WIDE - Web of Information for DEvelopment

Author : Denise Neves
Date added : 2000-08-31

Brief Project Background

Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC) is the collaborative execution and management of developmental activities and projects by institutions of developing countries. It is a modality by which developing countries share one another's experience and technical capacities. The Web of Information for Development (WIDE) system was initiated and developed with strategic partnership forged between UNDP and the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Brazilian non-profit Recife Center for Advanced Studies and Systems (CESAR) with a view to harnessing advances in information technology to facilitate greater access to experiences, skills and know-how available in developing countries.

WIDE deals with all four kinds of knowledge, centered upon the codification of knowledge associated to people, scientists and engineers all over the world, and the groups and institutions they belong to, from which one shall be able to look for bibliographical data and associated publications, areas of expertise, projects, problems solved, best practices, patents, products, processes, courses and services which can be provided to the community and the world.

WIDE is an original effort in that it is aimed at technical cooperation among developing countries and that it is free and open to all to participate. WIDE itself is innovative in a number of ways, including the very treatment it gives to users: they all are first class citizens, empowered by the democratic principles to manage their own data if they want a system record and, in any way they wish, to search the information banks with all tools provided.

Results

In many countries, the lack of information, training, knowledge and education is the primary cause for poverty, famine and disease which, most unfortunately and likely, can lead to huge human costs. It is also the case that, many times, information and knowledge to deal with a problem, once the political decision to do so has been reached, is nearby, but unknown to decision makers or unavailable to the public. In such circumstances, it is not possible to wait weeks for a standard search procedure, depending on mail, strikes, losses, inexact search results and, possibly, new search and more paper copies being sent, after (possibly) finding the expected information. Even by phone and fax, discussing maps, plans and maybe more sizeable and complex amounts of data and information, probably doing so through intermediaries and incurring in relatively high interaction costs, can make interested parties give up and try to sort the problem on their own or even give the exercise up altogether.

This leads to the conclusion that the potential user of information, if directly connected to the Internet and the information systems of his interest, will maximise the profit of interacting. It is also an indication that immediate response is essential, so that the user can refine searches, detailing them under his/her control as soon as ever he/she wants. In addition, the more online the information is available, the process as a whole will be more efficient, more effective and cheaper.

Although there are other systems with the same sort of information already running in some countries and by commercial enterprises, WIDE is unique in that it is a user-maintained public access database. It is also the case that government-funded research, worldwide, as well as projects financed by a number of intergovernmental agencies and NGOs ask for the results of those to be in the public domain. WIDE is also unique in its efforts to facilitate the networking of Southern expertise and institutions on a much wider scale, with the following specific objectives:

· Visibility of and utilization of Southern expertise

WIDE is one of the few international initiatives in which efforts have been made to identify the capacity and expertise of developing countries and to promote the greater utilization of these capacities. It also aims to raise consciousness about the importance of making use of more appropriate technical expertise.
· Multisectoral Data building

WIDE is intended to evolve into a South-South inventory of institutional and individual capacities in all fields of economic, social, scientific and technical development. It provides a platform for developing countries and institutions to continually identify, index, register and access each other expertise and experiences. It also makes the information available on-line for international access. WIDE also serves to underscore the importance of information in development generally and the necessity of creating a South-South information flow, more specifically.

Background

TCDC-INRES began as a manually operated service in 1978. The database was placed on a mainframe computer in 1984. The database was transferred to microcomputer in 1990 and a decentralization program was launched the following year. The software was converted to Microsoft Windows format in 1993. Renamed INRES-Lite, for the fact that having moved from the large main-frame to the smaller PC, was more portable, and was distributed to over 4,000 locations comprising UNDP field offices, United Nations organizations and national TCDC focal points.

One of the central problems with having a PC based databases such as INRES is that the act of compiling and distributing the data actually rendered the information obsolete as soon as it was stored. This means that any request information had to be tempered by the fact that it might be outdated by the time it was delivered.

Demand for the institutional and expert data on a diskette was also difficult to gauge since the policy was to deliver the diskettes directly to all focal points as part of the general TCDC process. Similarly, as to whether these diskettes were being used could be ascertained.

About a year and half ago, the Special Unit for Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC) conducted a series of consultations, studies and evaluations to see how best to make use of information and communication technology (ICT) to serve the Unit's mandate. The series of consultations led to the WIDE Initiative; and the rest, as they say, is history.

WIDE is aimed at technical cooperation among developing countries. It stores and retrieves information related to experts, institutions and associated innovative experiences and publications, from countries all over the world. The system allows user interaction in four languages (English, Spanish, French and Portuguese) - in fact, the design of the interface is inherently multilingual and introducing a new language in the interface is a simple process. At the very top level Web page, the user can choose the interface language by clicking the mouse over the language.

Users (experts and institutions) should create a login and password in the system so that they can enter and maintain their data up to date in the database. The roster of experts allows personnel (identification, address) and professional (institutional data, academic degrees, areas of expertise, publications, professional experience, products and processes developed) information to be catalogued in and retrieved from the system database.

WIDE Institutions holds information about scientific institutions, governmental and non-governmental organizations, public and private companies, funding agencies, development banks etc. It organizes the information about the institutions in the following sections: general information (identification, infrastructure, purpose, personnel), projects, products and services, and innovative experiences.

Information search can be performed in any language, regardless the language used to insert the information. For non-textual information, e.g., country names, language names, area of expertise, sectors of economy etc., the search itself is multilingual. For instance, it is possible to search for all researchers in "biotechnology" that speak "French" using the Spanish interface and the keywords in "biotechnology" and "French" will match information in all supported languages in the system. This is because structured information like country names have a unique internal code for all languages and the search is performed using the code instead of the name itself.

Search on the experts database can be done by the following fields: name, degree, area of expertise, institution, country and region. It is also possible to search institutions, projects, products and services, and innovative experiences by keyword, country, region and area of expertise. A combination of the above fields can be used for more sophisticated searches, e.g., search of all innovative experiences carried out in Malaysia on silk production.

It is important to take into consideration that a number of countries will have, in a near future, very little access to the information networks as perceived in Europe or North America. In those cases, it is fundamental to make digital information available off-line, in such a way that interested parties could download or upload particular views of the information bank available to and from client machines that will not be necessarily connected to the network in a permanent basis. This type of need exists in many contexts, not only related to lack of good network connections, but also to the need to have the information in places and times where it is not possible or necessary to be connected. WIDE also offers off-line client software.

Results

Although WIDE system is up and running since August 1998, it was launched, as part of the UNDP WIDE Initiative (http://www.undp.org/tcdc/wide), very recently in February 2000. UNDP, in collaboration with Bellanet (an international IT initiative), has mounted an electronic marketing campaign to advance the rapid population of WIDE with experts and institutions from other developing countries.

As WIDE system has evolved from the Brazilian National Register of Competence in Science and Technology and also inherited users from TCDC-INRES system, it has already thousands of users registered, including: 42088 experts, 11489 Institutions and 419153 indexed publications. The number of users listed above is from March 17th 2000, and includes users from several countries.

One major problem expected to be encountered in marketing WIDE is the limited Internet access and low PC penetration in several developing countries.

Lessons Learned:

The most interesting lesson to learn from this project is the value of partnership. It would have been very costly if the project were undertaken by UNDP alone. In terms of the system design, an important lesson is the decentralization of data entry, requesting institutions and experts to enter their own data. By making WIDE a user-maintained and public access database, it would encourage users to look for and network with institutions and individuals involved in the same area.

Lessons

Barriers found:

Some of the major barriers WIDE has encountered is listed below:

- Information gathering
Even considering the potential benefits of collaboration to solve real life problems in many countries, keeping an information base's coverage, relevance, quality and timeliness is not a trivial undertaking at all. A sizeable marketing effort is surely needed to achieve that and UNDP/TCDC will most probably have to create incentives in order to bring people and institutions to the information bank.

- Network infrastructure
As the speed of Internet connection in developing countries is not as good as it should be, the system sometimes gets a bit slow. This is one of the major problems users of WIDE encounter. Although we have the off-line client software, some features are only available online (for example, search capabilities).

- Operating costs
As happen to every system, WIDE has some operational costs for maintenance. As UNDP/TCDC do not have too many resources for it; we need to find more partners in order to help maintaining the system.

Future plans:

WIDE is to be used to store information about experts, institutions and their innovative experiences all over the world. Although the system has been designed to be as generic as possible, it is likely that in the future it will be necessary to cater for the specific needs of different countries. For example, some countries are organized in states, while others may have different ways of organization.

There must exist other information sources with related purposes all over the world, some of which under the UN umbrella. Such systems can and should co-exist, each one focusing on a range of problems, solutions and information provision not dealt with by other systems. It is an open, strategic and interesting problem to make like-minded systems to cooperate in such a way that clients and users should not be bothered to enter data sets in different formats.

In the long run, WIDE's architecture should be such that UNDP/TCDC's responsibilities in the system are related to its very core, with the system defining and implementing an open architecture -a platform- upon which other institutions and even people could deploy additional functionality.

We intend to hold a series of workshops, starting within the UN system and its programs and actions, in order to disseminate the use of the system in a lot of countries.

A project such WIDE greatly improves its chances of worldwide acceptance and success when a number of partners both support the system and add to its input, demand and, maybe, functionality and deployment.

WIDE can be argued to be the natural choice of platform for its purpose and UNDP/TCDC could promote such use of the system among national and international bodies and institutions funding research and development, as well as among companies, hardware and software producers, telecommunications operators and so forth. The latter group could be possibly linked to the continued funding of the effort, which is also likely to increase their sales anywhere the system is used, in a natural way.

Project Information

Total budget in US$ : -

Contact Information

Denise Neves

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