ICTworks by Inveneo

The organizers of the Barcamp Nigeria has announced the date for the 2010 edition. The theme is "Creating local content for Nigerian web market", which will be the 2nd edition in the history of Nigeria’s IT industry. The event will take place on Saturday, 22nd of May 2010 at CITS University of Lagos.

The selected Keynote speakers for this year’s barcamp Nigeria have been confirmed. They are Simdul Shagaya, the Founder of Alarena.com and Chinenye Mba-Ozoukwo of eShekel. The two speakers have firm grasp of the Nigerian technology market and will be pleased to share their insight with us at the event

Barcamp Nigeria Website

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It should not come as a surprise that Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Most of their articles are written by people personally interested in a subject, and subjects close to home interest most people. And most people online are in the global North, so Wikipedia articles put to a map might look something like this:

But what is shocking is the analysis from Mapping the Geographies of Wikipedia Content. Mark Graham found a information imbalance that should give us all pause:

Remarkably there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the fifty-three countries in Africa (or perhaps even more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia).

Now I think Africa's low ICT penetration rate is the root cause of this distortion, and as Africa comes online, we'll see this map darken the "Dark Continent", but that's a long term solution. In the near term, there are projects like Wikimedia by moulin that are getting Wikipedia out to African communities, but unless there is relevant content, end users will not see Wikipedia relating to them - now or in the future.

Which means its time for all of us to do our share to make information available and relevant - to Africans and the world - on Wikipedia now. If you're reading this article, you're most likely someone who both knows about Africa and has the Internet skills to contribute to Wikipedia.

So start a new article on a African topic of your choice today!

During a recent Inveneo training of ICT professionals, I was amazed to hear that most everyone had a Facebook account. Not only that, the computer technicians were seeing a spike in bandwidth usage directly tied to Facebook. And absolutely everyone felt that too much work-time was spent updating Facebooks accounts.

Now you could see that as a negative - the countless lost man hours of work time spent socializing instead of producing goods and services for Africa's millions. Or you could look at it another way:

Facebook in Swahili

Facebook is driving ICT adoption in Africa

The consensus of group, marketing and technical experts at African ICT companies, was that Facebook was creating demand for their services. Current clients wanted faster Internet connectivity to download all the images and video sent their way via Facebook, and more technology (cameras, video & image editing software) to create content for their Facebook pages.

All the chatter about Facebook accounts was also driving new customers to buy computers and invest in Internet connectivity. "I need to get Facebook," is becoming a common refrain at retail computer stores. This should not come as a surprise.

Facebook in Africa

Facebook has over 300,000 users in Kenya, is the most popular site in South Africa, and is growing by 20,000 new users per month in Nigeria and Ghana - 3x the US growth rate.

Facebook is encoraging this rapid growth with interfaces in Swahili and Afrikaans, with Zulu and Hausa on the way. Yes, even ICTworks is on Facebook.

Benefits Beyond Facebook

Now Facebook is not a personal favorite, but I am glad something is driving ICT adoption, and through that, an overall comfort with online activity. I expect that from Facebook usage will spring forth usage of other web services, like Twitter and blogging, and hopefully a blossoming of local African content that will make conferences like this one, seem quaint.

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East Africa’s enterprises and innovators have a unique opportunity on their doorsteps to learn new techniques in web content development at the East African Local Content Innovation Summit to be held in Nairobi over 7-8 August.

The Summit is being hosted by Ignite Consulting and AITEC Africa in response to the urgent need for development of locally relevant content that is responsive to the interests and needs within the region about to link to the world via undersea fibre cables that will deliver much faster and cheaper Internet connections.

http://www.aitecafrica.com/news/view/86