Mark Surman, Corina Gardner, and David Ascher
Local Content, Smartphones,
and Digital Inclusion
Connecting billions of new users to the Internet will be one of the most significant
events of this century. Mobile phones will be the primary way these people come
en línea. This change is already unfolding rapidly and generating worldwide excite-
mento, as mobile phones begin to play their part in improving social and economic
outcomes around the world.
But now is the time to ask, what kind of Internet do we need to build to unlock
these social and economic opportunities for people in emerging markets? Even if
we solve key issues like access, affordability, y eficiencia, what will the next bil-
lion Internet users find when they get online? Will it interest them? Will it
improve their lives? Will they be able to help shape the Internet to ensure that it
does?
Mark Surman, a community activist and technology executive for more than 20
años, is Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox, y uno
of the largest social enterprises in the world. In his position at Mozilla, Mark is
focused on using the open technology and ethos of the web to transform fields such
as education, journalism, and filmmaking. He has overseen the development of
Popcorn.js, which Wired magazine has called the future of online video; the Open
Badges initiative, launched by the U.S. secretary of education; and the Knight
Mozilla News Technology partnership, which seeks to reinvent the future of digital
journalism.
Corina Gardner leads the Mobile for Development Impact initiative at the GSMA,
a trade association that represents over 800 mobile network operators and industry
players around the world. She has built and manages an open data platform and
online community dedicated to anticipating what the next “big thing” will be in
order to harness the benefits of mobile technology for the underserved. She previously
worked in international development, managing HIV/AIDS programs throughout
Africa and providing technical assistance to global health projects in Central Asia.
David Ascher is VP of Product for the Mozilla Foundation. Previously, he was CEO
of Mozilla Messaging and Director of Mozilla Labs. In his current role, he oversees
the software aspects of the Webmaker program, at the intersection of digital skills
aprendiendo, economic opportunity, and the Web. David has a PhD in cognitive science
from Brown University, and a long-term interest in using technology and market
behaviors to drive public benefit outcomes.
© 2014 Mark Surman, Corina Gardner, and David Ascher
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Cifra 1. The 3-Step Path to Engaging with the Internet
By the end of this year, nearly one in three people around the globe—2.3 bil-
lion—will have access to mobile broadband service, which is double the penetra-
tion of just three years ago and five times what it was in 2008, according to the
International Telecommunications Union. Growth will of course be fastest in
places where access has been lacking: justo 20 percent of the population in the
developing world has mobile broadband now, compared to 84 percent in the
developed world. Within ten years, half the people on the planet will have access
to the Internet through a smartphone, as hardware is commoditized and high-
speed data coverage expands.
How the next wave of subscribers accesses the Internet—and what they find
when they get there—will be a huge factor in determining its relevance and utility.
Desafortunadamente, the mobile Internet we have built so far looks nothing like the wide
abierto, come-as-you-are, read-write world of HTML and traditional online pub-
lishing platforms. In many ways the mobile Internet is “read only,” not just
because authoring content is difficult on small screens but because mobile con-
tent—media, apps, and services—are distributed through much more restrictive
channels than the early web, or even Web 2.0.
The great promise of the World Wide Web was that anyone could publish
content without a license or permission. In many ways, the bar to create and dis-
tribute new apps and services is now actually rising. The main reason for this is
that a very small number of platform providers hold the keys to their respective
kingdoms. Google can exert a huge influence on what apps are installed on
Android through unilateral technology, política, and business decisions. The same
is true with Apple and iOS, and Microsoft and Windows phones. Without permis-
sion from a platform provider, creators can’t meaningfully get their wares onto
devices—or to the users of that platform. This “walled garden” approach could
end up defining the entire Internet.
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Local Content, Smartphones, and Digital Inclusion
We worry that the next billion Internet users will have little to do but post on
social networks and consume media using the apps, services, and platforms creat-
ed by a few big players. What we’ll then have is a world where people are simply
consumers, not creators, and where the economic and social power of the Internet
rests with a small number of players in a handful of countries.
But this is not just about who controls the effective “digital operating systems”
of people’s lives. It’s also about creativity and culture. It’s about artists and sellers
in any city around the world being able to easily build a digital presence and a fol-
lowing and to share their work without ever touching a computer that they can’t
afford. It’s about a world in which everyone everywhere can use the Internet to
support the pursuit of their dreams. If we want that more inclusive world to
emerge, we need to create it. It’s our choice.
How do we implement this choice? It comes down to how we design the
Internet platforms and services that we offer to the next three billion users. Do we
make it easy for people to create their own content and services? Do we insist on
open platforms for creating apps, services, and other content? If we want to design
for inclusion, that’s exactly what we need to do.
In this article, we argue for the creation of a diverse, inclusivo, geographically
distributed participation model that will allow the next billion users to directly
help create the Internet that will exist in their own societies. Assuming that goal,
we show that the health of the local content ecosystem is a key indicator of the
inclusiveness of the Internet in practice, with clear cultural, political, and econom-
ic implications. To understand the transition needed from the mobile web of
today to the mobile web that we need to build, we review the existing barriers to
creating local content that exist on modern smartphone systems, and the primary
models often used to shape information and communications technology activity
in the developing world. Analyzing the key attributes that have made users switch
from consumption to creation at scale in the past, we describe the initiatives cur-
rently under way to effect the same change for the mobile Internet.
LOCAL CONTENT CREATION: CANARY IN THE COALMINE?
Research and the history of the web suggest that user engagement with Internet
content follows a three-step path: from exploring, to building, to participating.
This process will continue only if the exploring phase is engaging and relevant.
Locally relevant content and services are clearly critical to that initial engagement.
Facebook and WhatsApp alone will (deliberately) not show new Internet users in
the developing world that they too can start to build. Without a mass of people
engaged in “building” and “participating” in the Internet, little new economic
value will be created, and the needs of a majority of the world population will
remain underserved. This is why a lack of locally relevant content is an indicator
that people aren’t yet exchanging value on the Internet, and that broader digital
skills development and socialization will be needed for people to benefit more fully
from digital life.
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Cifra 2. Native Language Speakers and Websites in that Language, Globally.
For each language given, the top bar represents the global percentage of native speakers of the
idioma; the bottom bar represents the global percentage of websites in the language.
Fuente: W3techs, Ethnologue and World Bank
The growth of local content and services is an important indicator that
Internet users are generating value, even if the macroeconomic impact has yet to
be felt. Local content is like the proverbial canary in a coal mine: where we see a
healthy ecosystem, it’s a good bet that people are being empowered to create,
compartir, and build. Where local content is lacking, the conditions for digital partici-
pation are likely also lacking.
In most parts of the world today, our “content canary” is not doing well.
Language dispersion is a simple useful indicator of how far we have to go. Como
Cifra 2 muestra, there is a huge chasm between the number of people speaking a
given language and the amount of content available in that language. If we held up
the Internet as a mirror to ourselves as a global people, the reflection would be a
funhouse distortion at best: bulging in the middle, and shrunken beyond recogni-
tion everywhere else.
The top ten Internet sites in India, as measured by traffic, have just two fully
Indian representatives: the India Times newspaper and the mobile shopping site
Flipkart. The rest are Indian versions of Google properties, Facebook, Yahoo, y
Wikipedia. You see similar trends across the globe, with the exception of China,
which has enough critical mass to develop its own popular in-country online
brands. This is due in part to the power of English as a leveling factor among edu-
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Local Content, Smartphones, and Digital Inclusion
cated elites who are already online, but that will change quickly as mobile broad-
band takes off. The question at hand is whether the new languages will grab a more
representative share of the content, or wheather non-English speakers will be fur-
ther disadvantaged.
This is not a new phenomenon, and several approaches are currently trying to
counteract the trend, but they all have limitations:
(cid:2)(cid:1) Development agencies are well aware that information services like health,
clima, and education can support development outcomes. Sin embargo, access to
this information alone is not enough to sustain economic development or create
the conditions for truly advanced digital economies.
(cid:2)(cid:1) The ubiquity of mobile allows for an unprecedented level of data collection.
Sin embargo, there is a significant risk that the introduction of digital access in
emerging markets will follow the extractive path of industries in the past. Mobile
services may provide access to information, but in turn extract data for use by a
minority of dominant players, often based out of country.
(cid:2)(cid:1)The practice of “zero-rating”—increasingly common in emerging markets—fur-
ther complicates this picture. Building off the success of “freemium” models in
the West, zero-rating is meant to whet the user’s appetite for data by providing
a prescripted amount of information for free and paving the way to buy more.
In Zambia, por ejemplo, Facebook has negotiated with Airtel to provide an
Internet.org app that gives users free access to a curated set of services.
Such models, sin embargo, are driven purely by the supply side. They make the
user’s journey from exploring to building even less likely because the incremental
cost of access for non-zero-rated services keeps users inside the comfortable walls
of the free services. It also makes it harder for local players to break in, innovate,
and make money in a world where network effects already favor the platform first
mudanzas.
When it comes to mobile content, the skew toward non-local content is worse,
for ergonomic, económico, and policy reasons. In developing countries, donde el
more expensive full-size computers with keyboards are less ubiquitous, the tech-
nology used to create apps is also less accessible. Original content creation on
touch devices is still in its infancy, as the specific form factor of much mobile con-
tent (apps in particular) implies a relatively expensive development process.
Finalmente, the global nature of the Internet, combined with the high investment cost
for new content and services, is a strong incentive for even small teams far from
Silicon Valley to target global audiences rather than local audiences. Angry Birds
may have been built in Finland, pero (rationally) dirigido (and reached) a global
audience.
MOBILE FOR DEVELOPMENT
Specific efforts have been made to bolster local mobile content in the emerging
economías. These initiatives often fall under the banner of Mobile for
Desarrollo (M4D) and are characterized as commercial (focused on growing
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Cifra 3. Mobile for Development (M4D) “Sweet Spot”
commerce) or nonprofit (motivated by a social outcome). The overlap of these
two is considered the M4D “sweet spot”—the services specifically focused on the
lower income customer segment that can also fuel thriving enterprises (ver figura
3).
Afortunadamente, access to these populations through mobile networks is increas-
ing our understanding, and pilot projects are helping us to develop better
approaches to providing these customers with truly valuable services. In order to
have a long-term impact, M4D investment is aimed at understanding what an
individual with relatively limited resources is willing to pay for, and then to build
those services in ways that make them self-sustaining over time.
Services developed in the M4D space take into account a number of basic
assumptions about customers: they only have access to basic feature phones rather
than data-consuming smartphones; they have low levels of literacy; and they have
limited disposable income to spend on mobile services.
In seeking the M4D sweet spot, mobile carriers have deployed a mix of short-
messaging service (SMS) and interactive voice response (IVR) messages to mobile
phones throughout sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Content might include
the latest advice on how to feed your baby, fertilize your crops, and correctly pro-
nounce English words—provided along with paid subscriptions to cricket score
updates and the latest ringtones.
While we have found some successful overlap of commercial interests and
social benefits, there are very few examples that have reached a large scale. Si nosotros
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Cifra 4. Factors in Web Content Creation
want to have the impact that is needed, this approach will not be sufficient. En
many cases, such services represent a big leap forward for farmers and others who
have never before had access to this kind of information, but it remains only the
consumption part of the story. Vibrant digital economies also require the produc-
tion of information from farmers and others.. If we can’t get healthy participation
on both sides, we are likely to slide toward digital exclusion.
As we have moved rapidly into an era of more affordable and widely available
smartphones, much of the conversation in the M4D community has been about
how to provide similar information on new platforms. While the need for health,
educational, and other traditional M4D services will definitely be needed in the
smartphone platform era, we should be focusing on how to shape those platforms
to host an organic proliferation of locally produced content that has the potential
to support and bolster real livelihoods.
A TOOLKIT FOR VIBRANT CONTENT CREATION
An obvious question at this stage is, what platform characteristics will specifically
support the creation of vibrant local content among people now coming online via
smartphones? The best period to study to determine this is the first wave of
Internet content creation, in the era of the desktop web. As the web took shape in
North America and Europe in the 1990s, three key factors fueled the growth of
content and services from a wide range of small and localized players:
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(cid:2)(cid:1)Building blocks. It was easy to create content and services (with open standards
such as HTML and easy tools such as Microsoft FrontPage).
(cid:2)(cid:1)Habilidades. People understood and seized opportunities on the Internet (such as cre-
ating a web page) and quickly developed the necessary skills, both hard
(markup, setting up a website, etc.) and soft (understanding links, how to make
money with SEO, etc.).
(cid:2)(cid:1)Open platform. There was easy access to markets and few real web gatekeepers.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, small businesses rushed to create their own web
presence by building individual sites. Internet service providers welcomed new
customers with
low-cost offerings.
Brand new web-based business models
quickly emerged as well, including vari-
ous forms of advertising and online
commerce. Capital was made available
to enterprises with the potential to scale.
The result in the decade or so since has
been a hugely prosperous digital econo-
my that has made so many aspects of
our lives easier, while also creating
wealth and opportunity for people able
to grasp the potential of digital tools.
The combination of easy-
to-learn HTML and view
source enabled millions
of people to easily figure
out how to become
creators on the web.
Without the right building blocks,
easy-to-learn skills, and an open net-
trabajar, it’s unlikely that any of this would have happened. Todavía, as we move into
what seems like a huge moment of opportunity—the expansion of the Internet to
the rest of humanity—the fundamental qualities of the early Internet clearly have
eroded.
The building blocks of creativity—the ability to learn how to make digital con-
tent on an open, permission-free network—are in decline as we move to a mobile
web dominated by apps and app stores controlled by the few large companies
behind mobile operating systems. The coming digital world needs an approach
more like the original web than the current mobile ecosystems, one that provides
the kind of democratic access and opportunity that drove past successes. A
design and invest in a world that is open to creativity, innovation, and opportunity
at the most local level, one must start by looking at the essential building blocks.
In the desktop era, the answer was HTML, or hypertext markup language. Si
you could use a word processor such as WordPerfect to “reveal codes,” you could
teach yourself how to make a rudimentary web page. Then along came Microsoft
FrontPage, which made it possible to use Microsoft Word to build a web page,
while the “view source” browser function allowed anyone to see how a web page
they liked had been created. The combination of easy-to-learn HTML and view
source enabled millions of people to easily figure out how to become creators on
the web.
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From there we moved on to early cloud publishing platforms, such as Blogger,
WordPress, and Movable Type. These kinds of products allowed everyone, de
artists to small businesses to budding web services, to get online quickly by using
building blocks. These types of building blocks have not yet been created for
mobile operating systems on any meaningful scale. Successful social media plat-
forms such as Facebook and Instagram are the introductory point for many who
want to create and share content online, and these are good first steps. But the
“app”—the most familiar unit of content in the mobile world—is a very difficult
medium for creators to approach. Creating apps requires specific skills, specific
packaging, and specific preparation, and they must be approved by the platform
gatekeepers. Mobile apps don’t have the same transparency as web pages, thus the
ability for anyone to learn their mechanics (and to succeed through imitation) es
not built into the system.
Existing mobile networks also have constraints: Unstructured Supplementary
Service Data (USSD) requires the cooperation and permission of mobile carriers;
it’s hard to imagine new USSD services emerging from the proverbial garage oper-
ación, which was a critical phenomenon in the desktop web era. Como resultado, nosotros
have an exclusive ecosystem oriented toward professional developers at the
expense of a broader set of content creators.
The necessary next step is to build software and an operating system that make
it easy to create any content—personal apps, a web page, a video—that posts
directly to the Internet and doesn’t require membership in a social network or
approval from a gatekeeper. Además, application programming interfaces
(APIs) and widgets are needed to easily pull in interoperable functionality, como
mobile money, customer relationship management, and weather data and maps,
that tie to locally relevant back-end services, especially those that can contribute to
the economic success of all parties in the local value exchanges. With these things
in place, we will at least have the necessary fuel for independent content and serv-
ices in emerging digital marketplaces.
PUTTING THEORY INTO ACTION
What we’ve outlined above is a theory: if we can replicate the conditions that exist-
ed for early desktop Internet users, then we are likely to unlock more opportunity
for the next three billion people who will come online through mobile. The start-
ing assumption for this theory is that the global transition from feature phones to
smartphones will be complete within the decade. Mozilla is participating in this
transition with Firefox OS by bringing ultra-low-cost devices to market, como
el $33 phone that just launched in India.
Over the past year, Mozilla, GSMA, and a number of mobile industry partners
have been talking about ways to test this theory. We also are working on a number
of initiatives to build the core components of a user-driven mobile Internet to test
these components and deploy them with mobile operators around the world.
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Cifra 5. Fleshing Out the Pillars of an Open Mobile Internet
The first step in this effort has been to work on the building blocks—that is, a
create software and an operating system that replicates the ease of use and access
to source code that existed on the early Internet. We want to make it easy for
smartphone users to become creators of mobile content and services.
One important part of this experiment was to create an authoring software
sistema (“Webmaker”) that makes it as easy to create a useful mobile application
(using a mobile phone!) as it was to create a website in FrontPage, while taking
into consideration the literacy levels of the potential creators. Another part is to
work with carriers and other partners to create maker-friendly APIs that can inte-
grate services such as mobile money, advertising, weather information, y el
like into a simple app. By creating easy application authoring and useful APIs, nosotros
believe we can create the foundations for local content and, por extensión, a partic-
ipatory mobile Internet. We don’t believe, expect, or even hope that our system
will be the only one that works. We do hope that it will show what’s possible.
The next step in this effort is to develop ways to massively improve the digital
literacy of people coming online for the first time. By actively moving people
through the stages of exploring, building, and participating, we intend to turn
mobile users into engaged, empowered Internet citizens who are able to both find
and create value on the Internet.
The desktop web grew slowly relative to today’s mobile growth, and the nec-
essary skills were defined after the fact. We need to take a much more intentional
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Cifra 6. Web Literacy Framework
Fuente: https://webmaker.org/resources
approach to making sure that the next three billion users have a way to learn the
skills they need to benefit from the Internet. As a start, Mozilla has developed a
framework that describes the skills and competencies people need to be consid-
ered “web literate.”
This starts with understanding the mobile Internet and what it can do, entonces
leads seamlessly to creating content and successfully running a business—and a
life—online. These are not skills that only programmers need; they are skills that
everyone needs to take part in a digital life and create local digital economies. Nosotros
need to find a way to get these skills to everyone, including shopkeepers, farmers,
and all kinds of creators from every part of the world.
To make this happen we are working on practical ways to make mobile
content and the app economy into something as open as the web. Part of the
process involves encouraging people to make apps and content using web
technologies such as HTML5, which makes it possible for content and services to
run on any smartphone without going through an app store first. From there we
will need to find ways to popularize the distribution of apps and services that are
more open than current app stores. We’re going to experiment, por ejemplo, con
sideloading, SMS distribution, email distribution, and hyperlocal or carrier-run
content discovery systems (aggregators, historias, search engines, etc.). All of these
things have the potential to create open distribution patterns that are more like the
open environment of the desktop web and to provide room for many to build
growing businesses.
ENGAGING CONTENT FOR NEW WEB EXPLORERS
In emerging markets, the smartphone penetration rate stands at about 10 por ciento,
which means that now is the time to create the foundational content that will
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enable a fruitful exploration phase for newcomers. We have time, but there is also
some urgency, because if people’s first contact with the Internet offers little value
beyond unaffordable consumption, we risk a massive retreat—by users, funders,
companies, and governments—from the inherent opportunities. We are prepared
to use this window of time to build content that demonstrates value as access
aumenta.
para hacerlo, we need coordinated efforts at the market level to create measurable
impacto. We envision a partnership that brings together the mobile industry, aca-
demia, gobierno, the international development community, innovators, y
digital entrepreneurs to create a serious, multidimensional campaign with a single
meta: to rapidly increase the amount of locally relevant content created in any
given country in a short period of time.
By prioritizing this common goal, we believe that the relevance and value of
the Internet to any country’s population could be dramatically increased in a short
período, without a herculean effort. Mobile network operators could make the soft-
ware and platform tools known and available through handsets in the market.
Technical universities could offer training for their students and host outreach
programs to create understanding and the ability to use these tools. Given useful
and accessible systems, users will, we predict, do their part.
We believe that the critical challenge that comes with the onboarding of the
next billion mobile users is to provide an Internet that works for them—not one
that simply sells them media and services. With these foundational elements in
lugar, we believe the Internet that the next billion users encounter will both reflect
their needs and offer them deep and lasting value. To see this happen, all parties—
operadores, gobiernos, ONG, and techies—have a role to play.
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