“Technological innovation is taking place at a breathtaking pace. Dozens of free or very low-cost interactive Web tools continuously emerge that can enhance the ways we create and publish information and the ways we collaborate and share resources. This evolution of the Web, commonly known as Web 2.0, offers opportunities and challenges to enhance collaboration. It is an easy way to voice out ideas, experiences and needs from which rural communities all over the world could benefit. We need to understand and grasp these, to further improve networking, collaborating and exchanging knowledge in the field of rural development and natural resource management.”
This was the aim of the “Web2forDev - Participatory Web for Development” Conference held in Rome from September 25th to 27th 2007, during the e-Agriculture Week.
The Conference has been extensively covered on the web, through the publication of all presentations and of several video recordings (all available on the Web2forDev Conference website), and also, as might be expected, through Web 2.0 tools like the Conference blog and the photos published on Flickr.   

Representatives from GFAR and the Regional Fora attended several sessions of the Conference, and GFAR had a presentation in the parallel session on “Shared Virtual Spaces for Remote Stakeholder Collaboration”. The presentation was on “The EGFAR Web Space: Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Electronically Mimic GFAR” and highlighted how GFAR’s objectives of providing a communication platform and facilitating the flow of information and GFAR’s principles of subsidiarity, additionality and decentralisation are best implemented electronically through the use of an overall Web 2.0 approach and of some specific Web 2.0 technologies. The Web 2.0 technologies applied in EGFAR were described and also the major challenges faced in this approach were discussed in the presentation, challenges such as attracting participation and involving partners in information sharing.