Blog: Web2fordev

Within about three minutes, I had five applications open: a browser, a note pad, a music synthesizer, a video recorder working off of a built in camera, and a text chat program

I had the chance to test out the One Laptop Per Child this week while at the Web2forDev conference at FAO Headquarters in Rome. I was searching for a wifi network and ended up on the rooftop terrace overlooking the city. That's when I ran into Matt Keller, Director of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East at One Laptop per Child, and Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Matt had a couple of machines with him, and I assume from the curious look I must of had on my face, knew I was interested and asked me if I wanted to check one out. 

First impression: having really, really small fingers is key, which makes sense given the target audience. After looking at the user interface for a few seconds not sure of what to do because it is very different from anything I've seen before, I dove in. I found it to be very intuitive. Within about three minutes, I had five applications open: a browser, a note pad, a music synthesizer, a video recorder working off of a built in camera, and a text chat program. All it took was some curiosity to find everything, something that I'm sure will be easier with children given their nature and the fact that they're not trying to use the interface in relationship to other systems they've used before. Aside from checking out the different apps, I was most interested in seeing how the mesh networking capabilities between machines worked. It's one of the features I'm most excited about - the idea that it will be easy for kids to use the tool to create a collaborative network. Matt and I turned on the mesh network on our machines, and then within seconds we each appeared on the other's monitor. I added him as my friend, which made him show up in my chat window, and we started chatting. Of course we immediately wanted to see the range on this. Our line of sight was from one end of the building to another, in my estimate about 250 meters, and we were connected at this distance. But then when our line of site broke, so did our connection.

Uses the BuzzMonitor as an Example of Good Filtering Tools for Development Agencies

Ethan Zuckerman, the man behind Global Voices Online and working with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, kicked off the last day of the Web2forDev conference yesterday here in Rome with a great presentation.

He had many great points on how organizations need to look at the web as an ecosystem, where websites are not stand alone pieces but are interconnected to everything else online. And that their communications plans need to look at it this way too. Ethan got straight to the point by saying, "You can't go to a party and stand in a corner and expect eveyone to just come and talk to you."

He went on to address the very practical ramifications of needing to interact with so much information. This is hard and can be intimidating, and only going to get worse. He explained that this creates a need to better monitor and filter information, and then gave an example of a tool that does this. I was pretty blown away to see that his example was BuzzMonitor, the news monitoring system we built for the World Bank. How awesome is that. And best of all, he repeatedly said "it is not the tool, it is the people." I couldn't agree more.

After his talk, I had the chance to catch up with him and chat about some interesting topics. More on that later.

International Development, Agriculture, and Smarter Tools

I just landed in Rome for the Web2forDev conference where I was invited to speak on how social software can be used to connect geographically diverse teams. The timing of the conference is fantastic. It’s eAgriculture week here in Rome, so I suspect that many of the 350 participants will have a lot of on the ground experience. 

There are a lot of great presentations in the queue that I want to sit in on. The session Cairo Concept: Village to Village Knowledge Sharing sounds fascinating – it will discuss a project that links small town together in an online network to help them better share knowledge, news, and expertise. I’m also excited to learn more about USAID’s Amazon Basin Conservation Initiative, which not only sounds interesting and necessary but is also of special interest to me as one of our very first clients back in 2003 - Amazon Alliance - worked in this area.  I’m also looking forward to catching my friend Tobias’ session explaining how African civil society organizations are and could be using blogs, wikis, and social networking tools to better use their limited internet connections.

I arrived in Rome straight from Barcelona, Spain and DrupalCon, which was a spectacular conference overall. I came away from it very energized about the future role of Drupal in international development.

After many conversations with Jose (who I was able to work with for most of September out of his Leon office) and Gábor  (who I talked with at both FrOSCon and DrupalCon), I’m extremely confident that Drupal will be a leading multilingual platform.  We are standing behind future investment in making Drupal multilingual by working on the i18n module that makes Drupal multilingual and getting more of this functionality into the core of the system. We’re also really excited to be working more closely with Gábor to make it easier to translate Drupal into more languages.

Our not so hidden agenda is to follow the huge aid investments for improved connectivity in developing countries made over the last decade with a few open source publishing platform that will make it simple for people all over the world to generate local content in their native language.