Ramping up on Africa
Last Updated on Friday, 25 December 2009 09:51 Written by Steve Thursday, 10 December 2009 10:54
A few weeks ago I felt a change in the force that drives me to do my work. It was a good and welcome change, one of renewed energy and focus. I wrote about how Africa has leapt back to the forefront of my mind, back to a position of prominence it held long ago. I have much to learn and catch up on as try to get reconnected to Africa. It’s an exciting time!
I’ve started connecting with interesting NGOs and entrepreneurs working in Africa. Through my contacts at work, I’ve been learning about some of the work being done in some of the countries in Africa. These conversations have been very interesting and helpful. I wrote a bit a while back about the cloud and the stack of infrastructure it relies on. This resetting of the landscape is an excellent process to undergo for me. It’s a process of understanding new constraints. Feeling out those constraints is key to critically thinking and solving problems. Knowledge workers who don’t understand the constraints they work under are doomed to come up with solutions that will not work.
And it’s been amazing to know those constraints but to keep in mind that boxes need to be broken out of. While constraints make you think creatively, blindly accepting those constraints is unacceptable if we want to bring about transformative change. Last week I changed my status message on IM from “constraints breed creativity” to “constraints are for suckers” to try to get at this duality. Understand, but do not accept the binds you feel!
A great place to get grounded in some of the newest thinking about Africa is to watch Africa-themed TED talks. So many of these talks are mind-blowing. In 2007, TED Global went to Tanzania and there are many amazing talks from that conference. If you’ve ever talked with me for more than 20 minutes, I’ve probably recommended a TED talk to you. I recommend watching them all! Stories about leadership, entrepreneurship, the economy, banking, the list goes on.
I’ve found a great way to follow what’s going on in Africa is to find the amazing folks on Twitter interested in the topics. I’ve created a list of Africa-related Twitter accounts I follow. Many are technology related, but not all. Feel free to peruse or follow the list if you want daily info on what’s happening in Africa from some amazing people.
Following Twitter will point you to all these blogs eventually. They’re all great:
- Afrigadget – making in Africa
- Appfrica – TED Senior Fellow Jonathan Gosier’s blog
- naijablog – Jeremy Weate with great stuff out of Nigeria
- Texas in Africa – Laura Seay, a professor at Morehouse
- White African – Founder of Afrigadget and Ushahidi Director of Operations, Erik Hersman
Do you think African IT infrastructure will necessarily have to evolve down the same path as the US? e.g. ‘computer on every desktop’, disconnected adoption, Internet, dial-up, then cloud.
Or can they learn from our constraints and skip straight to something like ChromeOS accessing cloud services through publicly funded Wi-Fi?