HASH – Page 62 – WhiteAfrican

Author: HASH (page 62 of 106)

The NEST Orphanage

July 11, 2007 / HASH / 1 Comment

Soccer kid at orphanage Four of the AfriGadget editors descended upon Limuru, Kenya to visit the NEST orphanage – a home of children whose mother’s are in prison. The orphanage lies about an hour outside of Nairobi and has 70 children ages 7 months to 15 years old. The true capacity of the home is 96 children, but the they’re resource-strapped as it is and the 70 they have is a lot.

95% of the children’s mothers are in prison. Only four mothers are in prison for capital offenses, the others are in for drugs, neglect, prostitution, or some other type of petty offense. Since the majority of children are neglected, there is generally a large amount of medical attention needed – which again stretches their resources.

Juergen, who writes as Kikuyumoja and originally asked us to take a look at the place, has set up a blog for the NEST home (www.thenesthome.com). It’s been up for a while, and it helps keep up to date with what is happening at the orphanage. If you would like to support them, you can there.

Afromusing has a moving blog post up telling a story about one of the abused babies that was given into the NEST home’s care.

Blogging and Social Networks are About OFFLINE Interaction

July 8, 2007 / HASH / 12 Comments

Two things happened within the last month that made me realize the true value of social networks:

I signed up for Facebook (finally, after much prodding)
I met some fellow real estate bloggers yesterday

Ory and Heather at the 27 Dinner in Joburg

(bloggers meeting up OFFLINE)

How could these two incidents be related? Well, the first is pretty obvious – joining Facebook. It’s the social network that has all the cool kids raving about it right now. It’s good, really good, at connecting people and keeping them coming back. I’ve used many other social networking sites, but this is by far the most useful and smoothest operating one I’ve found.

The second item was more important, primarily because we had a conversation there that proved out the theory better than anything else. Marcus brought up the fact that he thought social networks were a complete waste of time, it’s only offline that’s valuable. Social networks are most useful as facilitators for offline connections.

I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

Blogging can be useful for knowledge and as a public platform for one’s views. However, it shares something in common with social networking sites, in that it is also a way to network with people. Blogging can act as a catalyst for email and other forms of direct communication.

The value of blogging, and of being part of a social networking site, is that the people you meet and find through connections that you make online can be utilized in the offline world. Connecting to a larger hub of people, and being able to communicate with them all easily, allows you to leverage that group when doing things as diverse as looking for a new job, organizing a reunion or finding old friends.

The chance to meet with the bloggers at TED, as well as meet some great contacts for future business or employment, was the best example of this I can think of. The ongoing online connections will be useful for keeping in touch and doing a few projects – but the true value is when we do something again offlinedescend upon San Francisco, as real estate bloggers. The meetings that we have there, and the business that comes out of it will be the value for our blogging and connecting on social networks for the past couple years.

If you take part in these social networks, or if you blog, make sure you utilize the platform for it’s true potential – meeting people offline.

Heather Ford and an iCommons Relaunch

July 6, 2007 / HASH / 1 Comment

Heather Ford at iCommons.org Heather Ford of iCommons gets her Wikipedia page.
Heather is the head of iCommons, which has it’s world headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. iCommons also organizes the annual iSummit, held in a different country each year. I had the chance to sit down with her for a chat and can tell you that she is an amazing woman. I’m really impressed with how she has grown the awareness of open source issues outside of the US and Europe.

(Sidenote: What’s up with these graduates of the Rhodes University School of Journalism, they pop up everywhere!?)

iCommons.org Launches a New Community Focused Website
iCommons has also just launched it’s new website, which is a HUGE improvement over the previous version. It’s now a very interactive site that encourages you to register and dive in as a member of the iCommons community. This only makes sense due to the open nature of what they do. If you have an article, report or event to tell people about, do it here.

Top new features on the iCommons website:

A Digg-like voting system for interesting and important stories
An internal wiki for iCommons related issues
A new iCommons blog
There is now Culture Database
Create a “Node” – which is a way for people to submit projects for consideration by the community and by iCommons. “A node is a project that is focused on progressing one aspect of the open content, access to knowledge, open access publishing or free culture.”

iCommons has the respect and ear of many people. Africans around the continent should take advantage of the fact that it is headquartered in Africa. Contact Heather and her staff and find ways that you can work together. She mentioned to me more than once that she would like to have iCommons plugged into the local tech communities in each country – a great example would be the techies at Skunkworks in Kenya, or BusyInternet in Ghana, and iCommons working together on something.

A good place to start would be taking part in the iCommons community – register and see if you can add to the conversation. I know they also look for helping hands on organizing the iSummit each year.

A Few African Community Sites

July 2, 2007 / HASH / 8 Comments

Here are a couple of websites created by Africans for the African community. The first two are social networking-type sites, while the third is a personalize homepage.

It’s good to see individuals trying new things for specific niches, and even though some are built using prepackaged solutions. As John from Bwanji mentioned in a comment recently, using prepackaged solutions is the easiest way to get something out the door in a cheap and timely manner. However, it does constrain the product’s roadmap over time.

Bwanji.com is a Zambia’s social networking website. Bwanji is a community site dedicating to connecting Zambians. There looks to be about 3000 users taking part in it. I’d be interested to know what the percentage of users from the diaspora are compared to those within Zambia. On Bwanji there are the normal tools for interaction; a photo album, the ability to gather friends, a blog engine and forums. All in all, it looks like a healthy community and a useful tool.

Akopo, a blogging, chat and games platform, was created by another fellow African blogger: Nino. It was created using the LifeType open source blogging platform, and seems like it has quite a bit of traction (hopefully Nino will fill us in on the numbers). Though most of the blogs seem to be in French, there is an option to create a blog in English as well.

Afrikeo is a dynamic website homepage site, built using the Portaneo Posh tool. The default page comes loaded with African news feeds from Muti and Afrigator, and the BBC. If you’ve used tools like Netvibes or iGoogle before, you’ll recognize an interface that allows you to move modules around, add feeds from your favorite sites and create new pages for additional content.

The Pirates Trilogy

July 1, 2007 / HASH / 12 Comments

Pirates of the Caribbean 3

Fun!

I finally got out to see the third installment and it now joins my list of favorite trilogies, along with:

Star Wars
Indiana Jones
The Lord of the Rings
The Matrix

Where Africa and Technology Collide!

Author: HASH (page 62 of 106)