Out of the way

I arrived yesterday in Maputo about lunchtime, after travelling a day and a half (and staying up until too late because I had to catch a terribly early flight). From about no degrees to about 30 (Celsius) was a bit of a shift.

I had organised a hotel (by ringing them during a stopover), so I got to it. Although it turned out that MasterCard is not very welcome in Mozambique, so I had a few issues before I had enough cash to do anything. And then I settled in, and unpacked my bags to organise myself through the rest of the week.

I went to meet the people from the workshop for dinner, and had a nice dinner that took forever to arrive. It didn't seem like anyone here is in a hurry, except the bar manager - who was in a hurry for someone else to produce my bill... and then I walked home.

Welcome to Maputo. I stick to main streets, although even so around midnight Maputo is pretty deserted. I found a bank that worked, which was handy, and I had a rough idea of where I was going (which is generally enough for me - I am if anything over-confident in my ability to navigate). I did meet three gentlemen in the security profession (anyone carrying a gun is in the security profession, and these guys had rifles), who asked to see my passport. They were curious about why I was walking, why I was carrying a bag, and what I was doing in Maputo. But really it seemed they were curious about whether I would give them money. However, I politely declined the suggestion, took back my passport, and went to try and sleep in my hotel room.

It's warm at night, and it is humid. After a shower and an hour I was again lying in what felt like a puddle, so I cracked and turned on the air conditioner. I don't much like aircon, but there is no fan in the room. Maybe I should add a simple one to my travel kit, and some way to stick it to the roof.

This morning the workshop started. Presentations of projects, discussion of ideas, looking for what has worked and what hasn't and what we can learn. I presented some stuff about what people are actually doing now with the mobile web in Africa (mobile report to the rescue ) and some thoughts about what technology might enable, the potential for good or bad.

The W3C "Mobile Web for Social Development" group (or something like that) has run three workshops, the previous ones in Brazil and India. I have been at all three, and it seems that there is some real progress. There is a lot of focus on SMS as a technology - it is ubiquitous, while web access still isn't. But it is also limiting - although many people can learn to use it, and you can build many services on it, there are things that can't be done, like making significant amounts of content available to other people in a community, or convincing the rest of the worl that your 160 characters of text are a key part of the store of knowledge that the Web makes available.

I hope that in 5 years we are talking about a web that is far more ubiquitous, rather than still working on systems that rely on breaking things down to SMS. This means there need to be more examples of communities who have got hold of the technology, and done useful things for themselves - so that everyone knows some of these stories and can see themselves in one, and people see the value, and create it. (I would also rather that the main issue of development was what to do in a world where people can spend $10/day rather than one where they can spend $2/day).

The weather here is warm, but not murderous (if you have a fan or aircon ), the people are friendly, and I have learned that I really still only understand a tiny bit of portuguese, but can more or less make myself understood. When I am in Brazil I think I will be speaking in english, at least for presentations. The food is not always quick, but it's good.

And I might catch a taxi home tonight.