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Small Price Laptop

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September 14, 2007 in nptech, OLPC, ICT4D, Loband and Nigeria. 8 Comments

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’

Negroponte’s “$100 laptop” plans: yeah, right!

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Tobias Eigen

May 8, 2007 in Africa, nptech, Free/Libre Open Source Software, OLPC, ICT4D and Nigeria. 3 Comments

By way of the very useful and positively glowing with goodwill and open source optimism mailing list Bytes for All, I learned about India’s ambitious $10 laptop answer to Negroponte’s $100 laptop. The Times of India article reads like The Onion, I must say, and the first thing I did was go to The Onion website and look up related keywords. Unfortunately nothing about the $100 laptop, though I did find a good picture of MIT researchers and their $30 million dollar love tester and other silliness.

But I digress. I must agree with Jacqui Cheng when he writes in India’s “$10 laptop” plans: yeah, right:

It doesn’t take an engineer to realize that $10 per laptop will be a very ambitious project indeed. The current (and final) iteration of MIT’s OLPC stands at $176, 76 percent higher than originally estimated.

… Continue reading ‘Negroponte’s “$100 laptop” plans: yeah, right!’

Near a radio? Join talk about Nigeria election in BBC World Have Your Say

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Tobias Eigen

April 23, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Blogging, Nigeria and Democracy. 4 Comments

I got an email this morning from BBC inviting me to join their talk on today’s Have Your Say program is the Nigerian election. It’s on at 6pm GMT today, Monday April 23. They appear to be interested in hearing about how technology is being used, and my post last month on Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog.

Seems since then alot has happened in that department - but perhaps not enough. I’m still digesting it all, and trying to get my head around the tragedy that is the election results filtering through. The greenlightnigeria.org blog was set up by SDN, and NMEM, a to me unknown group, used the Frontline SMS tool by Ken Banks to do some election monitoring by SMS. I don’t know yet how the SMS experiment worked out, but the greenlightnigeria.org blog has been very inspiring to monitor, with audio and video testimony posted just about daily for the last two weeks.

Are you in Nigeria? Text your election observations to 0808-4032739

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Tobias Eigen

April 20, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Blogging, Media, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Nigeria and Democracy. 3 Comments

According to this Texts monitor Nigerian elections article on the BBC News website,

Anyone trying to rig or tamper with Saturday’s presidential elections in Nigeria could be caught out by a team of volunteers armed with mobile phones.

The number to text to is 0808-4032739. Note that number and tell everyone you know! According to the Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) website, here is how it works:

The success of our endeavor rest solely on the effectiveness of our volunteers. To participate is simple. First of you have to register as a volunteer, simply text the following information to 0808-403-2739. We will send a reply sms indicating we have signed you up as volunteer.

As a volunteer, you are expected to go out on Election Day and vote. This is the only way you can participate and report correctly on the election.

Volunteers are required to send in two reports on the conduct of the polls in their location.

The first report should be sent in before 12noon and should cover the following aspects of the polls.

Poll opening times

Voter accreditation

Ballot box / materials delivery times

2nd report at the close poll should be sent in before 6pm

Vote counting / result

Turn out at polling station

General conduct of election

Exit polls

And some more details from the BBC article:

The Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) will use SMS to feedback their observations to a central computer hub.

The collected text messages will then be passed on to other monitoring groups and authorities including the EU.

NMEM hopes the system will stop fraud, especially in areas considered too dangerous for other groups to enter.

“We want to set a precedent,” said Emauwa Nelson of the Human Emancipation Lead Project, a Nigerian NGO that helped set up the project.

“We want people to know that if they are trying to rig the election, there could be someone behind them and that person may send a text message saying what happened.”

… and don’t forget about blogging the election!

Then, if you are able to get to a computer with a microphone, please share your voice so the world can hear about what you are seeing and experiencing. Record a voice message to be posted directly on the greenlightnigeria.org election blog website. Or, if you prefer, send in your submissions via the greenlightnigeria.org contact form.

This is terrific news and I am very pleased to see that election monitors are making use of Ken Banks’s Frontline SMS tool to make this possible. These examples of SMS use for defending democracy are extremely important and can be applied everywhere in Africa.

Congratulations, Ken and NMEM, and may you succeed in helping to keep Nigeria from erupting tomorrow. All eyes are on you.

(If you can, please share your observations about your experience using this technology in a comment to this post - I’m very interested to hear about it.)

greenlightnigeria.org - it begins!

Published by

Tobias Eigen

April 8, 2007 in Civil Society, nptech, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Politics, Create Peace, Nigeria and Democracy. 0 Comments

In a comment to my Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog, Tim Concannon announced greenlightnigeria.org - I’m glad to see this development and hope it catches on. Congratulations SDN and IDASA! Please help spread the word and make this - and the Nigerian election - a success!

greenlightnigeria.org

… 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

Audioblogging by Mobile Phone? Round 2: Nigerian Election Blog Blueprint

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Tobias Eigen

April 4, 2007 in Africa, nptech, Web 2.0, WordPress, Blogging, Media, Politics, ICT4D, Loband and Nigeria. 6 Comments

When considering a Civil Society Election Blog for Nigeria, we realized fairly quickly that it has to be possible for people to contribute to it via their mobile phones. Post via the web and e-mail, yes, but also somehow via phone.

The obvious first destination is blogging via SMS, for which various tools are available. However, the constraints of SMS are immediately apparent - the limited number of letters you can send in a message, and that (apparently) SMS service is spotty in Nigeria. SMS messages simply do not always arrive at their destination. There are also not many carriers, and it seems risky to develop a strategy that depends too much on one carrier even if it seems likely that service will not be interrupted (after all, the police rely on their mobile phones as much as anybody else).

The next destination, audioblogging by telephone, is compelling. In fact, it’s so compelling that I’m surprised it has not caught on already.. especially in Africa. Why should it not be possible for activists and election monitors - and indeed citizens - to call a number and leave a message about problems they are experiencing or issues dear to them, and be able to expect their message to be immediately made available for listening on a blog?

We brainstormed on the topic, and it is remarkable how many affordable options are available. Read on to join me in looking into three of them - PhoneBlogz, Skype-In with Voicemail, and Evoca. Maybe you know others? None so far seem to make it particularly easy to provide a local Nigerian number to dial into, however it may be possible for some Mobile Activista to figure this out - so stay tuned for that.

Continue reading ‘Audioblogging by Mobile Phone? Round 2: Nigerian Election Blog Blueprint’

Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog

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Tobias Eigen

March 15, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, muti, Media, Politics, Create Peace, Nigeria and Global Voices. 15 Comments

Nigeria’s election in April promises to be full of surprises - and I am worried for the people in Nigeria and the region that it may not go well and descend the country into chaos. A Nigerian friend who should know has already said the country has only a 50/50 chance of getting through this unscathed. I don’t think he’s exaggerating, considering the rather shocking reports coming out of the country, such as this recent Amnesty International Urgent Action alert about another old friend, Anyakwee Nsirimovu. The organization Anyakwee started in Port Harcourt, Institute for Humanitarian and International Law, is one of the first 10 members of Kabissa. Here’s a quote from the AI alert:

Anyakwee Nsirimovu, Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (IHRHL) in Rivers State, in the Niger delta, was attacked on 4 March, a week after an apparent threat to kill his family if he did not stop his human rights activities. Amnesty International believes that his life may be in danger.

There will no doubt be more reports of incidents like this as we get closer to the elections, which is discouraging to contemplate. However, I am heartened by the strong solidarity shown by members of the African Democracy Forum in response to a posting on their e-network of the AI alert about Anyakwee. People around Nigeria, Africa and indeed the world unequivocally stated their support and readiness.

One way to perhaps help to prevent widescale abuses might be to make this solidarity more readily visible on the Internet through a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog. I did an Internet search and while there are some bloggers (like this and this and this ) discussing the election and Global Voices and Pambazuka News have been covering the elections, I did not see any clear effort to use blogging specifically to prevent violence during the election.

Perhaps I am being naive and there are good reasons for this - I’d love to hear them. But I’m very enthusiastic about the blogosphere and am always wondering how it might be applied to the important work of civil society organizations in Africa. I have jotted down some ideas below that perhaps others might pick up on or that might spur a collaboration. And if not in Nigeria, maybe it will be useful for someone trying to do the same in another “emerging democracy”. Read on, and let me know what you think.

Even if such a coordinated effort does not take off, I’d like to encourage everyone that knows anything at all about what is going on in Nigeria these days to blog actively about it and to tag blog postings at Technorati, Del.icio.us and other social networking sites. The election must be carried out as much as possible in public view, and Nigeria must know the world is watching. If you are concerned for your own safety, you can always blog under a pseudonym at WordPress.com or one of the many other free blogging sites out there.

Continue reading ‘Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog’