Erik is @whiteafrican
african fractals, something going on that many don't realize, so started looking more seriously about how african's design
Erik Hersman: Keynote
from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.
bandwidth.mobiles.culture
Erik writes 2 blogs:
afrigadget - solving every day problems with african ingenuity
whiteafrica - high tech stuff, his personal blog
ushahidi - one of co-founders
ihub in nirobi - one of founders, co-working and community commons, for high tech community in niarobi, over 2600 members
maker fair africa, ghana and niarobi - innovation born of necessity
bandwidth in context,
you can't take about africa
aptivate - out of london, specializes in dealing with low bandwidth..
size of pages
fb (zero rated) so most fundamental change in last 2 years in africa
tropically tolerant software
paradigm mobiles
default device
blurring of lines between web and mobile - device is less important
mocality
lowest end nokia phone
he caries what his users use
40% of subscribers don't have credit on their phone, they load it up every 90 days and don't make calls they just take them
can you zero rate data connectivity through mobiles and get to the rest of the market
iyam.mobi- anyone with a mobile phone (no email even) can sign up and then go there and create apps sms
might not be the sexiest thing, or the prettiest thing, but it's what people use
it's more expensive than data, but it's what people use
in africa, the phone number always trumps the email address
mobile payments - more empessa - more money transferred everyday in kenya using empessa than western union does for the world in a year
mxit - hs 12 mill users - because they understood that the mobile counts first - south africa and indonesia -
What is MXit?
Free online mobile chat, and so much more. Shop, play and explore a multi-million user social network.john white bochie, had gone up from others, nokia merchants, for marrying up mobile phones and pc's with bottle distributers, decreases the time to market by 4 days
interactive design culture
people
jeb chumba: african digital art
so tons of sites, but
the challenge:
even if you don't like olpc, olpc is important because it gets computers in the hands of kids
who's been trained in field of interaction design: 57% self taught
if you're living in rural africa, you don't ever come into contact with the tech to be able to be the people to do it, so all the builders are middle class or above, how to you get to the group that needs it..
nairo bits - a Digital Design School that provides education to the Nairobi slum youth
the case for ushahidi
problem - mobile phones were being used to spread a lot of hate
so juliana rotich, erik, ory okolloh, and david koba banded together to start ushahidi
allows people to participate, instead of one organization, many to many instead of one to many
aid is more effective if the loop is round, close that loop by feeding info to the citizens
disconnect between what they were hearing from sources and from the media was wide
at the time they built ushahidi, it was using tech that was already 3 years old, anybody could have built it, it's the use of this tech in a more dynamic way that is so groundbreaking
saving one life alone has validated ushahidi entirely
openness, innovation, community
however you can get the info in, we can take it and map it - now completely global
took them 3 days to build that app in 2008, then took it down to 3 hours, then 3 min,
now there are all kinds of apps for it
currently over 10000 deployments of ushahidi globally
in australia: pothole theory: you care about the pothole on your street but not the one 2 streets over
in atlanta: aggregating crime
voice of kibera: open street mappers, wiki for mapping, training up local guys in the slums to use gps's and map their neighborhood, and now is the most densely mapped space in all of open street map
biggest thing for ushahidi - haiti - 4636
info from people in need and get it to people who need help
but have to do translation, categorize, etc, etc, and all in 10 min
170 situation room volunteers in 4 diff universities, 3 in us one in switzerland
10000 volunteers at disposal in haite, only used a couple thousand - things google maps didn't know
local pop also translated into 3 languages
uchaguzi - them using ushahidi in home town
effort to see if they could deal with slow burn
everybody's upset but not upset enough to do something about it - huduma
there's a new generations of africa that are using tech to deal with inefficiencies
most inefficiencies are government and media, always been very top down
using tech to bring info from the bottom up
kenya is a leading example of how to do mobile payments, anywhere in the world, who would have expected that 3 years ago
the new africa - trying to solve problems in their neighborhood, ...
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