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suzanne ondrus

Social Media in Africa, Part 1 - 1 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ial_media_in_africa_part_1.php

shared by suzanne ondrus on 05 Apr 10 - Cached
  • undergoing a connectivity revolution
  • Africa
  • Part One of this series looks at social media contributions from Africans, Part Two looks at mobile and connectivity innovations and Part Three looks at how local Governments, NGOs and nonprofits are being affected.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Technology unconferences and Barcamps have sprung up all over the continent, everywhere from Kenya to Nairobi to Madagascar to Uganda and Senegal.
  • The three biggest success stories of independent social media projects taking off in Africa are Afrigator (a South African aggregator of African blogs and news), Zoopy (a YouTube/Flickr like service also out of South Africa) and Ushahidi (an SMS crisis reporting and mapping engine from Kenya). All three have drawn international attention which resulted in a major investment for Zoopy and Afrigator's acquisition (ReadWriteWeb's coverage). Meanwhile Ushahidi has successfully raised several rounds of funding after winning the Net2 Mashup Compeition prize of $25,000.
  • Afrigator defines itself as "a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the web."
  • Zoopy is a South African social media tool created by Jason Elk that allows users to upload videos, podcasts, and pictures and share them on the web.
  • Ushahidi relies heavily upon GoogleMaps, which it uses for mapping reports of incidents. It's built on the Zend framework for PHP and uses a number of different protocols for SMS, GPRS and mapping data.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10
       
      Example of mashup and use of geomapping.
  • The applications to follow are definitely the ones that leverage the mobile telephony infrastructure. An overwhelming portion of African users have no convenient access beyond cellular terminals - and that has spawned very innovative solutions based on existing and widely accessible technologies such as SMS. Examples abound such as Mpesa, Celpay, Etranzact and everyone else who is thriving in that formerly almost entirely cash-bound insecure environment. Underdeveloped banking and underdeveloped fixed telecommunications infrastructures are huge opportunities.
  • The Web Community
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 29 Apr 10
       
      Internet is expensive in Africa, at least where I was in Benin. It was a dollar an hour where I was. And teachers only earned $3 a day.
  • Mobile phones
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 29 Apr 10
       
      I was in Benin for nine months in 2006-2007 and can attest to how expensive it is to talk on cell phones- for local calls! A 15 min. local call cost about $20. I remember thinking how calling from the U.S. to Benin was cheaper than making local calls in Benin.
Barbara Lindsey

Kenya Launches Africa's First National Open Data Initiative - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...irst_national_open_data_in.php

africa national data open kenya openaccess

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 08 Jul 11
     
    via @coolcateacher aka Vicki Davis
Barbara Lindsey

Open university: Joi Ito plans a radical reinvention of MIT's Media Lab (Wired UK) - 0 views

www.wired.co.uk/...open-university

openeducation openaccess highered bwct mitmedialab MIT JoiIto

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We're sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground."
  • in which any bright talent anywhere, academically qualified or not, can be part of the world's leading "antidisciplinary" research lab. "Opening up the lab is more about expanding our reach and creating our network," explains Ito, appointed director in April 2011.
  • as Ito sees it, the formal channels of academia today inhibit progress. "In the old days, being relevant was writing academic papers. Today, if people can't find you on the internet, if they're not talking about you in Rwanda, you're irrelevant. That's the worst thing in the world for any researcher. The people inventing things might be in Kenya, and they go to the internet and search. Funders do the same thing. The old, traditional academic channel is not a good channel for attracting attention, funding, people, or preventing other people from competing with you.
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  • You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."
  • "Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."
  • It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."
  • As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".
  • There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."
  • "We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.
  • Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."
  • Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."
  • In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."
  • So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."
suzanne ondrus

Social Media in Africa, Part 2: Mobile Innovations - ReadWriteWeb - 1 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ia_in_africa_part_2_mobile.php

mobile_phones africa social_networking mobile

shared by suzanne ondrus on 05 Apr 10 - Cached
  • social media technology conference PICNIC2008
  • conference featured prolific social entrepreneurs and technology developers from around the world who offered insight into various projects from the African continent.
  • Africa is unique in that it seems to have bypassed the same era of community infrastructure building that has occurred in developed nations around the world.
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  • most of the technologies that currently permeate Africa aren't terrestrial. There are very few telephone lines, but mobile penetration is higher than any other region in the world.
  • Instead, internet connectivity is distributed nearly entirely by satellite.
  • The developers who are coming up with solutions in the continent, the ones who are writing software or hacking hardware, are creating for some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world. If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere."
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 29 Apr 10
       
      The word "developers" could also be "capitalists." Again, I don't see why cell phones are so expensive in Benin & Burkina Faso!!
  • Perhaps this thought is what motivated Google to invest in O3B Networks earlier this month. O3B Networks is an ambitious attempt to bring three billion people in the developing world (mainly in parts of Asia and Africa) online by launching sixteen inexpensive, low-orbit satellites. The potential benefits for Google are obvious. This is three billion new internet users, who will more than likely use Google to search, and who will potentially click-through Adsense links and use other Google products. An indicator that Google may be anticipating as much is their move into Africa last year. They've since opened offices and hired people in both South Africa and Kenya with plans to eventually operate out of all sub-Saharan African countries.
  • At the end of 2007 there were over 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4% Africa has become the fastest growing mobile market in the world with mobile penetration in the region ranging from 30% to 100% from country to country. Fastest growing markets are in Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt
  • The Democratic Republic of Congo, population 60 million, has 10,000 fixed telephones but more than a million mobile phone subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least developed country, mobile phone usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years.
  • Micro-payments and Mobile Banking
  • Mobile News Reporting
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