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.

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.

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

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.