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Web 2.0 tools and approaches are radically changing the ways we create, share, collaborate and publish digital information through the Internet. Participatory Web 2.0 for development – or Web2forDev for short – is a way of employing web services to intentionally improve information-sharing and online collaboration for development. Web 2.0 presents us with new opportunities for change – as well as challenges – that we need to better understand and grasp. This special issue shares learning and reflections from practice and considers the ways forward for using Web 2.0 for development:

(i) Part I introduces both Web 2.0 tools and the concept of Web2forDev.
(ii) Part II examines some uses of specific Web 2.0 tools for development purposes.
(iii) Part III focuses on the integration of multiple Web 2.0 tools to address specific issues.
(iv) Part IV discusses theory and reflections on practice, including lessons learnt from experience, challenges identified, and ways forward.
(v) Part V Tips for trainers provides a collection of short introductions to Web 2.0 tools.

Most of the themed articles are based on presentations made at the Web2forDev conference, 25th–27th September 2007 at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquarters in Rome, Italy. The conference was the first international event focusing specifically on how Web 2.0 tools could be used to the advantage of Southern development actors, operating in the sectors of agriculture, rural development and natural resource management.

By 2012, for instance, Rwanda wants every child in the country between the ages of nine and 12, 1.3m children in all, to have a laptop, each with an internet or intranet connection to download free educational software and electronic books. “We estimate the start-up cost will be $313m,” says Richard Niyonkuru of Rwanda’s education ministry. If all goes well, the programme will embrace children between six and eight by 2015.

The supplier will be One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an American charity linked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has been trying for years to push cheap and robust laptops into primary schools in poor countries. Yet critics say the present version of the OLPC machine is too expensive, too clunky and too slow. The charity has failed to sell as many laptops as it had hoped. Its deals with some governments have stalled.

According to The Financial Times, more than 300,000 people have already signed up for the service, which is great!

ASKED to name the single biggest benefit of America’s invasion, many Iraqis fail to mention freedom or democracy but instead praise the advent of mobile phones, which were banned under Saddam Hussein. Many Iraqis seem to feel more liberated by them than by the prospect of elected resident government.

In the five years since the first network started up, the number of subscribers has soared to 20m (in a population of around 27m), while the electricity supply is hardly better than in Mr Hussein’s day. That is double the rate for Lebanon, where a civil war ended two decades ago and income per head is four times higher.

In Cuba the internet is controlled by the state monopoly ETECSA, a joint venture between the Cuban government and Telecom Italia. Their reasoning for blocking Skype was simply commercial: to reduce competition for long distance phone calls.

The reason to block Revolico is less clear. I've argued passionately before why web capitalism is important to driving growth, community, creativity, and other goods here and at my Ignite talks here and here. For a society that is supposed to be opening up and that the Obama administration is making overtures toward, this blocking of a basic e-commerce destination is an ominous sign.

But what really was amazing is that she did this while also bringing a new technology and communication forum to this country of 170 million people. At Government College in Lahore, she announced support from the United States for the first free Pakistani mobile phone-based social network, known as Humari Awaz (“Our Voice”). She declared that the United States would fund the first 24 million text messages for people to communicate directly with one another in what she noted is “a service you can use on your cell phone to distribute news stories, to invite people to an event, to share your thoughts and opinions, to report problems that you see, to call for actions to solve those problems.” With more than 95.5 million mobile phone users, many of whom are youngsters, the mobile platform have enabled immense opportunity for wide range of community strengthening and social uplift applications like the one that was launched today.

More than 70 percent of Malaysian government offices are running open source software, according to figures released by the country's Open Source Competency Centre.

The centre was established as part of the 2004 Malaysian Public Sector OSS Master Plan, to guide and co-ordinate the implementation of OSS in the public sector.

The latest OSS adoption figures, released on 24 July, show that 521 of the country's 724 public sector agencies (72 per cent) have adopted OSS. This is a significant increase from 354 agencies (49 percent) in 2008 and 163 (22.5 per cent) in 2007.

Africans are buying mobile phones at a world record rate, with take-up soaring by 550% in five years, research shows.

"The mobile phone revolution continues," says a UN report charting the phenomenon that has transformed commerce, healthcare and social lives across the planet. Mobile subscriptions in Africa rose from 54m to almost 350m between 2003 and 2008, the quickest growth in the world. The global total reached 4bn at the end of last year and, although growth was down on the previous year, it remained close to 20%.

 Omidyar Network, the philanthropic fund created by eBay co-founder  Pierre Omidyar, just invested $2.4 million in  Global Integrity, a non-profit firm that researches corruption and transparency in developing countries.

“We wanted to fill an information gap in the field of good governance,” said  Nathaniel Heller, a co-founder and managing director. ” These reforms matter and they empower businesses in the developed world. But the data has been — to put it imprecisely — pretty squishy and crummy.”

The Blender Foundation just posted news of two e-books issued by the government of Thailand, one covering the 3d content creation suite Blender and one covering the GNU Image Manipulation Program, aka GIMP. I have a special affection for both of these programs, for several reasons.

Nowadays open source seems so inevitable, so commonplace, that we are not surprised to find it running everything from the New York Stock Exchange to the White House website. Of course there was a time when the idea of sharing source code seemed radical, but there was a time, too, when ideas like electricity were literally demonized. Now open source is everywhere, and more importantly, the idea that open source can do anything is even more prevalent. The GIMP was one of the first programs to really break free software (and later open source) out of the conventional mindset that open source was just for geeks, and that no open source program would ever have end-user appeal or functionality.

The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”

One criticism of the Internet Archive’s book digitization effort, which involves the use of optical character recognition software to transform images into digital text, is that the process results in numerous typographical errors. But last Monday, Kahle notes, the Internet Archive demonstrated a Wiki-like system that allows readers to instantly correct typos they find in the organization’s e-books. “This is all the advantage of openness,” Kahle says. (The demonstration was part of a larger rollout of the Internet Archive’s new Book Server project, envisioned as a centralized clearinghouse for e-book distribution that would provide publishers and libraries with an alternative to Amazon, Google, and the like.)

"Brewster Kahle of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive announced today that all 1.6 million books scanned and digitized by the Archive will be available for reading on XO laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The announcement came during a session on electronic books and electronic publishing at the Boston Book Festival. Kahle said the Archive has been collaborating with OLPC for a year to format the e-books for display on the XO laptops, some 750,000 of which are in use by children in developing countries."

"If you live in the EU, you probably enjoy low broadband costs. If you live in Finland, it's even a legal right. If you live in the US, you probably pay a moderate cost. But if you live in the developing world, a UNCTAD report paints your picture pretty grim. Ridiculously high bandwidth costs are inhibiting developing nations from enjoying productive use of the internet — like online banking and market tools."