If you sit in front a long list of information, it is often difficult to make quickly sense of it. If you look at a map of the same data, you might get a picture of it rather quickly.

1,470,000 US gallons of oil were leaking from an oil pipe of British Petrol in the Gulf of Mexico everyday. What does that tell you? When you look at this map from ifitweremyhome.com, then you get a better sense of it. The oil spill size was as big as Southern UK.

ifitweremyhome.com

If you do have some data, you can start working with a new great tool called openheatmap.com, however if not, then you need to collect it yourself.  One way is done by the grassrootmapping.org project, which has done a great initiative to document the oil spill on the coast line. Another one is the Oil Reporter from the Crisis Commons group. You “only” need an Iphone or Android driven phone and you can get the app to report where oil is found.

urbanforestmap.org

www.mappiness.org.uk

Context is king and therefore some other projects want you to share information to find out more about your environment. One example is the Urban Forest Map project: “The Urban Forest Map is a collaboration of government, nonprofits, businesses and you to build an inventory of San Francisco’s urban forest.” Citizens create an inventory of trees in their city and get exact information about the ecological impact.

Another mapping & crowdsourcing project is a research project, which founds to create a location based happiness index. Through an application, volunters are asked throughout the day about their mood and that information plus the location is then collected. Mappiness shall help to understand “how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.”

A similar project called Mapumental, done by Mysociety. Watch the video for that amazing idea.

In Germany a similar project, called Mapnificient, has been done. At the moment we try to implement the same for Create Frankfurt.

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For years, I have heard that the web is becoming a platform, where one can easily use a website as a tool box.  Community sites installed just with a few clicks and knowledge sharing communities are on their way. But as in most cases, there is always a hard point, and in this case is to get people involved. Although technology plays a less important role, it is still a critical factor whether people like to join and engage. Many ready-made-website fail to deliver the most important thing: To help people find stuff and help them exchange.

Technology constraints vs. user needs

Of course there are examples of simplified websites, which focus on user needs such as Gmail or Flickr. But knowledge sharing in a community is often way more complex if you have to combine different forms of media, a library of existing resources and so forth. I have tested numerous platforms and until today I have just been disappointed because each time I had certain needs and always had to put these under technology constraints. Although it should be the other way around and technology should help me make it better and easier.

Professional circles vs. passion driven communities

One big differentiation is important. I am talking here about professional communities, where people exchange about their work. These communities are much more difficult to establish. If people have a real desire to exchange ideas, for example, about their hobbies, a bizarre designed forum could work perfectly and would be more dynamic. There are many examples of dynamic communities that existed way before they were named Web2.0 or social media. To me, work related communities focus a lot on the knowledge management principle: Find the right information where and when it is needed.

Information seeking vs. engagement

I have less time. Nowadays, I can engage in so many communities, mostly when I am not even online. Why should I also join in your community? Perhaps because this community gives me the information I need: quick, easy and maybe even in high quality.  From this perspective, for example, a Ning website is a disaster. Flashy, blinky things focus on a personal presentation instead of orientation, coherence and relevance. Have you ever tried to find something on a Ning website?  How many communities are really active on Ning? Okay, to be fair, technology and a user centered website is one factor, but let me raise some more points:

• Most of these social network websites are features loaded and focus very little on plain people to people exchange.
• Although you have as a webmaster a set of options to change your network, it is not enough. You need to be able to tweak in detail to make a platform user-centered. Listen to your members and make changes according to them.
• Facebook, Linkedin, etc. are great tools to network and to mobilize, but offer almost no flexibility to build a community of practice. It is the Facebook way or no way. More important these big platforms have no interest in real exchange and learning. It is not their business concept.
• A questionable approach are widgets, where content is distributed all over the place. Photos here, documents there. A RSS feed is easily another information stream with little relevance.
• Each community has its own culture of exchange and different requirements. It is so difficult to find the right platform for that. Instead one needs to squeeze requirements to technology constraints.
• Confidentiality. Latest from Facebook, it is always a risk to give your data to such a platform. Also other platforms have a clear exit strategy for their users. You can leave easily and take your data with you.
• Community develop over time. It is impossible to foresee what is needed and what not for your platform in the future. Often a wonderful list of features is tempting, but so much is not really needed later on.
• If you want to make information finding for users the easiest possible way, the whole information structure behind a site becomes easily complex. The more is done through intelligently tagging in the background, the easier it becomes for users to find something.

Alternative?

Either you are lucky to find a service that offers you what you need or you opt for the usual stony way to build your own website. I know it is not a great alternative, but I believe we have to realize that so many web technologies are still in its infancy and we have just started to focus on the users as the center point of such technologies. I know it is not the best to shot at Ning as an example alone, but their latest turn in their payment policy shows a typical dilemma. Nobody knows where such providers are in a few years time.

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There is often that notion that once you have access to the Internet or to other information and communication technologies (ICT), the whole world of information lies rights at your feet, so you only need to pick the best of it. But in contrary, it can become incredibly time consuming to verify information and to make yourself a trusted source. In the field of ICT4D, this issue is particularly important. In many cases people do not have years of experience working with ICTs and have actually learnt them just the auto-didactic way – using the Internet for their own benefit. Let’s take the case of farmers in rural areas of Africa.

Kenya. Photo: © Curt Carnemark / World Bank

Farmers in developing countries

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a colleague, who has been working already for decades in the rural development and agriculture field around the world. We talked about the potentials for ICT in agriculture and in specific farmers. One of the major challenges is neither access nor literacy, but simply trust. Why should a farmer trust an information coming from somewhere as an SMS? Farmers make careful elaborations, before they change certain practices. Information from a website can help, but at the end of the day what counts is the advice of trusted colleagues. So, we have to realize that information through ICTs often have only a small impact.

ICT and agriculture

In the case of agriculture, behavioural change through extension advice is even more difficult to happen through ICTs. For decades, it has been well known that advise has no effect if simply some guides and brochures are sent to farmers. More effective is a participatory process, where farmers learn from each other directly. So why should farmers change practices they have done for years when they get advice through SMS or any other channel? “It needs a lot more than ICTs,” pointed my colleague.

In contrast, market information particularly through mobile phones is more successful because of the price information, which are much easier to trust than a particular advice for the next cultivation. But even in this case, they had to be introduced in groups of trusted people. Otherwise, who would trust a SMS from anywhere? Would you? There have been cases where rumors spread through SMS have even led to violence.

Demystify the Internet in Rural Africa

Take yourself as an example, how many sources do you really read or how many people do you speak to before you can take the information for granted? ICTs allow for incredibly easy publishing and disseminating of information; but the information is still not worth a penny if it is not trusted. Linda Raftree has a great post, where she describes her experiences during ICT training courses in Ghana.

“Another question that surfaced was ‘Is the internet true?’” This led to a great discussion on how information comes from all sides, and that anyone can actually put information online. It’s truth, and anyone can’t believe everything one reads, it’s not regulated, you need to find a few sources and make some judgment calls.”

Although all this information is not new at all, so many ICT approaches forgot exactly about that challenge. The information has to only be delivered somewhere and that should bring change. The problem is that trust is built slowly through social relations and these take a lot longer to grow online.

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There are more than one billion people, who are members of some sort of social network website. But, will these websites be the future platforms, where we can engage to create social networks? I doubt it. The future will go back to your address book, where it has always been.

Photo by Zheem from Flickr (CC)

Address book

An address book can combine contact details and much more information people add to it. Now, imagine these contacts are updated constantly adding new information available depending on each person and the social network they belong to. The HTC android driven mobile phone has already got that function. It connects you to certain social network websites and matches them to your address book. So, it really does not matter what website is behind it, you simply get an overview or stream of information of your friends’s and colleagues’s activities at various websites under each (online active) contact in your address book:

Own control vs. Facebook control

Photo by laihiu from Flickr (CC)

Now, the best way to decide what is public or private and who shall see what, would be if you have complete control over your information. In the case of Facebook, they want to do that job for you and that is the problem. If one looks at the continuous privacy issues of Facebook, it is about time that information gets protected from companies, which change their terms of services every second day (e.g. Apple).

Steve Boyd writes: “One simple observation is that users will not be able to get the privacy they want (or think they already have, or at least had in the past) in today’s Facebook.” and he concludes that Facebook, therefore, is not the future.

However, the answer of many social network websites is to collect as much personal information to become your personal address book. The Facebook friend finder stores all the information forever and therefore comes up with intriguing friend suggestions.

Reality check

The problem is that there is not really a serious initiative to work on an alternative open system, where users could control their data and give social networks access to the information they want to share. Still, in a call for a Facebook alternative, people donated in short time a hundred thousand dollars.

Another, albeit failed and disappointing, attempt was Open Social, initiated by Google about two years ago. The good news, however, is that even Facebook will have difficulties to be the decisive player. That might (hopefully) be history soon.

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DFID blogs.dfid.gov.uk

In addition to my recent Twitter analysis, I wrote another article on development organizations and social media on the web2fordev blog, which I crosspost also here.

Many organizations have approached the social web and new technologies from different angles during the last years. Large organisations have engaged in one or another way, in social media. But did they fully embrace the participatory web? Let’s take a look at how development organisations have approached the social web and where the status quo stands.

A general objective for development organisations is to increase their outreach. Social media are used to spread news and other information across the social web. Reaching an audience directly has many advantages, but are organisations ready to address the challenges inherent to a two-way communication interaction?

Video

Video channels are a popular form. All large development organizations have their own channels on Youtube: World Bank (2 236 subscribers), United Nations (6 608 subscribers), UNDP (1276 subscribers) USAID (43 subscribers) and CTA. While some organisations rely on the production of professional videos, USAID is still experimenting with a blend of professional and grassroots video productions. Like USAID, on its vimeo platform CTA offers both professional and in-house productions while on its official video site CTA offers a range of professionally produced multimedia related to agriculture and rural development.

Across the sites the number of subscribers confirms of the interest that people have in multimedia related to development cooperation. The download statistics of the World Bank, which exceed one million, support this assessment.

Twitter

Another area of involvement are social network websites such as Twitter. Many organizations have Twitter accounts such as UNDP , UNICEF, UNHCR , UN , USAid, CIDA , AfDB , CTA, etc. The World Bank has various Twitter accounts such as news of an Asian section.

While videos are used to broadcast news, I wonder whether these organizations use Twitter to nurture two-way communication. A quick analysis indicates that this is not the case. Out of ten organizations, only two reacted to their audience and replied with a message.

Blogging

The blogging efforts from the World Bank and DFID are certainly different. The world bank has blogs covering different thematic areas such as conflict , governance or private sector development and these are linked to debates and interactions with the wider blogosphere. DFID has taken a different approach and provides “real life perspectives from those working on the ground to fight poverty”. It offers surfers to join the debate. DFID’s bloggers trigger quite some discussions on some posts, but also leave some questions unanswered. Other blogging efforts are being conducted by the United Nations and the Overseas Development Institute.

Facebook

Another popular approach are the Fan pages on Facebook, which are mostly used as an alternative channel to broadcast organisational news (e.g. USAid) and create a space where fans can post questions and remarks. In the case of the World Bank, its page has 7758 members, with whom the organization is interacting quite actively. CTA has launched its Fan page on Facebook and accounts fora few hundred members so far.

Use of multiple social media

An more advanced approach is taken by some NGOs. A good example is Oxfam, which actively taps into the potential of the participatory web. Their blogging portal combines many different social media forms. Discussions are linked to different communities and Oxfam has built a far-reaching audience, with which it is engaged with.

Drawing the line

So, in conclusion, if one looks back at the time of the Web2forDev 2007 Conference , a lot has happened and some organisations have invested considerable resources to engage with social media. Nonetheless despite the promising signs for two-way conversations, it seems many organisations still have to define a well-though strategy and deploy the necessary resources to make the most out of the social web and its potentials.

In parallel some organisations are increasingly investing in integrating “social features” into existing internal web communication. This aspect will we be discussed in a forthcoming post.

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A while ago I was asked, by Markus Beckedahl, to present something on maptivism at the re-publica conference.  And even though I am still exploring this new field, I tried to give an overview of the fascinating world of maptivism.

Here is a video of my presentation (33 min.), which also shows the slides I have included below. The first two minutes are in German (in the beginning I forgot I wanted to held the presentation in English in the first place). The presentation covers a lot of what I have been blogging about here and there, but I also included some other great examples. The re-publica took place this year and, thanks to the organizer,  a lot more international and inspiring people got together in Berlin. It was great discussing digital activism with Sokari Enkine, Sam Ben Gharbia, David Sasaki, Rolf Kleef and Tobias Eigen.

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The Kindle New York Times von B.K. Dewey (Flickr)

Half a year ago I started a small experiment. I have changed to read content on digital devices. Before I opted to do so, I had always thought that I would miss the feeling of paper, but to my surprise I do not. I am quite impressed how easy and helpful it is to read on digital devices such as the iPhone and Kindle. There are a lot of advantages to this, which also have interesting implications for ICT4D. However, the “walled garden” concepts of Apple and Amazon are a catastrophe.

The Pros

By far, the best option is the instant delivery wherever you are. I can get books whether I am in Europe, Asia or Mexico. It is particularly great to receive your newspaper wherever you are; and even better to get it the night before publishing. Newspaper browsing is better than I thought with different sections or small abstracts.

A neat combination for the reading flow

The cons

Here comes a big disadvantage. If you want to browse quickly forward and backward it is a hassle. Imagine a travel guide where you want to find quickly all sorts of information. I have tried it a couple of times and I must admit it is a pain. You can search through and get too many results or click endlessly to find your required information. Hey, it might just be a matter of practice.

• Books are only available in English for the Kindle. Amazon has its own propriety format and does not accept the widely used epub format. So it is an Amazon or no book.

• If you want to get, for example, PDFs on your Kindle you need to get them converted by sending them to Amazon by email. The converted files do not appear very great. Who would have thought that?

Note taking

• Here comes a huge problem. You can make notes in Kindle by selecting certain text pieces. All notes are saved on a clipping.txt file, which you need to transfer to your computer. Now, you have a big file with bits and pieces of texts not always referring to where it belongs to. Of course, that is all different for the books you bought on Amazon. Here, all your notes can be even accessed on your private Kindle page. Amazon makes little or no effort to provide a good way to take notes from different content. So, in conclusion, note taking is not greatly solved. I have not seen anything good for the Iphone either. In a book you just underline the phrase and that’s it.

The big problem: Walled gardens

The big problem is, however, the concept behind either the Kindle or the iPhone/iPad approach. You depend completely on the companies behind it. The Kindle is basically a mobile shopping cart camouflaged as an e-reader. And the iPhone allows at least different formats such as the common epub format, but if Apple does not like a book, then you cannot get it.

Do not get me wrong, I find it great that authors and publishers have here a way to get some revenues, but they are themselves completely dependent on two giants. Apple and Amazon take a 30% share, although their costs to provide and deliver are minimal. In the case of the Kindle, the publisher has to even pay to deliver the book or sample chapters.

By the way, that is one reason why I decided to give up the iPhone and change to an open source driven mobile phone. I can recommend anyone to jailbreak the iPhone to get better privacy. It is very easy. Hope this will be soon possible for the Kindle as well. In conclusion, I see an increasing dilemma that many of these tools can be very practical, but they have serious privacy concerns.

Nevertheless, the delivery of content on mobile devices in such an easy and cost efficient way can help to draw lessons for non or little connected places around the world.

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Everybody wants to be on Twitter and development organizations are no exception. But what do they really want to gain from Twitter? Do they really want to use Twitter to interact through a two-way conversation with their audience? I was curious, so I did a small analysis.

However, the results are anyway quite clear: There is practicaly no interaction. Twitter is used by development organizations as a purely broadcast channel.

Most make great use of retweets, which are often from affiliated organizations such as in the case of the United Nations. So, even when they retweet, these organizations are still not necessarily following what happens in the twitterverse. Others use inflationationary hashtags such as UNDP. My favorite is: “Burkina Faso: Support for HIV-positive patients http://ow.ly/1BJ0I #HIV #AIDS #UNDP #UN #BURKINAFASO #AFRICA #ARVs” by UNDP.

The only exception I could find was the OECD and CIDA, which actually responded to people.

So why do such organization use Twitter if they miss the opportunity to engage with their audience? Don’t they have sufficient resources or are not ready for an authentic conversation? Or, are only the people behind public relations responsible for the Twitter account?

In any case, the amount of followers says very little if an account is also influential and being heard. For example, check out accounts with huge followers and their retweet rate. Not rarely it is incredibly low. That’s why I checked some of the above Twitter accounts also on Twinfluence, which analysis Twitter accounts through different parameters from social network analysis. The results are complementary with the ones above. The United Nations account with 32.055 followers has an influence of 1%. Development Gateway has 4% and OECD 62%.

So, in conclusion, it looks as if development organizations are still on a journey to develop listening skills. But to be fair, there are more promising examples such as the World Bank’s involvement in their Facebook page.

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What if you were in Ethiopia, walking by a school, directing your mobile’s camera to towards it and suddenly you get all the information available about the school, such as the development projects involved with it, the amount invested to build it, and the school’s drop out rate.

How transparent is development aid?

Is it only sciene-fiction? Welcome to augmented reality and the plans to use open data in the future. Owen Barder talked about the exact same idea in a recent podcast at the Center for Global Development. Of course, it is questionable whether concrete information stream is instantly needed; it might easily overwhelm us, but certainly this kind of transparency might have a huge impact on development aid.

Most people agree that the development aid world needs more transparency. It is not easy or almost impossible to get an overview of what really happens in a country or a sector. Senegal alone has 82 individual aid co-ordination forums, but that has not brought the transparency needed, and made it even more complicated, as Owen Barder writes in his thoughtful and provoking post: “The coming collapse of the development system”. A transparent overview on all activities, partnerships and financial involvements, could bring light in this unnecessary complexity.

Small first movers in the development aid world

Many organizations and some governments have started opening up their repositories of data to be accessed publicly, such is the example of the development sector, where first organizations have freed their data. The World Bank has an API to access data, and the UK Department for International Development  (DFID) has a new way to present its project data. Whereas the former offers statistical data, such as development indicators, the latter publishes project information to be monitored. But come on … is that all?

Initiatives to use open data

Ujima Website

Such open data could be used by external initiatives or watchdogs. A good example for development in Africa is the Ujima project, which shows project data from USAid and DFID. Unfortunately, the majority of organizations seem to be only discussing the move to open data, but until now, they rather enclose information. To be fair, many development organizations have a huge challenge – they have various different databases, formats and struggle to get them better connected as well. One example is the challenge around Management Information System.

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I wonder what are the factors and incentives that drive people to join an online community, and why not? My work normally involves different communities or evolves around these, but it is often difficult to anticipate how a community develops. Some things work, others not at all. To get a community started has a lot to do with experimenting. The other day I had an interesting chat with Nancy White and Joitske Hulsebosch about this specific topic, and decided to bring it up in public.

What did I miss?

Of course, mostly it depends on the context and on the person, as Nancy remarked. It is almost impossible to generalize here, but it seems that there are a multiple of factors that count. But the multitude of networks are all trying to gain one’s attention.

Lastly, this topic is also interesting as we often know so little about the majority of lurkers once they have joined and why they did? Ton Zijlstra and Lilia Efimova have some interesting thoughts about the value of lurkers:

“Lurking, although the word seems to imply a negative connotation, has usefull aspects nonetheless. It is a way of determining rules of behaviour for new comers to a group. (…) The most obvious characteristic of a lurker is that he is at the fringe of a group, listening and observing. Being at the fringe may seem like a bad place from the core, but in fact is a good position to build bridges to other groups, and be aware of other groups in the vicinity. “

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Mobile phones have tiny screens and keyboards, and need an agile finger to handle them. Yet some pioners believe mobile phones might be a key learning device for the future, and have even come up with smart ideas to make learning on the go a motivating and interactive approach. No doubts that if mobile learning (mlearning) works, it can potentially reach millions of people, who have difficulties to get access to learning materials, otherwise.

Moodle for the Iphone

For Steve Vosloo “…The cellphone is the kindle of Africa, until the prices of ebook readers come down…” (Tweet) Steve Vosloo from the M4Lit programm at the Shuttlewoth Foundation in South Africa sees here a potential for youth education. He experiments with an interactive mobile novel (www.kontax.mobi). “We want reading to be social (community) and engaging (interactivity). We’re reaching teens where they are — on their mobile phones”. He points out, “Teens don’t write enough”, but “teens love their phones.” So, could technology be an incentive to make youngsters learn?

My friend Inge de Waard is working on another interesting mlearning project around health. In her case, physicians working on HIV/AIDS care, in remote locations, are offered to learn through mobile phones about the latest medical information. “The didactic material consists of 3D animations simulating interactive clinical cases which are adapted to mobile devices.” The project is currently developing a mobile version of the well known learning plattform “moodle.” This way doctors not only get the course material to their mobile phone, but potentially can interact with colleagues around practice experiences.

For Robert Hawkins of the World Bank the future of education is around ubiquitous learning. “With the emergence of increasingly robust connectivity infrastructure and cheaper computers, school systems around the world are developing the ability to provide learning opportunities to students “anytime, anywhere”.

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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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