White African

  • Thinking 2020: The Future of Mobile in Africa

    Posted: April 29, 2011, 6:51 am by HASH

    A few months back Rudy de Waele got in touch with Ken Banks and myself about helping to curate a collaborative outlook on the mobile industry in Africa, called “Mobile Trends Africa 2020“.

    Our task was to gather the mobile minds from across the continent and the world and ask them to vision out what they saw happening in the mobile space in Africa in the year 2020. Not an easy thing to do, tech in general, and mobile specifically, are such fast moving items that it’s hard to say where things will be even 3 years from now, much less 10.

    Mobile Trends 2020 Africa View more presentations from Rudy De Waele

    The final 28 contributors include some of the people I most respect in this field. To name just a few:

    • Stephane Boyera (World Wide Web Foundation)
    • Will Mworia (Afrinnovator)
    • Gerald Begumisa (Yo! Uganda)
    • Steve Vosloo (Shuttleworth Foundation and mLab South Africa)
    • Nigel Waller (Movirtu)
    • Nicholas Heller (Google)
    • Moses Kemibaro (Blogger and Dealfish East Africa)
    • Gustav Praekelt (Praekelt)
    • Bright Simons (mPedigree, Ghana)
    • Nathan Eagle (TxtEagle)
    • Wolfgang Fengler (World Bank)
    • Anthony K. Ng’eno (WinAfrique)

  • More big emoticon symbol pictures!

    Posted: April 24, 2011, 3:08 pm by admin
    A lot of these big emoticon symbol pictures that you copy and paste in comments on blogs and Facebook, for whatever reason, involve love. There are different hearts, angels, puppies etc…but I don’t know why more people don’t make symbols pictures that include ‘cooler’ objects, like missiles, aliens or vampires. Below is a big set [...]

  • Ushahidi Strategy Meeting 2011

    Posted: April 21, 2011, 12:53 am by HASH

    [Reposted from the Ushahidi Blog]

    Yesterday Ushahidi won the Kenya ICT Award for “Social Equity and Poverty Reduction“, which we’re extremely grateful for. None of us were able to attend the conference in Kenya due to the whole team being at our big annual meeting.

    The Ushahidi core team works from 7 different timezones ranging from Kampala to Louisville, soon expanding to places like Brazil and Korea. One weekend a year we’re able to get together, in-person, to solidify our connections with each other and talk through the big strategic topics that are best done face-to-face. It could be argued that it’s the most important 3 days of the year for us.

    The First XV

    2010 was a big growth year for Ushahidi, where we got up to 12 core team members – doubling in size from 2009. We’re adding 3 more people this year, which brings us to 15, a fortuitous number for the team as many of us are big rugby fans.

    (Caleb decided to have a little fun, putting us all in our positions based on the date that we joined the team.)

    12 Months Later

    Last year we met in Miami, as we are this year, and a lot has happened since then. To name the big ones:

    • Plugins – extensible way to add new functionality without bloating the core
    • Crowdmap – maps for non-developers, also a means to quickly collect reports giving deployers time to install their own server
    • SMSSync – simple and robust alternative to Frontline and Clickatell
    • iOS – rich smart phone experience
    • Checkins – opens platform to entirely new uses
    • Stand-By Task Force – game changer in disaster response
    • J2ME – extending reaching onto older devices
    • Community Site – fantastic documentation
    • Map Geometry

    Looking at the historical record, it’s been a good year. However, there’s a lot more to do. At this meeting, besides drinking a Mojito on South Beach, we’ll get into some of the big future-looking issues, such as:

    Visual Reporting: What’s the perfect Ushahidi dashboard? How do we surface “power stats” for Ushahidi deployments and metrics. Swift-Ushahidi integration visuals on the front and back end.

    Knowledge Management: How do we come up with a plan to capture information that we know internally, so that it is shared with deployers and developers better?
    The inverse, how do we handle and capture information that our *users* know regularly?

    Crowdmap Scalability & Migration: Making sure that even the biggest deployments work on Crowdmap. Adding in new a la carte features, etc.

    Of course, this is a chance to discuss some of the more mundane items as well, around operations, funds and how we work towards organizational financial sustainability as well. It also means that we’ll be offline from today until about Tuesday of next week. We’ll be a little slower on email and other communications mediums, but bear with us as it’s for a good cause.

  • The Google Global Cache hits Kenya

    Posted: April 13, 2011, 11:51 am by HASH

    In January I wrote about the way the Google Global Cache is affecting Uganda – how local web caching is completely changing the internet user experience for that country. We’ve known for a couple weeks that this was underway in Kenya too. Well, here are some numbers on that.

    Here’s the aggregate month:

    We’re seeing the overall traffic increase 300% from around 100Mbs to around 400Mbs. Those are some pretty impressive numbers, no matter how you look at them. Why is KIXP/TESPOK not making some noise about this significant achievement?

    How does it look across the ISPs that are using it?

    KDN hosts the cache:

    Wananchi:

    Internet Solutions:

    Africa Online:

  • At the Best of Blogs as a Jury Member

    Posted: April 12, 2011, 5:44 pm by HASH

    I’m in Bonn, Germany as the English speaking judge for Deutsche Welle’s “Best of Blogs” awards (aka The BoBs). There are 11 judges, each representing different languages, and we each get to present one blog for each main category and each get one vote for the winner. Being the English judge is actually quite challenging, where many of the language judges need only focus on a single region, I have to contend with the fact that there are English blogs all over the world, so many that I can’t know all of them.

    House Help and Human Rights

    Blogs give voice – they lower the barriers, allowing stories to surface that would otherwise not be seen or heard.

    The first vote today is for a Special Award on Human Rights. It’s a sobering start to the morning, going through blogs where people are doing courageous writing, shining a light on atrocities from Mexico to Germany to China. My nomination was for the blog Migrant Rights in the Middle East. It’s a blog put together by Mideast Youth, led by Senior TED Fellow Esra’a al Shafei out of Bahrain – a true grassroots effort.

    One of the top contenders in this category is the Chinese blogger Teng Biao’s blog, a prominent human rights lawyer, writer and professor from Beijing. He was arrested this February dung the first day of China’s Jasmine Protests.

    Migrant Rights won the award. I think this is largely due to the fact that what the team at Mideast Youth is doing hits on a subject that is so rarely spoken of. There are millions of house help and casual laborers that work in homes throughout the middle east, they come from all over the world and they lack a voice. Their stories get picked up from time-to-time in mainstream media, but there’s a need to follow this all the time (with resources and a database of activities), across the whole region and that’s where Migrant Rights fits in.

    Expatriate workers are a crucial part of the fabric of Gulf society and economy, where they make up to 80% of the population in some states…

    Whether we are a Qatari citizen who has grown up with a team of domestic staff at home, a Saudi woman who relies on her Pakistani driver to go to visit her girlfriends, or a western expat who benefits from a Filipino cleaning lady and works in a smart, modern office tower that was build from the back-breaking work of Nepalis, Indian, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, we all owe these individuals a debt of gratitude. Yet instead these individuals are undervalued, ignored, exploited and denied their most basic human rights. This is modern day slavery.

    Congratulations to Esra’a and her team for providing a voice to the often voiceless.

    Other Jury Winners

    I was also in charge of the Best Blogs in English category, and I’m very happy to announce that the winner is Sandmonkey!

    (Note: For those counting, 3 of the 6 jury winners are from North Africa and the English winner is also from the continent. All for good reasons of course, the activity in this space has been amazing since just January. Now it’s time for sub-Saharan African bloggers to up their game. Part of that means nominating the really amazing bloggers who are doing incredible work in your region. )

  • Thinking About Africa’s Open Data

    Posted: April 4, 2011, 11:31 pm by HASH

    I love Afrographique, a site I just heard about today that does data visualizations on African data. It’s done by Ivan Colic, a South African designer, as a “small contribution to assist the changing perception of Africa…”

    What Ivan does is brilliantly delve into the data that’s freely open on the internet to show patterns and information in ways that we might not have noticed if looking at the data in its raw format. The problem that Ivan has, is there’s not always that much information about Africa to use – in fact, some of his maps show big blank spots for countries on the continent with no known data for them.

    Getting African Data

    In Kenya, Ushahidi is working on a project about public service delivery and the companies and government entities responsible for them. I’ve become painfully aware of just how inaccessible Kenya’s government data is.

    The entities that hold the most public and infrastructure data are always government institutions. Getting information from them, no matter where you are in the world can be difficult. In Africa it can be very hard indeed. For good reason too, the fact is that there are decisions made for and by politicians for themselves or their constituencies that they don’t want you to see. Having that data open, and visualized, can be damning.

    Tonight we had the Permanent Secretary for Information and Communications, Dr. Bitange Ndemo, at the iHub for a session that he wanted to hold on using Kenya’s government data for local applications. Dr. Ndemo might be the hardest working and best intentioned person in government that I know. He truly wants to see tech move the country further, faster and with everyone taking part. Open data is an idea he’s been championing for quite some time.

    However, we have a problem… A couple of them actually.

    • There is a lot of Kenya data, most of which resides in the Ministry of Planning, but that data isn’t accessible. We don’t know who to go to to get the data we need, and there is no mandate to support one group to centralize it.
    • Major data sets, like Kenya’s 2009 census data, are open (technically), since you can purchase the 4 books at $50/each and get it. That’s not really usable or accessible by many people though.
    • Kenya’s own OpenData.go.ke website has only ever seen a small handful of data sets, none of which are now available anymore
    • We don’t have a format for the data, it comes in anything from PDFs to Excel to CSV and books.
    • Groups like the Ministry of Education might publish some information on schools, but they won’t give anyone the location data. In fact, location data is the most hoarded information, rarely getting published in even a hardcopy format.

    Google has partnered with the Kenya government to show some of the data. The question is, why is one multinational given access to all this information, while Kenyan citizens or organizations can’t get it directly? Is it just the same data as the World Bank has in their excellent open data API, or is there more data visualized here than that?

    I hope that the Kenyan government will look closely at what the W3C has provided, and at what Sir Tim Berners-Lee advocated recently in regards to open data. I know that Dr. Ndemo is talking to many stakeholders on this, and my hope is that people step up and step forward to ensure that the data is open, accessible and usable – and soon.

    Kenya is just one example, across Africa much of the corruption and misinformation can be attributed to governments who purposely withhold data in order to further their own aims, not those of their constituents. Instead of being scared about what people will “find out” about them, these governments would do well to look at all the benefits of government open data initiatives.

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Fish cakes

Alas a fish cake.

Yet more fish cakes

Guess what ... yeah ... fish cakes.

The end of the fish cakes

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