Neville: thanks for so generously offering the muti platform - that would be interesting indeed! Let’s see what other interest emerges in this idea. Also, what I am trying to get my head around is whether it’s necessary to create lots of new infrastructure for this sort of effort, or if we can’t just create a simple blog that takes advantage of existing sites like muti, del.icio.us and technorati to raise awareness around possible election violence in Nigeria.

Beth: I’m in touch with the GV Africa Editors (indeed Sokari is in the Kabissa advisory group) but I haven’t talked to them about this particular idea. Good idea, though - perhaps they could help to focus the world’s attention on Nigeria through that platform. In a way they’d be ideally positioned to offer some of the stuff I was talking about - a Nigeria election homepage on their site that gathers the content and offers instructions for participating via badges, tags to use, etc. I’ll invite them to take a look at this post.

And Imnakoya: good points all, which do seem to support the need for some concerted effort. I was intrigued and amused to see how much goofing around there is on the blogs picked up by nigerianbloggers.com! The Nigerian blogosphere does seem to reflect the rest of the world in the mixture of content. I did see some good stuff in there though regarding the election that I had not seen before.

I’ve started tagging stuff I find at del.icio.us using the (oh so imaginative) tags “nigeria” and “election” - would be interesting to see the picture that emerges at

http://del.icio.us/tag/nigeria+election

Cheers,

Tobias

Here’s a nice excerpt referring to saidia.org:

Так, например, высказываются предложения использовать Twitter во время Апрельских выборов в Нигерии .For example, there are proposals to use Twitter during the April elections in Nigeria. Поскольку выборы ожидаются бурными правозащитникам, активистам да и простым гражданам может оказаться нелишней возможность ежеминутно сообщать и узнавать о том, что происходит на улицах городов.As elections are expected to enjoy human rights, activists and so ordinary citizens can be nelishnei every opportunity to communicate and learn about what is happening in the streets of cities.

I would be really interested in finding out if anyone in Nigeria is able to use Twitter.

The translation of this excerpt:
For example, there are proposals to use Twitter during the April elections in Nigeria. As elections are expected to be not so quiet, it could be good opportunity for human rights watchers, activists and so ordinary citizens to communicate and know about what is happening in the streets at the moment.

Sorry, am kind of a neophite computer user, my children say I two centuries behind. So can you please help educate me about this “blogg” thing, you see I am in the US of A yet have not gotten into the internet “chatroom”, now you guys and girls are talking about “blogging”. I’d just wanted to know about what’s becoming of the upcoming Nigerian election and when I Google it, I came into your website.

The way folks talk about curruptions in African coutries in general and Nigeria in particular, it makes people think that curroption is sinanimous to Africa. There are curroption every where in cluding my beloved US oa A Or what will you consider the present adminstration taking billions of taxpayer money to plunge into the Iraq war and only the White House big guns got the fat and often inflated contracts? Or what would you can the Boston, Massachusett’s glorified BIG DIG where millions of dollars were syphone off by closely politically connected contractors? That’s just to name a few. Ok you’re talking about election. Has anyone been able to explain the 2000 Presidential elections - especially what obtained in the state of Florida? And how about subsequent elections frot with irregularities, which are always swept under the carpet just to keep “Democracies going”?

Now regaring Nigerian election, let’s pray that it will go on and that President Obasonjo with his boys will not try to hijack it. And let’s pray that violence will be very minimal so the most vulnerable members of society - the poor - will be spared unnecessary pain and losses. I remember President Obasonjo when he visited Harvard University school of government, immediately after his first term in office, stating the military interventions in Africa was sanctioned by the superpowers at one time and that they (the super powers) no longer consider it expedient for control, rather it’s civilian politicians. And given our US governments champoining “peration Freedom Irag”, albeit with the heviest of military might, I believe that the election in Nigeria a few days from now will hold. GOD save, Democarcy of Nigeria, in JESUS name.

AU
Baltimore, MD, US of A

… it begins

Thanks for inspiring us to get this started, Mr Eigen, and for the support. We owe you and Kabissa yet another one.

Apart from some of the technology issues that people are raising here - and which you and I have talked back and forth offblog - I think Imnakoya and Sokari are highlighting the main challenges we have to overcome:

Nigeria and Africa isn’t up to speed with “blog” technology.

(I.e.: How to get Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, Wordpress, Joomla, Tagging, YouTube and everything to work together so you can do something useful with them.)

To be fair… I think some European human rights activists, who think they know a thing or two about websites, are also lagging somewhere behind in understanding how it all works together… I’ve learned a lot this week

The other main challenge for us, which Imnakoya and Sokari are correctly identifying is that the Nigerian “blogverse” is fragmented at the moment.

I think that is a reflection of Nigerian politics… things are not falling apart, so much as very slowly crumbling. (I have written about this here. I also write a little there about my experiences in Port Harcourt at Easter in 2003. On which note, by a coincidence I’m writing this on Easter Sunday 2007 so Happy Easter everyone :))

Greenlightnigeria.org is going to be an interesting experiment, to see if we can get a wave of enthusiasm for blogging going across the whole country.

In fact, why stop there? If this becomes a useful tool during Nigeria’s elections - with the biggest electorate in Africa - it must be possible to use the same technologies and approaches throughout the continent.

But we are very much aware of the fact that this is an experiment. April is the start of the process… the real crunch time is in February, when local government elections are scheduled.

For now, the main advantages greenlightnigeria.org has are for election monitors, activists and indepedent witnesses to the elections; all of whom want to be able to get information, experiences and opinions out, but want to minimise the risks to themselves of going public.

I am going to have to do a bit of editing and managing as we will have multiple bloggers, plenty of opportunity for people to interact through comments and in other ways.

We will have to manage the garbage-in / garbage-out problem with having multiple contributors… there’s no getting around our legal obligations as publishers in the UK, so a certain amount of fact checking is unavoidable.

For this reason we would love people to approach us to become bloggers - as well as to be “commenters” etc - but we will probably have to pick people up slowly, do basic ID checks, etc…

However, despite these limitations I am really excited by the huge opportunities for people to interact and use this as a tool to create debate.

More to come… -t