MWI Team Blog

I recently have discussions with few people, participants in some MWI events or Working Group meetings, and i almost always got the same questions: are there any specific needs for developing countries which are not already covered by MWI? Doesn't the "one Web" concept mean the same Web for all, those with phones, those with desktops, those with disabilities, those from developed and developing worlds, etc.? That's a good question, and i thought that it may be worth the time to try to explain why i think it is important to launch specific actions on this topic aside the ongoing MWI work.

When we launched the Mobile Web Initiative, the problem was about leveraging access to the Web from mobile phones (aka mobile browsing). To cope with this problem, it is important to understand why people would browse from their phones, what kind of content they would be interested in, what does mobility means, how to write content that would provide a good user experience, how to identify mobile friendly sites, etc. All these questions are very important and under investigation for now within MWI and its different working groups. Here, there is absolutely no big difference with big cities in the developing world. People have access to very cheap internet cafe everywhere, and the factors at stake to leverage Web access from mobile phones are most probably very very similar.

But, when we started working on the so called subject "the Mobile Web in Developing Countries", we entered a completely different world. The idea is that ICT in general, can improve people lives in rural areas by offering minimal services: access to minimal banking services (to store, retrieve, send and receive money), minimal access to health care (being able to contact a doctor etc.), minimal access to education, minimal access to business services (selling or buying good at the right price, looking for jobs, offering services, etc.), minimal access to government services (eg disaster management and prevention, etc.). The overall idea behind the need of ICT is to find a cheap and scalable way to offer those services which are not physically existing or available to rural communities and under-privileged people.

While there is a general agreement on the goal and impact of ICT, multiple solutions are currently explored, the major ones being:

• Very cheap laptop and mesh networking (OLPC aka 100$ laptop)
• Tele-centers with satellite connectivity
• Mobile phones

For now, as far as i know, the most successful stories are those based on mobile phones using either voice (read the fishermen in Kerala example) or SMS (see banking example). Unfortunately, if successful stories demonstrated the potential of the approach with mobile phones, there is still a long journey to make before seeing a real wide deployment of applications.

Here comes our action. Are the above mentionned technologies (voice or sms services) appropriate for large-scale development and deployment of services?

I don't think so.

The problem is that SMS technology has lots of flaws which does not make it scalable:

• Discoverability: it is impossible to know what are available services. You need to be aware of the number to call and the keywords to use in the message
• Interaction: SMS is just 160 char. plain text. that offers very limited interaction between the service and the user.
• Interoperability: almost all SMS services are limited to one operator. As of today for example all banking system based on sms are operator based. As now there are usually 2, 3 or 4 operators per country, this is a big problem.
• Development: no standard for SMS apps development. There are free and open source platforms (e.g., look at frontlineSMS), but they are all specific, and you can't migrate easily applications from one to the other.
• Deployment: it is very costly to run an sms service: either you make a deal with the operator and it may host it for you or you have a pc+gsm modem+subscription to the operator and this is again very expensive and prevent individual to start and run a service.

So, it is time, after the proof of concept, to think about the next generation of mobile applications, that would cope with those limitations. Our idea is that Web technology is a solution to all these problems from discoverability (with search engines or portals) to deployment (tons of free host on the internet), interaction (eg. html forms), interoperability,etc.

This doesn't answer the question about what need to be done specifically to ease this transition! The first step is, obviously to work towards the availability of browsing capabilities on emerging market handset (read the previous article i wrote on this topic) but here, except lobbying, there is not that much we can do. But lobbying would works, if and only if we can convince handset manufacturers and operators that this is just the last missing step to make the revolution.

If we suppose so that the technology will be there soon (browsing capabilities on mobile phones), what would leverage the development and deployment of the minimal services i was talking about earlier? Two things in my mind:

• Guidelines for service development: It is essential to understand how to make useful applications, things that people would really use. So we have to answer here a few questions: how to make mobile browser as simple to use as SMS? what does that mean to provide application to non-technology/computer aware users? How to understand the specific cultural and social factors to take into account? Is there solutions/technics/option to ease interactions with illetarate people? etc. All these questions are really specific to the Developing world and this is not covered now in MWI.
• Availability of expertise: even if one knows how to develop and deploy services, who would do the work? Are developing countries going again to rely on expertise coming from the north? I don't think this would be scalable, neither beneficial to developing countries. So the only solution, is then to enable the futur actors of the countries to do this work. This can only be achieved by organizing appropriate mobile applications curriculum in Developing Countries universities. There are already initiatives in that direction (look at EPROM) but these initiatives need to be extended to cover above mentioned factors, and free and open source multi-lingual materials should be made available.

To conclude, i clearly believe that there is a need for specific work at W3C to help bridging the Digital Divide and improve the lives of the poorest. The mobile platform is the most promising option for now, and in conjunction with Web technology, it has the potential to make a big step ahead. Moreover, the existence of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative is an incredible chance to have all involved actors already commited to work together. So isn't it time to jump on this opportunity?

by Stephane Boyera in Developing Countries 3 comments