Roadmap update and task definition

Dear All,

I take an action during last call to launch a discussion on the list 
about organizing better the work to "get things done" in a more 
effective way.
This was a follow-up on a thread in the mailing-list 2 weeks ago
Read
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-mw4d/2008Nov/0038.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-mw4d/2008Nov/0041.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-mw4d/2008Nov/0044.html

Let's start first with the goals of this group.
 From the charter (http://www.w3.org/2007/12/MW4D/charter1.1.html  )

1- how are mobile platforms delivering ICT-based services?
2- what are the strengths & weaknesses of the different ways
     of delivering applications on mobile phones?
3- what are the different type of challenges to developing & deploying
     ICT-based services in rural & underprivileged populations?
4- what are the challenges to capacity building, to stimulating
     local content & app dev, and to empowering people?

Instead of trying to adress these questions one by one, i propose that 
we define a strategy to adress them all in parrallel, and define a set 
of small tasks to different (set of) people and then merge the results 
all together which should bring the first real draft of the roadmap.

About question 1, as suggested in the thread i mentionned earlier, i 
believe that we should start by investigating existing applications and 
investigate the following aspects
- what is the technology used
- what are the requirements on device and network
- who is the content developer and provider (government/public sector, 
big corporation, individual enterpreneur, grassroot/ngo)
- what are the socio-economic impacts of the services (what kind of 
improvements for which segment of the population)
- what are the content provider challenges
- what are the access challenges (challenge for targeted users to access 
the service)
- what are the cost and sustainability challenges

any other aspect ?

At http://www.w3.org/2008/MW4D/wiki/Stories there is a quite impressive 
set of ressources including links to other existing database of similar 
information.
so in order to share the load between us, what we could do is roughly 
divide by type of applications:
- Education related services
- Agriculture
- Finance
- Health
- public/government
- disaster management
- Activism (this includes human rights report, election monitoring,...)
- conservation

any other category ?

About question 2, there are today 4 major ways of delivering content on 
mobile phones:
using SMS
using Voice
using a Web browser
using a native applications

Here again, we should consider having some people investigating each of 
these branch.
Some of the aspects that would need to be considered
- what are the available tools to support apps authoring and/or 
deployment using the technology
- what is the process/cycle for a content provider to develop and deploy 
a service
- what are the discovery mechanisms for potential users to learn about 
new services
- what are the requirements and cost of delivering a service
- what are the cost of accessing the service
- what are the requirements on the service developer (expertise, 
hardware, software...)
- what are the requirements on infrastructure and handset
- what are the access challenges and potential strenghts for users

the current roadmap document has quite a lot of information about the 
last part.
Mobilehacking.org has lots of information about sms platform
we heard about voikiosk during last teleconference and Arun will rpovide 
a summary of it
probably further investigation are needed about existing voice 
experience, and on the mobile web side.

About question 3, i don't think there is anything we should do, that are 
not covered by the work described in Q1 and Q2 ?

About question 4, there are already few experiences in teaching mobile 
technologies at universities in Africa. EPROM is the first project who 
explored this path (http://eprom.mit.edu/ ). We heard in brazil last 
june that there are also experiences in Uganda (see 
http://www.w3.org/2008/02/MS4D_WS/papers/MCASD_W3C.pdf)
I believe that existing experiences should be investigated. We should 
list them and see in which domains (related to Q2 investigation) they 
are applied, what are the impact in terms of employment, service 
deployment,... what are the challenges (maintenance and development of 
content, replicability, cost of training teachers,....)

So this is my proposal for a potential strategy to develop our roadmap.
I propose we discuss this strategy till next call, and then we start 
collecting the volunteers on the different task we identify.

As soon as we have agreed on htis strategy i will describe it in the 
roadmap document.

cheers
Stephane
-- 
Stephane Boyera		stephane@w3.org
W3C				+33 (0) 5 61 86 13 08
BP 93				fax: +33 (0) 4 92 38 78 22
F-06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,		
France

Received on Friday, 21 November 2008 16:55:46 UTC