The contribution of a Portuguese Angolan wiki for development promotion

Abstract

At the present time, it is understood by almost everybody that either the technology or the entrepreneurial decisions are conditioned by the quantity and quality of information available. Angola is a very large country with great amount of natural resources of very good quality, and in the present state of Angola development, the value of the marginal productivity of information is very high in almost all sectors of activity and in that sense crucial to promote development. There is plenty of specific information about Angola from research made in Angola, from the time when it was a Portuguese colony. Although, some of this information is written or recorded in magnetic support, most of them are possessed by private persons. The great part of the information is still in the minds of thousands of persons that used to teach, to research or to live there. In this context, the potential of the so called Web 2.0 or the Social Web and one of its most interesting collaborative platforms, the wiki is particularly relevant, to promote the development of a knowledge management strategy. In fact wikis are receiving growing attention since they are being used at a growing rate to build the most diverse information spaces, gathering people who are interested in a specific subject, building themselves as truly communities. In this way, building a virtual community, in this case, a Portuguese-Angolan wiki, where all the available information could be gathered and stored, through the spontaneous contribution of the community, could have a great impact on Angola development. The aims of this paper are: (1) to emphasize the economic value of information; (2) to show that it is possible to build a platform of information (a wiki), over the internet and stress its potential in the developmental process of Angola.