Web 2.0 (Participatory/Centralized Services) for (Socio-Economic) International Development
What are the wins, what are the losses?
Topic Raiser: Sarah Kerr, IDRC, Bellanet Blogs
Participants: Nelson Ko, Morgan Tocker, Sebastien Lacombe, Benoit Rheault, Andreas Gohr
Discussion Introduction: (Specifically referring to the centralized services subset of Web 2.0) Using and contributing to web 2.0 centralized 'services' sites by citizens of the socio-economic 'developing' world has some obvious 'wins' and 'losses'. What are these?
General Discussion:
The general discussion examined a few factors for consideration:
- Bandwidth: Many 'Northern'-based sites are bandwidth intense. While bandwidth ranges in price throughout the world, it is expensive is a lot of the world.
- Participatory/Northern-based sites don't have as their target audience countries in socio-economic development. It may be that these sites are not relevant or applicable to this new target (it doesn't necessarily have to be the case that centralized service sites are relevant.)
- "Easy" Access to technical services: Using shared services gives you access quickly/easily. (No install needed on a local server.)
- Ownership of technical infrastructure and local technical capacity: These things may be considered as being missed opportunities of using shared services.
- Localization: Within the language and the culture, these (Northern-based) services may not make sense.
- Mobile phones instead of online applications: This discussion has little applicability in cases where at present mobile phones are a more relevant technology.
References: http://del.icio.us/web2fordev