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

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

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

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

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

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

Map of the first 10 laboratories in the new Web Science Trust Network

Raleigh, North Carolina was a busy place two weeks ago.  At the same time as the Web for All Conference, and just upstairs in the convention center, the second Web Science Conference took place.  The agenda for WebSci10, as it was tagged (Tim Berners-Lee commented that this tag implied the event had been around for more years that it has been) framed the diversity and dynamism of this new field of study.  Tim and Wendy Hall announced the creation of a network of Web Science laboratories — WSTNet.  I took the opportunity of the proximity of the two conferences to hear some Web Science talks, review interesting posters, and have valuable discussions with Web scientists.

Betty in front of poster on her project to study the impact of mobile devices in developing countries

The Web Foundation was proud to be one of the sponsors of WebSci10, and our support paid for the travel and participation of Betty Purwandari.  Betty is a Web Science graduate student at Southampton University, is originally from Indonesia, and is embarking on a study of the impact of mobile devices in developing countries.  Best wishes for success, Betty!

People with disabilities, aging, reading poorly-supported languages, with low literacy and/or lack of technology experience.

Today and tomorrow, in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, the 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility is taking place. Most call this event Web for All or W4A. The focus this year is “Developing Regions: Common Goals, Common Problems?”, which is perfect fit for the Web Foundation’s initial focus.  I had the honor of delivering the opening keynote, entitled, “Breaking Barriers to a Read/Write Web that Empowers All” (PDF, PPT).

The vast majority in the room have a background in making the Web accessible for people with disabilities, and a great deal of progress has been made in this area.  The participants were receptive  to my message that perhaps an additional 1 billion people are being excluded by current Web technology and practice:  e.g.,  people increasingly challenged by age, people reading languages that don’t work well on the Web, people trying to create and find content in most of the world’s  nearly 7,000 active languages, people with low literacy, and/or those with little experience with technology.

I issued a call to action:  We need to increase our efforts  – individually and cooperatively – to make the Web accessible to all people.  We should leverage the experience in accessibility for disabled people to accelerate work to lower barriers for the other, above-mentioned groups of people in developed and developing countries.

I look forward to talking with others here in the next two days, as well as listening to presentations, to learn more about accessibility challenges and ideas for solutions.  Perhaps we’ll  find new collaborators. Follow W4A on Twitter at #w4a10

Lunch Break

Last week, I attended the National Forum on Mobile Applications for Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development organized by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). I gave the opening talk at this interesting event (slides). Apart from disseminating information about the Web Foundation, I was particularly interested in attending this event because, to the best of my knowledge, this was a first time a regulatory body was taking the lead on mobile applications for social development. The process is very interesting.

TRAI is aware of the potential of mobile phones to deliver public services to underprivileged communities in India, and wanted to gather all stakeholders to ensure that the conditions are set for the number of social-oriented mobile applications to take off. I wish it is opening a new era where telecom regulation authorities are more drivers then followers !

The event was well attended. Between 100 and 150 people were there, and most of the sessions were quite interesting. First of all, it is important to note that in most of presentations, particularly on case studies, the usual barriers were mentioned: languages, illiteracy, and ICT experience. Obviously, the language issue is particularly important in India (23 official languages, 12 scripts), and the lack of support of e.g. Hindi is critical, particularly for Web access.  Hindi is the fifth most spoken language (see the language ranking from Ethnologue.com) in the world with 182 millions of people, 182 millions of people that are not able yet to fully enjoy the Web, and particularly the mobile Web.

In terms of illiteracy, as I mentioned a in previous post, it is important that many speakers mentioned the potential of IVR systems (voice-based services). I particularly liked the presentation of life line India, a project driven by OneWorld-India, providing education and agriculture support through a voice-based system. It is a mix of an IVR system, and human interaction (recording answer in specific languages), due to the lack of language support in speech technologies too.

Among the difference sessions, one was particularly interesting for me about e- and m-governance. Here again, for the first time, I was surprised to hear people in charge of India eGovernment framework saying that they have been working since few years on their program with was computer-based only, and now they are realizing that the mobile revolution is here, and they have to adapt to it, and integrate the mobile dimension. In all the conferences I have attended during the last two years, I was always surprised to see people working in such projects, yet overlooking the mobile channel. So things are moving forward slowly, because there is still work to do to demonstrate the full potential of mobile technologies. For now, it strikes me to see people in the e-government session focusing almost only on SMS applications, and mobile banking, even if this is excluding all those who cannot read and write, or those who can read and write languages not supported by SMS/current mobile banking systems.

Unrelated to mobile, it was interesting to see the timeframe of e-government framework, going over multiple years before any services are provided to people.

Local Tour Operator

I have the impression that we are in a middle of paradigm shift moving from such framework to a more dynamic and quick concept which is open government data, where government focus more on releasing data, than developing services, which can be done by third parties. Releasing data can be far quicker, and create far more innovative services, that a more formal closed e-government framework. but this is not the topic of this post !

There were also very good talks and use-cases on m-health systems. One particularly impressive was from the India Institute of Public Health. It is about setting up an infectious disease surveillance system using mobile phones to replace paper transmission from field workers to public authorities. What is impressive about the system is that not only it demonstrated that the time between detection of an infectious disease outbreak and reaction of public health authorities is reduced a lot, limiting the impact of the outbreak on population, but it also demonstrated that the time saved on paper reports, plus the money saved on different costs (transport, postages, etc.) makes the system globally sustainable. For those interested, i put online the proceedings and some of the talks.

Another point, I was impressed by the explosion of mobile penetration in India. in March 2004, there were 33.7 millions of subcriber. 6 years later, 565 Millions ! over 50% of the population of India ! The forecast are even more impressive: 1 billion of subscriber by 2014 ! other interesting info: the forecast are that 50% of the subscribers will have a smartphone by 2015 ! These numbers are the reason why TRAI is willing to move wuickly on enabling a mobile ecosystem, and ensuring that lots of applications will be delivered on the mobile channel.

All in one, this forum was a nice initiative, and it was also a very interesting conference. Talks and speakers, in a vast majority, were very interesting, and i learnt about lots of initiatives in health, agriculture, and government, which all were very inspiring. I hope this will give ideas to other regulatory authorities to take a proactive role in promoting the development of mobile application for social development.

What I took away from the event in terms of greatest interest to the Web Foundation:

1. It is critical to promote the use of more advanced technologies such as mobile web and voice compared to traditional SMS
2. It is critical to promote the use of open standards, particularly on voice technologies, accessibility, and mobile web content and mobile web applications development
3. It is critical to investigate language issues, particularly on mobile browser, as this is a major barrier now
4. On a different topic, it would be interesting to conduct comparison and analysis between initiatives on open government data, and e-government framework: pro and cons, complementarity and so on

Stephane

Tim Berners-Lee gave a talk (see video above) in the Brussels, Belgium on 16 March to people from the European Union, industry and press.  He conveyed the motivation for the creation of the Web, for open Web standards, and for the creation of the Web Science Trust and the World Wide Web Foundation.

Tim also discussed the importance of enabling people in developing countries to more easily provide and access information, and the need to ensure separation, standardization, openness and neutrality across layers of technology stack that support the Web.  The principles that have made the Web a success up to now are critical for the Web’s future success and value to all of humanity.  I recorded the video from the back of the room, so apologies for the poor sound quality.

Tim and I were in Brussels at that time, in part to receive a grant from Vodafone. The grant will fund a project to empower entrepreneurs in Africa to create content relevant to others in the region.

I feel that this event was successful for many reasons. First, it was helpful to gather in the same room people from different background, and to have discussions across the combination of expertise areas. At the end, I had a far better understanding of the issues facing organizations like MARP or Sahel Eco, including what they are doing in the field, their needs in terms of information exchange, and so on.  How the Web might help them also became a little more clear.

The second point that impressed me was the positive energy coming out of all the presentations. We heard about stories of community radio and their roles, we heard about the burkina-ntic network, and all the activities of the impressive people from Yam Pukri. We heard about all the projects IICD is running in Mali and Burkina and their impact. Few other people from ICT companies like Softnet-Burkina were also very interesting. In the agroforestry domain, We also heard about the Africa Regreening Initiative, and what innovative farmers are doing and their incredible results. This was really refreshing. In Europe, or western countries in general, it is very rare to read or watch positive stories about Africa. It is always about disaster, starvation, wars, etc. But there are incredible stories, impressive successes, and very enthusiastic organizations and people, and we can see that energy in action, very much like what I witnessed in Kenya, or Uganda when I visited these countries with Tim last november. This is very exciting !

Obviously, this was just a first step, and we have to move from observation to action now. But this visit and this workshop were very positive, and very promising for the future. I will summarize in a future post, the different action areas we identified, and our next steps.

Ps: we also published all the photo and video we took during the whole week.

Stephane

Key learnings from this day:

• It is possible to grow trees and crops in very dry, near-desert conditions, and using locally-available resources:  a hoe, manure, available rain fall, bands of stones and/or hole to trap the moisture, and sprigs of vegetation that can be nurtured to grow into trees using the aforementioned resources.
• A small minority of farmers have discovered and are employing these techniques.
• The work of groups like the Africa Re-greening Initiative are helping to spread the sharing of knowledge of techniques between the farmers who are practicing them to others who could use the.  Most of this dissemination is through face-to-face visits, which limits the speed at which knowledge can be shared.
• Vast majority of farmers have access to mobile phones and radios.
• The Burkinabé people and our project partners are smart, open, enthusiastic, very friendly and great people to work with.

Saa Dittoh, Anna Bon, Nasse Ouedraogo, Sibiri Sawadogo, Chris Reij, Steve Bratt, Wendelien Tuyp, George Sadowsky, Hans Akkermans, Stephane Boyera, Jean Kabore