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

I am grateful to the organizers — conference chair Jim Larson in particular — for giving me an opportunity to dialog with leaders in the  industry about the issues that are so important to us. I am also very much looking forward to learning from voice technology experts.  So if you happen to be at SpeechTEK next week, you’re very welcome to come and join the discussion.

I’m delighted to see that the series of events called Mobile Web Africa, organized by Matthew Dawes from All Amber expanding all over Africa, with numerous dates and instances in south, east, and west part of the continent. As reported before, I took part of the first event last year in Joburg, and this was a very successful event. I was not able to attend the East Africa version, last February, but I heard from different participants that it was also a very good meeting.
I strongly believe that Mobile browsing will grow significantly in Africa, and a majority of people will meet the Web for the first time through their phone. We are still at the very early stage, bandwidth, devices, capacities, expertise and prices need to evolve to create an enabling environment, but it is critical to raise awareness among all stakeholders on the potential of mobile Web technologies. In that regards, all initiatives in that domain are welcome and it is great to see a series of conferences focusing on this technology. Therefore, the Web Foundation is very happy to support them.
More details of the upcoming events:

• The next event, Mobile Web in Africa 2010 will take place 28th September – 1st October 2010, in Johannesburg, South Africa
• Then, Mobile Web West Africa 2011 will take place 2nd and 3rd February 2011 in Lagos, Nigeria
• Finally, Mobile Web East Africa 2011 will take place 25th and 26th May 2011 in Nairobi, Kenya

Stephane

Event: Fortune Brainstorm: TECH 2010

Location: Aspen, CO, USA

Dates: 22 – 24 July 2010

Speaking: Steve Bratt, CEO, Web Foundation

Session Details:

• Name: High-Tech Giving – How technology can supercharge a new generation of nonprofits.
• Time: 7:45am – 8:45am Friday, 23 July 2010
• Other Panelists: Eva Chen, Co-founder and CEO, Trend Micro; Krista Donaldson, CEO, D-Rev; James Steyer, CEO and Founder, Common Sense Media; Maynard Webb, Chairman and CEO, LiveOps; and John Wood, Chair, Room to Read
• Moderator: Jessi Hempel, Fortune

Twitter: @brainstormtech

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Event: SpeechTek2010

Location: New York, NY, USA

Dates: 2 – 4 August 2010

Speaking: Max Froumentin, Program Manager, Web Foundation

Session Details:

• Name: SD301 – Speech Technologies for the Developing World
• Time: 8:00am – 8:45am Wednesday, 4 August 2010
• About: In much of the developing world, access to the internet via personal computers remains quite low, while mobile phone use is widespread. Unlike developed countries, in which individuals rely on the personal computers for access to information and self-service transactions, in the developing world, mobile phones are the primary means of communication and data access. Join us for a discussion of how speech technologies on mobile phones can be used to improve the lives of millions of people in developing countries.

Twitter: @speechtek/st2010

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Event: tech4africa 2010

Location: Johannesburg, South Africa

Dates: 12 – 13 August 2010

Attending: Stephane Boyera, Program Manager, Web Foundation

Twitter: @tech4africa

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Event: The 6th Caribbean Internet Governance Forum (CIGF) [part of St. Maarten's ICT Week]

Location: St. Maarten

Dates: 16 August 2010

Speaking: Steve Bratt, CEO, Web Foundation

Session Details:

• TBD

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

(photo by F. Perini)

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

The meeting established guidelines for a region-wide initiative that will explore how open institutional data approaches, Web 2.0 communications, and monitoring and evaluation methods can become forces that increase regional collaboration on key issues for the region such as agriculture, fishing, trade, tourism, immigration, ICTs, entrepreneurship, and others. IDRC’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Federico Burone noted that “the intention of this meeting was to explore the importance of making data available for knowledge production, and the need to strengthening the effective communication of this data by civil society groups and ordinary citizens. We think the effort was a successful one which proved enlightening for the participants about the many opportunities for collaboration”.

(photo by F. Perini)

Among the international experts, Steve Bratt, CEO of the Web Foundation, presented how governments around the world are increasingly making government data available online as a strategy to increase the provision of information services to the population. According to Steve, “I hope a Caribbean open government data policy will be one vision from this workshop, and that the Web Foundation can continue to support this vision through raising awareness, capacity building and coordinating collaborative fora in this region and around the world”. Founded by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, the Web Foundation has pioneered the concept of open data with a focus on its developmental potential.

According to one participant, Dr. Hopeton Dunn, Director of the Telecommunications Policy and Management Programme, Mona School of Business, UWI, the two-day event “exposed regional participants to the values of open access to public and policy related data as part of a regional strategy for more evidence-based policy making. But further, it raised the matter of the paradigm shift that is required to making more data available and accessible to the public, which will no doubt improve public and business processes toward regional growth.”

Several of the participants expressed commitment to promoting the concept of open data in their ongoing work. Secretary General of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, Bernadette Lewis, who also participated in the meeting, commented that her organization “will begin immediately to endorse the implementation of Open Data systems among our 20 member governments as we see the value that more open government systems will bring to our region”.

The event concluded that collaboration will continue in the form of a joint initiative to promote open data for policy-related research, driven by a regional group of researchers and organizations and supported by the IDRC. Among the institutions represented were UWI, Caribbean Telecommunications Union, Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, CARICOM and United Nations – Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

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

I’m looking forward to reading the results !

Stephane

Our meeting marathon continues! 2 more days, Thursday and Friday, leading to the terrible Friday night match (Ghana lost its World Cup football quarter-final match to Uruguay in penalties)! One of the most quiet 3 hours in terms of traffic in Accra in the memories of the oldest inhabitants!

Coming back to our meetings, Thursday was relatively soft compared to previous days, but heavy given that it was an official public holiday day in Ghana. We spent the morning debriefing on the first days and defining an action plan. We will publish it in the next 2 weeks.

Then we had a fruitful meeting with Kofi Appenteng, who is among other things member of the board of trustees of Ford Foundation. Kofi underlined the issues around access to capital in Ghana, and in particular access to capital for IT projects. Kofi mentionned that for development-oriented services, it might be easier to focus on donor funding for initial capital. They are more likely potential investors than traditional business angels.

We then met with a fascinating young entrepreneur, Bright Simons, who is behind a project called mPedigree. This is a mobile service to track fake drugs. It was really impressive to get the whole story, and how he came to the idea, starting from trying to sell organic goods to northern countries. Lots of interesting insight about all the challenges he met and still meeting to implement his idea.

traditionnal entrepreneurship

Finally, we met Dorothy Gordon, the director of Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in ICT. The center has been mentioned by almost all the people we met as a central place in the Ghana ICT scene. Dorothy is a very nice person who is very active to keep the center up to date with latest trend. We discussed how the potential training we have in mind could extend existing courses currently delivered at the center on software development and programming. Lots of potential synergies.

The day ended with a nice dinner in the trendy OSU/Oxford Street area with Mira Slavova, a researcher working at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Ghana. Mira is active in the W3C group on Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D), and we discussed how ICT can help spread new agri technics and support extension agents.

Our last day was very relaxing ! We had only one meeting. We met the CEO and the Chair of the board of the Ghana Information and Knowledge Sharing Network (GINKS). GINKS is a very active well-known network of individual and organizations, linking more than 400 members interested in ICT. GINKS will surely be helpful as a vector of dissemination, and as a major actor for community building. The discussion was very positive on how to promote a better usage, and greater availability of mobile content, and how to extend our initiative outside Accra in all part of Ghana particularly in rural areas.

Mobile Entrepreneurship

During these few days, we learnt a lot, and we met a good panel of the different actors in the domain. However, a couple of organizations have been mentioned almost all the time, and i will ensure that we visit them next time we come. These includes the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology, Ghana Multimedia Iincubator Centre (GMIC), a World Bank associated ICT Incubator, and the Kumasi University of Science and Technology. Now i will do my best to summarize our findings and next steps in a report to be published by mid july.

As this trip is finished now, I want to thank to all people who took the time to chat with us, and
i want to give a bigger thank to Dr. Nii Quaynor who helped us during the whole week to understand the local context, and to shape our project.

Stephane
Ps: previous posts are now illustrated with pictures !

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

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

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

NCS old Satellite Bandwidth

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

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

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

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

Isoc Meeting

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

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

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

Stephane

Welcoming participants and outlining vision for workshop

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

The workshop concludes later today with brainstorming on the kinds of pan-Caribbean initiatives and pilot projects that might lead to economic development and better governance.  I hope a Caribbean open government data policy will be one vision from this workshop, and that the Web Foundation can continue to support this vision through raising awareness, capacity building and coordinating collaborative fora in this region and around the world.

Our team includes George Sadowsky, one of our consultants, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, a W3C staff member doing volunteer work on this project, and Nienke Akkermans, a student of VU Amsterdam, who is working on exploring the potential of W4RA project in Ghana. We are also accompanied by two Vodafone staff from UK, Steven Wolak, and Franco Papeschi.

The objective of the mission is to talk to all potential stakeholders — ICT companies, universities, business sector, telecom operators, professional training institutions, mobile entrepreneurs, students, NGOs, etc. — and refine our plans to fit with the local context and identify promising partners.

The first day was very successful in that regards. On Monday we spent most of the day talking with Vodafone Ghana, and then met with Mark Davies, a very successful entrepreneur in Accra, founder of busyinternet, busylab and esoko project (aka tradenet).

In both cases, the discussions were very fruitful. Vodafone Ghana is very excited to help and support the project. We met three different teams and they are all very enthusiastic about the project, and will be more than happy to help, help us in setting up the project, but also help future entrepreneurs to deploy their businesses.

I had the impression that we are coming at the right time as Vodafone Ghana is just starting to focus on Value-added services (VAS) and is in the process of deploying new platforms, and mainstreaming and easing integration of third parties services. As a follow-up of these meetings, we will develop a white paper on the different type of technologies we have in mind, and the level of services telecom operators can provide to ease the development of businesses and services on these technologies. This will allow Vodafone to tell us the levels of support they want to provide on the different technologies, enabling us to scope a bit better the training program we are targeting.

We ended our meeting with the visit of Vodafone internet Cafes. Vodafone is running 11 internet cafes all over the country. Each has a fiber optic providing 40 MB/s: FOURTY MEGABIT PER SECOND! just incredible ! They are running two rooms at their facilities in Accra and they are full all day long. It is really nothing to do with traditional internet cafe i saw in other countries. This is top-notch classy stores, air conditioned, with high-end computers, as well as slots for laptop. Lots of people are using these cafes as their business place, staying all the day! They are selling in these cafes orange juices… and they became the first orange juice reseller in the whole country!! they might make more money with orange juices than with internet access!!! This is just incredible. The whole story of these cafes are really unbelievable. That said, given the bandwidth, that enables also potential video applications between the different cafes in the country, and that might be useful for broadcasting training sessions in a workable way. This is something i will keep in mind.

The second meeting we had was with Mark Davies. Mark is not only a very successful entrepreneur, but he is also a fascinating guy. We chatted almost two hours with him and that was very fruitful. What we learnt mostly is the need for better communications between the different parties: ICT companies and universities are not talking together, making students not very well fit for employment, the hands-on expertise and problem solving skills are missing. ICT companies and Telecom operators are not talking together, and the lack of easy availability of things like shortcodes are major barriers for mobile service deployment. According to Mark this is the major issue for now, and creating a regular event ala Mobile Monday might help a lot. The technical training would also be useful for companies to send their staff and acquire missing skills.

Concerning entrepreneurs, Mark is more doubtful. He believes that entrepreneurs can be successful after some time in the industry where they acquire some professional expertise. Students are very unlikely potential good entrepreneurs, due to lack of understanding of business (keeping books, etc.). He also believes that access to finance is a major challenges. It is usual to get loans at a rate above 50%, FIFTY PERCENT! As incredible as the Vodafone juice business!! There are business angels, and venture capital firms, but they are not very open to ICT businesses, and even less to students becoming entrepreneurs. Very interesting insights, and facts, that help us understand the context a bit better.

During the next three days we will continue our meetings, and i will also continue this series of posts. At the end of the week, we will work all together on a global report to capture the result of the week, and we will share our views with the community.

Stay tuned!

Stephane
PS:  Im not yet able to illustrate this post with nice pictures, but will when I’m back!

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

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

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

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

Steph