In September last year, I blogged about the very innovative nGOmobile competition - well, it seems it was a resounding success! I received an email today from Ken announcing that the winners have been chosen and profiled yesterday at the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona. (Sokari blogged earlier about Ken’s encounter threre with a $20 screenless mobile phone!).
More info, links and photos to come soon on the nGOmobile website, but in the meantime - congratulations to the winners! According to the website, there were over 70 applications, from which the following four winners were selected by a panel of judges:
Participatory rapid response forest management system (Kenya)
This project is working with local communities to promote the protection and sustainable use of environmental resources. They plan to implement messaging services to help with reporting, field communications and to provide an early warning system to help combat poaching and illegal logging
Ask NETWAS a water, sanitation and hygiene question and get an answer (Uganda)
This NGO plans to launch an SMS-based service for rural communities allowing them to ask a range of water-based questions on topics such as sanitation, hygiene, water harvesting, and water technologies
Continue reading ‘Projects in Kenya and Uganda among winners of nGOmobile competition!’
My kids can’t read, so I can safely share the news here that my father has very generously given me the go ahead to buy them OLPC Laptops for Christmas. Believe you me, they (and I) are going to be very excited to rip open their presents this year. The deadline for participating is November 26th, 2007 - so as of this writing it’s still not too late to order yours!
I complain alot about the OLPC project, but at the end of the day I am excited about the devices and am pleased that my children will finally get to have one - and in the process help to make sure that some kids (hopefully in Africa) also get to have them. I am also pleased at least to perceive that Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC Foundation appear to be coming back to earth and are developing realistic plans for deploying millions of these laptops in the third world. Perhaps I will even stop calling it a dam project with bunny ears.
Despite my excitement, I can’t help but continue complaining a little. It’s not so much about the devices but the attitude of Negroponte and the appearance of OLPC as traditional, very costly, top-heavy and not especially participative development project.
According to the Terms of “Give One Get One” page on the laptopgiving.org website (reposted below), that $847.90 purchase has involved us irrevocably in a global educational movement - participation may not be cancelled - even though there are no assurances as to when our devices will actually get here. The reason for this is that their priority is not me but the children in poor countries that will get the donated machines. If we decide to change our minds and ask for our money back, we have to act within 30 days, even if the devices are not in our possession and we haven’t decided if the laptops work well for us. And once we have them we will be seeking help using it from friends, family and bloggers. Wow!
I’m a geek and am used to getting help online, and everyone who knows me can attest that I am always eager to join global movements for change, especially when they involve creative uses of computers and the Internet, but these terms are still fairly heavy handed.
Continue reading ‘This email confirms that you have paid OLPC Foundation $847.90 USD using PayPal.’
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Via the mobileactive mailing list, I learned today about the nGOmobile competition, which is kicking off today! Grassroots groups in the third world seeking the tools and resources to use mobile phones and SMS in pursuit of their missions are invited to participate.
I am particularly excited because I have observed over the last two years, since participating in the first Mobile Active Convergence in Toronto back in 2005, that the opportunities of mobile phones for advocacy in the third world have been out there and available, but not fully exploited. The case studies (what works and what does not work) have not been widely shared and discussed for others around the continent to benefit from. More civil society groups need to see examples of how this technology is empowering others - and can empower them.
This competition will go a long way to remedying that problem - so hats off to kiwanja.net, 160 Characters and the others involved in putting on this competition. Read on to see the announcement, or go straight to ngomobile.org to learn more. Please help spread the word about this terrific initiative. Continue reading ‘NGOs going mobile… join the nGOmobile.org competition for grassroots groups in the third world’
Tope Famayegun, a colleague and Time To Get Online training partner in Lagos, Nigeria, asked a poignant question in an email to our all-trainers mailing list today:
Does anyone know what has happened to Professor
Negroponte and the $100.00 Laptop per Child Project?
I was struck by this since she is in Lagos and probably held the laptop as it made the rounds in the audience during Negroponte’s speach at the Digital World Africa 2006 Conference in Abuja.
Since Nigeria signed up to be in the first round of recipients of the device, I’d be interested in hearing more from our Nigerian colleagues about how the project is unfolding there. Continue reading ‘Small Price Laptop’
I love Creative Commons. I love pictures. And I love Africa! So I was very pleased to encounter - and promptly join - the Images of Africa - Images FOR Africa group on Flickr. The group gathers images of Africa by people who want to share them with others. The photos shared by the group can be used freely under a generous Creative Commons license, and of course can be browsed, discussed or searched in the usual nifty Flickr ways.
There is even a beautiful Flickr map so you can place your own photos on the map and allow people to browse them by country.
I am enthusiastic about the new channels this provides for building networks of shared interest among likeminded and generous people in Africa.
I would gather that Flickr groups like this with such a clear common benefit for group members will provide a wonderfully gentle route into Creative Commons for people that otherwise are skeptical of the hype surrounding Web 2.0.
Continue reading ‘Images FOR Africa - Flickr group promotes Creative Commons and sharing of Images FOR Africa’
Published by Tobias Eigen September 4, 2007
in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Democracy and web2fordev.
I was pleased to learn from Nunu Kidane (Priority Africa Network) this morning that an interview Kim Lowery and I did with Walter Turner back in May aired on KPFA in Berkeley yesterday and is available online.
The interview came on the heels of the Netsquared conference on “remixing the web for social change”, so Kim and I were very much jazzed up by - and no doubt still processing - the attention our Kabissa 2.0 proposal received at the conference and the many remarkable projects and ideas we were exposed to. We discussed Web 2.0 concepts but Walter Turner also challenged us to go into detail about the history and justification for Kabissa, on what we think civil society is and how we support the important work of organizations in Africa.
Hey folks - I’m going to web2fordev in September and in the lead up to that am finalizing various outputs, including..
- A paper I have been working on for the University of Washington’s Evans School about Web 2.0 in African Civil Society and which will be published on the Kabissa Wiki
- An article about Kabissa and Web 2.0 for ICT Update
- A presentation to give at the web2fordev conference about Kabissa and Web 2.0
As part of this, I wanted to get an update from Kabissa members and others in African civil society about their use of blogging and other social networking tools - remarkably, there are not that many case studies available despite the clearly active use of these nifty new tools and the massive potential dangling out there.
So I wrote a post on the Kabissa blog inviting grassroots groups to share their stories and sent out a quick mailing to members to invite them to come check it out. It should be interesting so stay tuned. If you have some good stories and links to share, please do so!
Anyone attempting to visit saidia.org today most likely encountered some fairly hideous database connection errors. Pole sana = many apologies! Especially after asking a bunch of people on the DDN list to come and help me identify the best Open Source in Civil Society book. D’oh! It’s not too late - please come and add your suggestions.
In any case, it’s good to have the move behind me. I had been planning to move to a new server for a bit now but the timing was decided by some severe errors I was suddenly getting on the old server relating to posting comments and a bunch of other things. Now I’m happily moved to this ridiculously powerful Dreamhost server and I can’t wait to see how I will take advantage of the space and cool features. Let me know if you notice anything unusual after the move.
If there is one book that needs to be in the local public library on the importance of Open Source in Civil Society, what would it be? Add your comments to this post.
I am open to all suggestions - I just want to know why. Special points for books that talk specifically about Africa, and do a good job explaining what Civil Society is all about. The most suitable book will be purchased for the Bainbridge Island library by the local Rotary Club in my name, so I want to be able to read it and recommend it to friends and neighbors that want to know more about why I do what I do in Africa.
Update: as luck would have it, various things seem to be broken on my blog including commenting. I’m trying to fix it - in the meantime, please email me your suggestions and I’ll post them here later. Thanks!
Sorry for the confusion for those looking for this site earlier today and getting error messages or blank screens when submitting your comments. I had been planning to move saidia.org, but the errors I was getting at the old place this morning precipitated things. Please go ahead and add your book suggestions now!
Africa Source Photo: GNU/Linux loyalty. Photo by Frederick “FN” Noronha. Creative Commons. Attribution. Some rights retained. 2006.
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