Digital Divide: W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries

The W3C Workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries findings have been published in a report which, when I read it, seemed pretty familiar to things myself and others had been speaking of for quite some time. Perhaps some of that was the influence of Justin Oberman who, like me, was at the MobileActive convergence where a few of us from developing nations seemed to fail to press the point that not all technology access is equal around the world. For example, Bukeni Waruzi said that an SMS message in his part of the world costs about $1 US to send - and that only one SMS message per mobile phone per day is/was allowed.

The report s available, and while it doesn't say too much that myself and others haven't mentioned before - I guess it is in report form now so the academics can reference it - people dealing with technology in the developing world on a day to day basis know most of the stuff - it seems mainly to be for educating people in developed nations. The next steps, per the report:

* First of all, this event demonstrated the need for a public forum to share and capitalize experiences in running ICT projects in developing countries. This may lead to the creation of best practices and guidelines for providing mobile e-services in the developing world. This forum would be a place where experts in the mobile technologies and experts in ICT in developing countries could share expertise.
* Given that SMS applications are successful, it is very important to analyze what are the key points of success in order to understand how to ease the transition to the mobile Web as the platform for applications
* It will be essential to lobby at handset manufacturers and international organizations defining the basic specifications of handsets for developing countries for them to integrate the minimum browsing capabilities. These minimal capabilities may be coming from the above-mentioned analysis of the success of SMS applications. It will also be very important to understand the nature of the low-end devices: what are current minimal characteristics of devices we could rely on in terms of memory, sim card, java availabilities, ... in order to recommend an appropriate way to provide web capabilities on these devices.
* The location of the event allowed participants to get more specifically feedback and information on the Indian market. It should be interesting to understand commonalities and specificities between different regions of the world in term of needs and usage (e.g., in Africa, South America, ...). It may be appropriate to run a series of such events around the World to gather more inputs from other areas.
* Some potential blocking factors for the Mobile Web as a platform for running mobile services has been identified. It may be appropriate to run experiments to test some of those hypothesis at a small scale.

Nothing new, but it probably won't hurt some people to read it again from a different source. :-)