The future of access to Information in a mobile world

Tim Berners-Lee recently published an article in the Scientific American. In this article he is touching on various issues with regard to the future of the World Wide Web. (for example digital human right). An other issue he mentions is about access-to-information (an issue that certainly concerns the field of global development aid in which we all aim at equality). He says:

Unfortunately, in August, Google and Verizon for some reason suggested that net neutrality should not apply to mobile phone–based connections. Many people in rural areas from Utah to Uganda have access to the Internet only via mobile phones; exempting wireless from net neutrality would leave these users open to discrimination of service. It is also bizarre to imagine that my fundamental right to access the information source of my choice should apply when I am on my WiFi-connected computer at home but not when I use my cell phone.

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

State of telecommunications in Bangladesh

In preparation to the Bangladesh Conference on 24 and 25 February 2011 (www.focuss.info/bangladesh) I am reading more about it's culture, structure and connectivity. The following is a section from the book 'A History of Bangladesh' by Willem van Schendel. The book is from 2009, so I thought it would give a great and updated inside.

Foreign aid and migration forced powerful transnational links, but nothing demonstrates better the sheer speed of change than the advances made in telecommunications. The delta had long been neglected in this respect. For example, in the 1970s it was a familiar experience to see a high official pick up one of several brightly coloured telephones on his desk and start shouting at the top of his voice in an attempt to make his words reach a colleague in the same city over the crackle of static and cross-wired conversations. Thirty years later, it was almost as common to see an illiterate village woman saunter over from her hut with no electricity to a neighbour's house, switch on a mobile phone and talk quietly to her son in Dubai. Within a generation, the way information travelled around the Bengal delta had been revolutionised. In the 1970s most Bangladeshis depended on word of mouth, newspapers, letters, telegrams and radio. A non-local telephone call took hours to arrange, and television was beyond the means of middle-class families. By the 1980s television came within their reach and began to spread to the rural areas, followed by mobile phones and all kinds of portable electronic devices. Even now electricity had not reached many parts of the countryside - but towns were connected and information about the outside world spread much more rapidly than before. Today the Bangladesh middle classes also have  become enthusiastic participants in global cyberspace: numorous Bengali founts are now available online, and Bangladeshi websites and discussion groups are multiplying rapidly. 

Strategy to improve internal & external knowledge sharing with social bookmarking

This message is also posted on richardlalleman.com and highlights why organisations (or knowledge sharing initiatives such as the Focuss.Info Initiative) should adapt to social bookmarking

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Last couple of months I have been working on rolling out social bookmarking in an organisation. You would probably think: why social bookmarking? Luis Suarezonce labelled social bookmarking in his post The Business Case for Enterprise Social Bookmarking: $4.6 Million a Year in Cost Savings as "one of the fundamental pillars from Enterprise 2.0". And I believe that it is a powerful tool which organisations can use to enhance both internal and external knowledge sharing.

After rolling out a start-up programme in using Delicious as social bookmarking platform for a couple of the client's staff members, I moved to a part in which I offered them a way or strategy how they should re-use personal social bookmark collections in order to enhance internal and external knowledge sharing.

To me social bookmark tools - together with all the other social media tools - can only become a success when staff members are using these tools from a personal point of view. If the staff member can answer the question:"what is it in for me?", it could become a big success.

So, will a staff member answers the question 'what is it in for me' positively when an organisation imposes many rules and restrictions on the use of social bookmarking (like you need to include this tag, or you cannot add stuff that is related to things outside working hours). No, the adaptation to social bookmarking will not be embraced and therefore organisations should give staff members to social bookmark what they want.

Another issue why organisations should not impose rules & regulations on the use of social bookmarking, is that it will then become fun to social bookmark, but also messy and fragmented. In particular these two elements are crucial for a learning culture. Dave Snowden once listed the 7 principles on rendering knowledgeand three of them relate to the messiness and fragmentation. He argues that:

1. Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted;
2. we only know what we know when we need to know it, and;
3. everything is fragmented

So this means that organisations should let staff members do what they want to do with their PERSONAL social bookmark accounts. With regard to Delicious, this means that organisations should not ...:

1. ... ask staff to add a unique tag when it is organisational-related;
2. ... ask staff to forward the specific social bookmark directly to someone in charge of keeping organisational bookmark accounts clean;
3. ... ask staff to mark bookmarks as private if not related to the organisation
4. ... ask staff to social bookmark in a common social bookmark account (i.e.just one account for the whole organisation)

It is clear that all of the four potential strategies are harming a learning culture in which internal and external knowledge sharing improves. Because how nice would it be to find out that somebody in the organisation is also bookmarking about fishing and you like this too. By letting staff bookmark what they want an organisation is certainly improving internal knowledge sharing / communication. Social bookmarking is then becoming the organisational water cooler where conversations flow. But on the other hand, when you let everybody bookmark what they want, an organisation cannot automatically re-use and re-mix it on, for example, the organisational website or publish it on Twitter through whichFlipboard can make a content-specific magazine uniquely to the organisation. Ways that improve the external communication and knowledge sharing

To make sure that social bookmarking is helping on both sides (internal and external knowledge sharing) I propose a social bookmarking adaptation strategy.

Not surprisingly I argue that there should be a moderator. This could be someone who already made his or her living to filter information. In organisations they are often known as librarians, or in modern times they are called information professionals or brokers. These people should moderate the accounts of colleagues and filter the ones interested to the organisation into an organisational account. This is how an organisation can maintain a clean list of high-valuable resources.

This strategy is about that the organisation is pulling the content from staff instead of that staff is pushing content to the organisation. 

Why we need to become better in sharing information and knowledge in global development aid?

I am reading the book ‘what’s so good about having to vote: democracy kills’ by Humphrey Hawksley. In the first 20 pages he describes an anecdote about the cacao industry and the cacao plantations in Ivory Coast (which is good for almost 50 % of cacao production). In the 1990s he was already writing about child labour on the cacao plantations. In 2001, child labour in this business got attention all over the world:

In April 2001, human rights groups reported that a tramp steamer, MV Etireno, was heading for the Ivory Coast with as many as two hundred children on board destined for forced labour on the cacao farms. The story played all around the world. Journalists headed for West-Africa and found how easy it was to gather evidence of child labour. (p. 18)

The chocolate companies buckled. They pledges to identify and eliminate the worst forms of child labour in 50 per cent of the cacao farms in West Africa by July 2005. The agreement became known as the Harkin-Engel protocol” (p. 18)

Hawksley went back to the Ivory Coast in 2005 to find out whether the cacao industry changed.

Kante (a local representative of the Canadian organisation Save the Children) and I sat under a shaded area under the outside steps coming down from the first floor. I showed him a copy of the Harkin-Engel protocol. We translated key parts of it to him, telling him that the chocolate companies had promised to end slavery. Surprise and disbelief spread across his face. 

‘I don’t know anything about this, he said’. 

‘So nobody has been here to talk to you about it?’

‘Nobody’ (p. 20)

Kante was a representative of a Canadian organisation! Still, this kind of crucial information that can make people like Kante stronger in battling child labour did not reach them. Therefore it is crucial that NGOs, research insitutions and other types of global development organisations should find ways to create and share knowledge. This is exactly what the Focuss.Info Initiative aims to do:

promoting the use of the latest information sharing and collaboration tools, technologies and skills in order to improve the exchange and access to information and knowledge in global development studies and research.

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?