World Wide Web Foundation

A Personal Experience in Zimbabwe

2009-06-16T03:31:18Z

Before getting involved with the Web Foundation I spent nearly a year traveling through Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. During that time I had the chance to meet a lot of incredible people who faced tremendous hardships. What struck me most at the time was the way in which they refused to let their problems stop them from achieving their goals and, instead, chose to work hard in the hopes of opening up new possibilities for change. Over my next few posts I’m going to highlight some of the people that had a lasting impact on me and helped me realize why the Web will be such a powerful tool in enabling underserved populations to get what they so desperately want: the freedom to choose their own future.

]]> Before getting involved with the Web Foundation I spent nearly a year traveling through Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. During that time I had the chance to meet a lot of incredible people who faced tremendous hardships. What struck me most at the time was the way in which they refused to let their problems stop them from achieving their goals and, instead, chose to work hard in the hopes of opening up new possibilities for change. Over my next few posts I’m going to highlight some of the people that had a lasting impact on me and helped me realize why the Web will be such a powerful tool in enabling under-served populations to get what they so desperately want: the freedom to choose their own future.

The first of these inspirational people is Freddy Mafira, a priest in a small village outside Vic Falls, Zimbabwe. I met him in an internet cafe in Vic Falls and we quickly became good friends. He invited me to attend church with him the next morning and told me he would be helping with some elderly people in town if I wanted to come along. That next morning, Freddy delivered his first sermon in English and, with the help of the gentleman beside me, I did my best to sing hymns in Shona, their local language. After the service, we visited an old man who had attended church regularly until he’d suffered a severe stroke that left him unable to walk or communicate. Freddy delivered the day’s sermon just as he had each week since the man’s stroke. This willingness to go out of his way to inspire those around him and give hope to those most in need resulted in him having near-celebrity status. Walking through town it was clear that everyone knew Freddy as they waved, smiled, and greeted us at every turn.

After the visit, Freddy took me to his home and introduced me to his family. He had three children - Pride, Princess, and Praise - and took care of his sister who lost her husband years ago. Pride was born without a tibia bone in his right leg so had to be amputated. Then about four years old, he had outgrown his prosthetic limb and used makeshift crutches to assist his movement. I learned that to support his family, Freddy helped local fruit and vegetable producers sell to businesses in Vic Falls and Harare. During the days we spent together he often spoke about his desire to learn new languages (he already spoke about five) and skills. His mentality was that if he could continue to do, know, and communicate more, then he would open up new doors that might result in additional income to provide food and education for his family.

It was exactly this open-minded determination that made me realize the power that the Web could have for people like Freddy and those around him. By working with partners to enable local leaders to access and publish relevant content, tools, and services on the Web using computers and mobile phones, we can have a much broader and deeper impact in the community. Building on Freddy’s determination to open as many doors as possible, we can help him, and those like him, to create his own doors and then watch as he shows everyone around him how to do the same.

Freddy and I have kept in touch since we met in late 2007. Though his country continues to face many tough problems he remains as passionate as ever about the possibility of change. He recently told me about a new business venture he is planning in order to better support his family and community. He is gathering people together to start a computer center in his village so that they can access the Web, learn how to use email and word processing tools, and build their own websites. His ultimate vision is the same as ours and it can be summed up with one overused and under-appreciated word: empowerment.

How to Achieve Global Impact ?

2009-06-12T16:30:20Z

I spent the last three days visiting the International Institute for Communication and Development(IICD). Among the numerous discussions we had with the staff and the other invited guests, one was about how to achieve global impact. As this is our major objective at the Web Foundation, I would like to share my view on this topic. Obviously, I don't want to let people think that I've the solution for this complex problem of how to reach a global impact, but sharing views and discussing with others is surely constructive.

Our objective, in the Web in Society domain, is to extend the benefits of the Web to a big part of the 75% of the World population which is not connected to the Information Society today. To achieve this goal, it is important to explicit what we learned while moving from 1 user to 1.5 billions in 20 years.

]]> I spent the last three days visiting the International Institute for Communication and Development(IICD). Among the numerous discussions we had with the staff and the other invited guests, one was about how to achieve global impact. As this is our major objective at the Web Foundation, I would like to share my view on this topic. Obviously, I don't want to lead people to think that I have the solution for the complex problem of how to reach a global impact, but sharing views and discussing with others is surely constructive.

Our objective, in the Web in Society domain, is to extend the benefits of the Web to a big part of the 75% of the World population which is not connected to the Information Society today. To achieve this goal, it is important to explicit what we learnt while moving from 1 user to 1.5 billions in 20 years.

The first important concept that explains the incredible success of the Web is the notion of global huge impact with millions of minimal local actions. The Web is not a big central system but a set of small nodes, each concerning a small number of users and authors. However, globally there are now more Web pages than neurons in a human brain, and information and knowledge is available about almost all possible subjects. The question is, what drove proliferation of the number of nodes from 1 to many millions?

Of course, there is a bit of luck, to propose something to the right people at the right moment in time. But the technology proposed by Tim took over all other options existing at that time. So it probably has some specific, critical characteristics. In my view there are 2 pieces: the specific features of the solution, and the viral growth. To be provocative I would say that the first part can be summarized in one word: replicability.

What is a replicable solution? That's the though question! There, IMHO, a number elements that are required:

Interoperability: This is the most important factor. Having interoperable technologies allows the realization of a global effect from local actions. In that area, the role of W3C has been critical as a global organization ensuring the interoperability of the fundamental standards that make the Web work.
Visibility: People that have problems and are looking for solutions have to be able to find and see what others are doing. Otherwise, they will start from scratch and make their own choices, leading most of the time to the same issues that others already experienced. Getting ideas by looking at what others are doing is an important part of the Web culture.
Openness: It is good to know that someone did something similar to what I want to do. But if I cannot look in depth at the solution, if I cannot use the same technology or the same tools, if the solution is more advertised than shared ...then this is not really useful. The fact that e.g. HTML is fully accessible and readable was a critical factor for people to understand how to achieve desired behaviors.
Customizability/modularity/extensibility: It is very rare to be able to use a solution out-of-the-box. One's conditions and use-case are rarely the same as one's neighbor's. The ability to take pieces of what someone did on a Website, and combine it with what someone else did somewhere else, is also one of the critical factor of success. I include in this theme the ability to use many languages, which also an essential factor of universality. More work is required to ensure that the Web can handle all languages of the World. However, a tremendous quantity and quality of work has already been achieved by the Internationalization community.
Simplicity: simplicity is also an essential feature. What is the percentage of Web authors today who have a computer science background? I guess a very small minority. And that's another reason for the Web's success: everybody, a 12 years-old child, a old grandma, almost everybody, in the developed World, is able to contribute to or use the Web today. While the technologies are simple (HTML, etc.), by themselves they are not enough simple to allow non-technical users to contribute. The availability of different kind of tools and services (free or very cheap hosting, authoring tools, monetization services such as PayPal, etc.) is an enabling factor.
Accessibility: Accessibility of Web content is a critical factor, allowing people with disabilities to access the same information as everyone else. Obviously, in this area, further work is needed e.g. to make Web content accessible to more people, including those with low reading skills.

Now let's have a look at the possibilities for viral growth. Obviously viral or organic growth requires replicability, as noted above. However, such growth also requires a vector of dissemination. As always, one has two options: either using the grass-roots model, or using a more formal, top-down approach via traditionnal vectors such as governments. I believe that the Web largely demonstrated the power of the first approach, but this is possible only when IPR is not a major, inhibiting factor. Tim very often mentions the importance of the decision of CERN to make html and http available to the world for free. This is a critical requirement for viral growth to happen.

I personally believe that all these concepts are directly applicable to the development sector, and particularly concerning the development and deployment of mobile services. I see evidence that illustrates this opinion. First of all, the proliferation of competing platforms and solutions for the same problem. For instance, this is impressive in the agriculture domain. The number of projects, the number of platforms, most of them being specific, non-interoperable, is incredible. Because most of these solutions are developing their own methodology from scratch -- without reusing what exists, without being open, without offering their learning and expertise to others -- people who want to setup similar solutions cannot reuse and adapt what's existing, and therefore redo their own thing, at a very high overall cost for society. On the opposite side, when you have a simple tool, which is free and open source, usable in many domains, and where one can see how others are using it, the success is impressive. The best example for me here is Ushahidi. Obviously, we need more Ushahidi-like solutions, in many domains. But i strongly believe this is the way to go. The critical steps, and that's what we plan to do within the Web in Society program, is to identify those missing enabling blocks, and raise awareness among potential users, NGOs, entrepreneurs, people working in the development sector on the potential of these solutions, and the easiness of use.

To conclude, I'm convinced that the Web is incredible potential as a platform for communication, creativity and commerce in the developing world. The Web offers a way to provide visibility, and scalability through viral replication. It is already accessible, using different channels, on mobile phones. It is essential now to develop the key enabling blocks, and raise awareness in this community about the potential. Now, let's hope that we will be able to convince potential funders of our work that the above concepts are sound. Certainly the success of the Web over the past 20 years is not something one can ignore, when looking for solutions to the problems that face us in future.

Stephane

Voice XML and Voice for Development

2009-05-20T15:35:44Z

Long time since I wanted to write down some thoughts about voice applications, and voice as a channel to deliver services.

I've attended a series of conference in april and may. the W3C Workshop on mobile technologies for development, ICTD 2009, IST-Africa 2009 and it is obvious to me that voice applications are attracting more and more attention.

I see many reasons for that:

The availability on all phones (mobile or not) as this is just like a classical phone conversation
The accessibility aspect: voice applications allow dissemination of information in any language of the world, and toward people with low reading skills
The flexibility of the business model: it is easy for the service provider to decide who will pay the communication, the user or the service provider, through e.g. call-back mechanisms, free phone number.
The absence of limitation like the 160 characters of SMS

]]> Long time since I wanted to write down some thoughts about voice applications, and voice as a channel to deliver services.

I see many reasons for that:

The availability on all phones (mobile or not) as this is just like a classical phone conversation
The accessibility aspect: voice applications allow dissemination of information in any language of the world, and toward people with low reading skills
The flexibility of the business model: it is easy for the service provider to decide who will pay the communication, the user or the service provider, through e.g. call-back mechanisms, free phone number.
The absence of limitation like the 160 characters of SMS

Therefore, lots of reasons for the number of voice applications to take off.

Of course, this domain has also lots of challenges. Some of them are mentionned in a paper i wrote in January 2008 but that's not the point i want to discuss in this post.

My concerns is about the current technology used for voice applications. Indeed there is not one single way of doing voice applications, but many different paths one can use, some are proprietary, some are standardized, some are tied to particular infrastructure,...

Let me start with a very rough overview of voice application infrastructure. In order to deliver content over telephony you need different layers:

a physical layer that connect the user with the service. this layer is in charge of receiving phone calls, or dialing back the user. it has also basic functionalities such as playing an audio stream, recording an audio stream, detecting and transmitting keypad press on the user side.
an application layer which implement the business logic of the application. This layer can be very simple and allow the author to manipulate only audio files, and capture keypad press. But it can also be a far more advanced version, with Text-to-speech (TTS) modules in different languages, Speech Recognition (SR) engines, ability to transfer the user to another external applications and so on.

What's really critical is to separate the two layers. There are many reasons for that:

the ability to change the physical layer to e.g. scale-up a prototype
the ability for software developers to have a standardized platform to develop content, or toolkit independently of the infrastructure that would be used to run it.

In order to meet this need of separation between physical and application layers, W3C, ten years ago !, in conjunction with major PBX vendors, and voice software developers and vendors launched the Voice Activity, which led to the definition of the VoiceXML family of markup languages. VoiceXML and related languages not only offer a standardized way of developing voice applications, but also a standardized way of adressing TTS, SR and related extensions. It also integrates key features of the Web, such as e.g. hyperlinks.

The following graphics shows a simplified view:

Having managed the voice activity at W3C few years ago, it is obvious to me that it is the only way to go. So i was really surprised to see that people, particularly NGOs, developing applications today in Africa, are not aware of this work, and the potential of the technology.

What i've seen so far is people using a particular physical layer and developing content and modules for that physical layer. I'm talking here about Asterisk, which is without discussion the leading free and open-source software PBX. But it is a PBX again, only the physical layer. All physical layers offer minimal application development capabilities. Here in the case of asterisk those capabilities are huge through modules, but still this is proprietary to the this physical layer.

Asterisk is an incredibly great tool, but that's not the level at which the application should be developed. VoiceXML offers the full strenght of the Web, including the ability to connect applications done by others through hyperlinks, built-in functionality such as interface to TTS and SR, Forms, language supports,... the access through search engines, the ability to use the web to provide services,...

There are also lots of tools available for validating your application, for authoring and so on. Read the presentation of some of these tools.

Obviously, there are modules for asterisk to become a voiceXML parser. 2 examples:

Voice Glue which is a free module under GPL license
VXI* VoiceXML Browser free for one call at a time, licenses based on number of concurrent calls

(Disclaimer: I didn't have the chance to test those yet and see what are their compliance to W3C standard)

So now, how to promote the use of VoiceXML in the community, and help people making the right choice when they investigate voice applications?

I believe there is a great need for a large initiative around using Voice in Development: identifying existing tools, developing best practices and techniques, identifiying key usability issues, developing TTS and SR engines in major languages... but again it is critical to promote the use of the appropriate underlying technology, VoiceXML, the standardized, vendor-neutral, infrastructure-neutral, Web-based technology.

We are thinking about such an initiative at the Web Foundation, and i hope we will be able to propose it to the community in a very near future.

Stephane

The IGF Success Story

2009-05-11T10:28:39Z

The World Summit on Information Society, or WSIS for short, was a multi-year initiative of the UN that culminated on Nov 16-19th 2005 in Tunis, Africa, with close to twenty thousands people from all over the world gathered to discuss various societal and policy-making aspects of the Internet and the Web.

A noticeable follow-up to this WSIS UN summit is called the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). IGF is hosted in Geneva, and after 4 years of activities, is very likely to be renewed for a few more years given the praises it has received.

]]> To understand the importance of a UN World Summit, one has to remember that they are held rarely; only when there is an issue of large societal impacts, such as women's rights in 1945, or global climate changes more recently. These summits typically involve themes that are well known and accepted by some, but not by all, and themes that have become ripe for all governements to take action together. The Internet is, today, such an issue.

With the IGF, two things are happening in parallel that are interesting:

The Internet and the Web, the Internet's most successful application, have spread everywhere, in all countries. Governments are not in control of the Internet, nor is any other single group of stakeholders.
The UN is looking at opening its participation model (historically reserved to official representatives) to adapt to the new multi-stakeholder dialog model that has made the Internet and the Web what they are.

I remember well the first face-to-face meeting between Markus Kummer (now UN Executive Coordinator for IGF, then in charge of the WSIS negociations on Internet Governance), and Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director, Steve Bratt, W3C CEO, Danny Weitzner (then head of the Technology and Society domain at W3C), it was on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of W3C Europe in Sophia-Antipolis, France, in June 2005.

The discussions, as they turned out, were half about the Internet and the Web as such, and half about understanding how W3C worked, in practice, day-to-day, e.g. how to use the technology itself, the Web, mailing list, irc, of our ways of running remote and face-to-face meetings, or getting consensus across diverse communities.

The key word was "inclusiveness" of course, based on a very simple but dramatic reasoning:

We don't know the answers to all the questions we are faced with on the Web
There are many, many more (order of a million times more) people outside than inside, so a much higher probablity that the answers we're looking for are not going to come from an insider.
Therefore we need to open up to find the answers.

This is true for W3C and IGF, or ICANN or any public administration for that matter, and relevant whether we're talking about just the staff that run the organizations (i.e. paid for doing this job) or the first few inner circles of participants (at most a few thousands compared to the billions outside)

This is now called participatory governance by some, or inclusive society, and even though this principle is not new, its implementation is now greatly facilitated by the Internet tools used for working in groups, for communicating across nations and geographical boundaries.

Today the IGF is renewing its MAG (Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group, in charge of setting the agenda of the plenary, that is, which issues to discuss in more details) and has to face its own future as an organization pushed by strong winds of administration reforms. The original issues at stake are of course still with us: digital divide, access for all, freedom of expression, critical resources (e.g. the DNS root), capacity building (in infrastructure as well as policy development), and new organizational challenges (i.e. the Dynamic Coalition process) are raising.

W3C and the Web Foundation strongly share the vision of an Information Society in which everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge -- in particular, knowledge about the system itself. This is the main reason justifying my participation in this forum (I'm on the MAG since the beginning), both as W3C and WF representative, bringing the perspective of open Web standards development that have led us to where we are today.

IGF had to go the way it went: opening, listening, discussing, questioning, in one word: facilitating dialog. This was the obvious course, because IGF had to interface with people who already worked like that. My hope is that it sets a good example for the rest of the UN agencies and for government agencies in general, and that IGF starts producing soft recommendations.

As we "collectively enter a new era of enormous potential", to quote the last article of the Tunis declaration, we are convinced that our mission of "Leading the Web to its full potential" and "Humanity Connected" align with those of the IGF to build this new knowledge society.

ICTD 2009 Travel Report

2009-04-20T08:06:15Z

I spent the last 3 days in Doha, Qatar to follow the 3rd ICTD conference (ICTD2009).

I was here to organize a panel on mobile web for Social development (see slides and panelist position papers).

]]> I spent the last 3 days in Doha, Qatar to follow the 3rd ICTD conference (ICTD2009).

I was here to organize a panel on mobile web for Social development (see slides and panelist position papers). The panel went very well, and the different views of the panelists triggered great discussions. I was very lucky to get all these great people on board !

The room was full, and nobody left before the end even if we ate part of the break. That's a good sign !! Let me thank again David Edelstein from Grameen Foundation, Ken Banks from Kiwanja, Gaetano Borriello from U. of Washington, Jesse Moore from GSMA Development Funds and Jonathan Donner from Microsoft Research for accepting my invitation to join this panel.

Concerning the conference, this was probably the best event i attended since long time. There were some interesting talks (see the program) but above all, what makes a good conference is the audience, and i met lots of very interesting people.

It was a real pleasure to meet for the first time Erik Hersman (Ushahidi) and Patrick Meier and have lots of interesting discussions. I'm trying to convince Erik to consider the mobile web channel for Ushahidi and i was amazed by what Patrick is doing in Sudan

It was good also to meet again Brenda Burrell (freedom fone) and had time for long discussion. She was in Maputo but we didn't have that much time to discuss. So it was good to have more time here.

Some talks were very interesting, and i particularly enjoyed the one by Jonathan Donner on the Mobile Use by Micro and Small Enterprises (not online yet afaik).

Out of the great networking, attending this conference, even if very academic, is inspiring. After Maputo and now this one, i'm more and more convinced that voice is a very promising channel, and lots of people are now investigating it. This was confirmed by a discussion i had with Jesse Moore from GSMA Development Fund, and a recent report they released on health.

However, discussing in lenght with Brenda, there is a lot to do in that domain to show to people how to take the best of VoiceXML and related technologies.

I'm also seeing people investigating more the potential of icons, and i discussed a bit with Anoop Gupta, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, who told me that MS will release a mobile platform for widgets soon.

Two other major points that are related to the Web Foundation:

there is still lots of people that are not aware of the easiness to develop and deploy mobile applications, being mobile web, sms or voice. There is a huge potential in raising awareness in this domain, and disseminate information about existing free tools and how to use them.
there is potentially a huge amount of human resources available to help in Development. I met many people from universities that explained me that numerous students are really ready to help developing and deploying solutions, helping local ngo to integrate ict tools in their work and so on, similarly to what e.g. Josh Nesbit did in Malawi. There is clearly a lack of organization to help connecting local needs and available volunteers, and this is perhaps a domain where the Web foundation could help.

Definetly it was worth the trip !

Mozambique Workshop on Mobile Tech for Development

2009-04-08T00:31:27Z

Non-profits, entrepreneurs and individuals in Africa and other under-served populations are on the verge of greater connectivity and power to address their most pressing challenges by leveraging access to the World Wide Web on mobile phones. But we have work to do to get there. This is the conclusion that I left Maputo, Mozambique with, following W3C's Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development. The Web Foundation is proud to have been a Gold Sponsor for the event. Here are some additional, personal impressions ...

]]>

Excellent mix of expert participants. Co-chairs Stéphane Boyera (current on the Foundation and W3C staffs) and George Sadowsky gathered the most knowledgeable, experienced and nicest people. About one third are helping people in the field in domains such as agriculture, health care, government services and education. Another third are technologists with expertise in SMS, voice, the Web. The remainder come from academia, government, etc. About half of the participants are based in Africa. The other half have strong international experience. The chemistry and conversation were remarkable.
Agenda as a Reference Library. The agenda contains links to useful papers and presentation slides. Good statistics, tech overviews, and inspirational stories from the field, illustrating successes (most importantly, in terms of serving and empowering people), as well as challenges.
Voice and SMS on mobiles dominate now. And there are some amazing applications addressing real problems. Four examples among tens from the workshop: Eric M.K Osiakwan described the use of SMS to support election monitoring. Josh Nesbit talked about the FrontlineSMS out-of-the-box solution, and its role in fostering more efficient and effective health care Malawi as one of many applications in a growing number of locales. Ushahidi is hardening their open source platform for SMS-based crowd sourcing in times of crisis and joy, as reported by Henry Addo (I had the pleasure of meeting Henry previously in Paris in February). Brenda Burrell described how FreedomFone's Interactive Voice Respone system is providing critical information in Africa.
Huge, as-yet-unrealized, opportunities for people, via the Web. In the current environment, voice and text applications have advantages. But they also come with challenges and limitations in areas such as authoring, scalability, discovery, interoperability, usability, cost and global connectivity. Fisseha Mekuria, Sean Krepp (Nokia) and Charles McCathieNevile (Opera) presented interesting stats on the rapid expansion of mobile devices and the mobile Web and a vision for continued expansion.
Path forward. People like those at the workshop, the technologies most are currently using, and the societal problems they are working to address are all important to the expanded use of the Web for development. In fact, I think that SMS and voice, as well as browsers and widgets can be effective human interfaces to the larger Web of knowledge, including locally- and globally-relevant connect. There are also barriers to the use of the Web, including availability of affordable data services, authoring tools, literacy (language and computer), content in local languages, and basic awareness of what is possible. The Web Foundation commits to address these challenges.
We need more events like this."When's the next one?" was a common question toward the end of the workshop. There is strong interest in learning more about the Web, and in seeing demonstrations and receiving training on how to author mobile-friendly Web sites (see W3C's resource center).

The co-chairs will publish a summary of the workshop on the W3C Web site, and perhaps Steph will share his personal impressions here later.

When's the next one? Stay tuned.

WebSci'09 in Athens

2009-03-30T16:16:26Z

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join the Web Science movement in Athens, Greece, and celebrate the first "f2f" of this new research group or community, a decentralized group really, with several fields of interest (from graph theory to online democratic practices), with a focus for the three days of this first conference on Society on-line.

]]> A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join the Web Science movement in Athens, Greece, and celebrate the first "f2f" of this new research group or community, a decentralized group really, with several fields of interest (from graph theory to online democratic practices), with a focus for the three days of this first conference on Society on-line.

Web Science, one of the Web Foundation's pillars, is all about understanding, designing and developing the "things" that made/make up the World Wide Web and our life. After twenty years of existence (see recent CERN Web@20 event), we are all persuaded of one thing: the Web only exists because of the participation of people and organizations from all horizons (world wideness), so this focus on world wide societal communication was welcome.

The conviviality of the center with its large hall and the scarcity of electrical plugs :) made for a very rich communication between humans, which was welcome as well. The variety and quality of paper presented and the poster hall were all inline with this goal of a world wide society at work. Just to mention a couple of my favorites: the presentation of the oreChem project by Carl Lagoze from Cornell on Integrating Chemistry Scholarship with the Semantic Web and the case studies for Web science and social behavior when Introducing new features to Wikipedia, done in collaboration by hundred of thousands of technical contributors. Such a complex socio-technical process has to be studied and fortunately, we have the Wikipedia archives as a first large scale experiment pool of data (thanks to their spirit of openness and transparency).

We do live at a time in human history where technical progress is accelerating at a pace that challenges our adaptation and the balance of some of our key principles in terms of communication with others. If we consider the specific domain of trust on the Web, a recurent topic in the field, and the privacy issues posed by the combined growth of the online social networks and the use of program-oriented Web pages, we see a clear need for a deeper understanding of the various usages and benefits brought to those billions of end-users.

Did I hear billions ? How can we understand billions of users ? It has never been done, we're close to having data for millions (e.g Wikipedia) the scaling effect is a topic of research in itself: measuring the Web using the Web, a bit of an Heiseinberg dilemma!

The first Web Science conference, organised by the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and the Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW) marked the start of the community gathering about this young Science, and it was a well organized, well attended and very rewarding event at all levels. Work is needed now to study the various output of the conference (on shared curricula for instance) and to plan the way forward.

Toward an Open ICT Standard Initiative

2009-03-18T15:25:17Z

The issues technologists and policy makers face today with Open ICT Standardization (Information Communication Technology) are similar to the issues W3C went through about 12 years ago when we started managing large initiatives cutting across several fields of expertise, like the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative for people with disabilities): missing definitions and tools which could only come from a missing framework.

In this paper, I'll remind people of how things developed (process-wise) last century in the W3C/WAI domain, a clearly mixed technology and policy area (as for the Open Standards debate), we'll look at the community reaction at that time, and what we have learned from that experience that could be re-used on the organisational side to help clarify and adopt an Open ICT Standardization model that suits all stakeholders.

]]> The issues technologists and policy makers face today with Open ICT Standardization (Information Communication Technology) are similar to the issues W3C went through about 12 years ago when we started managing large initiatives cutting across several fields of expertise, like the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative for people with disabilities): missing definitions and tools which could only come from a missing framework.

At the end of 1996, W3C was a couple of years old, HTML, http and URL were the hot buttons on our screen, and several guidelines to make HTML Web pages accessible were available and more or less in use on the net. W3C had a couple of pages listing them in no particular order or kind, and in addition to worried end-users experimenting more and more difficulties accessing the net (which was becoming less and less textual), page designers were complaining too that even though they really wanted to create cool pages for everybody without barriers, including blind users for instance, they couldn't, given the lack of technical directives for the Web at large, and the divergence of individual initiatives.

So W3C, with both private and public funding support) created the WAI as a community effort. We got in touch with all the known leaders in the disability/net accessibility field, and they all agreed to play the Consortium's standard game, with its overhead and constraints, starting with giving up their own guidelines editing authority. Those pionners and more to join our forces "became" the W3C/WAI community, while keeping their own independence and their own mission. There was little talk about making legislation out of our work (this happened later on), we were just looking for an agreement for ourselves, the Web designers, authors and users.

A bit more than a decade later, I won't say the Web accessibility issue is solved, far from that, but we now have a real market/pool of Web accessibility specialists, and some solid technical specifications (like the recent WCAG 2.0) and tools, and slowly but certainly, the fundamental principle of separation of structure, content and form/style for electronic communications is making its way in everybody's mind (and not just with the accessibility specialists: the goal is always mainstream adoption). Dare I say, we also have a leadership, a gathering place, the W3C WAI domain, where new problems can be addressed as technologies and usages evolve. Enough commercial!

The same context holds for Open Standards adoption today.

We have experts in all areas of standardization, and they all share the same goal: help humanity to get better connected, in a healthy ICT ecosystem, and more importantly, the same platform for everyone: gov, citizen, business, etc.

We also have, like WAI at the beginning, a plethora of guidelines and definitions, touching various grounds, and both the new users (the large buyers of technologies like governments or big non-ICT industries) and the designers (the programmers and the ICT vendors, those have changed too: lots of newcomers, much larger population) are left without a clear set of authoritative guidelines as to how to implement a good open ICT system. That's not saying that they don't do it, but it doesn't scale when they all do it a bit differently (e.g. one group will put the emphasis on the IPR regime, the other to the Due Process, a third on the Implementation support, another on Vendor neutrality, etc).

WAI as an example

What we have learned from WAI and W3C is that we need to look at the problem from an organisational point of view, and move forward in equally important parallel tracks, each having its own charter, scope, commitment timing from participants, sponsors, etc.

I can count at least six such tracks (I'll mention the WAI group equivalent each time, as I think it provides a good framework):

a track describing what is an open ict ecosystem (WCAG level, the Web content guidelines, forming the basis for the rest)
a track describing how to implement it (e.g. including process, tools, education, similar to the UUAG, the guidelines for developing WAI compatible browser)
a track describing how to produce/mandate open standards (e.g. procurement, technical references templates, similar the WAI authoring tools guidelines)
a track to promote it (similar to the WAI EO group, with a more bottom-up grassroot approach)
a track to evaluate it (WAI Evaluation tools group)
a track to research this field (coordinating with standardization research for future trends, blue sky scenario, etc)
and there must be an overall coordination group for all those tracks (WAI Coordination group) and an interest group for open discussions with no commitment.

As for WAI in its early days, chaos is mostly generated by the fact that the expertise from the various expert communities is cutting these groups horizontally, while each group eventually need a separate set of deliverables, talking to a different audience. This calls for a special attention to the scope of each groups early on (and of course adopting a very inclusive philosophy: invite whoever is not happy outside to come inside the house and fix the light themselves).

As you can guess, this is not a simple project and a challenge to organize such a community effectively, much more than for WAI in fact, since all the pre-existing expert communities are much more visible today in the new political debate than the accessibility experts from academia we dealt with years ago, and as a result, openess experts feel more attached to their own ideas.

But there's hope. Lots of groups are being created, with a lot of really smart people in them, which is an indication of some unification coming up (you can unite if you're alone :). To name a few, the United Nations IGF DCOS group is looking at some definition and procurement issues. The industry, e.g. IBM, is also moving forward with discussion fora and targeted programs, as they realize the importance of a sound open policy platform for their business to florish even more in the years to come (big markets being opened in Asia, India, etc). ISOC has also a solid team of Internet policy analysts.

The W3C eGov activity is also a very good step in the right direction, using the W3C inclusive process and looking at important use cases and specific themes (like Participative governments, Open Data, Identity Mgnt, etc). They are dozens of separate eGov groups besides W3C's, and so a lot of liaising going on in this field (where Open Standards is an important component).

I certainly hope that our new Web Foundation will play an important role in the future of such a project (once the foundation is created and running!). Indeed, WF has in its mission to support the promotion of Open Web Standards, which is a big piece on today's ICT open standard landscape (but not the only one, there's the Internet itself, the media industry, the mobile layers, etc).

I think that the year 2009 will see some important development in the Open ICT Standard area. They are just too many individuals with good will (a will that goes beyond their self interest or fame) working in the field.

In 20 years of Open ICT Standard development (in the area of Graphics, Unix, Desktop, Internet, Web) the overall lesson that we learned is that thousands of people can happily collaborate and share private knowledge to create blue-print specifications of any kind, for the benefit of all, you just have to support and help them cook together in the same large kitchen, and tell them they will have their own meals for dinner that night.

More seriously, we'll all in this together, we have the experts, the implementors, the producers, and what we need now is a sound framework roadmap to move together full speed in parallel coordinated tracks, to give this Open Standard field the critical mass it needs for full adoption. ICT done right is an accelerator of social and scientific progress, and progress saves lives, it's as simple as that.

Ref: 1997 WAI original project proposal.

20th Anniversary of the Proposal for the Web

2009-03-13T02:41:40Z

On 13 March 2009 CERN marks the 20th anniversary of a document by Tim Berners-Lee -- entitled, "Information Management : a Proposal" -- describing what would become the World World Wide Web. A schedule for the celebration includes a keynote by Tim. I hope you have a chance to follow some of this via the planned Webcast.

]]> On 13 March 2009 CERN marks the 20th anniversary of a document by Tim Berners-Lee -- entitled, "Information Management : a Proposal" -- describing what would become the World World Wide Web. A schedule for the celebration includes a keynote by Tim. I hope you have a chance to follow some of this via the planned Webcast.

I smile every time I am reminded of the comment that Tim's boss, Mike Sendall, wrote on Tim's proposal for the Web: "Vague, but exciting" :)

History leading up to and following Tim's proposal is recapped on the W3C and CERN sites.

I will take a moment on this day to be thankful for Tim's gift to the world, and for the stewardship that the World Wide Web Consortium and broader Web community have provided to ensure the creative and responsible development of what is arguably the most powerful communications medium the world has ever known. And there is still much more to do ...

Diverse Web Creations From Netexplorateurs

2009-02-24T01:50:38Z

I had the pleasure to speak at the NetExplorateur Forum in Paris earlier this month. A highlight for me was meeting a trio of the NetExplorateurs of the Year for 2009. These folks are similar in their intelligence, enterprise, energy and affability. The apps that they created to earn the award were interestingly diverse, and attest to the range of capabilities that can be made available to people using Web technologies.

]]> I had the pleasure to speak at the NetExplorateur Forum in Paris earlier this month. A highlight for me was meeting a trio of the NetExplorateurs of the Year for 2009. These folks are similar in their intelligence, enterprise, energy and affability. The apps that they created to earn the award were interestingly diverse, and attest to the range of capabilities that can be made available to people using Web technologies.

Ushahidi -- which means ''testimony'' in Swahili -- was first used to crowdsource and map outbreaks of violence following elections in Kenya in 2008. Henry Addo, hailing from Ghana (and in pic to left, with me), recently joined the Ushahidi team, and was in Paris to receive well-deserved recognition for their work. I'm seeing references to Ushahidi's systems everywhere these days, and it has been deployed to chart troubling activities in Gaza, the Congo, South Africa and elsewhere. Their maturing, open-source platform gives citizens the power to reports on events using their mobile phones, email and the Web. Geographic visualizations are created from these reports, for all to see and use.

Mobile banking is of growing importance in the developing world and elsewhere. M-banking provides the capability to accumulate savings, take out loans at reasonable interest rates, and to more fully participate in the global economy (OK ... perhaps not such a wonderful privilege these days!). Brian Richardson, CEO of Wizzit, was named a NetExplorateur of the Year for bringing affordable mobile banking to people across networks and devices in South Africa, Zambia and Romania.

The last app I'll describe is just plain fun. The product is the Sekai Camera, and Takahito Iguchi, from Tonchidot was in Paris to receive the award. With the software on your video/GPS/Web-enabled mobile phone (iPhone for now, but other platforms soon), you can capture video of the world around you, and then information just pops-up as overlays or "air tags" on the objects you are capturing. For example, you might be panning around a gallery in the Louvre, and selectable images of artwork, sounds from friends who were just there, the history of the artist, etc. start floating around the Louvre as viewed on your mobile device. You can add your own air tags too.

The growing value of the Web -- whether in crisis, for commerce, or as a tool of creativity -- continues to impress.

ICT and Development - Travel Report

2009-02-16T09:09:59Z

Last week, I was during three days at the Second International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation where I gave a talk on Mobile and ICT for Development.

I originally accepted the invitation because it was organized by my colleague Brendan Doyle from Fundacion CTIC, and I’m always happy to chat with him and Josema (Jose Manuel Alonzo). I participated in the first instance of this conference last year, and to be honest it was not really focused on my current work interests, and was mostly targeted at an audience from Spain. Therefore, i didn't expect very much from it this year and obviously I was completely wrong!

]]> Last week, I was during three days at the Second International Meeting on ICT for Development Cooperation where I gave a talk on Mobile and ICT for Development.

This year it was an event of another dimension. The attendance was far bigger (around 200 people I would say), and there was a strong international participation. Not only there were people from all over the World, but, more interesting, almost all the different actors from the development sector were represented. There were people from international organizations like The World Bank, OECD or UNDP, academics from Africa (Meraka Institute), people from the industry like Nokia, Microsoft Research India, people from small or bigger NGO like Ushahidi or APC, people from Development agencies or related like the Swiss development agency, IRDC, IICD or the South Centre. This diversity brought very interesting discussions.

Out of the networking opportunity and meetings with very interesting and nice people, I’m coming back with two particular highlights I would like to share.

The first one is about mobile. While last year, the event was also on the use of ICT in Development, almost nobody was talking about mobiles. I tried to ask questions, and see what the opinion of presenters was on the role of mobile in development but no success, mobile phones were person-to-person communication mechanism, not a real ICT platform. That was only 12 months ago. This year, I don’t recall one talk or round table not mentioning mobiles. It is really impressive to see how quickly all actors of ICTD have adopted mobiles.

The second highlight for me was to realize how diverse the views of the different actors of the domain are. There were different dimensions discussed. The first one is the role of governments. Being a bit provocative, I would say that some people believe that governments are mandatory parts of the solution, while at the opposite some others believe that they are part of the problem. I’m personally somewhere in the middle. I believe that governments have to be out of the critical path. There are simple services that could really improve people’s lives, and empowering local NGOs is the only way to see these services being deployed and available quickly at the local level. In another domain, about human rights, democracy, freedom of speech, transparent elections, only NGOs could develop and provide relevant services that would put pressure on governments to take the good option.

On the other end, for country-wide challenges (health, education…), or for public services, governments are the only one that could launch required actions, and empowering them with appropriate technologies would allow a better availability of these services. Therefore, in summary, I really believe that it is essential to work at both levels, empowering both NGOs and governments to allow them to better accomplish their work.

About empowering people, governments or NGOs, I realized also during this event that this is a concept that not everybody is sharing. For me, coming with a background and history about the Web, empowering people is the only way to have an impact at the global level. But from people coming from the development sector, the traditional top-down approach is to first understand what the issues are, then develop an appropriate solution and finally implement it in the field. There were lots of discussions on this approach. I was particularly interested by the talk made by Kentaro Toyama, from Microsoft Research India, where he presented two important concepts around first the importance of focusing on development and not on technology (understanding what are the needs first instead of trying to understand what kind of problems a particular technology could solve), and the need to integrate people in the very beginning of the cycle. Very inspiring presentation.

We were also few on the side of the importance of empowering people. Here, I was impressed by Juliana Rotich from Ushahidi, by Merryl Ford from Meraka Institute and Anriette Esterhuysen from APC. Another very interesting talk was done by Vikas Nath from South Centre about the importance for Developing Countries to shape their agenda themselves and not let others do it. To summarize, it is very important to understand the different viewpoints of the different actors, and in that regards convening people from different sectors was a great success of this event.

Finally, discussing with different people running projects in different countries, I realized that I was over-optimistic on the awareness of the potential of the mobile platform. Being in the domain since 3 years now, I didn’t realize that they are still people working in the field that are not really aware of the potential of mobile phones, and the way they could use them in their projects, without requiring heavy negotiation with operators and governments. There is a need for an important work on raising awareness on the easiness of developing, deploying and accessing mobile content.

Mobile Technologies for Social Development

2009-01-27T16:35:51Z

One of the first events the Web Foundation will sponsor is the W3C Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development which will take place on 1 and 2 April 2009 in Maputo, Mozambique.

This event aims to understand specific challenges of using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver services to underprivileged populations of developing countries, and to capture the specificities of the African context.

It is the third instance of a series started in December 2006 in India, and continued in Sao Paulo, Brazil in June 2008.

]]> One of the first events the Web Foundation will sponsor is the W3C Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social and Economic Development which will take place on 1 and 2 April 2009 in Maputo, Mozambique.

It is the third instance of a series started in December 2006 in India, and continued in Sao Paulo, Brazil in June 2008.

It is organized by the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group. This group, launched in June 2008, is chartered to build a community of mobile experts, web specialists, sociologists, experts in development, people/ngo with field experience, grassroots... that will work towards identifying the existing barriers to author, deploy and access development-oriented content and services on mobile phones.

There are two major reasons for the Web Foundation to sponsor this event:

First of all, the sponsorship program for this workshop is dedicated to allow people and grassroot organizations with field experience and expertise, particularly coming from developing countries, to attend the event (through travel grants), and share their expertise with others, as well as get valuable information for their activities. This is directly in line with the Web Foundation mission, which is working toward enabling people from developing countries to be part of the Web history and evolution, and to bring and share their expertise and requirements.
Then the specific topic of this event, using mobile technologies in social and economic development, is of particular interest to the foundation and will serve as the basis for the first program of the Web Foundation. Through this program, the Web Foundation will be engaged in addressing some of the challenges identified by the W3C MW4D group and its roadmap. This event will be a great opportunity to promote the future activities of the Web Foundation, and start community building activities and connect with most relevant experts of the domain.

For these reasons, Steve Bratt, our CEO, will give an introductory keynote at the event.

Progress and Plans

2009-01-18T20:24:37Z

Since announcing the plan to create the World Wide Web Foundation in September 2008, this proto-Web-site has been pretty quiet. Silence should not be mistaken for inactivity. Here's an update on what we've been doing, and what you will see as we ramp-up our activity during 2009.

In the last quarter of 2008, we made substantial progress on setting-up the "business" side of the Web Foundation (e.g., bylaws, budgeting, boards, branding, tax-exempt applications, processes, legal services, financial services, etc.). Though this work may not be interesting to most of you, it will prove important to creating a solid and flexible framework for tackling the ambitious challenges that we will undertake.

]]> Since announcing the plan to create the World Wide Web Foundation in September 2008, this proto-Web-site has been pretty quiet. Silence should not be mistaken for inactivity. Here's an update on what we've been doing, and what you will see as we ramp-up our activity during 2009.

With the help of the Monitor Group, we developed the strategy for the Foundation's future efforts. Our emphasis will be on advancing the Web to empower people and benefit humanity. We are developing plans for projects that aim to have a real impact in the world, including a blueprint for providing overall Web community focus and leadership, and for supporting Web science and standards. We also plan to launch a targeted initiative to accelerate the usability and usefulness of the Web on simple mobile phones in the hands of people who need life-critical services or who have services to provide. More on the strategy and plans in later postings.

How are we going to fund all of this work? Our 2009 began with a deposit of the first installment of the $5-million / 5-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This generous grant is seeding the launch of the Web Foundation. As such the Knight investment is funding most operational (non-program) costs for the foreseeable future, and providing a platform upon which to raise tens of millions of dollars from foundations, corporations, and people like you and me, so that we can achieve results.

With the Knight funding in the bank and working for us, you will see an acceleration of activity on this site and elsewhere in the coming months. At the same time, I hope to see an acceleration of your participation in our activity. A completely new Web site (still at webfoundation.org) will be the focal point for building the Web Foundation community. The new site will provide a place where you -- and others who care about the Web and how it can benefit humanity -- will exchange ideas, identify challenges and opportunities, volunteer to work, and help to raise funds needed to fuel success.

I'm excited about the year ahead. Watch this space. And prepare to work with us here and around the globe.

Transcription of Tim-Berner's Lees talk at Knight Foundation, 14 Sep 2008

2008-11-20T14:05:53Z

tbl-transcript.php

The Web Foundation Effect

2008-09-18T16:21:26Z

One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information. One aspect of these barriers is the ability for Web content to be available in all the languages of the World. For instance, The Unicode standard and HTML support characters in a large number of world languages, but many users may not have the right fonts to display those characters. Fonts for smaller language communities may not be readily available, making it hard to share knowledge in those languages.

Since we are just starting this Foundation, we are in the early phases of understanding the extent of this sort of need. But we didn't have to wait long, and we didn't have to look far. Indeed, the first case literally fell into our lap 30 minutes before announcing the Foundation. This is what i call the Web Foundation Effect !

]]> One of the focuses of the World Wide Web foundation is to investigate, in its Web for Society program, how to lower the barriers of accessing the Web for people who are not able, today, to find accessible and usable information. One aspect of these barriers is the ability for Web content to be available in all the languages of the World. For instance, The Unicode standard and HTML support characters in a large number of world languages, but many users may not have the right fonts to display those characters. Fonts for smaller language communities may not be readily available, making it hard to share knowledge in those languages.

Tim and Ian took a cab to go to the dinner, and, by chance, driving the cab was Aleme. Aleme is a taxi driver in Washington DC, but as an Ethiopian, and as a passionate about the Web, he is also, on his free time, a developer of a Web font for Amharic (Ethiopian language). He believes that the availability of such a font would allow all Ethiopians speaking only this language to exploit the potential of the Web for their purpose. What was the chance that people involved in the launch of the Web Foundation would find a potential contributor in a taxi driver ? almost zero... but it happened ! and it would not have happened a year ago, because this was clearly out of the scope of W3C.

This is a meaningful evidence that now, by investigating how, through the Foundation, we can make the Web more universal, we will find many potential contributors, many Aleme for hundreds of dialects in the World, who at their level will contribute to extend the frontier of the Web to their community.

Of course, we will follow up with Aleme, we will help him, when the foundation is up and running, to build a proposal for us, and to relate his work with other ongoing initiatives in this domain, and we will see if this is going somewhere, but i wanted to share this incredible story !

This is for me also an incredibly good illustration of how an individual actions could have an exponential effect on the accessibility and usability of the Web for people who are not able today to exploit its potential.

Stephane