Development Seed Blog

We just got out of a three day conference over at the World Bank called Web for Development - Telling the Development Story to the World. You can check out the agenda here: http://tinyurl.com/7t4fh. The World Bank has somewhere between 600 and 1000+ websites, of which 40 or 50 are corporate websites, and the remainder, everything else. The World Bank uses ePublish as their main content management system...how many sites are linked into this system I am not sure. If you search on google for epublish and the World Bank you'll find some documents on categorization and building a taxonomy system for an institution as large as the World Bank.Another presenter was Julian Casasbuenas from http://www.colnodo.org.co/ who works with Action Apps, an open source content management platform. A lot of discussions I had with various folks concerned the use of Open Source software for major websites and projects on the web. Allafrica.com is currently developing off an open source project and has a current blog aggregation at blogs.allafrica.com. I spoke with a representative from an organization based in Canada who looked at Zope several years ago before the multilingual support they needed was built, and it would have cost them close to a million dollars to implement it. Then, during a breakout session I listened to various institutions' work with making sites multilingual and how different systems were developed and customized to handle many different language needs. Another representative from the United Nations discussed an RFP which received no bids to be developed off an open source platform. Hearing many different stories on working or not working with open source software for websites and web applications with organizations as large as the World Bank, the United Nations, and related entities like the WHO.int got makes you wonder what an organized open source initiative could do for these organizations, how much money and time they may be able to save, and how much more they would be capable of tapping into developers all around the world, including the countries and regions which are capable of developing software in the developing world.