I’ve been involved with the UN Internet Governance Forum as W3C representative since before it was created, and I’ve attended most of the plenaries (Athens, Rio) and most of the prep meetings in Geneva, so for me, the IGF community, inclusive of UN staff like Markus Kummer and his team, is a bit like a second family of colleagues and friends that I take pleasure to meet and work on a regular basis.

This year, it was therefore very exciting for me to have Tim able to participate in the Sharm El Sheikh edition of IGF, not just as opening keynote, but also as active workshop participant in several panels, as driver of our first Web Foundation workshop, and as guest of honor at the various receptions organized around the event. Thanks Tim! Here’s a 2min short video Tim did on the side for the UN team.

This year’s IGF broke some new records in terms of attendance (1800+) and in terms of variety of topics discussed, but also, unfortunately, in terms of security hassles and chaos management. I guess the more successfull an international event becomes, the more it attracts VIPs (e.g. Prime ministers, CEOs) who needs protection against potential terrorism threads and the more everybody has to pay with their own time.. On the positive side, the Sinai weather and the Red Sea corals at the footsteps of our hotels made up for most of these inconveniences!

In addition to Tim, Stephane Boyera and I, all three from WF and W3C, two other W3C staff were present in Sharm: Marie-Claire Forgue and Shadi Abou-Zahra, and we had a nice booth positioned right in the conference hall entrance, so this IGF also set a mark in terms of outreach to this policy-maker audience regarding the importance of open standards for the Web, and more generally in terms of relevance in less technical fora of the multi-stakeholder model used by the Internet technical community to achieve a level of interoperability that allowed and still permit the Web to grow exponentially.

I think more and more people understand that geeks like us not only brought to life important open and free global technologies like IP, TCP, http, Smtp, HTML, XML, etc, but they also designed ways of working together as international and geographicaly distributed communities (using the tools they had built, of course), ways that reflect the very open nature of their spirit.

In his keynote address, Tim emphasized the importance of a single open Web shared and used by all, including on low connections, mobile devices, in all languages, and for people with disabilities. “It has to be one Web“, the same platform for governments, commerce, individuals, ministers and CEO, using technical standards that are royalty free, designed, shared and implemented by anyone, big or small, in an interoperable way, thus keeping the Web universal. Lots of people came to me after the opening keynote to express their agreement and admiration for Sir Tim and his vision for the Web and the Internet.

Just a few words to end this report on the Web Foundation workshop Tim, Steph and I ran on Monday morning.

About 20 people showed up on a very short notice (which means they had to give up something else in their schedule program to be there), coming from Egypt, the Gulf region, Kenya, UK, Germany, Italy, Singapore, US, India, France, etc. Very international to say the least. Some had funders experience, some project ideas, some were academic, open source advocates, NGO.

Stephane who made a great slideshow, did a good job summarising the discussions in his post, and Tim may add some notes when he’s back, so I’ll just add a few words. First, I wish we’d tape the entire session, and take some pictures too, but I was too busy just getting a room, announcing it in the hall, finding and a video cable for the projection, etc, and just making sure we’d be OK with the basics

Capacity building/education came up often in our discussions, the idea that we’re going to have to train the trainers, rather than doing things ourselves. I also remember an interesting discussions about the kind of constraints granters should put onto their grantees, on the project tools they deliver, in relation to using Open standards in particular, using open source licences, creative commons for reporting, etc. Tim said that we didn’t have any such thing at this point within WF but maybe we should be more proactive about it, and say that anything we will fund has be free for all to reuse. Being scalable as a requirement came up as well.

What I got out of this workshop is that our strength with WF, our unique flavor so to speaj, is our Web technical guruness/geekness, the fact that we know the technology we’re promoting better than anyone else, even the big guys from the north, since we’ve designed and are still evolving the Web stack for/with them. We are therefore best positioned to transfer this technology know-how to the south in such a way that not only they will catch-up fast, but they actually may become the real experts on the Web of data and the Web of trust of tomorrow.

My hopes with the Web Foundation societal programs is that they will help emerging economies to seize this opportunity to innovate on this very affordable Web/Internet platform, knowing that the technologies are available for free and that whatever we help create (e.g. a local Web application improving farmers life in one region) can scale to the entire planet.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

Kutcho is an independent farmer from Ghana, he’s about 55 years-old and he owns 10 acres (about 4 hectares) of land near Akropong/Abiriw, a small town three hours by bus, north-east of Accra, in the Akuapem hills region.

We first met in the Abiriw Community Center on Sunday morning. The plan was that he would guide us back to his farm a few miles south of Abiriw in the afternoon. Since we both had some time before lunch while Tim and Aleks (BBC anchor for the series) were discussing with a group of students in the PC room next door, we used a free terminal connected to the Internet and played with maps and satellite photos for a while, trying to locate his farm, or the road to Accra, or showing him my house in Europe.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

Although he’s originally from around here, Kutcho has only been an independent farmer for a few years, after having worked in large cities and abroad for most of his life. His goals for the rest of his life, as he told me later that day while we were waiting together for the day’s end in the BBC bus, is to live a simple life, close to nature, with family and friends nearby, and also of course be a good farmer, using performant techniques.

As a principle, he always tries to diversify, and always grows several crops in parallel during the year: corn, plantain, papaye, etc. That gives him more work and requires more knowledge, but it also lowers the risk associated with monoculture, of course. Here’s a short video of some of his fields.

Kutcho likes to come to the community center on a regular basis, mostly to look for information on the Web related to his job as farmer, but it’s a bit far for him to come whenever he needs or wants to, so he only spends some time online when he gets to the city.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

The Mobile Web is of course a solution to his problem, since he has a mobile phone like most people nowadays, even in Africa, but more importantly, as he puts it the following short video of a side-interview we did that day, he likes contents with figures, videos, photos, and not much text, that explain irrigation techniques, harvesting timelines, better use of chemicals, etc.

Illiteracy – the inability to read or write – is a relevant topic everywhere on the planet, but particularly in Africa where lots of people are still insufficiently educated. We should probably call them “non-literate” rather the more socially loaded term “illiterate”, since being able to read and write in a given language is often not relevant for them, especially if it’s not their mother’s tongue. Most people speak a very good English in Ghana, in addition to their local langage (e.g. Akan), but few people can read administrative or technical english for instance, with long sentences, acronyms, or lots of numbers mixed with text in long paragraphs.

It is very important that we do not consider as inferior or ignorant people that prefer pictures and rich media to understand a particular point (e.g. when to start cutting wild grass, depending on the crop, the amount of sun, rain, etc). If we are to improve or replace (when it’s missing) the education of another farmer or baker, we need to re-create the experience of live training as best as we can, and integrate voice and video as naturally as possible,

Today’s challenge for someone like Kutcho, who’s already aware of the potential of the Web, is to access “rich” content (in the sense media-rich: images, videos, audio) related to his kind of agriculture (tropical fruit), without leaving his farm location if possible.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

Of course when we talked about open social networks, open data, he’s also attracted by the ability to use the Web to communicate and express his needs to a larger audience, as well as to help others, and potentially also to use special applications like tradenet.biz to find better rates for the transport of goods and their resale (even though he already relies on his cell phone for business contact, which is already a big change compared to 10 years ago where there was nothing but a few fixed lines for the entire valley).

What we learned with this trip is that the directions we’ve been taking with our first WF program goes in the right direction: we need to work in parallel on both the infrastructure (make the Mobile Web platform a reality, partnering with operators, ngo, and train developpers to give data access at a reasonnable cost for the local population) and at the content level (in their language, using graphic and sound to complement the text, using community input and output, nice interface to government data, international data, etc).

The architecture of the Internet in independant layers, and the architecture of the Web itself separating the device capabilities from the nature of the content itself, are both enabling such an incremental and parallel approach: we can start working on content (our expertise is there) and partner with groups working on improvements at the lower level (IP, transport, etc) so that our effects add up to eventually improve the Web end-user experience.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

Some context first. We’ve been working on scheduling a series of WF staff visits in Africa in the coming months. The main goal is to make great connections with people, projects and organizations we’d been partially in touch with in the past through joined participation in various international fora (e.g. UN/IGF, Digital World Forum, ICANN, W3C, etc) and also to learn how the Internet is being used and understand better the barriers and opportunities special to each region. Our Mobile Web for Development ideas are clearly an important driver for this outreach. Issues around eGovernment best practices, open linked data and building effective user and social communities are also very relevant.

This trip was also motivated by a filming opportunity for the BBC series “Digital Revolution“. Thanks to Nii Quaynor, with whom I work with at the UN/IGF, a highly respected expert in the Internet and Web field in Africa, and thanks to the professional BBC handling of logistics, we were able manage our agenda with no stress.

In the next paragraphs, I’ll give a short summary of our three-day journey in this wonderful country. Then I’ll mention some of the things we learned.

Upon our arrival in Accra Friday evening, we were welcomed by the deputy Minister of Communications, Gideon Quarcoo, and together with Nii and Aleks Krotoski, the BBC anchor, we had our first discussion related to local ICT access and usage in Ghana, in particular in rural areas. During this first exchange, it became clear, at least for me, that Ghana has taken a positive approach to harness the power of the Web for their society: open principles, international participation, and serious focus on education and local connectivity.

Saturday morning, after an interesting breakfast meeting with a local entrepreneur, Mark Davies, who runs busyinternet, a internet cafe/incubation center, we took the road for Aburi, a village north-east of Accra in the Akuapem mountains, with the entire filming team (director/producer, assistant, cameraman, audio, interviewer, local contact, two drivers, Tim and I).

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

On Sunday, we visited two recently connected community centers, in Apirede and Abiriw.

There, we had the opportunity to interact with users. Tim and Aleks showed them how to edit Wikepedia to add information about their town/region. Hopefully they will teach the others in return.

The afternoon was spent in a farm community near Adwaso, a fear miles south, literally in the plantain fields, to film our dialog with a local producer about his use of ICT technologies. Basically, he finds useful information on the Web already, from the center, but would like the same services from here in the fields, rather than walk or drive 5 miles north to the local cybercafe.
Sounds logical.

Finally, on Monday, we left the BBC folks and came back to Accra for a lunch and workshop hosted by Dorothy Gordon at the Kofi Annan Center (for ICT). There we heard from local initiatives and organizations. Tim presented his principles and vision for the Web Foundation and the Web itself. A long and interesting Q&A session ended the program.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

Beyond the goal of introducing the new Web Foundation and learning more about the current ICT situation in this African region, the presence of Tim was a real opportunity to gather and motivate all the actors in various sectors, starting with government officials, academic, and the net technical community, to move into the direction proposed by the Web Foundation’s messages: open Web standard, open linked data, participative Web, mobile Web, transparent government, universal access, etc.

Improving ICT penetration in Ghana, opening the online government, educate the population with Internet/Web skills, is a clear goal of the current administration, something they promised during the last election, witness the opening of two hundred community centers around the country – like the ones we visited on Sunday – providing free connectivity for local students or farmers. This sort of development is really something to take into account for our future projects in the region.

Indeed, with such an infrastructure in place, it becomes much easier to train local programmers with the goal to develop local adapted services for a community they know really well. Of course, they need to learn and adapt to their use existing open platforms for trade, social network, and together we can improve the overall Mobile Web experience in the region.

Photo by Daniel Dardailler

As Nii put it, in Ghana, and in many parts of Africa, it will be years before most users get permanent connectivity. So we need to focus on more readily-available solutions for accessing the Web, e.g. using SMS technology, already well deployed. While doing that, paying attention to re-purposing information depending on the capacity and the variety of user interface is key, as they range from plain text with a limited number of characters (e.g. SMS) to java enabled UIs and full voice and Web UIs. The W3C has worked in these sorts of protocols and should be put in the loop as well.

As a conclusion, I’ll note that there are many technical and economical questions and challenges with an SMS-Web approach, and they can be analyzed at various levels (e.g. using new government/regulation, negociating with the operators, working with the community centers resources, develop new tools, create a keyword ontology platform for SMS applications, study revenue models based on prepaid vs. advertising, etc), and our next steps should be to lay out some of these options where WF can have the best impact, and build up the partnerships that are required to make them successful.

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 negotiations 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, eg, 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 (ie, 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 (eg, the DNS root), capacity building (in infrastructure as well as policy development), and new organizational challenges (ie, 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.

Source: Athens Tourism and Economic Development

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 (eg, Wikipedia) the scaling effect is a topic of research in itself: measuring the Web using the Web, a bit of an Heisenberg 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.

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.

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 (eg, 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 (eg, including process, tools, education, similar to the UUAG, the guidelines for developing WAI compatible browser).
• a track describing how to produce/mandate open standards (eg, 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, eg, 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 Management, 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, the Web Foundation 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.