In contrast, in Africa the Internet might offer new and promising ways, particularly for the publishing sector, with implications for local content.

Photo by schmuela from Flickr (CC License)

Publishing in Africa works under constraints. The market is often small, few books are sold and little is invested in book projects. For example, in Egypt a book becomes a bestseller with only 10 thousand copies are sold. The great city of Cairo, albeit its wonderful book stores, there are not more than a dozen of them. Some years ago, the Arab Human Development report stated that there are more books translated into Greek language than to Arabic.

Muhtar Bakare, who runs an independent literary publishing house in Lagos, Nigeria, said on a recent symposium in Olso: “There are lively publishing enterprises in different areas of Africa that are not formalized in the European sense. But they exist, they are not cataloged, [they] don’t have ISBN numbers…” Muhtar says a big problem is a missing distribution network and argues that there is a lot of local content. He goes as far as calling the Internet “our own Gutenberg moment. The internet is going to democratize knowledge in Africa.”

Arthur Attwell, who runs Electric Book Works, based out of Cape Town, believes the mobile phone is game changer for digital publishing. “I think print on-demand has got a massive future for Africa, and developing countries in general, because of the way it caters to people with low cash flow and who just need a book right now.”

“I think that we will see an incredible growth of digital publishing in Africa over the next few years, we’re in the process right now of really just laying down the infrastructure that’s going to make that possible.”

Moses Kemibaro shares the same optimism in East Africa: “The local content gold rush is only just getting started.” He emphasis that the potential for promoting local content could be social media.  “We have many platforms through which local content can be published for free, or nearly free.”

There is a plurality of local content in Africa, but is often not available as digital content. Social media offers here new ways of capturing some part of information. Video, audio and text are some formats. Social media is increasingly in the hands of millions of people through mobile phones.

That is why Google has recently initiated a Wikipedia contest in the Swahili language.  “Swahili is a lingua franca of much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo” (Wikipedia). Google started this initiative for the main dilemma they are facing. The have to search technology within places, but there is not enough digital information to index.

Gabriel Stricker from Google said in an interview, at the Business Daily Africa: “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”

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What are politician’s decisions about your neighborhood? What does usually happen in my street and what could be done better? In Frankfurt, Germany, there is now a website called Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt), which makes local political decision more transparent and offers a new space for citizen to participate.

The idea is to offer citizens helpful information services and this way motivate them to connect locally, to discuss and brainstorm on how to change their neighborhood. Already, after two weeks, I have learnt a lot of lessons. As usual online communities often develops in a direction you have not anticipated. It is incredible to get a lot of feedback right away and people taking responsibility. Makes me enthusiastic to explore further potential for collaboration.

The project was inspired by these great initiatives: theyworkforyou.com and fixmystreet.com. Thanks to Tom Steinberg and Rob Mckinnon from theyworkforyou.co.nz for there support. The website received already some nice publicity and we hope it will make German public authorities think about the potential for open data. Frontrunners are the USA and UK with Data.gov and Data.gov.uk. In the UK the city of London has started with an open data initiative too.

Luckily, the German scene is not passive: Abgeordnetenwatch (Member of Parliament Watch), participatory budgets for local communities or the API Germany (Deutschland API). The Open Data Network, where I am member of, does some great work to push the agenda for open government. One result is a Hacks4Democracy, a hackday on open data.

What fascinates me about the Frankfurt-gestalten.de project is that it has a lot of potential and can develop in many directions:

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The example of digital face recognition

Google has a face recognition feature already built in their Goggles software for mobile phones, but luckily it is so far blocked. But for how long? Imagine you sit in a cafe and make a photo of a person and get all available information from that person – forum entries, work life, etc. To be fair, they will also launch soon a translation function, where you can take a photo of a menu in a restaurant with your mobile phone and it will be translated within minutes.  A typical example of this dilemma: Practical technology achievements, but also huge consequences for privacy.

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Cairo

Johannesburg

In this blog post, I will dive into the latest buzz: Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is a huge jump in location-based services as it happens all around the world at once. I have browsed through the map of Google Buzz’ mobile phone version, where statuses can be combined with your location – it is striking to see where all information pops up. Here are maps of three different cities – Johannesburg, Cairo and Mumbai – showing messages from the last 24 hours.

Mumbai

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The new opportunity to have activism through mobile phones is fascinating. I  have already often written about it. A while ago Sokari Enkine asked me to write a chapter for a recent published book funded by Hivos. I wrote about future trends and software developments, and then blogged about some possible trends and got some interesting feedback to use in the article.

I have also had some inspiring discussions with Ken Banks and Patrick Meier, resulting these in the coming up of some scenarios such as a growth in local mobile innovation in Africa. If we look at the topics and the discussion of the latest Mobile Web East Africa conference, we are witnessing a fascinating rise of creative mobile programming.

The Guardian wrote a nice review of the book and, although I also wrote about different types challenges too, the author Anne Perkins rated me as an optimist – I can live with that.

The trouble with people who know about mobile phone technology is that they are a lot better at good ideas than they are at explaining to non-techies what their good ideas are for. So I fell upon SMS Uprising: Mobile activism in Africa, a collection of essays by people who either write mobile applications or transfer them to the field, hoping that at last I would understand not so much what’s going on as how.

SMS doesn’t always work (sometimes texts are just too slow). But this is a handbook for the small NGO or social change activist who is daunted by technology. Help is at hand, and SMS Uprising will help you find it.

I hope the little introduction has made you enough curious by now! You can order the book directly at Fahamu or at other book sellers for around 15$.

Table of content:

• Introduction
  Sokari Ekine

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Wouldn’t it be great if you had a question, you could find an answer in your network right away? Most of us are members of many communities – many people with a lot of expertise. Why is it not easier then to tap on that potential to get answers from peers? A main question of knowledge management is often note sufficiently solved through the social web.

Is the telephone still the best way for informal knowledge sharing? (Photo by splorp @Flickr)

The false promise of Linkedin and Xing
Take a look at Linkedin or Xing. Could you exploit the expertise found in there to use it, let’s say, on a daily basis? I have to accept that, unfortunately, for me the professional working networks Linkedin and Xing have been so far not so usefull. Of course, for recruting they play a role, but for other means they have little to offer. And this is the key goal for knowledge management. Yes, I have heard from people, who have gained a lot out of it, but these cases do not fall on the category of exchanging experiences or sharing knowledge on a daily basis.

Yellow pages have failed
So far, the most usual procedures are a quick search on Google, a request on a mailing list or a simple call. Those often work fine, but so many potential answers of your wider network are not tapped. And to get right away the person, who could deal with the specific issues is not easy. One attempt to improve this situation are yellow pages, often used in Intranets. The results are profile of colleagues delivering some information.  But the key challenge is that these profiles are mostly very specific and not rarely complex, which is not enough to describe the potential expertise of a person.

Twitter set a path for low barrier informal knowledge sharing
In some cases a sufficient answer might be written, but best is if you get in contact with a person directly to exchange and learn from each other. That is why Twitter is so strong. You can question your audience, might be lucky to get one or more answers and then can continue talking with a person directly.

Google Social Search a hint in the right direction?
Another challenge is that your networks are widely distributed and you do not have time to search or request an answer. You want to get it now. What a difference if you can tap into the potential of your wider network on a daily basis during your work. One interesting new approach to help you find the right person is introduced by Google’s new social search. If you join the project, which is currently in beta, you will see additional search results to your query from people in your network (twitter, google connect, friendfeed etc.) Here you can start it.

This is a new attempt to find information from your peers across your network. After the failure of Open Social, this now looks like a good alternative, which indexes blog posts, tweets and other tracks of your activities in the Internet. So, if one of your peers has already written about a topic, you will find it between your usual Google results. That is another interesting approach to make you aware of the expertise from friends and colleagues, you might not know of. If it works good, you suddenly can get connected directly to the person who might have an answer for you.

But, as usual there is a downside. The search works the better, the more information you give to Google, so the more stuff we publish the better results we get. Of course we do not want to publish everything, but I guess for the working context it is an interesting approach also acknowledging that most either automated semantic solutions, nor classical database, have succeeded so far in providing you the information you need at a certain point.

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“But the maps provided something that the narrative and statistics lacked [...] We could articulate the case in words. [...] But when you’d put up the maps, they’d stop listening to you and look at them [as if to] say, ‘Is this really possible?’” Reed Colfax in an interview by Bob Burtman (water distribution example below)

There are a growing number of cases of Maptivism (Maps + Activism) around the world. I wrote about the great potential for engagement and transparency before. Although it is not a new method, it is certainly still quite different from the old school maps – because of the easiness to use digital maps. There are also more and more tools offered to either get geodata or to use existing data to visualize it more easily. GeoCommons is one such service for open geospatial data.

Western Africa

The West Africa Trade Hub, a USAID funded project did an interesting project. They questioned truck drivers in Western Africa about their experiences with checkpoints. The results were long delays and high bribes at region’s worst checkpoints (mapped below). A recent interview I did with Mark Davies indicated also some interesting insights from African trade and the potentials of social networks.

Courtesy of the West Africa Trade Hub project.

China

The China Real Time blog has highlighted an initiative by the Chinese blogger Guo Baofeng for a China Pollution Map:

“The chart (developed on Google Maps) allows viewers to mark spots associated with high levels of pollution or incidents of contamination, based on publicly available information. Since it was open for public participation last week, the number of views has more than doubled to about 5,000 compared to a week earlier, when it was first displayed online.”

Due to the recent move of Google to re-think its engagement in China, hopefully this map will not be censored any time soon.

China Pollution Map

(Hat tip to Giulio Quaggiotto)

USA

Bob Burtman highlights intriguing mapping work in his article by the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities. Through surveys and public available data, they were able to produce the map below, which shows the partial distribution of water in city of Zanesville.  Read the full article about fascinating ways to combine data and mapping.

Courtesy the Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities

Brazil

Mapping can be particularly helpful for community development. Corinne Ramey reports form a project to map slums in Brazil through mobile phones. “By uploading information to the phones, the reporters are mapping the unmapped, one road and cafe at a time.” Once places are mapped they can be used for multiple purposes

Courtesy of wikimapa.org.br

Kenya

A similar, but more extensive project has happened in the biggest informal area in Nairobi: Kibera. A team of mappers trained cohabitants of Kibera to map the largest slum in Africa.

OpenStreetMap

Some of you probably know that I am particularly amazed about the OpenstreetMap project. Often, people ask me why we need such an open map, if we already have Google or Yahoo maps? Because it is not only about maps, but more importantly, about what we map and that we can use the data freely to use it the way it is needed. Or as Mikel Maron nicely puts it:”But the point is that with open source and open data, people everywhere don’t have to wait for Santa Google to gift them with new features ..”

When do you start mapping?

Mapping is really easy. I walk around in Mexico these days, during my free time and map streets and buildings with a GPS enabled mobile phone – a cheap GPS device is enough and costs under 100 Euro. That way you can already participate in tracking streets worldwide and upload them to OpenStreetMaps. Here is more information on how to participate.

Lastly, there is a great initiative by the tactical tech collective called Ten Tactics: “Exploring how rights advocates use information and digital technology to create positive change.”

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Information research is performed in many different ways throughout the Internet. Once an information is found, the assessment of its relevance and trustiness happens through objective criteria and on the premise of subjective factors. What are such criteria and factors?  And how are they changing in a growing social connected net?

Photo by Scarygami @Flickr

A typical situation: You sit with friends together and discuss; a fact is cited, but you do not believe it and want to prove it is wrong, so you quickly check it  in the Internet. We increasingly rely on our digital backbone, which now it is even ubiquitous available through mobile phones. The net becomes our extended memory – not in any case it is easy to find an answer quickly, but is getting easier thanks to sources such as Wikipedia.

But how do we trust these sources? Sources can have very different approaches, trusted behind the information they offer:

• Wikileaks anonymously “publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.”
• Bloggers stand with their reputation behind an information.
• Demand Media attempts to deliver thousands of answers each month from amateur writers and film-makers.
• Wikipedia relies on voluntarily work and editors to deliver accurate information or highlight it if it is not the case.
• Newspapers have a reputation of professional journalism.

But how do we decide in our daily information research source whether it is trusted or untrusted? There are many nuances between these two poles and various personal criteria on how to assess a source. I am curious to know what is desicive for you.  Here is a list of questions, which might apply or not:

Source Criteria:

• Who is behind the source?
• Is it a well-known institution or person?
• Where does it originally come from?
• Does it indicate an author?
• Is the article old or up-to-date?
• Does it have comments? How many comments?
• Has the website a commercial intention or is the information service a common good?
• Is the article personally or objectively written?
• Does it have many or none citation to other sources?
• How well written is the article?
• How open is the person behind a presented page? For example, does the author have a biography or a Twitter account?

Network factor:

• Who has recommended the source? Is it a friend, colleague or peer?
• Is it a link from  a well-known or unknown blog post to the source?
• Does the source have many readers/subscribers?
• Is it often cited? Can it be checked for example through a Twitter search or Technorati rank, in case of a blog.

Appearance:

• Is the website professionally designed?
• Do you like the design? Would you trust an information source with an appalling design?
• Does it focus on content or rather advertisement?
• Can you navigate easily or are there obstacles to find your information?
• Is it a rather closed site or does it link to a website?

These are only some examples showing how tricky it is to evaluate a source and set the needed range of skills to assess an information from different angles. How can these skills be learnt? A topic for another post.

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Something has changed. Information sharing isn’t what it used to be. We are in a middle of a network transformation as information sharing becomes faster, more intensive and more interconnected. In terms of collaboration and innovation, it is exciting, but in terms of speed, we might reach our limits. Twitter is the gravitation center of these changes, showing us how things will develop further:

• Speed: Sharing and interaction becomes amazingly fast through real-time web.
• Intensity: An explosion in “fast food content” shared across networks.
• Crisscrossed: Networks are not only growing exponentially in size, but also in their density.

Speed

Not so long ago, information sharing in open and loose networks used to take days. One could see how the news or an article was bookmarked in Delicious, bookmarked by other in the next days and sometimes developed to a larger wave until bloggers picked it up and a conversation emerged here and there. It was the start of the social web, which now seems to be outdated if one looks at the breathtaking speed of tweets. Whereas before some waves were drifting through the ocean – nowadays the sea is full of waves wandering across networks in minutes. Welcome to the real-time web. Want to know what is going on somewhere right now?
Have a look at Twitter search and you may find out because most probably, someone will be there. For certain requests this search is excellent. Even Google has acknowledged it recently and started to include tweets into its search. The Internet turns into a central nerve system.
I have asked how people share and search information nowadays through Twitter and these are some of the interesting feedbacks I have got, most related to speed: (Thanks for sharing!)

On a scale from 1-5 how much quicker/ better information you get through tools such as Twitter, Friendfeed vs. blogs or social bookmarking?

Intensity

Amit Agarwal has an interesting comparison on how people used to share information and how drastically it has changed. Whereas in 2008 email was still leading with over 30%, it is now bypassed by Facebook for sharing links with nearly 30%. In second place come emails with 13,8% and then Twitter with 11%. It shows how information sharing across networks becomes a truly mainstream activity. But it seems as if sharing was being dominated by short content or “fast food content,” as Michael Arrington calls it. He mainly talks of aggregated content but also discusses “the end of hand crafted content.” The ‘read/write’ web offers an explosion in content creation and micro-blogging; as Twitter seems to the right channel for sharing information.

Crisscrossed

From my observations, the explosion in network connectivity is the most fascinating one. The exponential growth of networks can be counted everywhere, but more fascinating is the growing density within networks. Particularly on Twitter with its low barriers for connections and openness, new connections are being built easily and interaction is a core piece behind it. This can really bring people, expertise and ideas together. One such example is the ICT4D field. Two years ago there were more or less loosely linked communities  around the Internet. Now you can tap into a community within a short time through searching social networks a la Facebook or Twitter. I wish there was a study on what this new density of interaction and many links between people bring, in terms of collaboration and innovation.

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Here comes a list of statement you might (or not) avoid to say when you want to convince colleagues or clients for such changes. Please share more as I am sure you have plenty.

This is for all of you who share the daily burden of convincing people about the value of open knowledge sharing through the Internet for the benefit of all. The outdated hierarchies and top down work styles restrict free flowing ideas and creative work in self-responsible teams, so what can you do?

Here comes a list of statements you might (or might not!) avoid when you want to convince colleagues or clients to make such changes. Please share more as I am sure you have plenty.

• Yes sure we can measure the results of online knowledge sharing and prove value for money for each invested penny.
• Tell the IT people that there are stuck in the 80’s, far from reality and will soon be obsolete.
• We will not implement a website. It will be a mashup consisting of social networks, blogs, wikis, widgets, tagging, maps and much more.
• Let us move the informal conversation online. We will have real-time interaction from all employees tweeting 9-5.
• Forget about email. It is oudated and we will share openly information across departments and hierarchies.
• Inside – outside does not matter anymore, so re-think your Intranet and open it.
• Let’s give up the documentation management system and let all employees tag files how they think best.
• Your employees will have full control of the website themselves and we can turn off the workflow function.
• Forgot about desktop solutions. Outsource your applications to external providers.
• We should do it in the wiki fashion – everybody will add their knowledge and expertise across your organization web.
• Have you heard of Firefox and Skype? They are dangerous tools luckily blocked by your firewall.

Your thoughts?

No related posts.

There are over one billion Internet users worldwide according to a list from Wikipedia. Every day thousand of people joining social networks such as Facebook. How can these social networks be used to boost business? Are there differences between countries or regions how such social networks work? Mark Davies from Esoko, explains intriguing thoughts from his work in Ghana on market information systems through mobile phones.

The next billion

It is not easy to get figures, but the ones existing might come as a surprise to some. The largest social network in China, QQ has over 300 million active members. According to Appfrica, South Africa has 1.1 million Facebook members, Morocco 369,000, Tunisia 279,000, Nigeria 220,000, Kenya 150,000,and Mauritius 60,000.  Here are more details on social networks worldwide. The key role will be around mobile phones as the main way to access and interact in online social networks. According to research from Frost & Sullivan and Colibria, mobile social networks will grow ten fold to over 500 million users in Latin America and Africa in the next five years.

Culture and impact

But what happens in this social networks is what we know little about. What are the impact of such networks and their potentials beyond pure leisure exchange? This question has made me thought for a while and wonder what is the role of different cultures in such communities. For Anand Giridharadas, Facebook becomes an Indian village. Back at the ICT observatory I had an interesting discussion with Mark Davies around these questions, which I have recorded and transcribed below.

Christian: Hello Mark. We attended the last day of the ICT Observatory. We’ve had very interesting discussions the past days, and I would like to ask you, or discuss with you, the topic about social networks in Africa. Especially, you already mentioned that in your project, you really want to go in that direction using mobiles and the web for farmers, and to bring farmers and traders together. What do you think is the role of these networks and their potentials for the future?

Mark Davies: Well, I think it’s really interesting that we’ve been through a period of three or four years, where networks seem to be one of the most compelling and interesting uses of the web, or the web 2.0. We’ve experience FaceBook, Twitter, and these other, MySpace.

Sitting in Africa, where we’re working in Africa, and we’re working in commerce and trade, it’s all about social networks. You’re trading with individuals that you know, this is perhaps a friends, or an associate, or somebody within your village. There is some identity that you can associate with them, and there is an element of trust.

So it’s just intriguing to consider, if we took some of those principals of FaceBook, of Twitter, of MySpace, and we used it in a environment where, actually, social networks are even stringer. Does that mean that they are more or less appropriate? I think that’s what’s fascinating us.

Certainly in the case of European trade, or me as a businessman in America, I didn’t need to know the person that I was trading with. I working within legislative framework I was working where standards and grades existed, and we knew who and what we were trading.

In Africa, if you’re trading something, how do you insure that you get paid? How do you insure that the item that you’re trading is what you’ve agreed upon? How do you insure that these things are what they say they are? You use networks as a way to reinforce, in this informal sector, that kind of commence and trade.

I think that’s where we’re looking at using technology to reinforce those networks, and make it easier for you to extend your networks beyond, perhaps, the geography or immediate linkages that you currently experience.

Christian: So that would mean the physical presence, the face-to-face exchange, is very important. To which extent do you think it is possible to do something over the Internet, when it comes to something as serious as trader and business-to-business solutions through mobile phones?

Mark Davies: Well I don’t think you do trade over the web, I don’t think that’s what happens. But I think it’s about “how do you exploit some of your social capitol using the web?” I don’t think that means everything suddenly happens on the web, I don’t think that we’re going to see e-commerce anytime soon.

But how do I connect to somebody who might be in a different village, further away? If somebody has said that they have a product that I’m interested in, how can I use some networking tool to get closer to that person, to establish some identity or some reputation?

Perhaps I might find somebody that I already know in their community. And I can ask them “do you know so-and-so? Are they trustworthy? Can I send them the money before they send me the product?” I think that’s the way.

It’s a little more complex, it’s about minimizing risk. You’re using social networking, you’re using technology to minimize your risk. Not to replace complete transactional activities, which will still be, if not face-to-face, it will be mouth-to-mouth. You will be negotiating, you will be arguing, you will be qualifying the deal.

But you can certainly use technology to use society, and used linkages as ways of minimizing your risk. In the same way how Grameen, with finance and loans, has leveraged your community, your network to create social pressure on you to pay back during certain periods, or on certain dates. In the same way, we can use social networks to create peer pressure so that you’re not abusing a trade or commerce relationship, in a similar way, with a stranger.

Christian: Very interesting. You also told me that you, for implementation, that you think about reputation. The keyword is reputation. Can you imagine something like eBay for rating and reputation? To which extent could that work? Especially, also, what could be the role of mobile phones then?

Mark Davies: Well, I think that people trade in Africa based on reputation. They know that “I may not even get the best price from this person, but I know that I will get paid, and I know that I will paid quickly.” These are the sorts of reputations that are important when you are choosing “who might I trade with?”

So the fact is that I think people in Africa, more or less, are simply not digitized. They don’t exist in a database. They have have a SIM card. Do they have a phone number? Yes. Do they have a postal address, or in they in a electoral register? These thing are beginning, but in effect, they aren’t accessible. You can’t find a profile to find out whether this person has abused previous trading relationships or not.

So I think, that as we profile people and put them into these databases, and digitize communities, we can associate content, observations, and commentary about them that can help other people interact with them. And again, reduce their risk. Now whether, in the simplest form, that might mean “are you allowing that community to rank and rate an individual?” We don’t know.

It’s, I think, a very dangerous games to be in. Because people may have all kinds of reasons why they might want to rank you and rate you, that are not particularly objective. So I think we need to think very carefully about who can rank who, under what circumstances. How can we keep it objective? Do we have particular agents, or brokers, that have greater weighting, or ranking, to their own ranking of other individuals?

But very simply, you could see a system whereby I, on a mobile phone, could enter the could enter the mobile phone of the person I’m trading with, and just establish “does the person exist? Are they on a system somewhere? How long have they been on that system? If they’ve been on it for three weeks, can I trust them? And if they’ve been on for three years, maybe there’s some more credibility there. And can you tell me how many complaints have been approved by brokers within that platforms, so that I can see that there is quite some risk with doing a trade with this person?”

So very much like eBay. 73 percent score, because 300 people have ranked this person and had a positive experience. That introduction of reputation into markets in Africa, will have a profound impact on expanding circles of trade.

Christian: That means, of course, more sales for products, and more…

Mark Davies: Yes, I think it’s not only about trying to push product our of Africa, to the rest of the world. It’s within Africa, it’s within the sub-regions. It’s between Ghana and Burkina, that we find trade breaking down because there are barriers of language, barriers of trust, barriers of regulation.

A great deal of thinking is being emphasized on “how do we create inter-regional trade, so that the wealth can be rationed within these African communities? That we can increase production, that we can increase demand within national consumer populations?”

As such, I think these tools, and these technologies, can play a very important role in facilitating that, and allowing cross-border trade with people that you might not have traded with before. Even if it just means “how do I convert a price into my currency?” In northern regions of Ghana, where you’re trying to understand what the price is in Burkina, it’s in French and it’s in CFR, in their currency.

So it’s very difficult to kind of compare. “Should I go a few extra kilometer, and buy or sell that product.” Technology can be used, and it will be on the mobile, to breakdown those kinds of barriers or language and currency, so that you can judge for you self what is the opportunity that is presented.

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This blog post is a personal note. As you might have noticed, I have redesigned the blog and I hope you like it. Moreover, since I started this blog, more than 2 years ago, quite a lot in my life has changed. Now, I would like to tell more about it and catch up with you on that.

It has been one year already since I left GTZ (German Technical Cooperation), after having worked there for five years. My desicion was based on my desire to follow different paths as a freelancer. I have to admit that wanting to give up the 9-5 rythm also played a big role. I believed that my working life will transform to a great extent in the next coming years and it is time to experiment. Another factor were the many fascinating topics in this wide world, on which one could immerse, and the sadly fact that organizations are in some cases to slow to listen and to adapt. “But that’s why we have ‘you’ consultants,” said once a colleague to me. Therefore, I have been more that pleased to provide that service for the past year, which has brought me to different organizations and interesting projects.

A lot of this professional transformation would not have happened without this blog. It has given me the chance to meet great and inspiring people, from whom I have learnt more than a lot and have helped me to build up my own business. I have been blogging for 2 and a half years now and I can look back at great times. Honestly, when I started this blog, I never imagined I was about to enter such a rich and open network of creative people. These days, Twitter makes the networking even easier and faster, but I believe it is incomparable to the exchanged thoughts and ideas through blogs.

So, I want to thank all of my readers and commenters for the past years, and ensure them that I will definetely continue blogging. Hope you enjoy the new blog and please let me know about your thoughts on it. If you are interested in my services, take a look at the new section “Consultancy” in the top menu, where I explain a bit more my services and references.

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Location, mobile phones and the Internet, combined together, are becoming an attractive amalgam for new opportunities. There is a fascinating trend to see the convergence of mobile technologies connected to the Internet and the rising importance of location. This is not just another hype, but could really be interesting for the non-profit arena.

I have already written about the potential renaissance of the Internet of Things – how low-cost technology can be used for better transparency. In a recent paper Tim O’Reilly calls it the information shadow, which simply means “offline” things and their information are increasingly connected to the web. “All of these breakthroughs are reflections of the fact – noted by Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM – that real world objects have “information shadows” in cyberspace.”

At the recent KM4DEV conference, I tried to summarize my thoughts on these developments and their potential implications on development work and activism. I have uploaded the presentation, which is hopefully as self-explanatory as possible and, in this blog post, I would like to add some more remarks:

My initial attempt for the presentation was my reflections on “what would happen if the Internet becomes locational aware? What are the implications of the boost in geo-data? And, what are the consequences of the ubiquitousness of mobile phones?”

Presentation

I start with two interesting quotes:

“It is estimated that as much as 80% of data contains geo-referenced information.” (Liping Di)

“It is not about mobile any more. It is the convergence from the social web with the mobile. The mobile let you interact within a network in a highly contextual way.” (Teemu Arina)

A jump to Uganda, where Google, Grameen, MTN and Brosdi have established an SMS service for health and agriculture tips. It has attracted over a million in the first months. I have heard that it was free in the beginning and maybe that was also a reason for such high use. Interestingly Google needed local institutions to get the content as it is not as easy to collect in the African context. For example, statistical data is not widely collected and, in particular, local content rarely digitalized. That might be a reason why Google has sponsored the Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge.

Citizen journalism (action) from anywhere

The famous initiative around the mobile African reporters is just one way to use the mobile phone and report from everywhere. “Fix my Street” in Great Britain shows how citizens can report on street damages through their mobile phones and emails are send to public institutions. “Stop stockouts,” a recent project running with the Ushahidi software, allows citizens to report medical stockouts in pharamcies, which are obliged by law for a certain stock in Southern African countries. I have wondered for a while how these efforts can help to monitor and evaluate development projects in a different way?

What makes digital maps different?

I was recently invited to moderate an online dialogue on human rights and geo-mapping. It is fascinating to see how mapping can help to advocate human rights and also empower local communities to share their environment. One such project is Green Maps with projects all around the world or a Google Earth project with indigenous communities in the Amazon. Maps can reflect different perspectives, interests, constraints and demands for change. What are the implications of people worldwide mapping their environment and having access to these in any place through their mobile phone?

To get a further understanding of digital maps, we need to forget about the usual paper maps with typical street information. Digital maps can offer all kinds of information, but different to paper maps, they have all the underlying geo-data, which can be used in many other contexts.
There are countless things that can be mapped and might help others in the local context:

• Surveillance cameras in my neighborhood
• Accessibility of facilities
• Bike tracks in my city, etc.
• Environmental pollution
• Cheapest shoe stores

So we have:

1. Increasing geo-data available
2. Access to these data through maps or other applications on mobile phones wherever we are, and
3. Increasing contributions to this information base.

Such efforts can lead to all sorts of services such as the traffic information or to find public bus connections in Chennai, India, for instance, which I highlighted in my post on Maptivism.

Explosion of location-based services

There is an “explosion” in location-based services these days, and all big players have been buying map services. Apple has just bought a mapping company and Google has announced that they will offer free navigation services for Android phones.

The geospatial web

In recent years we have been able to see huge efforts to offer maps and geo-data. Big names such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft offer maps. OpenStreetMaps offers the geo-data behind it even for free because it is a worldwide voluntarily run project. Although Google has done some remarkable efforts to offer maps also in developing countries, I believe it is very important that such maps and the data behind them are a public good. A nice example is Kabul, which is only accurately mapped through the voluntarily run OpenStreetMap, and it is much better.

The geospatial web for development work

It is striking to see that so many development organizations seem to be sleeping when one looks at the potential for geo-referenced information. The World Bank is heading in this direction and the humanitarian and relief sector is doing a lot, as the recent crisis mapping conference showed. But many development organizations are still overwhelmed to offer their data in universal standards such as RSS or offer Application Progamming Interfaces to mix data.

We are struggling daily for better filters, particularly in development organization, but location could be a decisive third filter:
Information

• Filter 1: Topic
• Filter 2: Person
• Filter 3: Location

I finish with a great image by Andrew Turner, who has an inspiring, albeit rather technical presentation about the geospatial web. From global to local – lets get the Internet location aware.

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There is a wide variety of information and communication technologies, but even more ways to use them to deliver content. Particularly in constraint environments such as rural areas, a whole range of channels are offered to get information to a person needed. In preparation for next week’s ICT observatory 2009 by CTA, Pete Cranston and I came up with examples of such different channels used in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

They can probably be categorized in a different way and more easily. They should show that if one wants to deliver service models around ICTs, they do not necessarily need to be around mobile phones, as the exchange of video CD of farmers shows (Interview of Louise Clark below), although the latter is oundoubtly the most promising tool. I have followed the tweets from the Mobile Web Africa conference and read these fascinating statistics:

• The recently launched SMS service by Google, Grameen, MTN and BROSDI in Uganda for agriculture and tips received over a million queries in the first few weeks although the service charges premium SMS rates. The service offers answers out of search results from specific databases via SMS.
• Google mobile traffic has increased 5 fold since 2007 in Africa. Google search results on mobile use in Africa are the highest in Nigeria, followed by Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania and Cote d’Ivoire
• It is estimated that South Africa will have 10.1 million mobile web users by the end of 2009.  The popular mobile social network application MXit has already over 5 million users in South Africa.

So here are some categories to differentiate between all the possible different channels. I am sure there are many missing or overlapping. Please add more in the comments.

Channels

Radio

• Broadcasting
• Community Radio
• Feedback through mobile phone: SMS to radio

Basic mobile phones

• Voice
• Voice to text / Text to voice
• Short Message (SMS)

Mid-range mobile phones

• Mobile phones with additional features such as cameras and data transfers.
• Data Transfer through GPRS
• Mobile Application (e.g. Java software)
• Mobile WAP
• Additional features such as camera or bluetooth

Smart phones

• Sensor Rich Application (All Purpose Tool)
• Location based services through Global position system (GPS)
• Social Network Features
• Mobile Web
• Video and Audio recording and sharing

Direct sharing
Many different informal forms of content shared through different technologies.

• CD, USB or IPod (Video, Audio, Text, Image)
• Mobile (Video, Audio, Text, Image)

Indirect access
For people who do not have direct access to mobile phones, computers or the Internet.

• Infopreneur (Use of intermediary to access information)
• Village phone (rent a mobile phone)
• Village Area Networks (VAN)

Rural access
Specific approaches to offer access in rural and remote areas

• Internet Cafe
• Telecentre
• Rural kiosk
• Local networks through Wifi and WiMax

Back at the last KM4DEV conference, I had the chance to interview Louise Clark, who talks about an interesting alternative way of sharing digital content in Nigeria.

Transcription

Hello, Louise. We’re here at the KM4DEV meeting in Brussels, and you have just brought some very interesting experiences from Africa about local content in rural areas.

Yes. I went last month to Benin and Nigeria to work with the African Rice Center. They have a very interesting project of using videos to share information around rice processing technology. The history to this project is that it started in Bangladesh, so the first of the series of videos were made in Bangladesh and showed technologies of how Bangladeshi families were selecting rice and storing their rice seeds.

These videos were brought to Africa to look at the kind of South/South knowledge exchange, and then some videos were made with African farmers in the African context and we distributed the six videos together. I went to Nigeria with some staff from Africa Rice to look at how farmers were using the videos and what was their experience of video for processing. And their experience was great. The feedback that we got was very, very positive.

Farmers, much to our great surprise, has access to video playing equipment. They were using VCD formats. So the extension service had transferred it from DVD to a VCD format. And the farmers were using the videos as part of their group meetings. So when they would get together in one of the farmer’s houses, they would sit down and watch the video together, which we found to be really an innovation in itself, regardless of the innovations that the videos were promoting in terms of better rice processing techniques.

One of the great surprises was the accessibility of this equipment. There was one group that didn’t have its own VCR player, or VCD player, and had bought a laptop to watch the video. I asked them about what else they used the laptop for, but they said just for the video. And they didn’t think that was a waste of money because they now sell their rice for twice the price as they did before.

So that was a really great experience. Now Africa Rice have just released a new video looking more at Pproduction, soil management, crop management, different techniques, which is now being distributed across Africa.

You also told me that they are shared, in Nigeria in your case, these videos are shared between farmers all over the country.

In the Nigerian case, the farmers, there was a really high demand amongst the farmers for their own copy of the video. And that was one of the issues that we discussed, was how we could get better dissemination of the video, creating linkages with small enterprise in terms of making copies of the video for sale. Because all of the farmers reported that they would buy a copy for themselves and watch it in their homes. So we discussed the advantages and the disadvantages. They said the real advantage was that they could watch the videos over and over again. The disadvantage being that there was no extension agent on hand to ask questions.

So this is an interesting new challenge for us as knowledge management people, in terms of how we can improve the two-way flow of communication using a media like video. So the visual impact and the audio impact combined with farmers was very effective, but how can we use this to really encourage communication from the research institute like Africa Rice to the field and the farmers.

So if I have any more, I’ll keep you posted.

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Next to information overload, probably comes network overload. Each day a new social network website appears. Another temptation for information and exchange, and again: new registration, same profile and more information to lock up. But with every new social network come along the questions: What about the filters? How do I get relevant information from my community? And, how do I manage all these memberships?

Illustration by Hugh MacLeod

Challenge 1: Managing networks
One easy example are profiles. Can you remember all of the websites on which you have created a profile, and which may even be long outdated? Why is not there a mechanism that allow you to include only one profile across social network websites? One such failed and disappointing attempt was Open Social, initiated by Google about two years ago. Some neat widgets can be integrated across social network applications, but altogether, social network sites often remain walled gardens. Unfortunately, open source solutions are not offering such mechanism (standards) either. Please let me know if you know of one.

One small solution – albeit only half step – to at least avoid working with countless logins is called Open ID, which works with several websites. You have got your login information on one server and can connect other websites through it, which theoretically can see only the information you want them to provide.

Challenge 2: Getting the information from networks

Who has got the time to log in to all different social network sites?

It becomes a hassle to log in and search for the latest information. I find that in many communities only bits and pieces are really relevant and interesting to me, but to only have access to that information is quite tricky – one way is to subscribe via RSS or emails. At Ning, you get a feed telling you each little nonsense detail: “A is now friends with B”, “C commented here”. The result is information overload. With emails you only need to persistently scan email content. I wish there was a dashboard of all of my community, which allowed me to filter all the information and stay on top of the news.

Challenge 3: Loose networks
What I love about blogging is that – on the contrary to social networks – each blog is part of a network, and bloggers and commenters create meaning through linking posts from different blogs. Relevance is something social networks are missing. For example, if I am interested in waste water projects in Eastern Africa, I would love to discover the given networks across websites, but more often I have to search countless islands of well intended social network websites. Websites such as the social bookmarking website “delicious” still create more relevance through a simple tag; what countless social network websites have not yet achieved.

Where are the brilliant solutions to link better relevant information?

You still need to find your human information hubs for best information. Technical help is not offered yet. Unfortunately there is now a lot of emphasis on real-time solutions and too little work on filters and creating relevance. As a result some of my friends and colleagues are leaving Facebook. Too much noise, too little benefit.

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At the Socialcamp in Berlin last weekend, a session dealt with “social business 2.0,” which turned out to be an intense and inspiring discussion on open innovation for appropriate technology through crowdsourcing – a sentence with many buzzwords. Essentially, many questions were raised, but among those were: How can innovative solutions and their implementation be coordinated through the web? And, what is the role of the web and which are its limitations? I hope this post may trigger some answers in the comments!

Appropriate technology development through the web?

Photo by Todd Huffman (CC BY 2.0)

A group of people who met over at the Betterplace platform – a German peer-to-peer aid platform –  and whom did not know each other before, founded a project request to build an new innovative toilet waste water system. Of course, there are many of such solutions out there already, but in their case, the group has no technical skilled members and it, therefore, seeked for people with a technical solution to help them out. I keep the description rather short, because the main discussion was more about the different dimensions of crowdsourcing. So, how such a complex, technical advanced project can be done through the web?

Definition of Appropriate Technology according to Wikipedia:
“Appropriate technology is technology that is designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social and economical aspects of the community it is intended for.”
And, according to Oikos:
“Appropriate Technology is technology that creates minimal environmental impact while serving basic human needs. Uses the simplest level of technology that can effectively achieve the intended purpose in a particular location.”

Crowdsourcing vs. Community building
It seems that, within the discussion, the term crowdsourcing is understood very differently. Can you even crowdsource a technical solution? Can you mobilize a crowd of engineers or do you need a community? Dan Woods asks “Does crowdsourcing exist as it is popularly conceived?” and replies “Yes, it does, but it doesn’t have anything to do with innovation.”

So I think you need to have a community involved in such a project, otherwise how could you motivate people to participate and evaluate such a solution voluntarily?

But then again, we realized we focused too much on the solution and too little on implementation. One needs to focus on the implementation and on what the people who are using it really want. There is the famous failure of the solar cooker, which led to eye injury from its parabolic antenna and ignored that what people wanted was to cook in the evenings.

But, for appropriate technology aren’t the people living in the local context the real experts? How can a bridge be build between scientist and local practitioners?
There are interesting platforms, which can be used in many different ways to use the web for innovation:

• Appropedia is a site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development.
• Nabuur, where volunteers worldwide help to find solutions for villages.
• Scientist without borders
• Innocentive, a platform to find scientific solutions with a for-profit purpose.
• Social Innovation Camp is an experiment in using social technology for social change

Connecting the local and global: Local vs. global knowledge
These four initiatives have very different approaches and do not necessarily aim to open innovation. Who owns the solution and who decides for the solution to be implemented? The discussion goes onto whether it is possible for the technical part of the solution to separate the solution in different parts? Or would that mean competition? But what if each engineer has different solutions, then which one should be taken? Clearly, you need expert knowledge, but it is even more important for such a project to learn together, on the path for a such a solution and to be open to all problems and feedback.

So, peer-to-peer aid has to do a lot with peer-to-peer learning. But to be inclusive is quite tricky as many rural areas in developing countries have no easy access. There is an interesting initiative by Stephan Wolak to make this link through mobile phones and connect the local to the global.
Do you know any more examples? What is your perspective for the potentials and limitations of such crowdsourcing efforts for open innovation?

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The Internet of Things is a rather old story within the web. But through simple, low-cost technology such as RFID chips (Radio Frequency Identification Tags) volunteers worldwide gain another potentially powerful monitoring instrument. Such crowdsourcing efforts can unseal environmental damage, give valuable data to advocacy organizations and development projects.

Internet of Things
Originally, the Internet of Things was thought for modern household. Household appliances are connected to the Internet, so that the refrigerator sends out a message when it is running out of orange juice or eggs, for example. Not surprisingly this advancement in technology has not made a big impact nor made it to the daily life of millions as yet. Such technology are RFID chips, which are low-cost, simple stickers, which can be put on commodities.

Things become connected
Businesses such as logistic enterprises use them to follow each article or package easily. These little stickers can store information. So, for example, logistic companies use them to document the travel route of a package. You only need to scan the piece within the range of a few meters and then see where it comes from. Environmentalists use the same technology to monitor the route that logged down trees from the rainforest take.

Barcoding to save the tropical forest
According to TreeHugger: Will Barcoding Trees Save Tropical Forests? This video shows how these barcodes can be used to find out where trees are really originally from and whether they are protected or illegally cut down. In this case, however, it is offered by a company. Of course, such barcodes can be removed, but they can also be as small as only a few millimeters.

Crowdsourcing transparency
Imagine that volunteers worldwide could check how products go along the supply chain. Another interesting project in this regard is Sourcemap, a collective tool for transparency and sustainability, which is looking into the unsealing of the supply chain of products. But this does not only have to be done through radio frequency identification technology. A project called Citizen Water works with inexpensive water quality test kits. Here, people check across any country the water quality, and then map the results in a transparent way in the Internet, to show the different levels of water quality in different areas.

So far, this technology has been used mainly by businesses or governments. Nowadays, more and more governments are planning on adding it to passports. Regarding privacy, these attempts are quite scary, since you as a customer or citizen cannot control what gets on or off thes echips nor who can or cannot read the stored information. It is time to use such technology for openness.

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It is estimated as much as 80% of data contains geo-referenced information. So, a lot of information can be displayed through maps. Digital maps allow easy ways to present large amounts of data and reduce complexity. Activists have found creative ways to use maps, but also development organizations have to deal with a lot of spatial information. Using geo-referenced through maps can improve transparency, and yet not so many organizations use it.

Difference of digital maps
Digital maps have brought three major changes.

1. Digital maps, in contrast to paper maps, can be combined with all kinds of data even in real time.
2. Nowadays, everybody can access huge data from the public domain and combine these with maps.
3. Citizen maps are created through voluntarily worldwide effort and participation, are freely available and offer new ways for transparency.

The Tactical Tech Collective has a great guide for beginners and comes up with a good description of why maps are so helpful:

“Advocacy organisations worldwide face great challenges. One of these is how best to communicate and disseminate information to communities, staff, founders, governments and other organisations in a world saturated with information, media and advertising. They may also need to keep track of complex and diverse information in their own work.”

By the way, there was also an interesting online forum by New Tactics on ‘information activism’ with many examples and exciting discussions.

But why are make maps so different?
Anders Peders has come up with some simple points in his presentation “Geomapping Making Invisible Data Visible”:

• Recognition: Ooh that’s the place we are talking about!
• A feeling of connection: It’s around the corner!
• Connecting the dots (topics) on complex issues.
• Engagement: This has to change! I want to help out.

Maps for activism and campaigning
Maps have a long history and since the early days maps have been used for many purposes, such as to show changes through bygone times and to manipulate them for propaganda. But never before it has been so easy for individuals and groups to use maps for own purposes. The Economist goes a step further and writes “mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice.”

There are various projects using maps worldwide and here are a few examples:

Green Map System has engaged communities worldwide to map green living (nature and cultural resources). In one case, a map was created for the environmental hazards and challenges in the greater Banjul area in Gambia. Other maps from Europe are already interactive.

“Eight Maps” has been mapping people in San Fransisco, who donate for a campaign against a law that supports sex marriage, trying this way to put them on the spot. This example also shows how far such campaign might go into privacy issues.

Another great example comes from Worldmapper:

Ecological footprint of each country in the world

© Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

Another nice, albeit printed map series, is an Atlas of Radical Cartography, “a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration.” My favorite map is of the only walking track left in Manhatten, where you are not followed by surveillance cameras.

One key role will be played by the OpenstreetMap project. Other than Google Maps, it offers all geocoded information for free and is, equally to Wikipedia, an open project. I am working these days on a local politics project for transparency. The richness of geodata was astonishing and very helpful. It all started with the city of London and is now a worldwide movement. I went to the annual State of the Map conference in Amsterdam, learnt a lot about mapping and filmed some interviews. It was great to meet finally Mikel Maron, foundation member of OpenStreetMaps, who gives fascinating examples of how open maps benefit people living in informal areas in India.

Fredy Rivera from Colombia describes the dangerous work of mapping in Colombia and how they plan to provide better geodata to indigenous groups in the rising competition around water resources.

Arun Ganesh has done some incredible mapping efforts for the city of Chennai in cooperation with the local administration. He even went a step further and build a great website to find public bus connections and organized the printing of maps to post them on local bus stations.

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Imagine we do not only use our mobile phones to make phones calls and SMS, but to contribute to science. How does that work? We can directly engage in micro-voluntarism or contribute valuable information without doing much more than carrying our mobile phone with us. Just as volunteers share computer processing power or look out for new galaxies, so can mobile phones become tools that collect valuable data.

Cairo traffic jam by tronics on flickr (CC)

How does that work?

Newest mobiles phones have global position system (GPS), which shows on a map where you are at the moment. Google and TomTom have developed – independently from each other – an initiative to use location-based data to gather real time traffic information. It is quite simple and genial. GPS can determine whether you move fast or slow, so if you are probably in a car or walking.  So, if feedbacks are sent from an area of slow or non movement where the map indicates a highway, then it is much likely that there is a traffic jam.

The Swiss datenvisualization.ch blog has a nice image to show how it works. (By the way a great resource!)

Location services through all devices

By the way Google offers location position system also for non-GPS enabled phones and browsers (Firefox). How? They have a huge database of mobile tower locations. Computers have an IP address, and a wifi access point delivers another proximity. A bit scary if you think of privacy.

Mobile phones sensors

But that is just the beginning. Nokia has developed a mobile phone with sensors to gather results from your environment, such as noise level, pollution, personal health, weather monitoring, etc. Scientists from MIT call it “Reality Mining” and “provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior.” The Economist has an interesting article called Mobile Phones: Sensors and Sensitivity.

“Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism,… Dr Paulos has already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh.“

This information can then be offered again for mobile phone users through applications with augmented reality, the latest hype around mobile phones. Tim Boucher has post, where he outlines a critical way augmented reality can lead to:

Privacy and surveillance

The flip side of the coin is privacy and potentially larger surveillance of citizens. Iphone owners already can get a taste of it. Pinch Media Spyware can be implemented by any Iphone-application-developer and can send your location and much more to the developer. Potentially, a programmer can develop profiles of movements. As long as a mobile is not really turned off, it continuously sends information and therefore can be located. In countries with authoritarian governments one can imagine, how easy it is to monitor exactly where dissidents are moving if they do not protect themselves.

Technology driven volunteerism?

Step by step mobile phones develop to a much broader instrument. It can help to valuable data for development such as another project described in the Economist article:  “A good example is the study of well-water contamination in Bangladesh conducted by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. His project combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones.“

In particular in development projects a sufficient data base is often not giving. Ushahidi has shown the potential for mobile crowdsourcing. Eric Paulos “foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park.” However, it has to secure that this information guarantee privacy and are a free public good.

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Inspired by a post on ICTWorks, I have compiled a comprehensive list of 400 ICT4D twitter members. Almost a year ago, I started a second Twitter account for news around ICT4D. I had previously offered the ICT4D feed (subscribe) for a while and publish the best pieces of that feed on Twitter. Although the feed has around 30 resources each day, it also attracted already some 50 subscribers.

A year ago, only a few people were twittering around ICT4D topics, but nowadays, a year later, Twitter has developed into so many niche topics and brought so many people together interested in ICT4D. Twitter offers new ways to find synergies and the people who are part of it might not otherwise get to know so much about their topics. More importantly, it becomes a fascinating community tool, which helps spread ideas around ICT4D and lessons learnt – something that is much needed. I have uploaded a list of 400 users in a Google Spreadsheet, and I am still sure I have most probably missed some people.

Therefore, if this is your case, please feel free to add yourself in the open spreadsheet or add users in the comment area. I have also included the location information from each account, so most users are represented in a map. It is already looking nicely populated. What do you think?

Update: Please be patient to see the map. It can take longer. (sorry!) Thought that Google map gadget works well quicker. Click here for larger map.

Update 2: The map shows only one marker per city, so be sure to check the table below for the full list.
Download the list as an Excel file (26/08/09) or export yourself the latest version in Google spreadsheets.

By the way, it is quite nice what you can do with Google Docs these days. Every table with geographic information can be transformed in such a map. I wrote about it in another post on the web2fordev gateway. You may want to follow web2fordev also on Twitter.

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