Dispatches from the hi-blogs.info krew

BarCamp Africa UK – London, 07 Nov. 2009 November 7, 2009

Peter is at BarCamp Africa UK which is being hosted at Vodafone’s Paddington offices in London today.

Information on the event is at various sources, including http://barcampafrica-uk.wikispaces.com and http://africamp.com/uk (which latter is using a Livestream video feed on the site)

I will be blogging intermittently today, as well as tweeting (search hashtag #bcafricauk09 on Twitter).

Based in the premise that technology will be the way to develop Africa; aims to be action-oriented, user-driven, interactive event. The opening “keynote” is from Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, the Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), who gave introductory remarks.

One of sponsors is http://www.betavine.net (part of Vodafone) which aims to develop social and sustainable applications of mobile technology to bring about change.

I am attending one of the parallel sessions, which is on ‘Blogging from Africa’ – Miquel Hudin from maneno.org (incorporated in USA as an NGO) is leading it. They aim to try and deal with low bandwidth, multi-lingual issues etc that impact bloggers in Africa. Estimates are that less than 1% of world’s bloggers are from Africa. Finding internet access an be a problem; often have to use slow satellite connections. About 40 bloggers (out of a population of 23 million) in Ghana, for example, says Miquel. The maneno.org platform is available in nine languages (inc. Swahili and Zulu) – people can customise their own blogs on the site, which can be a help to newcomers to blogging and the internet. The site also runs a hib for African barcamp events. Miquel notes that a barcamp is also running today in Cameroon – http://www.maneno.org/eng/articles/country/cameroon/ Q – how many Africans want to blog in the language they speak? – won’t they reach more people by blogging in English?

Stephen Wolak, from Vodafone, is doing one of the first parallel sessions in the afternoon, on ‘Betavine Social Exchange – pilot in South Africa’ – which is about bringing together people dealing with social issues and technology people, including applications developers. betavine.mobi is an area for downloading applications. http://www.vodafonebetavine.net/bvportal/community/linux is for getting software to make 3G mobiles work on Linux. Mobile technologies are being used increasingly for social change. http://crowdtalk.wordpress.com/ is a blog related to this initiative.

Conrad Taylor doing a session on “Publishing technology and fonts for Africa” (>>>). I couldn’t go to Cornelia’s session on OLPC project, but you can find plenty of tweets about it; see also http://codex2project.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/