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White African
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11:15
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 Unfortunately it looks like TED Africa won’t be taking place in September of this year. A lot of us were looking forward to this, so it’s very disappointing.
I hope they can get this to work in 2009.
Here’s the email from TED curator Chris Anderson:
Dear Friends of TED,
Regretfully, we’re having to suspend plans for our TEDAfrica event scheduled for the end of September 2008 in Cape Town.
As you may know, we sought to launch this event under the control of a local team, operating under a license. The goal was to build on the full impact and quality of the TED conference held in Tanzania last year. But after reviewing progress with our licensees, we have mutually agreed that that is not going to be achievable in the available time. Our licensees did all they could to deliver on an ambitious plan, and I commend their efforts.
We apologize to those of you who are disappointed or inconvenienced. TED remains 100% committed to continuing to serve its growing and passionate African community. We are considering a number of options, including holding an event in 2009, and expect to make a further announcement soon.
If you have any specific questions or concerns, please write to my colleague jane@ted.com. Meanwhile we will continue to promote content from the Arusha conference online and to work on Neil Turok’s amazing TED Prize wish: that the next Einstein should come from Africa. Please take a look at the nexteinstein.org website just launched by TED partners Avenue A/Razorfish, as well as this recent TEDBlog post celebrating the new AIMS Research Centre in South Africa.
Sincerely,
Chris Anderson
TED Curator
If you’re looking to take part in another conference in Cape Town, Gareth Knight is putting on Tech4Africa, which was supposed to be right after TED Africa.
 
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0:49
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
I had the honor of closing O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference today, where I gave a talk on “Activist Mapping” and some history on our Ushahidi project in Kenya. A couple people have asked me to make the slides available, so I’ve embedded the presentation below.
 | View | Upload your own
I’m not sure how useful those images are without the context of me speaking to them. Since I generally type out my notes, I’ve added those below after the “more” button. The notes are not verbatim what I said, but will give you a general indication of what I talked about.
More after the jump! (warning, this is long as it’s a 20 minute talk)
This is my transcript for the talk, follow along as you can…
Where 2.0 Talk on Mapping and Digital Activism
Intro
I’m here to talk to you about real-world usage of your work. Specifically, in the world of causes and issues, where (usually) unpaid civilians use your tools to further their causes: Activists.
My name is Erik Hersman. A short intro on me that will help you understand some of my personal history and motivations will give you some context before you hear about what I did a little later in this talk. I grew up as the son of linguistic missionaries in Sudan and Kenya, only moving back to the US to go to college. I write two blogs, White African is my personal blog where I like to talk about high-tech mobile, web and PC issues pertaining to Africa. AfriGaget is a group blog that I started a couple years ago that focuses on low-tech ingenuity in Africa.
First off, since I’m the last speaker, and since I’m one of those tech guys on the far end of the spectrum that Jesse Robbins talked about earlier, I want to cover some of the really cool things that I saw here that could be hacked/simplified and used in crisis, disaster, and relief scenarios.
Things I’m excited about!
Geotate - imagine this kind of device used by bloggers/reporters in a hot zone
AfricaMap open source project by Harvard
Bug Labs device
DIY Drones - think what you could do with cheap UAVs in a post-disaster scenario.
The tools you create, and the work you do to map the world digitally, are incredibly useful. The world is only now beginning to wake up to the power of the digital, social and living map.
Okay, on to my real talk!
The Ushahidi Story (Summarized)
So, the reason I’m here is due to the fact that I stood up and did something during a time that I wish had never happened. Some of you might be aware that in January of this year in Kenya there was a disputed election where the incumbent (President Mwai Kibaki) claimed a win. There were some gross irregularities, and the opposition (Raila Odinga) refused to accept the questionable results.
What started out as a political fracas quickly devolved down ethnic lines where Raila’s supporters displaced and killed many of Kibaki’s tribe (Kikuyu), while the same happened in Kibaki’s area and the ethnic groups around that area (Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin).
Government forces and civilians battled it out in the urban slums and rural Kenya. It was crazy, somewhat unexpected, and few were ready to report what was happening. Speaking of reporting, as soon as Kibaki swore himself in to a second term, he simultaneously created a media blackout. The only way to get news now was via non-traditional news sources, like blogs. Internally, though there was only old TV and radio show reruns, though rumors and messages were still flying via SMS.
In the midst of it were a couple members of what would soon become the Ushahidi team. Juliana was upcountry and used her blog, Twitter and Flickr to get news out. Ory was in Nairobi, and her blog quickly became the focal point for the international Kenyan diaspora as they tried to get information about what was happening back home. Ory was hearing stories and reports that were not being told outside of Kenya, and many not being reported at all. On one blog post she said,
[Quote slide by Ory]
When I read that, I quickly contacted my Kenyan tech friends.
Our goals were to:
- Create a way for ordinary Kenyans to report in what they saw
- Create an archive of news and reports
- Visualize what’s happening on a macro level, and then drill into the details
Building Ushahidi
- Detailed geospatial data is hard to come by in Africa
- How much should be web-based in a mobile phone culture?
- Mobile phones - getting a full report in 140 characters is not easy
- What data points do we need?
[Ushahidi Calendar]
A loose affiliation of Kenyan technologists and bloggers banded together to create this tool, with the initial goal of aggregating citizen and news reports of violence in real time. 4 days later we had Ushahidi.
It was a way for everyday Kenyans to report in incidences of violence via SMS, email or the web. It was very simple, but it worked, and that was what was important. The Kenyan diaspora, especially the blogging community, rallied around this cause and made people take notice. It ended up being a community action that led to whatever success Ushahidi had.
[Main page] - Demo the site live
[Report detail page]
[Timeline feature]
Let me give you just a few examples from an active day on Ushahidi during the crisis. On January 17th the following things happened:
“Protesters gathered in groups and attempted to walk into the town centre; police fired live shots and tear gas canisters to disperse them. Three protesters were seriously injured and one shot dead.”
“Police battled youths who set fire to roadblocks; the police shot indiscriminately, “targeting anyone on sight”; one man was shot in the stomach as he stood in front of his house.”
“A 13-year old boy was laid to rest next to his uncle´s house; the burial was attended by hundreds of residents who wailed and lit up bonfires.”
What we realized was that we were receiving a lot of information, but we didn’t have a way to track what happened afterwards. We heard anecdotally about how the information was used for good, but we had no way of knowing all of the time.
Results
Lessons Learned
- The importance of mapping accuracy
- Data poisoning - what happens when your antagonist starts using it?
- Verification and authentication are difficult
- Clarify why it was created and make sure that is inescapably obvious
- Create a feedback loop back to end users
- Know why you built it. Is it for advocacy, security, monitoring or information gathering? (we did it for information gathering at Ushahidi)
An Enemy Around Every Corner (Really?)
Thoughts on this issue evolved out of discussions I had with a gentleman in meeting we both attended about tools for digital activists. Ushahidi was still fresh, and up until that point we had been so focused on just getting the site up and getting the word out about the project that we hadn’t thought about things such as security of our information, how it could be used by “bad guys”, or how we could verify all reports.
Map Accuracy
- How do you deal with this in a relatively unmapped regions?
- How important is accuracy when raising awareness vs using that data for human rights violations?
Verification
- Is the source trusted?
- Data poisoning
What we learned after development was that data sources and accuracy are very important. What you do with your data, the verification process, and how accurate the data is represented on the map all play a huge role in credibility. More so, how that tool is used by friendly and non-friendly organizations has large repercussions for both the tool and the people you are trying to help.
What’s next
Ushahidi ended up being a prototype that we’ve learned a lot from, and which opened the door for us to learn what organizations and everyday people are looking for when trying to share their data in a map-based setting during a crisis. We were approached, about creating an easy tool that can be used in early warning or conflict mapping scenarios by the public. We think we’ve learned a thing or two about that, but still have a long way to go on it.
We finally incorporated Ushahidi as a US-based non-profit last month. We have some initial funders, which will allow us to create a simple, useful and powerful tool for activists and NGOs around the world. It’s an Open Source project, with over a dozen international developer volunteers so far. If you’d like to know more about this, talk to me afterwards.
On Activism
Activism is a funny thing, because what you care enough to be active about might seem mundane, stupid or even like enemy actions. It covers the gamut - political, societal, land rights, environmental, etc…
It also turns out that activism is very subjective. Your idea of who an activist is and what they do can span the spectrum.
- Bra burning women of the 1960’s (fact or fiction?)
- Anonymous (vs Scientology)
- G-8 protesters
- Support Your Local Brewery!
- Minutemen on the US border (for & against)
As seen in the last example, there’s always an “enemy”, due to the fact that on the other side of an activist’s issue is another person. For better or for worse, they’re the antagonist.
Activists are just a cross section of society, so they’re not always technologically proficient. If you ask yourself later why ever single example I show you of activist mapping is using Google Maps or Google Earth, I can tell you that it’s most likely due to the simplicity of just getting something to work quickly.
Examples of activists using maps around the world:
I’d like to end by giving you a speed-run through other examples of maps being used in creative ways around the world by activists. You can find much more on their individual websites, and I will have the whole presentation available for download on my blog (white african) and it should be available on the Where 2.0 site after the conference as well.
A few points to end with.
- Mapping for human rights violations vs mapping for activists are different things. Activist are not the authority.
- What can you do? How can your skills be used to impact issues that are important to you?
Finally, a digitally connected world not only grants us a front row seat to the rest of the world, but also the power to influence events and create change in a way that was impossible just a few short decades ago. So that events that may occur thousands of miles away are in fact - quite literally - in our digital backyard. Which makes it a lot harder to just sit back and watch.
 
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13:53
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Where 2.0 has started. One series of speakers down, and much more to come. I have the distinct impression that I’m going to have some serious information overload by the end of the day…
I thoroughly enjoyed Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock’s talk. His partner Paul wrote a couple pieces on rolling your own maps recently that I loved. They’re breaking down the reliance on the mega mapping API’s (Google, Yahoo, MS) as the only way to show your geographic data. Adrian also talked about something that I often think of; using more than just points in showing map data. We need more polygons (ex: heatmaps) and lines.
Nokia’s Michael Halbherr, head of Location Based Services (LBS) did a short talk on Ovi, their platform for seemless mapping integration between mobiles and the web. He made a point of saying that Nokia is mobile/guidance centric, not web/location centric.
 Next up was Sean Gorman, who is doing some really interesting things with his organization(s) FortiusOne and Geocommons. His biggest thoughts/concerns were over dealing with massive data sets and the emerging semantic web. To that end he announced Finder!, which I have to admit seems pretty slick. His demo was showing how you could mashup private data sets (your company’s local sales data) with open census data, all available for download as KML, CSV or shape files. It’s slick, go sign up for the beta.
Last up was John Hanke of Google Earth, who announced two items:
- Google Earth’s Geo Search API launching
- GIS data relationship with ESRI in ArcGIS 9.3
John mentioned that, “maps help us organize, plan, provide context and decide.” I think that’s what has made me love maps since I was a kid, and why I’m so interested in the ability to do dynamic and real-time mapping.
For thoughts and analysis on what is happening here at Where 2.0, I’ll pass you off to some mapping gurus:
Off the Map
All Points Blog
Mapufacture Blog
Google Earth Blog
The AnyGeo Blog
High Earth Orbit
Very Spatial
 
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13:51
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
As I was putting together my talk on “Activist Mapping” for Where 2.0, I realized that I was getting a little to fragmented in message. One of the areas I’m probably not going to have time to cover is what I consider the consumer-accessibility of mapping tools, so here it is.
Is There Something to be Learned from the Blogging Evolution?
In my last blog post I showed a slide talking about the timeline of major blogging engines. I did this because I was exploring a premise that there might be something in common with the way self-publishing tools on the web have developed, and the way mapping tools are developing. As I’ve dealt with mapping solutions on eppraisal.com and Ushahidi, I can’t help but think how powerful they are, but still so hard for a non-programmer to really master. The beauty of the blogging engines is that they finally created a way for an “ordinary” person to create a personal website.
When I look at that timeline, I wonder if we’re not in the same era with mapping that we were in with blog CMS tools back in the early 2000’s?
Comparing 3 Digital Activist Tools
As I was thinking about mapping, blogging and activism, I also thought about another one of the core digital tools that activist use worldwide: mobile phones. What would a simple comparison be between the 3?
Blogging’s learning curve is fairly shallow, if you can handle email or word processing, then you can understand how blogging works and do it. It’s middling when it comes to accessibility worldwide, due to bandwidth and PC requirements.
Mobiles are moderately hard to work into good activist campaigns, additional software can make this easier, but planning the campaign doesn’t necessarily take a technologist. Accessibility is widespread and simple to g
Getting from the Tech Elite to “Everyone Else”
Those thoughts led me to think about Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm book, where he talks about the difficulties of getting technologies to leap from the technology elite to the the masses. By anyones definition, I think we’ve seen that happen with blogging. Not so with mapping… yet.
Within the mapping ranks there are definitely those that are trying. Google’s My Maps and Platial/Frappr come to mind as I think of good examples of consumer-facing self-generated mapping applications. However, so much of what is being done (as cool/powerful/amazing as it is) is still only understood and grokked by the mapping gurus of the world.
This is seen first hand in what we had to do with Ushahidi. The ability to just create a map system that was even slightly geo-coded correctly for Kenya took a little work. Not everyone could just jump right in and mashup something as simple as that. Will it ever be as easy as jumping in and creating a blog, or will mapping always be a tech-centered effort?
 
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12:33
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
- October 1998: Open Diary begins and pioneers reader commenting
- March 1999: LiveJournal started
- July 1999: Pitas launches the first free build your own blog web tool.
- August 1999: Pyra releases Blogger which becomes the most popular web based blogging tool to date, and popularizes blogging with mainstream internet users
- June 2001: b2Cafelog starts being built by a few unemployed hackers
- October 2001: Movable Type released
- August 2003: TypePad launches for the non-technical masses
- May 2003: WordPress.org begins as a branch of the b2Cafelog code, and quickly becomes the most popular self-hosted blogging engine
- December 2005: WordPress.com launches
- July 2006: Microblogging tool Twitter launched
- October 2006: Vox Released by Six Apart
- March 2007: Tumblr microblogging tool launches
Sources: I put the above graphic together from the following timeline that I found on Wikipedia, Enterprise blogs and the platform owners blogs.
Why?
I’m working on my talk for Where 2.0 next week and am starting to think that there is an analogy between current consumer-facing mapping tools and where we were in the early 2000’s with blogging and journaling tools. Not sure if I’ll even talk about this, but thought the research into blogging engines was worth sharing.
 
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10:20
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
An article over at Ostatic blog about the escalating open source wars at the OLPC got me thinking again about this project. In general, I’m a big proponent of using OS in the OLPC and hate where this fight is taking things. Why do I even like the OLPC? Well, it has something to do with this quote:
It should be noted that the point of the laptop project was not to give children access to the Internet, or to word processors, or even so that they could learn to touch-type. The idea was to provide children with an open-ended system with which they could tinker and explore — and through that exploration, learn. Papert long referred to computers as “the children’s machine,” because it offers children the chance to learn by creating and sharing, two key elements of Papert’s educational theory known as “constructionism.”
At the end of the day, I just want more computers in the hands of kids in Africa. It’s only by younger generations gaining access to technology that we see major change happen.
Of course, this begs the question about mobile phones. Is it possible to program for mobile phones on mobile phones? If so, maybe we can skip some of this PC paradigm altogether…
 
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11:23
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
There is a reason that Africans, by and large, love Nokia and there’s a reason that the brand has made such an impact in that part of the world. While most companies around the world are ignoring Africa, Nokia actively develops solutions for the continent.
I’m continually impressed with Nokia. They seem to really care about making money by doing things right. That’s easy enough for any large multinational to say, but much harder to practice. However, a couple new stories popped up recently that prove this out.
First off, you should go read what Jan Chipchase is writing about Nokia’s Open Studios. They’re working in shanty towns from Ghana to India actively listening to their target audience in the developing world. One of the initiatives that they just ran was a competition to design your ideal future phone”. Below is just one of the designs, see the rest in at BusinessWeek.
Nokia Civilian Police: Designed by a 17-year-old living in a Liberian refugee settlement, this phone is designed to help the user record daily life in the camp. This way he can share his experiences with others. It also helps fight crime by including two separate cameras. This also ensures that both he and his brother have access to a camera.
Beyond the ethnographic and discovery stages of what Nokia does are the actual phones. Juliana writes about Nokia’s new mobile phones for emerging markets. This is where all the work by people like Jan and Younghee come to fruition.
Lastly, everyone should be aware of Nokia’s Beta Labs, which is full of news and information on what they’re doing in markets around the world. It’s their skunkworks and R&D center (the stuff that they share anyway), and it’s just one more touch point to see how Nokia is innovating around the world.
 
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15:12
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
This was my favorite talk at the Web 2.0 Expo - probably one of my favorite talks period. I promptly went out and bought Clay’s new book, Here Comes Everybody, and am working through that right now. It’s good.
The big question he answers is, “Where do people find the time?”
Enjoy the 15 minute video:
Read the transcript here.
 
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9:40
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
“Building a Startup You Love is Hard”
A new paper by South African Gareth Knight that gives valuable advice for new entrepreneurs in the digital space. He’s the creator of Kindo, a family tree application.
Startups Nigeria Blog
I’m really digging this new blog by a Nigerian named Loy. He’s covering some cool new apps by Nigerians, including CVCrib, which I plan on reviewing myself soon.
Techpreneurs in Kenya
A PDF document by Business Daily that discusses some of the brilliant young entrepreneurs and their ideas in Kenya. Here’s the PDF for download
“Why Africa May Never Produce a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or Facebook”
An interesting article that discusses the challenge that young college-level entrepreneurs face in Africa.
 
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10:51
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
There are a number of technology companies from South Africa that have had no small amount of success. I want to take a minute to highlight two of them though, because I think they show something important.
The decision you have to make when deciding to create a technology business, a web or mobile application in Africa, is whether it’s something for the local market or international. Very few companies are solving for both. In my examples you’ll see Mxit, a company solving for a local problem, and Synthasite, a company solving for an international problem.
For those who don’t know, Mxit created a java-enabled chat application for mobile phones that decreases the cost per message compared by ~90% of a normal SMS message. They have over 7.5 million users after just a few years in action, and are the staple communication system for young mobile users in South Africa. It’s a phenomenon, and they’re looking to expand internationally.
Synthasite is the free web site creator and publishing platform, designed and created in the mold of any Web 2.0 app coming out of the Silicon Valley. Vinny, the founder, tells me that they have over 70k users and are increasing that by 1000 each day - which puts them as one of the top 3 services like this in the world. They have just moved 1/3 of their operations to San Francisco, with 2/3 of the company still in Cape Town.
Both of these companies had completely different strategies: local and global. These companies serve to prove that any developer in Africa with a good idea that solves a problem, and has the drive to see it through, can be incredibly successful. It’s inspiring, and I hope that more of Africa’s web developers will see the opportunities all around them.
[Image courtesy of Rafiq via Flickr]
 
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23:07
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
I was fortunate enough to spend an evening talking to Kaushal yesterday. He’s a third-generation Kenyan of Indian descent, now working in the tech-land of San Francisco.
During the course of our discussion, we talked about mobile phones and the web. An interesting point that Kaushal brought up was the fact that only a certain layer of society really has access to the web, and the rest only have access to simple communications through their mobile phone.
That little insight gets pretty interesting when you start applying some real project concepts to that thought. One of Kaushal’s ideas was to create a job platform that had two different levels and forms of interaction (using some of the same ideas behind Babajob in India).
- Those hiring would interact on the web level first, and also the mobile at some point.
- Job seekers would only need to ever interact through their mobile phone.
This allows those without access to high bandwidth technology to bypass the normal flaws (in a Western ideology) in the technology loop that generally break the cycle in Africa.
The Technology Gap in Africa
UNCTAD defines the technology gap:
“There is a wide gap between those who have access to technology and use it effectively and those who do not. The technology gap exists between those who can create and innovate to produce new technologies and those who cannot. It also exists between those who can access, adapt, master and use existing technologies and those who cannot.”
In Africa, the world thinks of the technology gap as the lack of bandwidth, low access to computers and non-data enabled mobile phones. This is all true, these deficiencies do cause a technology gap to grow. African income levels just won’t allow the same type of consumer behavior towards all technologies as we see in the West.
The average African is not the same type of technology user as the average European or American. Information flows differently, African’s don’t drink from the fire-hose of data that we do. They do use technology though, almost everyone has the minimal level of access to a mobile phone.
What if the technology gap that we see is not as big as we think?
In the UNCTAD definition, we can agree that there is a difference of levels between access and use. However, the gap between creation and innovation is less clear. It gets downright blurry when talking about adaptation and mastering of technologies.
You see, most Africans have a better understanding of the abilities and limitations of their mobile phones that most Americans. There is more modding and hacking of hardware happening in Africa than almost anywhere in Europe.
Summarizing these many thoughts…
What Kaushal is getting at with his ideas on using technology is really about adapting cultural and technological norms to everyday problems. Like any entrepreneurial thought, it’s about finding a challenge and creatively solving it. Ignoring the status quo way of thinking finding another way to make it work.
The R&D that goes into solving technical problems doesn’t always happen in the traditional form in Africa. It happens on the street level with little fan fair, it’s not always flashy and it doesn’t always conform to the way that Westerners would like to see a problem solved.
More high school and university programs should be in place to train technologists, but what is really needed is more businesses being created by solving African technology and communication problems. African government organizations generally do a poor job of marshaling their resources to foster growth in the technology sector - so more businesses pressuring their leaders to pay attention to this industry would be welcome as well.
 
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14:51
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
There are more and more services popping up created for Africans living abroad to shop and deliver commodities to their relatives in their home country. As covered in a previous story, the sub-Saharan African remittance market is about $20 billion annually, so it only makes sense for more tech-smart businessmen to tap into this.
The lack of any cost-effective traditional money transfer service has also played a part in the creation of this financial back-channel. Africans in the diaspora can buy (or send) a wide variety of goods and services including; airtime minutes, flowers, cakes, school fees, shopping vouchers, etc… the list goes on.
Below are a couple of these websites and their respective country:
iCare - Uganda
Happysend - Cameroon
Akyedie - Ghana
MamaMikes - Kenya
Zimbuyer - Zimbabwe
I’m sure there will be more innovation and interesting sites building out in this place throughout the continent. In fact, I’m sure I’ve missed a great deal of the sites that are already out there. If there is a site that you think I have missed, add it to the comment area below.
 
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14:38
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
ICTP Science Dissemination Unit has been monitoring and testing internet connectivity to 45 universities in Africa for the past 12 months. Using at tool called PingER Africa, they track real-time network performances in terms of response time (for a succession of pings) and packet loss percentages.
The 45-second video embedded below are their results.
If this type of data interests you, you should read their full report titled, Scientific Measure of Africa’s Connectivity (PDF - .64Mb). It’s an incredibly interesting report on their methods and findings.
The new millennium is beginning to see significant advances in Africa’s quest for greater connectivity. Nevertheless, although a substantial increase in the rate of expansion of networks is taking place, the ITU statistics on teledensity show that although there are 57.3 Internet users per 100 inhabitants in Sweden, 57 in the United States, and 34.7 in Italy, there are just 0.5 in Mali and 0.2 in Niger. The Internet tariff for the same type of connection is 1.1% of the Gross National Income in Sweden and in the United States and 1% in Italy, whereas it is 289% in Mali and 683% in Niger. The same differences are reflected by the Internet performance.
One other organization to pay attention to is AfrISPA (African Internet Service Provider Associations), run by Eric Osiakwan. They have been hard at work trying to build relationships between ISPs in different African nations, building an association big and strong enough to make serious change happen.
(hat tip Riyaz and Brough)
 
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14:25
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
Everyone has to answer phone calls after midnight. Thankfully, it’s usually not the emergency that you’re dreading it will be, but a wrong number. Which begs the question, who calls someone after midnight without it being an emergency?
Advertisers, is it really that difficult to understand that you should advertise your value proposition not your unknown brand name? No one knows, or cares to ask, what ABCWidgets.com is or does. They might care that you create the right widget for their need, or that you’re the fastest delivery in the business, etc…
 Learn about saving the mountain gorilla in a conflict zone by playing this new game on your mobile phone. A Java game with an education component.
Saving your image files with a specific name (ex: soccer_ball.jpg rather than ns8743.jpg) is a lot better for both your sanity and your search engine traffic. Funny enough, but image search engines still use the file name as their key - so if you want to be found for a certain image, make sure you name it appropriately.
 
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0:27
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
The only other event that I’ve attended that brings as many high profile and high net worth individuals together besides the GPF is TED. What’s wonderful about both events is how open everyone you meet is to discussing new ideas, no matter if they’re (literally) a rockstar or not.
Unfortunately for me, I woke up to only about 20% voice usability. I could barely talk. After drinking gallons of hot water, with lemon and honey, I was able to croak well enough for my panel session on early warning systems.
Sitting on the panel listening to my fellow panelists was actually one of the best parts. Jan Chipchase of Nokia, who writes the wonderful Future Perfect blog, had some incredibly good thoughts on mobile phones and their real-world usage. In honor of how he takes photos of random things he sees around the world, I’ve added the image below of his Moleskin notebook.
One of the great examples he brought up was the how people were being incentivized to take their medications in some developing nations. They were given a piece of paper that when urinated on would show a specific code that needed to be SMS’d in to the health clinic. If it was right, that person would receive top-up minutes for their phone. Just brilliant.
The other panelist was Mark Smolinski, Director of the Predict and Prevent Initiative at Google.org. Again, another class-act with more experience covering health-related crisis in his pinky finger than I have in my whole body. He covered some thoughts on getting “two steps to the left“, thoughts on how hyper-early warning in epidemics can drastically reduce the impact of a pandemic. Fascinating and an infinitely difficult task to perform.
After the panel I was approached to take part in some digital strategy discussions with The Elders - a group of “retired” politicians and high-profile individuals who work to ease human suffering. A prime example of this was when Elders Kofi Annan and Graça Machel went to Kenya for 5 weeks to help resolve the post-election dispute. Needless to say, it was somewhat surreal sitting next to Peter Gabriel while talking with people like Mary Robinson.
Before the night was over, we were treated to a talk about doing something around the HIV/AIDS “genocide” in Africa, and a few songs by Annie Lennox. Her new campaign on AIDS in Africa is called Sing.
We ended the night with a stage discussion with Richard Branson, where he talked about being one of the founders of The Elders and how he uses his business success for global good. He made some polarizing statements about Mbeki and Zuma in South Africa, followed by some thoughts on letting Mugabe walk away in Zimbabwe. In the question and answer session he was called to task by some of the audience.
What I wanted to ask him, but didn’t have the voice for, was his thoughts what he likes to call crisis “war rooms”. He has big ideas on these for both epidemic crisis in Africa and the climate crisis globally. What I wanted to know was why he doesn’t throw a third one in to his collection - a crisis “war room” for human rights and mass atrocities so we’re more prepared for events like Kenya and Zimbabwe.
I’m praying that I get my voice back by tomorrow.
 
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12:45
From: White African
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I just got through reading an excellent post by Bret Taylor, ex-Googler and creator of FriendFeed, about the need for open data sets. He makes a compelling argument on how difficult and expensive it is to get any type of meaningful data that can really be used to make interesting web applications. I experienced this first-hand in the creation of eppraisal.com - getting good quality real estate data was not cheap or easy.
I think all of these barriers to data are holding back innovation at a scale that few people realize. The most important part of an environment that encourages innovation is low barriers to entry. The moment a contract and lawyers are involved, you inherently restrict the set of people who can work on a problem to well-funded companies with a profitable product. Likewise, companies that sell data have to protect their investments, so permitted uses for the data are almost always explicitly enumerated in contracts. The entire system is designed to restrict the data to be used in product categories that already exist.
Interesting, but how does this apply to Africa?
Depending on how you look at it, this is a great opportunity or a serious problem. For instance, it’s a problem for us on the Ushahidi project because it is difficult to get some of the detailed mapping data that we need in a usable format. However, if you’re an enterprising businessman you would realize how much un-digitized data is in Africa and would start doing something to create data sets and license that out.
Of course, you licensing that data out puts us all in the same quandry that Bret outlines in his post… That by it not being open and free, the barriers to entry are high(er) and only larger organizations with access to a lot of resources can utilize it. A catch-22 if ever there was one.
It only make sense to give up data, or collect data and give it away for free of the relative cost of doing that for each person is minimal. Anytime you need to use a lot of resources to collect data, then you deserve to charge a fair market price for it. So, while I’d love to have more free data available, I know that the challenges to getting there are quite steep.
A few sources of open and free data:
Twine - Misc.
OpenStreetMap - Geographical data
Freebase - Open shared database
OpenTick - Financial data
Numbrary - Numbers
DBpedia - Structured data from Wikipedia
Swivel - Misc and nice visuals
Jigsaw - business contacts
InfoChimps - Misc free data sets
NumberZoom - Phone numbers
 
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10:58
From: White African
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Today is the first day of the Global Philanthropy Forum. Last night I was pleased to find out a couple of connections from TED Global were present; Ali Mufuruki of Infotech and Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation.
I’ll be speaking on a panel here tomorrow called “Early Warning: Listening, Technology and Activism“. My fellow panelists are:
- [M] Mitul Shah, Senior Director, Technology Partnerships, United Nations Foundation
- Mark Smolinski, Director, Predict and Prevent Initiative, Google.org
- Erik Hersman, Web Strategist, Ushahidi.com
- Jan Chipchase, Human Behavioral Researcher, Design Team, Nokia
In the evening I’m heading off with Jan Chipchase (who I happen to be a big fan of) to an Adaptive Path event about using mobile phones, design and development called, “Street Hacks and Long Wows“. Should be a lot of fun! If you’re in the area, come and join us.
 
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6:40
From: White African
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I’m on my way to San Francisco for the Global Philanthropy Forum, and have been pretty busy. In the absence of any real thoughtful post by me, I thought it might be good to make everyone aware of a presentation that I found online by Rudy De Waele of M-Trends.org.
It’s got a ton of great information and food for thought. Enjoy!
| View | Upload your own
 
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10:10
From: White African
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UNOSAT has released the following map of pirate activity off the coast of Somalia in 2007. Fascinating map.
You can download the much larger and more detailed 6Mb PDF of the map here, or you can click on the image above to see a larger jpg of it.
[via War & Health and Humanitarian.info]
 
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15:43
From: White African
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My parents were linguists, they worked to create a written language for the Toposa of southeastern Sudan. From a young age the importance of language was impressed upon me, but it was academic… How many other 8 year olds do you know that are aware that there are 134 distinct Sudanese languages of which 8 are extinct?
Academic understanding of language barriers becomes real-life frustration for me as I try and cover the web and mobile space in Africa. For instance, I’d love to know more about, and do a write-up on the following:
- Ivoire Blog - The new blogging platform for Cote D’Ivoire
- Akopo - A social media and blogging platform for Cameroonians
- Mboasu - A new West African mobile remittance product
However, it’s hard for me to track, contact and write about services like these that are popping up in Francophone or Arabic-speaking Africa, simply because I lack the language skills.
Sometimes I come across what looks to be an interesting blog - usually due to visuals since I can’t read it. I then filter that blog through a tool like Google’s Translation service and get back a nicely garbled bunching of English words that I then work towards deciphering into usable chunks.
(did you know that approximately 50% of the African continent speaks French?)
PALDO - An African Language Initiative
These types of thoughts were running through my head, when I got an email about an upcoming meeting (April 2, 2008) and initiative called The Pan-African Living Dictionary Online (PALDO). They are attempting to create an interlinked multilingual dictionary for African languages. It is being built upon the foundation of the well-known Kamusi Project, which developed a useful online Swahili/English dictionary.
PALDO is particularly hoping for participation from programmers, linguists, database experts, lexicographers and past users with experience in other online dictionaries.
 It’s encouraging to see that this is in partnership with Kasahorow, who is working to solve the problem of localized computer input methods for languages. Basically, create a keyboard that works for multiple language clusters.
A couple years ago I wrote a post about technology versus tribal languages in Africa. It’s a HUGE hurdle to overcome when creating web and mobile platforms that you would like to take to the whole African market. It’s why so many companies do great stuff in their local market, maybe even their region, but fail getting pan-African adoption.
It’s unclear how PALDO will solve some of these issues. However, I’m always interested in seeing how aggregation and visualization of data can be used to create better products, or bring insight into areas where things are so confused.
One thing is for sure though, PALDO won’t solve my personal communications issues - what I need to do is go learn French and re-learn Arabic.
 
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12:56
From: White African
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Below is a question and answer (through email) that I had with Andi Friedman, who heads up Populi’s Mobile Researcher product. Standby for some really interesting thoughts on the mobile landscape in Africa. (read Part 1, with background on the Populi platform, here.)
A gallery of images showcasing Populi’s Mobile Researcher product in action, on mobile phones and computer interfaces:
Question: What about pricing? How do you charge for Mobile Researcher?
As we roll out additional products on the platform (Populi), we hope to develop a multitude of billing models (including free models whereby revenue could be generated through advertising, opt-in marketing, permission-based data mining or context-sensitive search for example). We’d obviously need to drive volumes for that to work effectively.
For the current Mobile Researcher product which focuses on organisations who deploy fieldworkers to conduct research, we have implemented a transactional billing model whereby the organisation conducting the research purchases credit allowing them to process responses. We took this decision for several reasons:
- The prepaid credit model has worked exceptionally well in Africa so far (e.g. airtime).
- The cost of submitting responses is borne predominantly by the organisation receiving the data (not by the respondent although there are tiny airtime charges for data), thus centralising costs.
- The barrier to entry and risk is very low as we don’t require organisations to buy expensive licenses or software. They purchase credit (even a few hundred dollars worth to start) and don’t need to commit to anything.
- Transactional billing is fair since the organisation is only billed for the service when it is used.
- Many organisations are looking for a hosted solution as they do not wish to or cannot support the hardware and personnel required to manage their own systems.
When an organisation signs up, a ‘Research Console’ (essentially a web portal) is created for them which centralises research-related activity (such as survey design, data export, reporting and fieldworker management). From here they may design surveys which consist of fields (questions) which need to be answered and logic which links them together (such as ‘If response = yes, skip to Q11′).
Surveys are then deployed to fieldworkers who conduct the them on their phones using a mobile application, WAP, Web or SMS (each ‘channel’ has its advantages and limitations). When a completed survey is uploaded from a fieldworker’s phone, the system calculates an amount to deduct from the available prepaid credit for the corresponding organisation based on the number of fields actually submitted in that response.
The baseline cost is approximately $0.01 per field (we work in South African Rands so it’s exchange rate specific). Thus, if 10 questions were posed, the total cost per response would be approx $0.10. If, for some reason, such as skip logic, only 5 questions were posed in the survey, an amount of approx $0.05 would be deducted. Airtime costs (rendered by the relevant network operators) are dependent on the package the fieldworker is on, but even in worst case scenarios are usually in the order of fractions of a cent per survey.
We also negotiate volume discounts in cases where an organisation wishes to purchase a large amount of credit.
Question: Why does Mobile Researcher matter in the African context?
Our goals for Mobile Researcher are to improve the quality, quantity and speed of data being collected. Bad decisions, policy and life choices are the result of poor quality, insufficient or outdated information. In Africa, where these problems are all-too-common, the prevalence of the mobile phone in the absence of other technologies makes it an excellent tool to help improve the situation. Traditionally, paper-based data collection techniques have been expensive, difficult to manage and have taken so long to be processed that the data may be may no longer be accurate or relevant.
To highlight the benefits, Health Systems Trust (an NGO in South Africa I have close ties with) is currently evaluating rural clinics using Mobile Researcher where there aren’t even computers in some cases. They receive the information back in near real-time as opposed to months later and it is stored securely and without the need for additional data capture. The possibility of building a near real-time Health Information System based on Mobile Researcher is a very real one. This could allow outbreaks to be rapidly identified, patients to be more effectively treated and monitored, and so on. As with any new technology however, it takes some time to educate and convince the naysayers.
Question: Who are the competitors and what are their advantages/disadvantages?
There are of course many companies who offer PDA solutions but we believe one of the core differentiators of our solution is that it leverages low cost and existing mobile phones and the internet.
Two companies offering similar solutions in the UK who we’ve found on the internet but haven’t had direct contact with are listed below. There are others but to limit the brevity of this email, I’ve kept to these two.
- Embrace Mobile (www.embracemobile.com)
- Bluetrail (www.bluetrail.co.uk)
Of course we’d like to believe that technically our solution is better (but that is up to the public to decide!). We have extensive experience in both mobile and web development and believe that the simplicity and usability of our solution underpins its elegance.
Africa’s unusual technology profile makes it the ideal place to build and market mobile-driven service delivery and information exchange mechanisms. While sending out fieldworkers to conduct research is critical (particularly in Africa where monitoring and evaluation of intervention efforts is so important), the real power will come when the end user is empowered to retrieve and feedback information. We are working hard to make this a reality. We have direct access to these markets (we’ve been focusing closest to home to start of course). Even in South Africa, there are enormous challenges of poverty and lack of physical infrastructure. But mobile phones can help overcome these challenges - a platform to leverage them is what is missing. I recently read your paper on The Africa Network in which you make similar observations.
In addition to our geographic positioning, we also believe that our high level vision will differentiate us. As I mentioned, eventually we’d like to see the end user being able to submit and request information with almost an unlimited number of interactions (for research purposes but also for a variety of other things such as trade, incident reporting, health information, remote diagnoses, etc.). Most of our competitors’ visions end at research.
We already have good connections with some of the biggest research organisations in South Africa (specifically in the health sector), such as the Medical Research Council of South Africa (www.mrc.ac.za), Health Systems Trust (www.hst.org.za), Human Sciences Research Council (www.hsrc.ac.za), University of KwaZulu-Natal (www.ukzn.ac.za), University of Cape Town (www.uct.ac.za), University of Witswatersrand (www.wits.ac.za), Statistics South Africa (www.statssa.gov.za), and others. It will take time for this technology (or rather the use of it in this way) to become mainstream. It will also take money and high level talks with network operators and manufacturers to be widely successful. It is our belief that we need to build a strong business first to be able to spearhead this.
Another South African NGO called Cell-Life (www.cell-life.org.za) has been working on an Open Source mobile data capture project. I have met with them before and will be meeting with them again this week at their request to discuss areas for collaboration. Of course our strategies are different: they are funded by donations where we are trying to build a sustainable business model but our intentions are similar.
 
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13:36
From: White African
Read This Entry & More At White African
 Twitter and Africa
Soyapi writes about the Potential of Twitter in Africa. Followed by a Twitter conversation of SMS and web costs in Malawi by Nchenga.
If you’re an African on Twitter, consider following the generic user “AfriTwit” to help us create an index of African Twitter users. Started by JKE of Kikuyumoja, see original post on AfriTwit here.
Mobile News
Ken Banks has informed me that FrontlineSMS has been selected as a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge, along with NMEM who used it to monitor the Nigerian elections. The Awards website should be announcing the finalists sometime soon. In a related story, Ken tells of how the UN is using FrontlineSMS to help with transparency in coffee markets in Africa. | |
