Few people around Africa, or the world, are unaware of the injustices being perpetrated against Zimbabweans by their government. It has gone from being the “bread basket of Africa” to a place of staggering inflation and a broken economy. Through it all, there are a few voices online that help bring the real stories of what is happening there to the world.

One of those voices is Sokwanele (which means “enough is enough”), an excellent resource for background and news. Just recently they posted on their blog This is Zimbabwe about a project they have created to map breaches in the Zimbabwe elections using Google maps.

This map mashes up the data that Zimbabwe Election Watch has collected of government intimidation, via the media, with a Google map. Due to the hostile climate towards journalists, the urban areas get more coverage than the hard-to-reach rural areas. If anything, the creators of this map feel that the data is under-reported.

The interactive map aims to give a visual impression of the scale and many ways in which the Zimbabwean government has breached the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections. Elections are a process, not an event, and the same applies to rigging: the scene has been set for unfree and unfair elections on March 29th, and the conditions on the ground have been developed through many months of non-compliance with regional electoral standards.

In just a few days Zimbabweans will begin lining up at the ballot box to cast their vote. It’s hard to voice your vote for the opposition though. There are reports of “underground” SMS messaging campaigns, but everyone fears the government (or their sympathizers) backlash if they are found out.

It’s a tough situation, one that technologists have been fighting to try and help with on two fronts: to keep information flowing internally within the country, and also to make sure that the rest of the world sees the images and hears the stories of what is going on within the Zimbabwe. This SADC Breaches map is a great example of external messaging and visualization.

Here are some thoughts, tips and tools that I have found useful, and thought other bloggers could benefit from as well:

Allow People to Contact You
Please, make it easy for your readers to contact you personally. They might have stories, pictures or thoughts that could help you out. I’ve seen way to many blogs with no way to contact the author, leaving it up to the reader to spam your comments section. If you don’t want to display your email address, use some type of contact form plugin on your blog.

• Those who are using Blogger (blogspot) or WordPress.com can just activate it within the service.
• If you’re using WordPress on your own site, consider the Enhanced WordPress contact form plugin.
• Want to make your own contact form? I suggest setting it up through Wufoo, it’s brain dead simple and free.

Getting Readers to Come Back
Make it easy for people to follow your writing. Almost every blog has some type of RSS as part of the structure, however you can make it even more user friendly by doing the following:

• Most people don’t know what RSS is or how to use it, so allow readers to signup for updates via email. Personally, I use Feedburner and just activate their tool. Simple and well done.
• WordPress has an incredibly nice little plugin called Subscribe to Comments. This allows anyone who leaves a comment to get pinged with an email when another person does the same (if they so choose). I’ve seen this really reader interactions.

Useful WordPress Plugins
Be proactive and get ready for problems before they happen. Whether your site gets hacked or you’re finding that you’re being overloaded by traffic, here are a couple WordPress plugins that can help:

• WP Cache - for when you’re getting slammed by traffic. Think KenyanPundit.com in the middle of the Kenyan election debacle, or if your story gets on a site like Digg.
• WP Database Backup - I have this setup to auto-save and email me the file each week. This saved me when my hosting service was hacked this last summer.

Anyway, I hope some of this stuff helps, I know it’s helped me over the years.

A big thanks goes out to Nick Rabinowitz who saw what we were doing on Ushahidi and offered up his technological expertise in the mashing up of timelines and Google maps. This is really cool stuff, but beyond that, it’s incredibly useful for visualization as well.

One of our hardest problems with the current Ushahidi UI was trying to show the chronological implications of the data we were receiving as incident reports. What the Ushahidi Timeline allows you to do is see what, where and when it was happening - all on one screen.

How it works:

• You can scroll the timeline by dragging it from left to right. As you do that, the events on the map dynamically update to what is being shown on the timeline.
• Clicking on an event will open the “detail bubble” of the corresponding event on the map.
• Within the detail bubble, you can click to find more information about that incident.

A Kenyan Shortcode Number for Reports
Thanks to some fellow Kenyans, you can now send reports directly via your mobile phone to 6007 in Kenya.

An Ushahidi Blog
Ironically, Ushahidi was started by bloggers but a blog was one of the last items that we put onto the site. Well, we now have a blog up so you can find out more information, helpful links, updates, thoughts and videos there. Send in stories from Kenya too, we’d like to post them.

What About a “Global Ushahidi”?
What we’re starting to see with Ushahidi is a template for public-facing crisis information. Over the last two weeks I’ve been working with Ory and David to come up with an overview of what a global site might look like, its requirements and how interaction with NGOs and the public happen. We can’t build that product without funding though, so contact me if you’re interested in seeing the document and potentially supporting it.

As I mentioned in my last post, it would be good for us to have a tool to chronicle the incidents of violence happening around Kenya. That is the basic premise behind a new site that was quickly scratched together by a couple of us this weekend.

Ushahidi.com is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya in these post-election times. You can report the incident that you have seen, and it will appear on a map-based view for others to see. Ory and Daudi are working with local Kenyan NGO’s to get information and to verify each incident.

What you can do is get the word out about Ushahidi so that it’s utilized to it’s full potential. This especially extends to talking to the people that you know who have seen things in Kenya and getting them to the site as well.

the Ushahidi.com Homepage

At the beginning of a project like this the technology portion can seem to be the hardest to get off the ground. In the end, it’s just the tool, and the hard work will come from people in the field who are working with NGO’s to keep this information accurate and to chronicle as much of it as they can. If you want to help, get in touch with Daudi or Ory to get started.

When all the dust settles from this in Kenya, don’t be one of the ones saying, “I should have done something”.

[A special thanks goes out to David Kobia of Kobia Interactive for stepping up and shouldering the load and developing this site in just 2 days!]

Get the Word Out!
If you would like to raise awareness of Ushahidi via your blog or website. Feel free to use one of these buttons that I created, or make your own. (You can grab them from the Flickr set too)

The code for the bottom one would be like what you see below, which you can just copy and paste:

<a href="http://www.ushahidi.com"><img src="http://whiteafrican.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/ushahidi_v2c_250px.jpg"
alt="Ushahidi Button v2c 250px" /></a>

If you’re an African blogger, and you’re not yet a part of Afrigator, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Afrigator is an African blog aggregator that keeps you up to date with bloggers across Africa, but beyond that it’s a valuable tool. They provide analytics that allow you to see how many people are visiting your site and from where.

Afrigator Gets Even Better
They have just released their new beta of their service, completely redesigned and with added functionality. I’m extremely impressed with how polished it seems, but that’s to be expected from the guys working on it. There’s no reason for me to do another review of all the changes, those have been covered well by Charl and Marshall.

So How Many Bloggers are There in Africa Anyway?

That’s a question that I keep asking, and one that’s hard to measure. Afrigator might give us the best start in finding that answer.

I asked Justin Hartman if he would mind sharing what their numbers are by country. He graciously obliged, and you can see them at right.

Because Afrigator is developed (and marketed most) by South Africans the blog count is heavily tilted that direction. However, the rest of the countries are fairly accurate relative to each other. We know that Kenya does indeed have one of the largest populations of bloggers in Africa as does Nigeria. I do notice that there is a lack of North African countries, and I know that there are a lot of bloggers from there.

What I’d like to see is a true representation across all of the African blogosphere. With some intelligent spidering, I would think that Afrigator is best positioned to tackle this challenge.

What we can all do is help spread the word to our other African blogger counterparts and get them signed up on Afrigator, helping to legitimize our region by organization and ease of finding good bloggers in any country.

Heather Ford of iCommons gets her Wikipedia page.
Heather is the head of iCommons, which has it’s world headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. iCommons also organizes the annual iSummit, held in a different country each year. I had the chance to sit down with her for a chat and can tell you that she is an amazing woman. I’m really impressed with how she has grown the awareness of open source issues outside of the US and Europe.

(Sidenote: What’s up with these graduates of the Rhodes University School of Journalism, they pop up everywhere!?)

iCommons.org Launches a New Community Focused Website
iCommons has also just launched it’s new website, which is a HUGE improvement over the previous version. It’s now a very interactive site that encourages you to register and dive in as a member of the iCommons community. This only makes sense due to the open nature of what they do. If you have an article, report or event to tell people about, do it here.

Top new features on the iCommons website:

• A Digg-like voting system for interesting and important stories
• An internal wiki for iCommons related issues
• A new iCommons blog
• There is now Culture Database
• Create a “Node” - which is a way for people to submit projects for consideration by the community and by iCommons. “A node is a project that is focused on progressing one aspect of the open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing or free culture.”

iCommons has the respect and ear of many people. Africans around the continent should take advantage of the fact that it is headquartered in Africa. Contact Heather and her staff and find ways that you can work together. She mentioned to me more than once that she would like to have iCommons plugged into the local tech communities in each country - a great example would be the techies at Skunkworks in Kenya, or BusyInternet in Ghana, and iCommons working together on something.

A good place to start would be taking part in the iCommons community - register and see if you can add to the conversation. I know they also look for helping hands on organizing the iSummit each year.

This is the year or the rebirth of news coverage in Africa. It’s driven partly by the growth in non-traditional news stories brought about by blogs, but it is also a part of the greater change on the internet that is taking place. More people are getting involved - and the people are in control.

We’re seeing the beginnings of a new wave of websites and a new way of reading news. Here is a basic rundown of the current new offerings that cover news on a pan-African level:

African Path
Joshua Wanyama started African Path at the beginning of the year. He acts as an editor, bringing in stories from the AP and Reuters, filtering them for the most interesting news in Africa. More importantly, African Path has a stable of 38 bloggers who weigh in on issues that are interesting to people in the diaspora and within Africa.

AfricanLoft
AfricanLoft launched in May, just last month. Imnakoya, a well known African blogger living in the US, has put together a website that aggregates African news, African blogs and creates a sense of community. There are areas to upload images and video, as well as a stable 20 bloggers (which I’m sure will grow soon), that also write about Africa-focused issues.

Afrigator
Afrigator, also launched this year, is a blog aggregator for Africa. The Afrigator team informs me that they are tracking close to 800 blogs from 32 countries. Though the number of bloggers, and those who read African blogs, is still small Afrigator represents the beginnings of a new trend. Where African Path and AfricanLoft pay homage to their blogging roots, Afrigator IS the voice of the African blogosphere.

AllAfrica
I can’t leave AllAfrica out of this mix. They have been part of this transformation, and on the forefront of news coverage in Africa for a long time, specifically they aggregate the newspapers from all over the continent. That’s no small task! They have the best connections in this space, I hope that they continue to innovate so that they remain relevant.

Muti
The last piece of the puzzle is a community-based approach to African news. Muti allows anyone who finds an interesting tid-bit of news on Africa to provide a link to it in one centralized place. It’s a filter for “interesting” for both bloggers and news readers alike.

In Summary
I’m excited about the way technologists are stepping up to solve the information gap in Africa. I’m even more interested in seeing how these different entities will evolve through this year. Knowing most of them personally, and knowing the amount of hard work and time they spend on their websites, I’m convinced that continued growth is in order.

[Update: if you feel that I missed a particular site, especially if it’s not in English, please let me know. I am burdened with a language barrier called French, so many times those great Francophone websites are missed by me.]