I attended BarCampAfrica at the Google campus on Saturday. It was an incredible event. This unconference was the brainchild of Ellen Petry Leanse and Kaushal Jhalia, with some incredible volunteer work by many including Saul Wainwright, Shara Karasic, and many more, and a sponsorship by many organizations including, of course, Google, who provided a great space for the unconference! Here are some links to info and videos on this great event:
- Panel events were videotaped and you can watch them here.
- Wiki
- Blog with some cool Meet the Attendees posts
- Facebook Group
My interest in Africa was spurred on by my daughter’s mission to Rwanda. Read more about it on her blog and consider contributing to her expenses. My reading has also included books and articles about eradicating poverty so it was hard not to feel that something has to be done. Muhammed Yunus’ recent book on social businesses intrigued me and it is through private enterprise that I believe Africa will rise from poverty.
An idea I brought back from barcamp is that building a business that can fund sustainable humanitarian programs is itself far more sustainable than creating humanitarian programs using the traditional non-profit model which requires continuous fundraising. This is not exactly what Yunus has in mind when he talks about social businesses but I believe there are probably several models of private enterprise that can be leveraged for humanitarian purposes.
The best parts of BarCampAfrica were, of course, the conversations. I was excited to finally meet Jon Gosier, creator of Appfrica, an African IT news and culture site. Jon is a creative guy, I got that from reading about Appfrica on his blog. To attest to this, check out his post about using Damn Small Linux to help local student software developers who cannot purchase their own website space.
Another prominent African software developer I was thrilled to meet is David Kobia, one of the creators of Ushahidi.com, a mashup that aggregates citizen-generated information on crises such as the post-election violence in Kenya. What is so great about these guys is that, not only are doing some of the snazziest web development in Africa, but that they reach out to the worldwide community of developers. And they’re pretty cool people too. Here’s a Twitter tweet from David from earlier today:
In the same car with @african_minute, @kiwanja & @appfrica - truly a moment.
After the introductory notes and a panel discussion, we had an interesting conference organizing session. This was a little different than what we did for BarCampPortland, but variety is the spice of life and I enjoyed this method. With everyone seated in the main auditorium, those who wanted to hold a session were asked to line up along one wall. So many people got up that the line stretched along a full wall of the room and then just about the full length of another wall! One-by-one we gave a one-sentence description of our session, spoke our name, and then the moderator asked the audience to raise their hands if interested. This allowed each of us to determine how big a room was needed to accommodate our session.
My session was on open source software projects and also how to get university and possibly secondary-school students in Africa into such projects. Although I had under ten people raise their hands, when we met in a conference room, upwards of fifteen or more people came, some for only part of the session.
Having barcamp at Google was really exciting not only because we got to see the coolest company campus in the valley but because there were numerous Google employees attending. Two of them from the developer training organization came to my open source session and we had some great discussion about training African computer science students and getting them involved in projects.
There are so many other people I met that if I wrote about each one, I’d never get this post out. I’ll try to cover more of the interesting ideas and follow-ups of BarCampAfrica in future posts. Needless to say, it was a meaningful way to spend a Saturday, and well worth the trip.