Tim Berners-Lee spoke today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about the future of the Web and the value of working at “Web Scale”. The next generation of the Web promises greater opportunity for advancing human intelligence, creativity, collaboration, and commerce by linking the underlying data representing knowledge, opinions, activities, personal preferences, etc. This Web of linked data — the semantic Web — will realize the Web as “humanity connected by technology”. Watch the video …
Read MoreThe Man Who Stopped the Desert: Helping Others to Do the Same
Photo by Anna Bon
The Web-alliance for Regreening in Africa (W4RA) — the Web Foundation’s first project — starts in earnest in a bit over a week. We are all quite excited, to say the least. We are also collecting other experiences in the use of the Web to support agricultural projects. So please comment below or send email with your knowledge and experience.
Stephane Boyera, George Sadowsky and I will be meeting with our new W4RA partners (VU University, Africa Regreening Initiative) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso to make field visits, gather with technology and agriculture experts, and then refine the project plan. The problem to be solved begins with the fact that a very, very small minority of ingenious, typically uneducated, farmers in the African Sahel have figured out how to grow plants and trees in near-desert conditions. They use little more than the materials they have at hand to do so (hoe, rocks, manure and sprigs of native vegetation, natural rainfall, etc.). Yacouba Sawadogo is one such genius, with whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet. You’ll enjoy viewing the trailer for a great documentary that 1080 Films is completing on Yacouba, titled: The Man Who Stopped the Desert.
Read MoreMobile Web East Africa Conference
I’m glad to see that Matthew Dawes and All Amber are continuing their efforts to promote the Mobile Web in Africa. Last october, i attended and chaired part of Mobile Web Africa which took place in South Africa. This was the first event focusing on this topic in Africa, and this was a real success [...] Read More
Internet Governance Forum 2009
IGF Nov 15-18 2009 in Sharm
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, [...] Read More
Web Foundation Workshop in Egypt
While those in Boston were working day and night preparing the new Web site and speaking with the press, I was with Tim Berners-Lee and Daniel Dardailler in Sharm-el-Sheik, at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting, to participate in the launch of the Web Foundation and to organize a workshop on the Web Foundation. This [...] Read More
Mobile Web Africa
I spent the last two days in the Mobile Web Africa conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first quite surprising fact for me was the attendance; Around 200 people everyday interested to learn and talk about Mobile Web. Based on my past experience, with other related event like Africom, this was a real surprise. [...] Read More
Localisation in the Clouds Conference
I gave a talk entitled, “Breaking Barriers to Empowerment“, and encouraged the localization community to work with the Web Foundation to identify the opportunities for reducing language as a barrier to using the Web.
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Mobile Web Africa
I’ve been trying to bring discussion about Mobile Web access in Africa on the agenda of different conferences for more than 3 years now, and it might be that eventually this will take off!
Up to know, except the conferences I’ve been organizing like the one in mozambique last April, there was no real interest on [...] Read More
The IGF Success Story
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 [...] Read More