Back at the end of August 2003, the Open Source Community hoped that the strong language of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) would encourage the adoption of Open Source Software to help close the widening “digital divide” between rich countries and poor countries, or as some like to say, between North and South.

Bold ICT initiatives, such as “Programmers Without Frontiers”, the promotion of collaborative technology tools for civil society, and the creation of new public-interest open source IP mechanisms had been called for in its August Plan of Action. Free and Open Source Software was seen as key to creating wealth by empowering governments in developing countries to provide the software infrastructure for access and services in the coming Information Society.

Fast forward one month. September. The US and the EU, together with the international business community, evidently got wind of this heresy and stepped up their lobby to dumb down any possible insurgency.

The “visionaries” were taken to the virtual wood shed. The next revision of the document all but eliminated any support for practical initiatives that could truly change the cost-effectiveness equation for developing countries. Instead, the Plan of Action had become a tedious repetition of bureaucratic fence-sitting where all solutions would be realized by mutually benefiting government/private partnerships embracing the needs of all possible stakeholders.

In an effort to appease potential donors who might be persuaded to actually fund the Plan of Action, the result was a thoroughly bland initiative to preserve and promote the status-quo. Yet the dumb-down also left a divided group unprepared to sign even the first stage of the multi-national agreements required for bridging the digital divide. While nothing of substance remained in the document itself, the disagreements themselves remained painfully glaring. Protectionism using proprietary software and information rights management and even Internet governance remained hotly contentious topics through to the end. And, as if predicting the WTO fiasco in Cancun a few weeks later, the WSIS representatives from the “Have” and “Have-Not” countries deadlocked on financial assistance to make any Plan of Action, even in its weakened form, affordable for developing economies.

It is imperative that developing countries stay on the global stages erected by the likes of the ITU and the WTO: if only as a visible, in-your-face reminder that change is needed. However, they should also go where the action is. If governments want to truly unleash the potential of progress they should consider other, parallel strategies. The well-publicized steps to build and promote Open Source solutions for their countries initiated collaboratively by China, South Korea and Japan is the premier example today. This consortium should be joined by all national governments of developing economies who wish to see action and practical solutions emerge quickly. The alternative is more WSIS nonsense which in the end is self-serving and will only marginalize the people who need the benefits of ICT the most.

Talk: OSS and Linux tools for Accessibility

Daisy Consortium Workshop
National Association for the Blind, New Delhi, India
November 2003

Robert Adkins of Technetra talked about Linux based accessibility tools such as Emacspeak and other speech recognition software which could be used by vision-impaired individuals in India for education and on-the-job. This one day workshop was hosted by the National Association for the Blind (NAB) and the Daisy Consortium.

Today, “surfing the Web” is unthinkable without first “searching the Web”. Remarkable new search technologies help Google, Yahoo, Verity, Ask Jeeves, Kaidera and others spread their influence far and wide across the Internet.

The Answering Machine

Search has become essential for locating diverse content across large organizations. Much more than just a simple query and response mechanism, search technologies allow content to be more intuitive, smart and personalized. In fact, search technologies already are revolutionizing the way big repositories of information are organized, stored and retrieved. Large-scale software applications such as content management systems, enterprise portals, collaboration tools, and customer relationship management systems are embedding these new search techniques into their core capabilities.

Smart Search is the next wave. Making search algorithms smarter and faster, using intelligent ontologies to understand concepts, processing natural language, real-time indexing and performance clustering - these areas are all part of the innovation pushing the Internet’s “answer machines” to the next level.

No One but You

Personalizing search to suit a user’s specific needs has also become important. But personalization is very hard to get right. It can turn off the user if not accurate or if it’s perceived to be coercive. Yet if it can be made to work, the benefits are palpable. Imagine your very own Google - all of Google’s rankings of page popularity and relevance are tailored instantly to just your interests. No longer must “one suit fit all”. The searcher obviously benefits but so does the search provider: the prize is an ever larger share of the $6-8B targeted advertising market.

The God of Search

Google is today’s God of Search. So far, Google has done the best job of balancing user trust and providing relevant results to maintain very high search quality.

The popularity of Google has provided healthy competition for others in the business. Both Yahoo and Microsoft have woken up to the fact that people increasingly turn to Google for its simple design and focused search results. Google’s success has spurred all major portals and navigation sites to invest in better search technology as well as to promote search-targeted ad sales.

A reinvigorated Yahoo, which was using Google as its search engine until last year, has acquired competitor Inktomi and has committed nearly $2 billion to a Google counterattack. Yahoo, which has about 25 percent of the U.S. market, wants to avoid losing users to other sites with better search technologies and wants, as well, to market premium services, based on the perceived interests of the individual, to those who stay.

Even, Microsoft is investing a significant portion of its $49 billion war chest to build a better search engine. Microsoft is reducing its reliance on third-party providers such as Inktomi and LookSmart, which had been its Web search partners. As part of this investment, the company is adding new staff and enhancing its own navigation technologies.

Meanwhile, Google has formed a close relationship with AOL, solidifying its anti-Microsoft alliance. Who says the search industry is not working overtime? In the search for Search Supremacy, we’ll all benefit from better, quicker answers to life’s persistent questions, or at least to those that can be posed with a keyboard and a mouse.