http://www.websci10.org/registration.html
for WebSci2010! This exciting conference is during the WWW2010 week in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. The organizers seek papers that demonstrate the development, scope, and relevance of the emerging field of Web Science, which is taking off around the globe. Web Science Conference 2010 is the 2nd such event, following a successful inaugural event in Athens, Greece last year.
Read MoreGrant to Fund Training of Entrepreneurs in Africa.
The World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation), a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the Web to empower people, announced today that the world’s leading mobile telecommunications company Vodafone Group, will donate $1 million toward projects that will train entrepreneurs in Africa to leverage the Web as a platform for delivering locally relevant content, applications and services. Some of the funding will also go to research on what needs to be done to make the Web more accessible and valuable to people in developing economies.
Read MoreYou may recall from past blog posts, Web Foundation founder Tim Berners-Lee, Director Rosemary Leith, and program manager Stephane Boyera had really interesting visits with many people in Egpyt, Kenya and Uganda during November 2009. I don’t think we have previously pointed you to a cool video that Tim took himself (and took of himself) at Ghetto-FM, a community radio station, Nairobi, Kenya. Check out the tour of the station and a live (at the time) interview with Tim …
Read MoreDuring our recent visit to Burkina Faso for the Web-alliance for Regreening Africa (W4RA) project , we organized a two days workshop and invited a mixed audience of people working in agriculture/agroforestry in Burkina, people working in the ICT sector in Burkina, and people from development agencies (e.g. IICD), or international organizations working on agroforestry in other regions of the World. We just published the final agenda with slides, as well as the minutes of the event.
Read MoreI returned to Boston from Ouagadougou, after 27 hours in transit. 
Stephane and I will have much more to relay from this exciting visit. This post relays a number of additional observations, as well as still and moving images, from our 31 January – 1 February visits north of Ouaga (the towns of Dori, Kaya, Kongoussi and a small village 10km west of Kongoussi) with farmers who’ve developed techniques for promoting natural regeneration of trees on the edge of the Sahara Desert. A video mapping the trip can be found in my 3 February post. See the entire Burkina video album containing 25 short segments.
Chris Reij from VU University – Amsterdam led a group including Stephane Boyera, George Sadowsky and me from the Web Foundation on an educational tour of the desert regions north of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The purpose was to orient participants in the new Web-alliance for Regreening in Africa (W4RA) and others on the progress and challenges made by initiatives aimed at natural regeneration of trees in these regions. This was an incredibly useful trip for informing the Workshop on Mobile Web for Rural Development, the Foundation’s first workshop held in Ouagadougou on 3-4 February. I have many, many pictures and videos from this trip, and many more stories and memories. In the interest of speed over completeness, below is a small set of visuals from Burkina Faso from 31 January 2010 with less explanation that there should be.
Read MoreTim 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 …
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