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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the 54-year-old British scientist who invented the World Wide Web, was in Kampala last week for the launch of his foundation in Uganda. He hopes to help people understand, use and develop the web as a platform, keep it a free and open resource, and not least, encourage governments to embrace open systems of information-sharing.
“The web accelerates so much of what happens in the world,” he told journalists at the Sheraton Kampala Hotel. He said that 20% of the world uses the web and “it’s important to look after the future of the web, but the web should also serve the future of humanity.” Sir Berners-Lee is on an ambitious programme of getting the other 80% of the globe connected to the web. This, he says, could be made possible by using voice and mobile solutions, including short messaging services (SMS). It would also depend on governments providing better infrastructure, including higher bandwidth, better computer and mobile phone equipment. “The foundation wants to show the possibility for more rapid change than what people had imagined,” he says, “to make people realise the amount of opportunity there is if people work together on lots of different fronts in parallel.”
He urged the Ugandan public to use Ugandan content to propel the development process. Future web development in Uganda, Berners-Lee said, will also depend on users identifying specific challenges to specific communities, which can then be addressed using web-based technologies. Given the country’s low access to infrastructure, Sir Tim Berners-Lee suggests that individuals or NGOs in communities might be nominated as resource hubs, who can then be empowered and facilitated to access web-based information on crop prices, the weather and the like, in order to share it with others. This, however, he admitted, could undermine the democratic nature of information access on the web. Your web The emerging challenge, Berners-Lee said, is to make most web-based applications accessible by mobile phone. “You really have to get very good reading glasses and have very fine fingers,” he commented on accessing web-content by mobile phones. However, this is being recognised by web developers. The Web Accessibility Initiative, a collaborative effort of web designers, mobile companies, and individual users, has already drawn up guidelines showing how access can be more easily facilitated on mobiles. For instance, single-column websites with shortcuts to content marked at the top, and voice options, would really benefit mobile-browsers of the internet. “These guidelines are really a distillation of common knowledge and the result of doing experiments,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee told The Observer. The web founder has always championed what he calls the fundamentally collaborative nature of web development. “How do you get content to be made by people right out the door, in Kampala [or] by people on farms?” he asks? “You can give them a fibre optic cable that connects them to USA where a drug company has produced a whole lot of medical information and let them browse it; but what’s really interesting to them is health information from somebody living in their country, speaking their language [and] whose cows suffer from the diseases that their cows suffer from.” Making history Named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century, Sir Berners-Lee started out studying physics at Queen’s College, Oxford University, where he built his first computer. He later worked at leading information systems centres, including CERN – the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, where he was to conceive and formalise his programme codes for the World Wide Web. Along with a host of other top responsibilities in the world of science, he is currently Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, whose home is the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Democratic platform The web that Sir Berners-Lee helped to spin is today arguably the most utilised and democratic information-sharing platform in human history. He now wants it to be mainstreamed into the working of governments. “I have had a personal agenda this past one year, for any government I go to, to ask them to put their data on the web. This was a good year to choose, because Barack Obama had said that he would.” Sir Berners-Lee wants the Uganda Government to do the same, as “government data is a really valuable resource, paid for with taxpayers’ money.” Rather than sitting idle, such information should be opened up for use by industry and individuals, he said. “Just simple data about the state of Uganda,” he explains. “How may people speak which languages, where are the post boxes, when do the trains run, where are the holes in the road we haven’t fixed yet?”
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