Mobile Web for Social Development
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EnglishThemes
Goals
At the end of 2006, according to the GSMA and ITU, the total number of people having accessing to a mobile phone was around 2.7 billions, and 80% of the World population was covered by a GSM network. These numbers illustrate the potential of the mobile platform to be the right solution to deploy services now.
For about two years, the use of mobile phones as a platform to deliver services to underprivileged populations and rural communities has been experienced all over the Developing World. Many stories have demonstrated the ability for ICT-based applications to improve people lives and increase their incomes with simple services.
While all the existing success stories demonstrate the potential of mobile phones to be the most promising platform, moving from “islands” of successes as it is today, to a World where thousands of services are available, usable and useful for under-privileged populations is a huge challenge which could hardly be tackled by the technology currently used: SMS. Indeed, so far, almost all projects have been using SMS technology: People, knowing the phone number associated with the service, send an SMS to this number with appropriate keywords, and get back the answer by SMS. Sometimes, when there is no interaction needed (e.g. sending weather forecast), it is just a broadcast of SMS messages to people subscribed to the service. While this technology has some specific strengths (availability on all phones, low network requirements, low costs,...), it has also some weaknesses (read a white paper on the potential and challenges of the Mobile Web for Development ) which seriously question its scalability and its potential to be used for thousand of services.
On this topic of scalability, the Web has demonstrated its strenghts. The recent achievements of the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, and the take-off of Mobile Web access in US, Europe or Japan has also demonstrated that mobile phones are appropriate Web devices. The question is to know how the Mobile Web could be a promising solution to connect the unconnected and leverage Social Development, and to identify the challenges to address to make the Web on mobile phones accessible, relevant, usable and useful for rural communities and under-priviledged populations of Developing Countries.
The aim of the Work Package 1 (WP1) of Digital World Forum is to understand what are the existing challenges to take advantage of the current potential, and to look at possible solutions to overcome these difficulties. The expected outcome of this WP, out of developing some specific resources for the community, will be either the recommendation to the W3C to create new work items in the Mobile Web Initiative with a draft charter, or a set of requirements to different existing working groups, for them to take into account the identified specificities of this area.
In order to achieve these goals, some specific tasks will be handled:- Building the appropriate community and offering a worldwide multi-disciplinary forum with experts in technology, experts in Development, experts in the Digital Divide, and people with grassroots experience and expertise.
- Gathering use cases and information about active relevant players (organization, individuals, ...)
- Gathering information about the devive market and Mobile infrastructure
- Identifying usability challenges associated with the specific targeted user communities
- Identifying challenges of integrating ICT/Web-based services in daily life
- Identifying people empowerment and capacity building challenges
2 Workshops in Latin America and Africa: The organization of the first W3C workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries in Bangalore, India, at the end of 2006 showed that international travels is a challenge for people working in the field. Therefore, most of the grassroot experience and use cases presented during this workshop were coming from India. In order to capture the specificities of each Developing Region, and to gather feedback from different continent, WP1 will organize 2 new workshops, one in Latin America and one in Africa.
a Directory of information about the device markets and mobile infrastructure in Developing Countries: the W3C Mobile Web Best Practice 1.0 are relying on the definition of the Default Delivery Context which represent the most common characteristics of mobile Devices and infrastructure existing in Europe, US or Japan. It is important to gather similar information about Developing Regions in order to take those specificities into account when identifying the challenges of Mobile Web Access in these countries.
a Directory of Organizations/Companies/Individiduals working in the field of ICT4D and more particularly those focusing on the use of mobile phones: The aim of WP1 is to create an inter-disciplinary forum that will gather people from the technology side, and people with background in Social Development. There are already lots of initiatives or projects going on all around the world on the use of ICT in Development. It is important to identify them, and gather the existing expertise, use cases and so on, that would serve as the basis for WP1 work.
- a Roadmap identifying the potential and the challenges of using the Mobile Web as a tool for social Development, and the potential direction to explore to tackle them: This roadmap will be the major goal of WP1. It will identify the key challenges to make the Mobile Web accessible, relevant, usable and useful in Development actions. This roadmap should cover the whole domain, from the technological aspects till the social aspects (e.g. adoption and appropriation factors), including e.g. sustainability points.
Documents
The work conducted in this theme is managed by W3C and follow the W3C process. Further information on this topic and related document are available on a specific section of the W3C Site.
Talks and Conferences
- S.Boyera Using Mobile Phones in Social Development, ICT@grassroots, July 2008, Washington DC, USA
- S.Boyera Mobile Web in Rural China?, WWW2008, April 2008, Beijin China
- S.Boyera Using Mobile Web Technologies in Social Development, HFT2008, March 2008, Kuala Lumpu, Malaysia
- S.Boyera Using the Mobile Web in Development, DIS2008, February 2008, Cape Town, South Africa
Deliverables and Achievements
Contacts
The partner in charge of this item is W3C and the person in charge of this domain is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
