• Artist: GK3 Online
• Title: Intervieew with Christian Kreutz
• Year: 2007
• Length: 5:02 minutes (2.3 MB)
• Format: Stereo 22kHz 64Kbps (CBR)

Web2forDev- Participatory web for Development is happening at the end of September (25th to 27th) in Rome ,and it's bringing together a group of practitioners that use Web 2.0 in development contexts. Web2forDev aims to start a broad scope discussion about "networking, collaborating and exchanging knowledge in agriculture, rural development and natural resources management".

We talk to Christian Kreutz, one of the organizers of this initiative supported by a variety of partners such as FAO, GTZ, APC and IICD, among others.

Summary:

The conference is going to take place in Rome, Sept 25th to 27th. It is a conference that brings together people involved in web 2.0, the shift of changes of the web. It's a first experiment to see what is happening in the field. There is a lot happening between organization but only a few happening in the field. We have interesting proposals in all kinds of domains. The focus is mainly rural development and natrual resources management but we also have presentations from all fields, from Creative Commons, Dgroups etc.

From our experiences, we have setup a blog and a Dgroup a few months prior to the conference and we have had very interesting discussions. Most discussions go around connectivity, problems and challenges of being connected in Africa, Asia and America, the situation is very different. In these discussions sometimes there's a fear that Web 2.0 is widening the gap of participation from those who have Internet and those who don't. Other people say it presents many opportunities in different levels, for example NGOs and different organizations and individuals can access the Internet, participate and share knowledge.

The discussion is between the big challenges and on the other hand, there's a lot of interest in the topic because people have the feeling there's something on the rise that makes a difference. Having blogs, having a two way conversation, discussing development themes in different angles and different places. The conference is meant to grasp what's going on. We as organizers don't really know! Even though we've done ICTs for Development for quite a long time, Web 2.0 is still very much new in the context of Development. And these presentations of blogging and videoblogging, things that are actually going in the field, mobile phones, we're very excited to hear the lessons learned so far.

One point that I find very interesting about organizing the conference is that we, as the organizers, experimenting with Web 2.0 has changed the way that the conference is organized. Usually in a conference there's an Agenda and people come and present their things. We now have the possibility to engage the community, meaning that people down to the activist level can discuss the issues, highlight the difficulties and I imagine some people don't know how important they can be, the people on the field. We're going to try to integrate the model of Unconference, a model that is rooted out of the web, we will have open sessions and we will discuss how we can develop something out of Web 2.0 in another dimension than what we've done so far. I think that is going to be very exciting.