Information and Communication Technologies

I've been here in San Francisco for the past few days, and when I haven't been stuffing my face with burritos and Blue Bottle coffee, I've been spending time at the Web 2.0 Summit.

I'll jot down some more coherent and cohesive thoughts about the Summit during my red-eye back to DC later tonight, but for now, I wanted to share a few presentations, issues, and ideas that have jumped out at me during the session so far.

Delivering experiences. Brian Roberts of Comcast spoke about why they've invested so much in content and customer service as well as infrastructure: they're "in business to deliver experiences." Comcast's heavy use of social networks for customer service is just one way they're enhancing the experience for their consumers. A question: how do we in development "deliver experiences" for our stakeholders?

The app economy. Mark Pincus from Zynga had a great presentation where he spoke about how we've moved from a link economy to a search economy, and are now moving towards an app economy, where the social breadcrumb is the primary tool to promote content. He also spoke about ways that social games can be used for social good. A question: can international development be enhanced by using gaming and leveraging these social breadcrumbs?

Information networks. Evan Williams of Twitter was adamant: "Twitter is not a social network, but an information network." He stressed that different tools provide different features to target different audiences — and are used by different people in different ways. One way he sees Twitter being used is to provide front-line information and service to consumers (a bit like @WorldBankNews?). A question: what other "social" networks can be leveraged as information networks to provide better access to development knowledge?

Complete openness. Jeff Immelt of GE echoed concepts we hear every day, but it was nice to see a leader of a global company say it: "complete openness with constituents," along with complete transparency and the ability to take in stakeholder feedback and criticism, is key to any organization these days. A question: what are we doing, as international organizations, to stay relevant through openness and transparency?

Outside voices. Dan Rosensweig from Guitar Hero hinted at something that we've been thinking about recently: people don't want to simply access good content, but want to contribute to that content. A question: how are we in the development sector allowing people to contribute to our development knowledge, and how are we letting the people affected by our work contribute to our results narratives?

Mobile. Lots of things going on in the mobile sphere. In fact, instead of writing anything here, I'll have an entire post on mobile up later next week.

Here are a few links that were mentioned at the Summit that piqued my interest:

• Bing Real-Time Search: Relevancy-ranked Twitter integration.
• Google Social Search: Enhancing search through your social network.
• MagCloud: Magazine and publication print-on-demand services.
• Your Flowing Data: Visualizing real-time data in interesting ways.
• Aardvark: Getting answers from people who have them.
• GE Vscan: Portable, affordable ultrasound machines.
• The Progress Project: Using mobile technology to change lives.
• MakerBot: 3D printing and creation.
• CellScope: Using mobile phones for medical diagnosis.
   

Expect more coherent thoughts in the next few days. In the meantime, check out some of the presentations from the Summit on the live stream or on the news and coverage page.

We get quite a few questions about how the World Bank manages to coordinate its web presence in a multitude of languages and still keep most of the multilingual content up-to-date and relevant.

Valerie Hufbauer, the head of the World Bank Multilingual Web Team, will be answering some of those questions at the next Web Managers Roundtable in Washington DC taking place here, at the World Bank, in two weeks.

From the event site:

We’ll look at the case study provided by The World Bank, a global web leader that wrangles 59 languages and users from more than 67 countries with a site in another language other than English. Our examination will take us from the content and process strategies they’ve developed to the trends they’ve identified for 2010. We’ll see how they’ve established and sustained their multilingual web presence, how they decide what to translate, how they manage these translation needs, and how they maintain brand consistency and content accuracy across dozens of sites.

If you can't make it to the Web Managers Roundtable this month and have questions for Valerie, leave us a comment and I'll do my best to get them answered here.

For those of you who are in Washington DC and want to learn more about the World Bank's work on the web — specifically, how audience feedback and data are driving the way we approach our new online initiatives — I'd recommend you attend the DigitalCitizen Conference on October 8, 2009.

Margaret Allen, the Program Manager here at the Bank's Web Program Office, will be delivering a case study on the way we use our Foresee results and our metrics to cater to a global audience. From the conference website:

The World Bank Case Study: Roadmap for Meeting the Diverse Needs of Global Audiences Online.
Learn how The World Bank demonstrated the need for resources to overhaul the current website and captured data and insights about the diverse needs between developed and developing countries.  Voice of customer data guides the organization's social media communications strategy, a mobile strategy, and overall content strategy toward greater success.

The conference is a free, day-long event, and will feature case studies from other public sector organizations as well.

If you do decide to attend the DigitalCitizen Conference, be sure to say hullo to Margaret while you're there. And if you have any other ideas on how we can be sharing our research and work with the community even more, please let us know!

In his most recent TED talk, open data advocate Hans Rosling blasted the World Bank (and lauded the US government) on data sharing practices. Rosling said that while we at the Bank have some of the best researchers and the best access to data, we're not doing enough to share that data openly, and for free.

I've embedded the video below so you can not only see what he has to say about the Bank, but also hear about some of the great ideas he has about datasets and mindsets.

Of course, it looks like Rosling may have ignored some of our more recent efforts to get our data to the hands of the people: efforts like our recently revamped API, and even the new data section (with great visualizations!) of the new World Bank Climate Change beta site.

But Rosling does have a point: we need to be doing more to share our data in open and usable formats. The question is, how do we do that?

While we've had some interest in our data visualization tools and our API, use of these tools is still low, making it hard to justify spending more resources on data sharing. Sure, there's a hunger for it, but how do we make sure we're feeding the right appetite?

There are a few questions that I have — questions where the answers will probably help me make a stronger case for increased emphasis on open data:

1. What kind of data is the audience looking for?
2. What does the audience want to do with this data?
3. What are the best formats in which to release this data?
4. What can we do to make it more enticing for people to use — and share — our data?

Mr. Rosling: we hear your call for open data. And while we hope that some of the steps we've already taken are helping address the world's data sharing needs, do know that we're working on sharing even more.

We just need the community's help — not their derision — in answering some questions so that we can make it better.