The Power of the Social Web for African Civil Society

Social Web? What's that? Sometimes Mimi likes to push the envelope, and to encourage her gentle readers to sit back and reflect on the latest advances in technology that are now - or soon will be - affecting African civil society. The social web, also called Web 2.0 by trendsetters, represents a new era of the Internet in which people no longer go on the web expecting to merely access information provided by others. Everyone can now comment on what they read, change it, rate it, and put up information of their own - all using new user-friendly web interfaces. As a result, many now approach the Internet as a place to make and develop relationships with friends, network professionally and socially, and to create an image for themselves. Kabissa is taking an indepth look a Web 2.0 right now and will be sharing the benefits with Kabissa members - for now, all Mimi can do is to give a preview of the promises (and pitfalls) Web 2.0 offers. She welcomes your feedback!


The Revolutionary Promises of Web 2.0

  • Information wants to be free.
    People are sharing all kinds of online content at unprecedented levels, and one reason for this is that it is being licensed under new, unrestrictive licensing agreements. This is largely driven by the Free and Open Source Software movement. But a nonprofit organization called Creative Commons makes it particularly easy by providing standard "human readable" license agreements for various circumstances that anyone can choose and apply to any original work they make available. This is a bigger shift than you might realize, since the alternative is that all content is by default limited by copyright laws whether or not it was marked copyright or not. Large companies like Yahoo and Google are taking advantage of this to create new services that encourage active sharing of content. Civil Society Organizations (see the footer of this page) are doing it too! These licenses are also internationally recognized, so very applicable to Africa.
  • You can share anything!
    In the last year, people started to share and download not just text, but also photos , audio and video. It’s become incredibly quick and easy to do, thanks to technological advances. Portable USB drives, MP3 players and iPods, digital cameras, camera phones, video cameras, and webcams have come down in price and are available in increasingly portable form factors. Innovative entrepreneurs are responding by offering online services to facilitate the sharing of content produced for and by these devices.
  • Learn the existence of things you care about in new ways.
    It used to be that if you needed to do some research on a topic online, you would either go to a website you know is likely to have the information you need and hope they have it readily available. Then search sites came along - this made it easier, assuming you were looking for something commonly needed and knew the right combination of keywords! Now, with the new interactive features in Web 2.0, such as commenting and keyword tagging, people help one another and themselves to make connections in new ways. By combining tags and observing what others are keeping track of using tags that you care about, you will be amazed and astonished at what you will find.
  • Interact in real time!
    Voice over Internet (VOIP), video conferencing, and their precursor instant messaging are a powerful addition to e-mail for personal communication via the Internet. Web 2.0 services and websites also encourage immediate interactions with others. People are able to remain remarkably closely connected, right now and in real time, thanks to these tools. This makes it possible to work from home or from a cybercafe, to collaborate over long distances, to remain in touch in a substantial way with family and friends no matter where they are - as long as you all are near an Internet-connected computer. This is a tremendous shift since the days of relying on only “asynchronous” e-mail for keeping in touch.
  • Spend less time online while moving more of your work online.
    This sounds like a contradiction, but Web 2.0 makes it possible to make the time you spend online more productive, so you can do more faster - while also encouraging you to move things you used to do offline, online. Web 2.0 services are springing up that make it quicker and easier to take care of tasks online, from storing your email to managing your calendar, saving you time and, amazingly, enabling you to do more work online and keep track of your obligations online as well.
  • Use your Mobile Phone to access the Internet.
    Many people, also in Africa, look at their Mobile Phones and the Internet as separate things. Increasingly, however, innovative people are finding ways to use them together. For example, it is possible to post to a blog via text messaging, to podcast via mobile phone, and to send photos and videos created on mobile phones to websites. It is also possible to use text messaging to stay connected to a community or advocacy group that also has a website presence. We will see more innovations like this to connect the Internet with other day-to-day tools.

Pitfalls to watch out for

  • What to do when you√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re away from the Internet?
    People that spend alot of time online begin to take it for granted - this was already the case before Web 2.0, but now new Web 2.0 services are encouraging you to do more online than ever. What do you do when you’re not near your Yahoo mailbox, your blog, your flickr account? Please be very strategic and don’t fall into the trap of being in a life threatening situation without critical information that is only available on Yahoo and you are 200 miles from the nearest cybercafe.
  • Choose online services carefully.
    There are now a great many online communities, news portals, support forums, instant messaging providers, and advocacy sites that are serving every conceivable interest and perceived business need. Think carefully when you land on a website and are asked to join, participate, sign petitions or add your e-mail address/mobile phone number. At the least it can become tricky to maintain profile pages on many sites, but you might also find yourself getting unwanted phone calls or e-mails that don’t interest you and clutter your mailbox.
  • A "stale" blog makes you look incompetent.
    Setting up a blog is quick and easy to do - but keeping it going takes perserverence, nurturing and planning. Many make the mistake of creating a blog, adding an optimistic launch post and then abandoning it forever. This is even more disheartening than the many old and out of date websites we see on the Internet belonging to organizations that pay somebody to set it up for them without planning ahead to ensure they are able to continue updating it.
  • The web is forever.
    This may be hard to imagine, but thanks to sites like Google and the Wayback Machine, anything you add to blog websites or post to an e-mail mailing list might be retrievable even years later. So think on that when you want to make an angry reply to someone’s libelous comments about you or are thinking about posting a video or photograph of a controversial event on the Internet.
  • Bad information is worse than no information.
    With a read-write web, any nutcase can set up a beautiful, legitimate-looking blog website and start posting falsehoods to the world. We have always had to be vigilant when using the Internet for research, but now that it has become so easy to post content we need to be more careful than ever when checking out websites that we come across.

Curious? Look at some examples!

Hopefully this taste of the power and pitfalls of Web 2.0 has piqued your interest. We will be sharing the results of our research soon, as well as incorporate as much Web 2.0 functionality as possible in our Web projects. in the meantime, here are a few particularly interesting examples of Web 2.0 that Mimi recommends. Explore and reflect on how you can incorporate these tools into your organization's work!