Sebastian Mwansa Musonda
From Web2forDev
Today Monday 24th September, 2007 was my first day at the Rome Web2forDev conference. The day was dubbed Taster day. Saskia Harmsen from IICD was the lead facilitator and she led us through the program for the day before handing us over to Kevin Painting from CTA who led us through Plenary session 1. Kevin led us through an introduction to Web 2.0 and a brief on social networking technologies. The other sessions were as follows:
- Plenary 2 was on publishing tools and we were led through video blogging by Prince Deh from GINKS in Ghana. Professor Jayanta Chatterjee from an IT college in India led us through Audio blogging for farming communities in the region of Utah Pradesh consisting of some 300,000 people, mostly surviving on subsistence farming.
- Plenary 3
Day 2 which was actually day 1 of the conference was equally very exciting - maybe not so much as day zero coz i felt that i suffered from information overload. I guess the idea with these web2.0 tools is that you have to develop the interest to experiment and try out new things. They are all very exciting tools which can make the work of collaboration , info sharing and knowledge management much easier. But the challenge i see in Africa is achieving a critical mass of users to really make these tools effective and appreciable. For example it is not much fun if you are the only one blogging in your locality about a particular topic only relevant to your community. True the world is one global village but still interests and culture are quite diverse. Take another example of wikis. It is a really exciting tool that can be used to collaboratively work on a document or project. But it is only exciting if a number of you geographically dispersed actively embrace the idea and actively participate in the collaboration. If i start the wiki and am the only one working on it, it quickly loses its excitement and so
