Focuss is also about gaining the skills & ability to re-use and remix open data

The Focuss.Info Initiative encourages students, researchers, policy-makers and individual practitioners in global development studies and research to use the latest information sharing and collaboration tools. One of the recurring tools is social bookmarking. However, as you can see in the weblogs of the Focuss workshop facilitators from Africa, Asia and South America, they have also used other tools.

Take Pablo Andres Rivero Morales from Bolivia for example. For his workshop he used many different collaborative tools. YouTube to spread videos, Slideshare to spread his presentations, and Scribd to spread and collaborate on producing documents.

All these tools are crucial for the success of networked infrastructure. However, people should know how to use these tools before it can benefit cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary information & knowledge sharing. That's why the Focuss.Info Initiative is encouraging peers from all over the world to use this tools, as well as Focuss starts collaborating with institutes and NGOs from all over the world. Focuss cannot make this change alone; Focuss needs to work on this together with the institutes and NGOs. 

Therefore I want to say to the institutes and NGOs out there: start rolling out workshops and ongoing educational service on how to use the latest tools and techniques to improve the access to information and knowledge in global development studies & research.

But what does this exactly mean? Why should institutes or NGOs be bothered? When using these tools, we can improve information and knowledge sharing because the information and knowledge is saved - and thus available - on the Internet. Is this a benefit? Yes! Let me show you this through one example.

Richard Heeks, professor at the University of Manchester, recently shared an Excel sheet via Google Docs. Google Docs is similar to all the tools I just summarised: it is social. With social I mean that you share it with others, and others can re-use and/or re-mix it. The Excel sheet is a large data-set that compares mobile and Internet penetration from 1998 to 2009 in the rich and poor countries. And because this data is available on the Internet, I downloaded the file and used parts of the data because I wanted to know how good or bad Bangladesh is doing in comparison to its neighbouring countries regarding mobile and Internet penetration. Within 30 minutes I got the following results:

In this image of Internet penetration we can see that Bangladesh (yellow) is not doing good when you compare it with neighbouring countries. 

In the following two images we can see that more people are connected to the internet via mobile communication instead of broad band (which is not a very shocking outcome). However, by re-using data like these we can better understand or motivate people on what we should focus on (should the Focuss.Info Initiative focus on social bookmarking via a stand-alone computer connected to the broad band, or should we focus on social bookmarking tools on the cell phone?). Additionally, these graphs also show that the field of global development aid cannot forget Bangladesh. That's one of the reasons why the Focuss.Info Initiative is planning a two-day conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh in the beginning of 2011.

Another remarkable development in this graph is the fact that the Internet is far more penetrated in the Maldives than in its neighbouring countries. It is clear that as of 2004 the Maldives increased its penetration to Internet substantially, and 2004 was also the same year in which a Tsunami hit the coastal region of the Indian Ocean. My first thought is that after the Tsunami the Maldives invested heavily in Internet penetration, because at the time of the Tsunami the Maldives experienced a lack of access to information. As a result, people at the Maldives couldn't responds faster. And this slow reaction had catastrophic consequences for the Maldives. Besides the deaths and dislocations, the Maldives faced serious damage to critical infrastructure. The total damage was estimated at more than 400 million US dollars, or some 62 percent of the GDP. As a result, the international community (under the leadership of the UNDP) established the Aid Coordination Project which supported the government in strengthening government owned information management systems, assessing the capacity need of key ministries, identify training need, and facilitating the implementation and delivery of external resources.

Knowing all this, the next interesting step would be to figure out whether my gut feeling about (a) the increase of Internet penetration was due to the lack of access to information and knowledge, and if this was the case (b) did the increase of Internet penetration improve the access and exchange of information and knowledge?

Why institutes and NGOs should promote the latest information sharing and collaboration tools?

What is the Focuss.Info Initiative and what is its objective?

The Focuss.Info Initiative aims at improving the exchange and access to information and knowledge, a fundamental human right that strengthens democracy. In order to improve the exchange and access to information and knowledge in the domain of global development research and studies successfully, the Initiative assists individuals and institutes in the developed as well as developing countries in advancing an information infrastructure by inducing skills and abilities to create and share information and knowledge in a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-border network. 

To keep it more simple: the workshops cover social networking approaches, strategies and tools in general and induce students, researchers and practitioners in the field of global development studies and research how they can best use the latest information sharing and collaboration tools specifically. There are many reasons why this is needed. One of the arguments is that these tools let us form social networks in which individuals act, but the network of individuals also provides resources such as social memory that individuals and groups can exploit. However, there is also another less-known argument which is, according to the Australian political scientist John Keane, a development-in-the-make.

He argues that there are experiments going on in the age of the Internet- and he believes that China is at the cutting-edge -where governments cleverly are developing tools for using the Internet, to control the Internet for undemocratic ends. For example, through the recruitment of - what he calls - Internet debaters, or 50 cents bloggers. If on the Internet a firestorm develops - a protest - against the authorities, the communist authorities, then one way of dealing with it is to recruit a million of two who respond and who swamp the protest with their own pro-government views. It is a very 21st century cutting edge development.

We are more and more moving to this development, because governments cannot censor people anymore. One reason is because they want to pretend that they are good leaders and when they arrest someone on the Internet, for example Han Han from Shanghai who only in 2009 had 330 million visitors, it will create a revolution. That’s why China - and perhaps other countries - are looking for other ways to influence the public opinion.

 At the same time, the Internet is a crucial way for individuals to share information globally in an instant. This is a pressure that those regimes have been confronted with before. So these regimes are investing a lot of resources to come up with ways to tackle this problem. And these regimes are very capable in also using the latest technologies. For example, even though individuals or a protester can document a violation of human right with a cell phone, the same cell phone is also leaving a finger print, your whereabouts, your contacts, your social network, and that can be used against you by these regimes. That’s why I believe that indivuals should become better to use the latest information sharing and networking tools by making them: 

• information literate (how can individuals evaluate information so that they can judge their decisions on qualitative information);
• computer literate (how to use device and tools which are connected to the Internet and which are connecting the world as a whole)
• network literate (a crucial competence of individuals is that they should occupy roles such as brokers and/or facilitators and therefore they should also have networking competences).