Netsquared in Silicon Valley

During the past few days I have participated in the Netsquared conference at the Cisco Systems Vineyard Conference Center in San Jose, California.

Hosted by Techsoup, a project of Compumentor, the conference focussed on how non-profit organisations use various new Internet tools, referred to as Web 2.0 or the social web, to collaborate, build relationships, share information and mobilise support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts and social bookmarking. With more than a billion Internet users today, Technorati is already indexing 42 million blogs.

The conference was an interesting experience, with a number of fascinating speakers and sessions. I really enjoyed the presentations by Ethan Zuckerman, Co-Founder of
Global Voices; Joan Blades, Co-Founder of Moveon.org; and Amy Goodman, Host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now, as well as the various information-sharing sessions and practical workshops on the final afternoon.

I made a presentation during the session on “Surfing the Rolling Cloud of Connectivity: ICT and the Developing World”. The other presenter in this session was Partha Sarker, Co-founder of Bytes for All.

Connectivity and access to the Internet are critical requirements for the Web 2.0. In most developing countries connectivity and ICTs are contextualised by he “digital divide”. More than ten years ago, at a G-7 conference on the information society in February 1995 in Brussels, then deputy president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, pointed out that there were more telephone lines in Manhattan than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. "Half of humanity has never made a telephone call," he said.

Although mobile communication and other applications are changing the telecommunications environment in Africa, given the topic of this session, the “digital divide” can be summarised as follows:

Before one can surf, three things are essential - the ability to swim (or does one fly in cyberspace?), a surfboard, and of course, the sea of clouds. All three are generally missing in most of Africa. The vast population can't swim, have no, or cannot afford the surfboard, and are caged in landlocked enclaves very far from cyberspace. This situation presents serious challenges to the relevance of Web 2.0 applications in developing countries.

Having said this, is Web 2.0 therefore just hype or irrelevant in a developing country context? Definitely not. The activities of bloggers in developing countries that highlight and expose human rights violations demonstrate the power of this medium.

However, for Web 2.0 to become more widely used within non-profit organisations in developing countries, a few issues require attention. Broadband has to become mainstream and ubiquitous, resulting in increased usage of the Internet on different devices; a critical mass of people should be online for a variety of tasks and commerce-related activities; barriers to entry have to be dropped - both by ISPs in terms of access, but also by websites in terms of allowing usage and sharing of content; and more needs to be done to increase awareness and understanding about the potential role and contribution of new web applications.