Using Mobile Phones in Social Development

ICT@Grassroots

Washington DC, USA, July 9 2008

W3C: Leading the Web to its Full Potential

Founded by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 ...

W3C Vision: Universal Web Access: The Web Anywhere, for Everyone, at Anytime, on Everything :

1994: Creation of W3C for standardization and interoperability of Web technologies
1997: Creation of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI): To make the Web Accessible
2005: Creation of the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI): To Access the Web from Mobile Phones
2008: Creation of the Mobile Web for Social Development Interest Group (MW4D) to investigate the role of the Mobile and Web technologies to bridge the Digital Divide

	Primary Goal: offer a scalable and affordable platform to develop and deploy eServices: Government Services Education Health Banking Communities services Business ...
(Photo Source: Der Spiegel)

With cheap laptops and mesh networking: One Laptop Per Child?
With the Mobile Phones:
- Taking advantage of the existing 3+billion of mobile phones
- Taking advantage of the GSM cover (>80% of the world population)

Using mobile phones as an ICT platform ?

Successful Mobile Applications
- Banking
- egovernment services
- NGOs-run SMS based system: agriculture, weather forecast, health, employment
- ...

Mission of MW4D: understanding the key blocking factors and potential actions to remove them

(Photo Source: Vodafone)

What: W3C Workshop on the Role of Mobile Technologies in fostering Social Development
Who: ~60-70 people from academics, government, NGOs, International organizations, and mobile industry
When: 2-3 june 2008
Where: Sao Paulo Brazil

Lots of activity in the field but disconnected
All actors are aware of the potential but have their own view and agenda
- Mobile industry: focusing on the technological aspects
- NGOs: developing and deploying small scale services
- International Organization: defining massive framework
- Academics: focusing on some R&D aspects
- Government/regulators
Many ways to deliver content but no global vision on the domain of applicability

How to empower people and NGOs
- ongoing successfull experience at small scale on capacity building
- few free packages available but still relatively difficult to use
How to make illiterate-accessible content
How to handle internationalization
How to identify ICT needs
...

Bridging the gap between practionners, mobile industry, International Organizations, Academics,...
Identifying the different ways of deploying content and applications on Mobile phones and their respective domain of applicability and weaknesses
Identifying the key issues and the potential characteristics of an enabling context
- capacity building
- toolkit/software packages
- best practices and guidelines (technology, entrepreneurship, cultural relevance, adoption, needs identification,...)
- ...
Identifying the key R&D issues to tackle in the future
- Making illiterate accessible content

The Mobile Web for Social Development (MW4D) home page: http://www.w3.org/2008/MW4D/
A white paper on the key challenges: http://www.w3.org/2006/12/digital_divide/ajc.pdf
The executive summary of the june Workshop: http://www.w3.org/2008/02/MS4D_WS/exec_summary.html
A public-mailing list: public-m4d@w3.org archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-m4d/
A public Wiki: http://www.w3.org/2006/12/digital_divide/wiki/
Stéphane Boyera : boyera@w3.org

Mobile phones have a big potential to be the primary delivery channel of ICT based services
Proof-of-concept established
Need of a concerted effort to draft a roadmap towards exploiting the full potential of the platform
Join the process of gathering the critical mass of experts to start the work