Web4Dev

The Web4Dev conference is an annual event organized by the UN to bring together innovators from the UN system, academia, the private sector, NGOs to focus on building partnerships and sharing information. This years conference was held in New York had close to 150 people.

The focus of the event is squarely on the use of technology to promote development in the developing world. And to that end most aspects of technology development we’re covered including tool building and programming, mobile development and distribution, logistics & supply chain, web governance and the use of GIS and crowd-sourced geodata.

There were several objectives for attending the conference as a representative of AGCommons. Many attendees are frequent travelers and it can be difficult to get a face-to-face meeting. In fact several people were in attendance that members of the AGCommons team only knows through Facebook, Twitter and Skype. There we’re key potential partners and collaborators in attendance from a variety of organizations and NGOs.

The Meraka Institute presented on the DigitalDorways project setting up computer kiosks in remote villages in South Africa. They report a 24×7 usage on the machines which use all open source software. They brought an actual machine with them to the conference in New York which provided a great example of a real solution for rural communities.There was a lot of discussion about the increasing uptake and penetration of mobile devices and what the impact might be on information collection and distribution in the field.

VIA technologies presented on recent developments on micro-scale, extremely low power laptop or netbook computers. These systems are very portable, have a very small form factor and are very cheap. The UN Innovations group formally announced the release of the RapidSMS platform for the Android affectionately known as Rapid Android. This innovation allows an inexpensive Android based device to act as an SMS sender and as an aggregator of data from the field. Users can broadcast survey forms via SMS to the field and aggregate responses in a single, low-cost, mobile device. The UN had several ‘Bee’ systems on display including ‘Worker Bees’ and a ‘Queen Bee’. The Bee systems are low-cost solar powered, open hardware and open source software systems a available for deployment in disaster areas that contain wi-fi, cameras and small FM transmitters with a 50km range in a ruggedized case. InSTEDD presented on three technology solutions including SMS GeoChat, Evolve, and FeedSync. The technology implementations are quite robust and are released as free and Open Source.

While many of the solutions emphasized sudden and often fast moving disasters such as earthquakes, floods and disease. However there is no reason the technology and lessons learned can not be applied to more slow moving disasters such as price shocks and food insecurity. The remarkable work people are doing with mobile phones can be applied to a number of agriculture use cases. And indeed for AGCommons we are keeping this in mind as we put together the target technology architecture.