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As I develop a draft concept document on a new iSummit in South Africa next year, I’m looking around at cool events to draw inspiration from, and perhaps form partnerships with. The International Development Design Summit is one such event which will be hosted next year in Ghana (as part of the Maker Faire Africa concept being spoken about on Ned).
This is a great event because it seems to be:
1. Interdisciplinary - ‘we believe that innovation thrives in the intersections of disciplines that come from bringing together such an eclectic group’
2. Focuses on doing rather than talking - ‘we emphasize the development of prototypes, not papers and proceedings’
3. Demonstrates co-creation in action - ‘It is our goal to demonstrate a model where a user-based community of active, creative designers can invent, innovate and inspire each other to create new technologies’
It’s great that the group has hit on the key issue that the open source/open content revolution inspired:
In the traditional model of development, communities receive donated technology, and while they may be trained in how to maintain and repair the technology, they are rarely taught or encouraged to evolve the technology and adapt it to their needs.
And it’s for this reason why it’s a little sad that they’ve fallen into another ‘traditional model of development’ trap: that innovation for ‘development’ is only about electric generators and HIV/AIDS projects, and not also about projects to get musicians to market their music, artist collectives to build innovative public art projects or interactive games that are about communities doing nothing more than finding a way to have fun together.
It looks like there is some will for Maker Faire Africa to involve artists in ‘fabrication conversations… as well as (to) create relaxed times and spaces for networking’ - but I know that this really has to be central to the concept - otherwise artists end up being the background music, decorating the space, rather than key participants to innovation challenges.
I’m thinking that for the iSummit next year we really need to make the connection between artists/creators and technologists/builders a central focus. I’ve had visions of things like an open day where artists come with their challenges (marketing their work online, building fun projects using technology, creating public art using public domain footage) and work on prototypes for projects with interdisciplinary teams who are then funded to bring the concepts to market.
Or building the entire event around a week-long prototype-building affair, where we fund, say, 10 ‘Innovation challenges’ and their development over a period of time. There would be a closed workshop for the 50 or so participants to come together, learn about prototyping and creative techniques, intellectual property management etc and then build their own prototype solutions to the Innovation challenges. In the weekend after the workshop, there’d be a festival, open to the public, in which participants could conduct ‘reverse-engineering’ workshops where they could show how they designed their particular solution - as well as some simple workshops around learning specific skills.
We could get big names to sponsor relevant ‘Innovation challenge’ prizes and involve universities, technikons and schools around the world.
Ok, now I’m getting really excited, but will have to chew on this a while. And would love to know what you all think!
I’ve been thinking for a while now how great it would be to have a Maker-Faire-type event in South Africa when Jess Hemerly from the Institute for the Study of the Future sent me a link to an AfriGadget post by Erik Hersman on the idea (original post by Emeka Okafor is here). I always wanted the iSummit to be more about really making stuff: making, building, working together on concrete, real things that you can touch, test and experiment with (Maker-Faire’s strapline encapsulates my favorite things in the world: build, craft, hack, play). I think it’s one of the best ways to learn and one of the most important ways to show how innovation can work in the digital space after the event (where there isn’t the awesome opportunity for people to get together physically).
According to AfriGadget, the organising team of the Ghana event ‘will collaborate with the organizers of the International Development Design Summit (IDDS), which will be held at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in mid/late Summer 2009′. There are so many potential partners for an SA event, but I’m particularly interested in the intersection of music and the arts (thinking of Dean Henning’s awesome musical toys ‘basic circuit bending’ experiments at LiquidFridge in 2007).
More soon…
Pic by Nortis on Flickr CC BY NC SA
To kick off my research into what’s happening in the Internet space in SA, I went to see one of my favorite people yesterday and came back super-inspired. Mike Stopforth runs a company called Cerebra who specialise in creating social media and mobile campaigns for companies like Samsung Mobile SA and the really interesting IS-Labs project. The great thing about Mike is that he really understands what old-fashioned companies rarely realise: that being open (and that’s open in the most essential human way rather than using open licenses) is probably one of the most valuable things that you can do for yourself and your company. Mike’s always been willing to make a connection, set up a meeting, speak at an event or just give good, solid advice - without any concrete idea as to whether he’ll get something out of it. And with me starting again again, I’m really grateful for that.
Anyway, enough of the mushy stuff. What got me really excited talking to Mike was his enthusiasm for us doing more innovative tech events like the iSummit. He noted that there is such an opportunity to put on great events in the spirit of Pop!Tech, TED and Foocamp in SA - but very few people who could really pull it off. The experience that the SA team has had in running these great events with an international network of some of the world’s top Internet thinkers is a great foundation for doing something as amazing - if not better - here, and I’m starting to think that it’s something I really want to do.
So. Watch this space.
I just blogged about the Global Voices Summit and the importance of community for bloggers on Techleader. What an awesome event.
Pic: by nehavish on Flickr, CC BY-NC
Oh, so this is why I had a sore neck when I woke up on Saturday morning.
Picture: Julie Melton on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
One of my favorite board members, Jimmy Wales, will be in Johannesburg in exactly 11 sleeps. Jimmy is in the country to launch the African Wikipedia Academies - a series of Wikipedia sprints, workshops and boot camps to encourage the local celebration of Wikipedia as an amazing tool for education, culture and enterprise in Africa.
As I continually say, Wikipedia is not exciting because its the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Its exciting because it gives us the opportunity to write our own history, our own textbooks, our own view of the world. Wikipedia is a practical expression of what makes the Internet special. And practicing contributions to Wikipedia is what makes us realise what the Internet is really for. It’s not just about using, its about being active participants in the creation of meaning about the world around us. It’s about valuing a resource that is powerful because it is in the commons - free for anyone to reuse, remake and remix.
Jimmy is coming to South Africa because he is passionate about his goal of ‘Wikipedias in every major language in the world’ - and this is where he’s starting the experiments. I’ll never forget how kind he was in drumming it into me that the Wikipedia way is not to just translate English articles into Afrikaans articles (even though it might start out that way). The idea is that a local language community can build its own Wikipedia completely separate from the English version. It is this autonomy and the community spirit that has enabled Wikipedia to thrive on the back of volunteer contributions by over 50,000 active users.
A number of schools in South Africa use Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia copyright license enables anyone to freely copy and share the resource in textbooks, lesson plans etc as long as it is attributed. In terms of local language Wikipedias, Afrikaans Wikipedia has an active community of contributors. But contributors are hardly applauded for their work in the local press, and a lot needs to be done to encourage the smaller local language editions of Wikipedia.
This is the goal of the African Wikipedia Academies. iCommons is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring people like Ndesanjo Macha, considered the Father of Swahili Wikipedia, Ian Gilfillan, a great contributor to the South African local language Wikipedias, as well as Frank Schulenburg who conceptualised the first Wikipedia Academies in Germany.
Better yet, we’re having a fabulous cocktail party during which Jimmy will talk about Wikipedia, Wikia (the business application of wiki software) and a vision for the Academies. Everyone is invited to that one. All you have to do is shell out R500 in aid of the Academies, and join the party at 4pm on Tuesday the 13th of November at the Grace Hotel in Rosebank. Register here. Everyone who is anyone on the SA Internet scene will be there. I promise.
Picture of Jimmy Wales (above) by Chrys on flickr.com, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.
This Monday, 24 September, is Heritage Day in South Africa.
In celebration of Heritage Day, iCommons will be running a parallel real and virtual campaign where we invite South Africans to upload a photograph or two to Wikimedia Commons under a free licence so that others can build on and share our memories. So, if you’re a blogger, please write a post on or around Heritage Day on Monday, including the sticker on the top of this post and a link to what you’ve shared. I’ve heard people talking about sharing recipes from Grabouw, photographs of their Miss South Africa moms (hey, we need a Wikipedia article for that!), and writing Wikipedia articles on places like Mzoli’s Meats in Guguletu (thank you, Jimmy Wales!). All the details are on the iCommons Heritage Day page. So, before you go for braai and beer on this important public holiday, make sure you’ve made a contribution to the commons in celebration of what makes South Africans tick.
Oh, and if you’re in the area, please swing by our sprint at Rosebank Mall in Johannesburg next to M&A. You’ll get a 10% discount from M&A if you have a sticker saying that you’ve contributed 
The image above by Daniela Faris is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence which means you are free to copy and share it - even for commercial purposes - as long as you give attribution to the author, Daniela Faris, iCommons and link back to the Heritage Day page on icommons.org.
Fumi and I are in Sapporo at the moment - working with the awesome team at the City of Sapporo to plan next year’s iSummit. Inoue-san took us to the Rising Sun Rock Festival yesterday. It was a truly awesome experience. 37,000 people, 6 stages, loads of artwork (by kids, professionals and amateurs), tree stump carving with chain saws, so many different kinds of food (from Russian to Chinese) and lots of beer.
In this picture, Fumi, Ellie and I are sitting waiting for ‘Begin‘ to start playing. They’re an amazing band. A vocalist (who also plays a variety of other instruments including ), a pianist and lead guitarist. They have an amazing diversity of songs - from blues to rock, jazz and pop.
It was an incredible feeling to be standing in this crowd of hundreds of people all knowing the words to their songs.
Pic: Heather Ford, CC BY-SA 2.0
I was actually about to take a nap before the final session of Wikimania when Jimmy Wales grabbed me and asked if I’d help him with his speech to close the incredible Wikimania 2007 in Taipei. He’d been inspired by my talk about parties in the earlier session, and suggested that we start a ‘50 free/sharing culture parties club’ where people around the globe hosted parties in their city and invited member of the free culture fraternity - Wikipedians, Creative Commoners, open access-ers, free software-ers and those interested in finding out more about free/sharing digital culture.
We’ve had an amazing response. Jimmy started a Facebook group that has 148 members after just 10 hours and we have parties planned for Cape Town, Chennai and Austin.
It looks as though Dave Duarte will be organising the first party and that it will be in Cape Town in September when Jimmy comes to town Dave is probably the best person I know in the world to organise a party, and so I’m really looking forward to it! If you’re in the Cape Town area, or if you want to fly in for the feast, go to this link and start preparing!
