ICTworks by Inveneo

• Comparing Approaches to Information Filtering for Relevance by @ScepticGeek Useful taxonomy of strategies to determine relevance within different search and serendipity structures. (tags: serendipity search information influence social socialmedia filtering algorithms)
• Mapping Startups & Services Filtering For Relevance In A Matrix by @ScepticGeek Useful post. Suggests thinking about information discovery services in terms of two axes – search/serendipity and personal/popular. Not sure it's the hierarchy I want to use, but an effective framing, with links to interesting tools in each quadrant (tags: search serendipity homophily information discovery)
• Mogadishu Man Fascinating news and analysis from an anonymous blogger in Mogadishu (tags: somalia blogs islam terror politics africa failedstate bloggers analysis)

... Executive Director, Malawi Health Equity Network Matt Berg, Millennium Villages Project Mark Summer, Inveneo Robert Kirkpatrick, Global Pulse Also see the Mashable Mashable & 92Y Social Good Summit: Date: Monday, September 20, ...

Mobile phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson will finally be entering the Kenyan mobile market by partnering with Safaricom to distribute Xperia X10 line of Android smart phones, according to Capital FM Kenya.

Country Manager Jonas Gronqwist said on Tuesday that the company aims to capitalise on the mobile phone boom in the country as well as introduce internet-enabled phones that will enhance internet penetration.

"If you look at the Kenyan market there are more mobile phones than fixed lines; the internet penetration is going straight up. I believe the possibilities are enormous for the coming two to three years," Mr Gronqwist said.

All I can say is its about time. Nokia, and now Apple are already all over the Kenya market. Safaricom even launched its own solar power phones. Sony Ericsson needs to step up and join the sales frenzy.

Hat tip to Kiwanja/Ken Banks.

You are not watching this post, click to start watchingWayan Vota

... Executive Director, Malawi Health Equity Network Matt Berg, Millennium Villages Project Mark Summer, Inveneo Robert Kirkpatrick, Global Pulse Also see the Mashable Mashable & 92Y Social Good Summit: Date: Monday, September 20, ...

An exhibition of African lace will start next month (October) in Vienna, transferring next March to Lagos. Details here and here.

Photo Credit: Al Pavangkanan

I have so much to do these days

Setting the alarm on 6 am

Waking up to full-packed days

Full-packed bags

I feel like a dolphin in a sea of A4 sheets

Happily hopping between meetings and lectures

Always reading 4 books, 5 articles and the latest email

Staying in the office until it is dark outside

Keeping a note pad by my bed for all the things Which I Must Not Forget

Setting the alarm on 6 am

Waking up to full-packed days

How I have been waiting to be this busy

Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) launched an Online Payment Solution. The system provides the tourism sector with an easy and affordable access to reservations and management of online payments. It is mostly geared  towards electronic tourism and largely ideal for hotels, tour operators and other tourism merchants. KCB system has been done in  partnership with  Nightsbridge. Nightsbridge [...]kabzinski.andrzej

Heather Blanchard, Noel Dickover and Andrew Turner from Crisis Commons visited the Berkman Center Tuesday to discuss the rapidly growing technology and crisis response space. Crisis Commons, Andrew tells us, came in part from the recognition that the volunteers who respond to crises aren’t necessarily amateurs. They include first responders, doctors, CEOs.. and lately, they include a lot of software developers.

Recent technology “camps” – Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp – sparked discussion about whether there should be a crisis response camp. Crisis Camp was born in May, 2009 with a two-day event in Washington DC which brought together a variety of civic hackers who wanted to share knowledge around crisis technology and response. The World Bank took notice and ended up hosting the Ignite sessions associated with the camp, giving developers a chance to put ideas for crisis response in front of people who often end up providing funds to rebuild after crises.

The World Bank wasn’t the only large group interested in working with crisis hackers. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft came together to found the Random Hacks of Kindness event, designed to let programmers “hack for humanity” in marathon sessions around the world.

While these events preceded the earthquake earlier this year in Haiti, that crisis was the seminal event in increasing interest in participating in technology for crisis relief efforts. A crisis camp to respond to the Haitian earthquake involved 400 participants in five cities and pioneered 13 projects. Over time, the crisis camp model spread to Argentina, Chile and New Zealand, with developers focused on building tools for use in Haiti, Chile and Pakistan. Blanchard explained that the events provided space for people who “didn’t want to contribute money – they wanted to do something.”

The camps had some tangible outcomes:
- I’m Okay, a simple application that allows people to easily tell friends and family that they’re okay, in an emergency situation, was developed at Random Hacks of Kindness
- Tradui, an English/Kreyol dictionary for the Android was developed during the Crisis camps
- Crisis camps also developed a better routing protocol to enable point to point wireless between camps in Haiti, writing new drivers in 48 hours that were optimized for the long ping times associated with using WiFi over multi-kilometer distances

Perhaps the most impressive collaboration to come from the Crisis Camps was work on OpenStreetMap for Port au Prince. Using satellite imagery released by the UN, a team created a highly detailed map, leveraging the work of non-programmers to trace roads on the satellite images and diasporans to identify and name landmarks and streets. As the map improved in quality, the volunteers were eventually able to offer routing information for relief trucks, based on road damage that was visible on the satellite imagery. A convoy would request a route for a 4-ton water truck, and volunteers would use their bird’s eye view of the situation – from half a continent away – to suggest the safest route. Ultimately, the government of Haiti requested access to the information, and Crisis Camps provided not only the data, but training in using it.

The conversation turned to the challenges Crisis Camps have faced in making their model work:
- About 1/3rd of the participants are programmers. The others range from the “internet savvy” to those with complementary skill.
- Problems and requirements are often poorly defined
- It’s challenging to match volunteers to projects
- There’s a shortage of sustainable project management and leadership
- Projects often suffer from undocumented requirements and code, few updates on project status.
- Little work focuses on usability, privacy and security.
- Code licensing often isn’t carefully considered, and issues can arise about reusability of code on a licensing basis.
- Projects can be disconnected from what’s needed on the ground
- Disconnection happens in part because relief organizations don’t know what they want and need and are too busy to work with an untested, unproven community
- Volunteer fatigue – the surge of interest after a disaster tends to dissipate within four weeks
- There’s a lack of metrics and performance standards to evaluate project success.

The goal is to move from a Bar Camp/Hackathon model to a model that’s able to build sustainable projects. This means bringing project management into the mix, and asking hard questions like, “Does this project have a customer? Is it filling a well-defined need?” It also means building trust with crisis response organizations and groups like the World Bank and FEMA, who can help bring volunteer technology groups and crisis response groups together.

Crisis Commons see themselves as mediating between three groups: crisis response organizations like the Red Cross; volunteer technology organizations like OpenStreetMap; and private sector companies willing to donate resources. Each group has a set of challenges they face in engaging with these sorts of projects.

Crisis response organizations have a difficult time incorporating informal, ad-hoc citizen organizations into their emergency response plans. There’s a notion in the crisis response space of “operating rogue” if you’re not formally affiliated with an established relief organization… which further marginalizes volunteer tech communities. Many CROs have little tech understanding, which means they aren’t able to make informed decisions about collaboration with technical volunteers. In a very real way, crises are economic opportunities for relief organizations – that reality doesn’t breed resource sharing, which in turn, gets in the way of sharing best practices and lessons learned.

Volunteer tech communities frequently don’t understand the processes used by CROs, and frequently fail to understand that there’s often a good reason for those processes. While VTCs provide tremendous surge capacity that could help CROs, if there’s no good way for CROs to use this surge capacity, it’s a waste of effort on all sides. At the same time, tech communities inevitably suffer from the “CNN effect” – when crises are out of sight, they’re out of mind, and participation slumps. This is particularly challenging for managing long-term projects… and tech communities have massive project management and resource needs. Finally, successful VTCs can find themselves in a situation where they have a conflict of interest – they’re seeking paid work from relief organizations and may choose to cooperate only with those who can support them in the long term.

Private sector partners are usually participating in these projects led by their business development or corporate social responsibility divisions… while cooperation with the other entities often requires technical staff. Response organizations are often the clients of private sector players – the Red Cross is a major customer for information systems – which can create financial conflicts of interest. And working with large technology companies often raises intellectual property challenges, especially around joint development of software.

Meeting with a subset of crisis response organizations, Crisis Commons understands that there’s a need for long term relationships between tech volunteers and relief organizations, tapping the innovation power of these charitably minded geeks. But this requires relief organizations to know what solutions are already out there and what are reasonable requests to make of volunteers. And volunteer organizations need to understand the processes CROs have and how to work within them.

The hope for Crisis Commons is to become an “independent, nonpartisan honest broker” that can “bridge the ecosystem and matrix the resources.” This means “translating requirements of the CRO to the crisis crowd, helping the public understand CRO requirements,” and the reasons behind them. This could lead towards being able to set up a service like “Crisis Turk”, which could allow internet savvy non-programmers to engage in data entry tasks during a crisis.

In the long term, Crisis Commons might emerge as an international forum for standards development and data sharing around crises. Building capacity that could be active between crises, not just during them, they could direct research projects on lessons learned from prior disaster relief, could build a data library and begin preparing operations centers and emergency response teams for future crises. Some scenarios could involve managing physical spaces to encourage cooperation within and between volunteer tech teams and providing support for future innovation through a technology incubation program.

Starting from the shared premise the Crisis Commons founders presented us with – “Anyone can help in a crisis” – the discussion at Berkman focused on the structure Crisis Commons might take. The goal behind a “commons” structure is to be able to be an independent and trusted actor in the long term, to be able to be objective source of tech requirements, and to be able to bring non-market solutions to the table. But the founders realize that this is an inherently competitive space, and that volunteer organizations might find themselves in conflict with professional software developers in providing support to relief organizations, or with relief organizations if volunteer organizations began providing direct support.

It’s also possible that another player in the space could compete with Crisis Commons in this matchmaking role. Red Cross could develop an in-house technology team focused on collaborating with technology volunteers. Google could use the power of their tech resources to provide services directly to relief organizations. A partnership like Random Hacks of Kindness could emerge as the powerful leader in the space. Other volunteer technology organizations – Crisis Mappers, Strong Angel – might see themselves providing this bridging function. FEMA could start a private-public partnership under the NET Guard program. What’s the sweet spot for Crisis Commons?

One of our participants suggested that Crisis Commons could be valuable as a developer of standards, working to train the broader community about the importance of standards, and on the challenge of defining problems where solutions would benefit a broad community.

Another participant, who’d been involved with several Crisis Camp events worried that “the apps, while neat, never really made it into the field,” suggesting that the problems raised are real, not theoretical. It’s genuinely very difficult for tech volunteers to know what problems to work on… and hard for relief organizations under tremendous pressure to learn how to use these new tools.

This, I pointed out, is the problem that could prove most challenging for Crisis Commons in the long term. When crises arise, people want to help… but it’s critical that their help actually be… helpful. Clay Shirky told the story of his student, Jorge Just, who’s worked closely with UNICEF to develop RapidFTR, a family tracking and reunification tool. It’s been a long, engaged process with enormous amounts of time needed for the parties to understand each other’s needs and working methods… and it’s easy to understand why it might be difficult to convince volunteers to participate to this depth in a project.

I offered an observation from my time working on Geekcorps – I meet a lot of geeks who are convinced that the tech they’re most interested in – XML microformats, mesh wireless, cryptographic voting protocols – are precisely what the world needs to solve some pressing crisis. Occasionally, they’re right. Often, they’re more attached to their tech of choice than to addressing the crisis in question.

As such, the toughest job is defining problems and matching geeks to problems. At Geekcorps, it often took six months to design a volunteer assignment, and a talented tech person needed to meet several times with a tech firm to understand needs, brainstorm projects and create a scope of work, so we could recruit the right volunteer. While that model was expensive – and ultimately, made Geekcorps unsustainable – I think aspects of it could help Crisis Commons find a place in the world.

I ended up suggesting that Crisis Commons act as:
- a consultant to relief organizations, helping them define their technical needs, understand what was already available commercially and non-commercially and to frame needs to volunteer communities who could assist them
- a matchmaking service that connected volunteer orgs to short term and long term tech needs, preferably ones that had been clearly defined through a collaborative process
- a repository for best practices, collective knowledge about what works in this collaboration.

Unclear that this is the right solution for Crisis Commons or the road they’ll follow, but I came away with a strong sense that they are wrestling with the right questions in figuring out how to be most effective in this space. Very much looking forward to discovering what they come up with.

Salt-making, Awe, Nasarawa State, originally uploaded by nobodaddy69.

Crossing the river at Awe, Nasarawa State, originally uploaded by nobodaddy69.

The Andoma of Doma, originally uploaded by nobodaddy69.

Guards at the Andoma's palace, Andoma, Nasarawa State, originally uploaded by nobodaddy69.

Authored by: Ignacio Mas

Editor's note: This is the first entry of a two-part series focused on the promise of mobile payments, contributed by Ignacio Mas from the Financial Services for the Poor Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Bridge International Academies is a new for-profit primary school franchise with big plans. It aims to build and manage low-cost schools, the kind that cost $4 per kid per month. And it hopes to build lots of them, ramping up eventually to one new school launched per day, first in Kenya, then elsewhere in Africa. Since its founding in 2007, it has opened 12 schools in Nairobi, through which they are testing their assumptions and refining their model.

To meet these admirably ambitious plans, they need to operate a very tight business model. Bridge International Academies works on a franchise-like model, in which school headmasters are engaged in a profit sharing relationship, with a high degree of standardization. They have developed highly detailed construction plans with simplified diagrams for how to build and assemble the school, allowing them to use standard supply contracts and relatively unskilled local construction labor, resulting in a cost of less than $1800 per classroom. They need to focus maniacally on automating their processes and developing systems for all aspects of their business, including in curriculum development and teaching. And to protect their revenue stream, they need to ensure that only students that are paid up each month remain in the class.

One thing Bridge International Academies co-founder Phil Frei doesn't want to handle is cash. He doesn't want school managers collecting cash from parents, as this creates logistical problems (how to keep the cash safe in the school, how to collect the cash from the schools) and raises trust issues (are school managers collecting side-payments, are teachers reporting accurately which parents are paid up). Equally, he wants to be able to pay all suppliers centrally against budgets his system has checked rather than from petty cash pots in each school.

Continue reading this story...

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If you are trying to become an entrepreneur and start a new business, the Startup Index is a great new initiative from Benjamin Charagu and Jay Bhalla. They're bringing startups and investors together with comprehensive resources like these entrepreneurship documents, presentations, websites, and books:

Start-up Documents

WSGR Term Sheet Generator
SME Toolkit IFC
Advisory Board Agreement
Cap Table and Returns Template
Executive Summary Template
free SWOT analysis Template

Presentations

The Lean VC a Silicon Valley story
How to Create a successful freemium
Customer Development Methodology
Start-up Viagra - How to pitch to a VC
Developing a compelling Pitch

Blogs / Websites

Mixergy
Hacker blogs
Afrinnovator
ihub
Nailabs
ICT Board
Business Plans
Paul Grahams Essays
Andrew Chens Blogs
Both sides of the Table
37 signals podcast
Y-combinator
Startup Nation
Y-combinator Start-up Library
WSGR Term Sheet Generator
Venture Capital for Africa

Books

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
Pitching Hacks: How to pitch startups to investors
The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty
Entrepreneur's Notebook: Practical Advice for Starting a New Business Venture
Rework
Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
The High Performance Entrepreneur: Golden Rules for Success in Today's World
Go Kiss the World: Life Lessons for the Young Professional
The Professional
Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry

You are not watching this post, click to start watchingWayan Vota

Yellow Masai is a
"comprehensive Online Destination Travel Agency dedicated to the East Africa Region" Their " location and team enables them to bring a local yet modern approach to travel booking taking advantages of technological trends to make it easier for travelers to connect and book travel deals with more hotels, tours and regional airlines."via MTAA

The Grid, Vodacom’s mobile social network, was originally launched in South Africa in 2008. In 2009, The Grid launched into both Tanzania and Nigeria – both developing African countries with high volumes of mobile web traffic. With effect from today, people from all over the world can sign up and join the social network.(...)
Read the rest of The Grid, a South African mobile social network, goes global! (163 words)

© Clement Nyirenda for Clement Nyirenda's blog world, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to delicious | Add to Stumbleupon | Add to Digg | Add to Technorati
Post tags: Grid, mobile, Nigeria, social, South Africa, Tanzania, Vodacom

Send in your archive of party pics from the 1950s and 1960s in Nigeria here.

Everything to do with the hausa language here.

Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE), a non-profit organization uses mobile phone games to improve literacy skills in emerging countries.  Founded in 2004, MILLEE develops human-centred, immersive and enjoyable language learning mobile games which are modelled after the traditional games children play in the community. In India, MILLEE is using mobile games to impart English literacy skills to the poor children attending public schools. Mobile phones have also facilitated out-of-school learning. The organization has confirmed the effectiveness of mobile phones in learning through field projects in India.

Mobile phones provide a cost-effective, easy to use and fun medium for learning. Issues with mobile phones such as small screen, small keyboard and limited amount of storage have not proved to be hindrances for MILLEE. MILLEE is scaling up its English literacy program in India and also expanding to China, Kenya and other emerging countries. The rapid proliferation of mobile phones provides an excellent opportunity for expanding into many countries. India, for example, has more than 600 million mobile phone connections.

Mobile phone as a medium of learning has attracted considerable interest. Last year Nokia introduced Nokia Life Tools, a set of application for Agriculture, Education and Entertainment services for customers in emerging economies. Recently, a mobile service operator in India has also started offering language learning feature.

Photo Credit - unreasonableinstitute

AttachmentSize Mobile_Phone_For_Education.jpg39.05 KB Sandesh R. S.