Hblog

Blogging for Africa

I got back last night from a trip to Asilomar, Monterray Bay, to the north of San Fransisco. As part of the Stanford Digital Vision Fellowship, we advanced deas about our users by teaching another fellow and getting them to role play the user that we had in mind. I was Chichi from Nigeria - I was excited about a new project at the local telecentre where I would be paid a small fee to dispatch email letters to families in the village who had friends and family overseas. That's Njideka's project - it's exciting - and I'm hoping that the Oweri Digital Village will partner with my blog project and get African youth to start talking to each other.

I'm going to be conducting a number of training sessions with youth in South Africa while I'm in there in December. In the first week, I'll be teaching about 10 high school youths about blogging - we'll be developing blogs about their lives, culture and heritage during a 5-day workshop. I'm hoping to link up with other bloggers around the world to get the kids going. It should be lots of fun. Email me if you're interested in being part of the project. I need a documentary filmmaker to document the workshop - and others to respond to the kids' posts.

Check this out: http://www.themeatrix.com. It's a brilliant Flash movie that educates people about the ills of factory farming. The company that made it (http://www.freerangegraphics.com) has a grant to make Flash movies for non-profits - I think that it is a brilliant method for online activism - it stimulates empathy in a really direct way, and gets people to act immediately. Like everything, we need this in Africa, or at least, for Africa. I'd like to see one for the Free African Debt campaign. Any takers?

Digital Community Trees

I've had an epiphany. I know what you're all thinking: yes, Heather, you have epiphanies all the time - and they last approximately 5 hours - but friends, this time its different.

It's called community blogging and it's a way for community Internet access points (telecentres, Internet cafes etc) to deliver relevant local content. I've been thinking a great deal about the concept of open content but keep coming up against the stumbling block that, in Africa, we could have access to all the content in the world, but it wouldn't be useful unless it was converted into a format that was locally relevant. Blogging offers a really simple way for Internet-savvy individuals to filter through all that content to find stuff that is really applicable to the life of the community.

If we built a platform like the grand Typepad service that I use to update Hblog, but with more community-oriented features - such as enhanced hyperlinking to other people with similar interests, and services like community meetup alerts - you could get ISPs to charge a small fee for hosting the blogs and then get community access centres to incorporate these costs into the Internet users' charge. This is a lot more like the early Internet's vision of a place where users are authors as well as readers.

I'd love to hear ideas or thoughts on epiphany no. 56. Fire away!