Silicon Valley luminaries on a State Department-sponsored trip to Iraq are already making observations and floating ideas through Twitter and blog posts about how to bring the war-battered country up to web 2.0 speed.
How bad is it? Almost no one in Iraq has internet at home thanks to years of censorship under Saddam Hussein’s rule — making cellphones the platform for engaging the public in the occupied country.
Tube and WordPress, will be in the country through Thursday, picking up ideas on how to help Iraqis employ interactive technology and user-generated content to improve transparency and engage a newly free citizenry.
Editor’s note: Wired magazine senior writer Steven Levy is the only reporter on the trip. Read his first-person account here.
According to a Tweet from Richard Robbins, the director of social innovation at AT&T, they are already seeing signs of real progress.
Iraqi deputy PM quote: "The only way I can get through cabinet meetings that are long and boring is looking at my iPhone."
Only about 5 percent of Iraqis have internet access at home, while a larger (unknown) percentage get online at internet cafes, WordPress vice president Raanan Bar-Cohen says on his blog. But cell service is practically universal and almost everyone owns a mobile phone.
"With 18M+ lines, mobile is critical for engaging public," Tweets Robbins, who is also impressed with local mobile companies. "Great example of private industry playing major role in rebuilding Iraq," he writes.
The reliance on mobile service for communication could also provide the perfect setting for adoption of the astoundingly popular micro-blogging service Twitter, which lets cell users post and read "tweets" using SMS messages from any mobile phone.
Junket participant — and Twitter co-founder — Jack Dorsey says a service like that could help make the government more open.
The government could easily get a real-time sense of what the people are talking about, and by Tweeting information to the public, it would make it more human and approachable, says Dorsey. For instance, citizens could let the government know when government services break down, and agencies could monitor residents’ posts to make sure that the people it hires to clean the streets actually do the work.
"We’d like to create something that the entire world can use," Dorsey told Cal Perry, a Baghdad-based CNN reporter who is also tweeting. "What we’ve seen, and what we’ve learned in this time is that 85 percent of the people here have mobile phones, and a large majority of them want to participate in the government."
But Iraq’s three mobile networks aren’t reliable and are often overloaded — making them about as reliable as Twitter itself.
"This creates a bit of a comical situational where many people carry at least 2 phones with them from different providers to make sure they can conduct business regardless of where they are," writes Bar-Cohen on his blog.
Bar-Cohen also writes that building a new fiber-based infrastructure for more widespread internet is being held back by legacy systems as well as "security requirements / sabotage missions" that disrupt the work.
A number of participants are Twittering the trip, including @jack, @heif, @dfnssr, @jasonliebman, @raanan and @rar624. You can also follow the conversation using the hashtag #iraqtech.