition information specifically requested)
• People would be interested to have access to the information themselves directly on their own phones (for those who have phones)

It is important to note that most of the farmers are illiterate (we were told that in Uganda only 30-40% of people are literate), and most do not speak English (numerous different languages exist).

I believe that this concept of CKW is very powerful as a bridge between ICT services and people who are unable to access them today. Hopefully, in few years, when more people have a phone, when content is available in their own languages, and when they have some way to get information even if they are illiterate, CKW could become redundant.

A Community Knowledge Worker interacting with his community

The last part of the day was dedicated to interacting with users of Grameen Foundation’s services. Some of the services mentioned above, more specifically the SMS-based ones, are also available directly to people. The targeted end-users here are urban or semi-urban English-speaking people. We discussed with 4 of them. Their feedback was globally positive. Usually they were using one particular service (but not the same), and were not aware of the others. Their major concern were about languages, and their difficulties some time to use English.

All in one, this was a very interesting day, the first time in our trip where we had a chance to get feedback and opinions from end-users.

Stephane

Tim with farmers

About government, we had 3 different meetings with ministers and parliamentarians. There were some commonalities among these discussions. First of all, it was impressive for me to see people really committed to ICT, and switched on about the potential of the Web for Kenya. The vision of the country they described (e.g. a parliament with people using laptops during the sessions) is promising.

The second interesting point is around the 2 new sea cables (SEACOM and TEAMS). There is a huge hope in this new infrastructure, but for now, everbody is somhow holding their breath and waiting for a revolution to happen … particularly for prices to go down. But for now this is a chicken-and-egg situation: prices are high because users are few, and users are few because prices high.

Tim Berners-Lee explained to them and to industry leaders, including TESPOK, the association of kenyan telecom providers, that to boost things and go for a circle of virtue there is a need for a vision and leadership.  There is a need to offer low-cost broadband that will attract new users who in turn discover the power of the Web and talk to their friends or communities, bringing again new customers. So the sea cables are expected to solve many problems, but things have to happen yet.

The third point is around the level of the discussion. There were lots of discussions at a very general level around connecting people to the Web. This is clearly a huge task which may surely needs some prioritizations. For instance, it is essential, in my mind, to assess the major problems, and the biggest potential for the Web in Kenya. For instance, there are 3% roughly of the population suffering from visual impairment. It is therefore essential to focus on ensuring that public and major sites are accessible. Same for mobile technologies:  given the current mobile penetration and the issues around power supply, there is a huge probability that the easiest way in the nearest future for people to reach the Web is through mobile. It is therefore essential to examine the situation a level below than just focusing on Web access, and identify the most appropriate technologies which could solve some of the particular challenges the country is facing.

The last point Iwant to mention is around openess, transparency, and releasing open public data. Tim pushed all representatives to work towards releasing their data on the Web, moving form a wish to be transparent, to real actions. We all hope that these seeds Tim put in their minds will florish soon!  This is surely an area where the Web Foundation could provide a global leadership.

About research and education, we had only a brief meeting with KENET (Kenya Education NETwork).

Participants in the breakfast with KENET

Very interesting information about the development of the sea cables, and the penetration of fiber optics. Lots of interest also on their side on Web Science.

About developers, we participated in an event organized by Skunkworks, a network of developers from all over the country. Skunkworks group is particularly focusing on how Kenyans can use technology to improve their lives, and develop local businesses.We missed part the event, but attended three interesting presentations on mobile applications.

Tim speaking to the Skunkworks group at Strathmore University

The presentation of how Skunworks was created and is developing, and the importance of creating a community that in turns creates emulation among its members was very interesting. This emulation through sharing of ideas among people from all over the country and neighbors leverages potential entrepreneurs, and enable them to create businesses around their ideas. The three presentations were done by such young entrepeneurs.

About NGOs and Civil society organizations. For me, beeing the geek of the Web Foundation, learning what is happening on the field, and what are the challenges was the most interesting part of the visit. We meet with four different organizations:

• Plan International
• Kenya Society for the Blind
• Kimathi Information Center
• SIDAREC / Ghetto FM

We learned a lot during these visits. At Plan International, we heard about their initiatives on education and integration of kids from underprivileged communities. There are some commonalities with our project on Youth Empowerment with CDI.

Rosemary Leith in front of the regional office of Plan International in Nairobi

Among the many things we discussed, one of their projects around connecting schools was particularly interesting: connecting through the Web and online tools a school in East Africa, with a scool from Europe or USA. They explained us the impact of such linkages, and also their needs for more easy-to-use tools.  They also explained the importance of offering a way for children to express their voices and their feelings about the different situations they have in their daily lives, and the potential of the Web for that purpose. Finally they also underlined the importance of IT skills for employers in Kenya, and therefore their own efforts to deliver even short courses (3 months) to give children such skills.

At the Kenya Society for the Blind, we learned about accessibility in developing countries. W3C has been working for more than 12 years to make the Web accessible for people with disabilities. The work developed within the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is targeting both the Web developer level (standardized guidelines, tools, education and outreach, etc.) and the policy level (ensuring that public policies make mandatory the development of accessible Web sites). The Web Foundation’s Web in Society program has also a strong focus on accessibility. Our objectives with this visit was to have an overview of the relevance of WAI work in the context of developing countries, and to understand if there are particular challenges. In that regards, we learnt lots of very interesting things to incorporate in our programs:

Kenya Society of the Blind team, Winston (student), Tim, Rosemary, Stephane

• Accessibility is critical in developing countries, as lots of people have some kinds of disabilities. For instance, in Kenya, we have been told that around 3% of the population suffer from visual impairment.
• Cost of assistive technologies, specifically screen readers and screen magnifiers is a challenging barrier for most of people. The Kenya Society of the Blind has a training center for people with visual impairment to teach them computer skills, including Web access. We had a long discussion with one trainer, and one student (Winston), who explained us the challenges for individuals to buy good screen readers and magnifiers, or to convince potential employers to buy those software, given their costs (at least 1000$US for a good screen reader, and 500$US for a screen magnifier). Both the student and the trainer also reported the relatively low quality of the current leading free and open-source solution NVDA, particularly in the text-to-speech module, and the complete absence of any free screen magnifier.
• Lack of awareness at both the developer and policy makers level on existing technics, standards and tools to make accessible Web sites. There is a big need for awareness raising, and dissemination of information about WAI work, and resources at both the developer and policy makers level.
• Poor accessibility of some major sites like Facebook, or Yahoo mail

This meeting confirmed the importance for the Web Foundation to leverage accessibility as part of its programs, to raise awareness and build capacitites at the local/country level, among developers, public authorities, and major sites/companies (newspaper,etc.), and to invest further in free/low-cost and open source software solutions for most important assistive technologies.

It is also very important to continue promoting acccessibility at the global level, particularly among major sites.

Our third field visit was at Kimathi Information Center, a telecenter in an underprivileged community in the suburb of Nairobi. This project has also some commonalities with our Youth Empowerment project. The aim of this telecenter is to give minimal Web skills to local children and young adults, to enable them to find jobs more easily. This telecenter also integrates training and support for potential entrepreneurs to start their businesses. Jose and Cathryne, the two founders and operators of the telecenter we met explained us the importance of the IT and Web skills to increase the employability of young adults, and to also enable them to start their own business for the community or outside.

Our last visit was at SIDAREC (aka Ghetto FM), where Tim did a live interview, and received also a very nice, very localized present.

Tim is receiving a nice present from the Sidarec Director hands

We learned about the importance of community radios to address the concerns of local communities, and the importance of the Web to both provide associated services to the community (like online libraries), and to find help from outside Kenya (see the story I wrote about that). Using community radios as a relay to disseminate information available on the Web, and vice-versa, using the Web to get feedback
and involvment from the community in its radio is a powerful model. This is one of the ideas we might explore in the Web Alliance for Re-greening in Africa project.

All in one, as you can see, in three days, we had a quite extensive overview from the different stakeholders in Kenya !

PS: for those who where following us during our visits, you should notice a delay between the posts and the date of the meetings (We were in Kenya from 19 to 22 November). This is due to the incredible agenda we had, not enabling me to find time to write in real time!

• There is a need for actions at levels of technology, awareness, capacity-building and tool.  It was interesting to hear different messages from different participants. Some believe strongly that there are gaps in the Web technical ability to support access for all, particularly in terms of support for people reading and writing in certain language support and for people with low-reading skills. Some others think that the issue is not technology, but more a lack of awareness and capacity building. This is very interesting. We believe that actions are needed at both levels, and this discussion support our belief and program structure.
• The importance of vendor-neutral technical leadership: Some participants welcome the Web Foundation as one of the first organizations with a strong technical background, and that could help non-governmental and civil society organizations that do not have this expertise to identify and implement the most relevant standardized, interoperable ICT solutions.
• The importance of organization to connect and link existing initiatives: Many participants mentioned  that this community-organizing function is lacking now. Many projects have no visibility on where to start, or are reinventing the wheel in their corner while others have done similar work in another corner. It is critical today to connect the different initiatives together, and offer them a place to share, collaborate and exchange.
• The importance defining a clear and strong Web Foundation position: We had a series of questions on the role of the Web Foundation compared to the World Wide Web Consortium and the Web Science Trust, but also as compared to other organizations working in the field, or researchers working in technological solutions for social development. I believe it is critical for us to explain better where we focus our action, and why we believe we are filling a hole not covered today by the other actors working in the technology for development domain.

Another key discussion was around intellectual property, and the importance of open source and free content, not only at the tools level, but also in the different materials and tools developed by the thousands of projects in the field. This is an area we will surely investigate further.

This workshop was very instructive, and gave us good feedback on where to focus. It convinced me to that we should start as soon as possible to establish communication channels between the Web Foundation and the community at large to receive comments, and views on our programs and actions.  Above all, the positive energy expressed by all participants are very promising for the future.

Now, we are off to Kenya and Uganda!