As Ismael is blogging from the other room (Notes of Ismael on Coop 2.0 best practices session), I thought I would give him a hand and cover the sessions in this room 1 here.

The sessions are about best practices in existing ICT4D projects.

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CEDDET – La Fundación Centro de Educación a Distancia para el Desarrollo Económico y Tecnológico

Objective: contribution & cooperation for development – ICT4D

Basic tool: knowledge management throught the usage of ICTs

Exchange of knowledge between Spain and Latin America

2 types of activities

• online teaching
• virtual networks of experts
• no model, they should find their own track for development

Target:

• toplevel civil servants
• experience of 5 years
• all kinds of sectors – which have an economic repercussion

Achievements:

• more time & geographical flexibility
• increased number of experts
• p2p communication – exchange of experiences

Weaknesses:

• evaluation
• therefore training is also longer
• shortage of technological resources
• not applicable to all types of knowledge – e.g. presence required

Work with ~50 institutions, implementing online training courses

Average age – 39 years, 15 years experience

Feedback by assessment by trainees

After 7 years

• 449 training courses
• more 10 000 civil servants
• 16 networks of experts with > 4000 members

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Ushahidi – Juliana Rotich

Started in January 2008 when in Kenya after the elections there were riots

Blogs were an important source of information during that time

Ory Okolloh started the project – visualizing information about these riots

• create an online archive about the incidents
• create a way for everyday Kenyans to report incidents
• show where the majority of violence was occuring

Three ways to enter information to the web

• Mobile
• Email
• Directly over internet

User generated content is due to its amount at least as interesting as content created by professionals

A little later:

• DR Congo – Ushahidi in French
• Engine for Al Jazeera Labs – War on Gaza, incorporating Twitter reports
• Peace heroes in Kenya – positive incidents

At the beginning it was all volunteer work – the funding came later

The whole projects is predominantly based in Africa – programmers from Malawi, Ghana, …

If it works in Africa, it works everywhere

Partner with FrontlineSMS of Ken Banks to automate incoming sms-reports

Lessons learned:

• mapping accuracy and value of geolocation
• data poisoning – danger of wrong information and intentional misinformation
• verification is difficult but by partnering with (hyper)local NGOs that could be achieved
• it’s not only about gathering data – create a feedback-loop with sms & rss alerts; make those customizable
• offline (newspapers, radio), online (blogsphere) and mobile (here: FrontlineSMS, but also other possibilities) strategy

Q & A:

What about the cost? How much does an sms cost?

• It can get really expensive

People pay anyway?

• It has come down since then, but it would be great to partner with the mobile phone companies

In offering “heroes” it was difficult to create specific tags – how difficult is it to replicate this process for organizations which are not as tech-savy? Would you provide support?

• Right now, there is a Beta version which can be downloaded and there the categories can manually defined. For the customization PHP knowledge is required. So it’s not that difficult. The tool itself is very intuitive. It’s also possible to use different map providers.

Do you design only for citizens? How are you funded?

• Future: Mass collaboration

• Funding: first 5 months – all volunteers, no funding. July 2008 Humanity United donated some money, but still Ushahidi doesn’t rely to heavily on funding.

Would funding make a difference? Would you expand the tool? What would you do with 4 mio. $?

• Growing the the community of supporters
• support more technology (sms chat, …)
• Geo-RSS – notifications dependent on location
• Freedom Fone integration  – Audio -> SMS

– With 4 mio. $ we would make a very robust application which would run on every mobile and provide an online system and filter the data semi-automated

– Or crowdsourcing crisis response – how many NGOs, volunteers are in that area and willing to help? Moving from crisis reporting to crisis response.