“For a long time, even when I was going to school, we were taught that the structure of the human brain was basically fixed by the time we got to our early 20s. But it’s become clear in the last few decades that in fact, even the adult human brain is quite malleable. And our neural circuitry is kind of always in the process of adapting to circumstances and to environment and to the tools we use, particularly those for finding information and making sense of information.”–Nicholas Carr

The future is coming at a faster pace than we can imagine. Ten years ago we thought technology was advancing fast. Now, technology is moving faster than we thought it ever would. And it shows no signs of slowing down. I chalk it up to the singularity. What is the singularity? Think of the singularity as compounding interest, except that in addition to the principal balance always increasing, so is the interest rate! And the further you go along the path into the future, the faster both are increasing. Eventually, you get to a point where the speed of both are increasing so fast you can no longer predict where they will be and the lines begin to blur. You’ve reached the singularity. Ray Kurzweil, the brilliant man behind the singularity theory, predicts we will reach this “zenith” around 2020. Machines will become as smart as humans and progress will be moving so fast we will not be able to keep up with it. Believe in the coming singularity or not, technology isn’t waiting for anyone.

Back to being a Web professional…

The days are gone where a person could survive as a generalist. Now, one has to be a specialist at whatever one does, and choose it wisely to avoid too much duplication with other professionals. And don’t get too comfortable in your specialty. Before you know it, everyone will be doing what you are doing and you will, once again, be forced to evolve into another specialty or sub-specialty of where you once started.

Think of a profession or specialty that has to do with the Web and I will show you a dead-end road to obsolescence. A one-way ticket to irrelevance. No longer can you survive doing the same thing you always did. The world of Web professionals is now diluted. The barriers to entry into most Web professions have been lowered to the point where it is harder and harder to compete and make a living.

I’m not complaining. After all, this is why I chose this profession. If you want excitement and aren’t afraid to work hard, being a web professional might be for you. Afraid of continual learning and 10-hour workdays and being a Web professional might not be your cup of tea.

The amazing thing about being a Web professional is that if you work for someone else, chances are you are either being held back technologically or dragging them screaming and kicking into the future. Consider yourself fortunate if you are freely able to pursue the advancements in your Web profession with support. This is what leads many web professionals into performing freelance work, myself included.

That leads me to where I am today. Now that I am beginning my graduate studies in August focusing on technology and international education, I am thinking more and more about how they will fit in with my web profession and the whole thought about technological progress. It is a hard pill to swallow, especially when your biggest fear is irrelevance in today’s world.

Where this will lead me, who knows. But one thing is for sure, I’m not going to stop learning and moving forward. I’m welcoming the future with open arms, even if I am kicking and screaming.

To close this post, allow me to repeat one of my favorite sayings that is printed on a bookmark always sitting on my desk near my monitor,

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle… when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

BTW, if you need any web work done, email me!

A good example of an ombudsman to the international aid business would likely be someone like William Easterly, a New York Times writer who blogs over at Aid Watch. Many people love him and many hate him, but one thing is for sure, he says what needs to be said as though he were a modern-day prophet. He blogs passionately and calls out large entities on what they might be doing wrong in order that they might change their habits and become more effective and responsible to the people. I have great respect for the man. Sometimes he is wrong and more often he is right, but he is willing to admit to any mistakes he might have made in his statements as long as there is fact to prove it. In my opinion, he is a great ombudsman who is badly needed in the constantly-troubled and corrupt international aid business.

Now that we have an idea of what an ombudsman does, why does African tech need an ombudsman?
For those who don’t follow the African tech scene, much of this might be news to you. Much of it is likely to stir up some strong feelings from those working in African tech, but it needs to be said. Stay with me…

The African tech scene is very young and taking shape. With this comes many mistakes, lessons learned, and hardships that nobody wants to experience, but are necessary to the journey of progress. Because tech is still so young to Africa, it is common to see many people looking for a leader or someone to follow. This has always been a sore spot for me because good, worthy leaders are hard to find, but those willing to claim tech priesthood in African tech are a dime a dozen.

Because there are so many “thought leaders” coming out of the woodwork, there is a high need for criticism to be openly accepted among African tech. Without this criticism, we have a few leaders and tons of followers. We have lots of new ventures but no real lessons learned. With healthy criticism and investigation, we have more leaders being raised up and fewer people feeling like they are being neglected and ignored. We also have more positive cases of progress and fewer wasted resources and duplicity among efforts.

I was once asked by an African to participate in his venture whereby I would handle web design and consultation while working closely with an African designer on the company branding. I received several drafts of the logo design from the African designer and felt strongly that they weren’t up to the standard I wanted to portray for the company. I sent my thoughts to both the owner and the designer, giving a detailed and technical analysis as to why the branding wasn’t where we wanted to be and what could be done to improve the design. I was immediately blasted by the African owner for this analysis claiming it would hurt the designers’ feelings. I was shocked since my intention was to see the designer build upon his skill set and improve his abilities. Call it a cultural misunderstanding, but I wasn’t tearing him down, only trying to build him up. It took quite a few emails to clear things up and in the end the designer told me his feelings were never hurt in the beginning after all and that he welcomed open criticism. High standards were important to me but it was clear that it wasn’t the priority for the businessman.

The reason I bring this up is because we need to be open about African tech and the people involved. We need to ask questions and voice our opinions. We need to speak up regardless of who’s feelings might be hurt. After all, don’t we all want to see progress being made in African tech? How is progress going to be made if there is no willingness to have open and critical discussions about what is being done? We need to stop tip-toeing around and communicate openly with how we are really feeling.

Having said that, what issues need to be openly criticized?
I have listed a few of my complaints below, although there are many more.

• Elitism–It is fairly easy to narrow down Africa’s tech leaders to a handful of people, once you have been in the scene for a few months. I could go on and on about the elitism in African tech. Willing participants or not, these leaders are seen by many as elitist jet-setters who travel the globe from conference to conference hobnobbing with other so-called “thought leaders” discussing ways they are going to ‘save’ Africa with their ideas. God only knows how much money is spent on their global travel, yet how little real and measurable progress is made from such events. A friend once told me that an idea is worthless unless it is executed. Only then can you tell if it is holds any value. It’s true, ideas are easy to come by and everyone has tons of them. Go to a tech conference and you will be surrounded by tech buzzwords and ‘brilliant’ ideas spouted by caffeinated techies carrying expensive Macbooks. The same is true for inspiration. What good is it if there isn’t a measurable result or outcome? I can be inspired by many things, but unless I turn that inspiration into something proactive, it fails to have any impact. Now that I’ve said it, I’ll be the first to admit that some things do come out of conferencing and face-to-face meetups. But I’ve been to an equal amount of events that have benefited me versus one’s that have been a complete waste of my time with lots of fancy words thrown around by so-called thought leaders. What I am saying is that few people have stood up to measure the results, if there are any to be measured, or for these elitist individuals to be accountable to ordinary Africans for themselves and what they spend their time on. With leadership comes great responsibility, but to hear a leader in African tech claim they were wrong about something is like finding a needle in a haystack. This builds a strong sense of elitism among African tech that is clearly evident once you measure how many of these leaders are actual Africans. What we are witnessing now in African tech is a modern form of colonialism where few Africans are seen as leaders and the leaders in the public eye are all Americans. Unless I’m missing it, there is very little evidence of African leadership rising from the tech circles. The goal should be to build up African leaders who can contribute to the tech industry with real progress. If you claim to be an African tech incubator, where is the measurable impact? How many startups have you fueled? This brings me to my second point, self-interest.
• Self-interest–On the surface, many ventures and individuals elicit a sense of charity, community, and openness. Buzzwords are intermingled with fancy logos and graphics. But behind the scenes there is self-interest and elitism built into these ventures. Too many of these individuals are more interested in building up a name for themselves. I once went to a meetup with a handful of some of the more well-known people in the African mobile tech industry and I was amazed at how many nonprofits there were that were just businesses in disguise seeking to make a dollar off of Africa. But the minute you mentioned business, the room would get quiet. Now, I’m not in any way against doing business in Africa. What I am against is dishonesty and lack of transparency. Call a spade a spade. If you’re in Africa for the business, come out and say it. Africa desperately needs business in a global context, but what Africa needs more is for Africans to be trained up in the ways of doing business. Instead of so many trying to find ways of profiting off of Africa, why are there so few concerned with Africa’s long-term ability to become self-sustainable? After all, this is true empowerment. If we are really interested in empowerment, where are the results in African tech? How many of them are empowering others instead of empowering themselves?
• No passion–At that same meeting mentioned above, not only was it only about the business side of things and the “opportunities” to be had, there was no passion in the participants. None. I couldn’t find one reason they were doing what they do other than it was an opportunity. I started my interest in Africa before I was 16 years old because of the human rights issues evident in South Sudan. I became passionate about the African people and I quickly understood how many needs there were throughout this diverse continent and the complexity of those needs. I visited 4 African countries in 2005 and saw incredible diversity between each of them. I saw tremendous beauty in the people I met and I fell in love with Africa. I wasn’t an idealist but a realist who saw the human factor in what I was striving for. This is too often absent from African tech circles. We need to bring a healthy dose of passion back to African tech and make personal connections to why we do what we do. If we are not reaching out to African individuals, we are not doing Africa any good for the long-term. We need to trace our passion back to individuals.
• Lack of communication–There is a serious problem with communication among African tech. I can’t count how many unanswered emails I have from people you likely read about every day. Whether they lack the time or interest to respond, the fact stands that they are not willing to communicate to people who truly need their advice. While it takes less than 5 minutes to respond to an email, even to say you aren’t interested or have the time, to not respond sends an entirely wrong signal. It echoes the elitism that exists among African tech circles. I’m important, you’re not. The sad part about this lack of communication is that it only hurts collaborative efforts and morale among those of us striving to make some sort of difference.

There are many more issues that could be added to the list, but these are a few that I have dealt with personally. I have witnessed all of these firsthand with African Tech Network. I am sure that I am not the first, nor will be the last to deal with them. My point for writing this is to say, we need more honest communicators in African tech who are willing to say what needs to be said. African tech needs an ombudsman who’s reputation isn’t on the line who is willing to call out people on their lack of transparency and unwillingness to accept open criticism. African tech leaders need to understand their responsibility to African techies. When someone calls for help, help them.

Following that trend, feel free to voice your concern, anger, disagreement, approval in the comments section below. I’m more than willing to hear you out.

ACMFI is currently holding a logo contest sponsored by Redcloud Money and the prize is $2,000 USD. You could design the official logo for ACMFI! If interested, email Emmanuel Okoegwale your interest.

Also, we highly encourage you to join us on LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as subscribe to our email list to stay up-to-date with our organization. (Our Facebook group is coming soon.)

“How do we move from netsourcing to crowdsourcing and on to turksourcing?”

In his post, Patrick Meier talks about how Ushahidi was able to netsource out the roles of volunteers for both the Haiti and Chile disasters to Fletcher/Tufts, SIPA/Columbia and the Graduate Institute in Geneva. These networks were closely-knit related groups of people connected by social networks of universities. In other words, definitely not an anonymous crowd but a refined crowd who were related by academic interests. As he stated, “Netsourcing presents some important advantages. Pre-existing social ties can help mobilize a trusted volunteer network.” This was an example of netsourcing at its best. Quick mobilization.

The problem with netsourcing is that it is basically “bounded crowdsourcing” and is “sale-constrained” (words of @patrickmeier). Netsourcing works, but on levels that cannot grow beyond their own closely bounded social networks. Growing beyond those closely knit social networks to a larger crowdsourcing effort of anonymous volunteers is the next step to higher participation and more data.

As Patrick Meier asks, “How do we move from having 300 volunteers connected via existing social networks to 300,000 or even 3,000,000 anonymous volunteers?” This is a great question.

I think an equally important question to ask is, what kind of metrics do we use to choose which method of sourcing works best for the given situation? Some efforts might be better off using localized netsourcing, while other larger efforts might require us to move more into crowdsourcing instead of localized netsourcing. I think it’s a matter of using the right tool for the job (while I don’t have any examples that come to mind).

To take matters one step further, how do we move from crowdsourcing to turksourcing? I think that’s the first time I heard that word before, but it would involve a hybrid combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk with Swift River. Turksourcing moves into the territory of making small tasks easy, cheap, but with enough incentive to get a return on investment (aka data). The main challenge is likely how to build incentive into existing applications and efforts (such as mobile gaming). Gaming might just be the beginning, but I would venture to ask if it were possible to bring CrowdFlower and Samasource into the fold and expand into other areas? How about a WordPress widget that allows visitors to easily complete a task as they read a blog post? Or, as Maarten commented on iRevolution, starting with Facebook? That seems to be the go-to place to launch an effort of this magnitude.

This is just the beginning of a new model of not only crowdsourcing for Ushahidi-related crisis reporting, but also into other modes of employing refugees, such as what Samasource is doing, and other unemployed people around the world who have access to either mobile or computing technologies. The end result is creating opportunity that is accessible but also fulfills a social good. This will most definitely be a space to watch in the coming year as opportunity becomes more accessible to others who have no opportunity.

Also important to note:

Among the countries “under surveillance” are several democracies: Australia, because of the upcoming implementation of a highly developed Internet filtering system, and South Korea, where draconian laws are creating too many specific restrictions on Web users by challenging their anonymity and promoting selfcensorship.

Turkey and Russia have just been added to the “Under Surveillance” list. In Russia, aside from the control exercised by the Kremlin on most of its media outlets, the Internet has become the freest space for sharing information. Yet its independence is being jeopardized by blogger arrests and prosecutions, as well as by blockings of so-called “extremist” websites. The regime’s propaganda is increasingly omnipresent on the Web. There is a real risk that the Internet will be transformed into a tool for political control.

In Turkey, taboo topics mainly deal with Ataturk, the army, issues concerning minorities (notably Kurds and Armenians) and the dignity of the Nation. They have served as justification for blocking several thousand sites, including YouTube, thereby triggering a great deal of protest. Bloggers and netizens who express themselves freely on such topics may well face judicial reprisals.

Other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, Belarus and Thailand are also maintaining their “under surveillance” status, but will need to make more progress to avoid getting transferred into the next “Enemies of the Internet” list. Thailand, because of abuses related to the crime of “lèse-majesté”; the Emirates, because they have bolstered their filtering system; Belarus because its president has just signed a liberticidal order that will regulate the Net, and which will enter into force this summer – just a few months before the elections.

These countries will do anything within their power to stop their citizens from freely accessing information on the Internet. The levels to which these countries will go to prevent this access is astounding. I highly recommend you read the report by RSF linked below.

More information on the report is available here.

Also affiliated with the World Language Documentation Centre, the Kamusi Project needs help from technical individuals. They are in need of programmers to help them update the legacy code used in their website framework into something that allows them to grow. If you know Drupal, Perl, PHP, & MySQL, this is the project for you to volunteer time towards.

As described on their Call for Volunteer Coders:

We need your help to hack kamusiproject.org!

The Kamusi Project, the web’s leading Swahili language resource, needs coding help in a hurry. We have a lot of old code that works pretty well for what we’ve been doing (running a collaborative online Swahili dictionary), but we need to modify and modernize our back end in order to get where we’re going: a free and open source interlinked dictionary and learning center for dozens of African languages.

Our code has been patched together over the years, adding bits and pieces to meet specific needs of the moment. Now we have a tangle of Perl and PHP overlaying a MySQL database, shoehorned into a Drupal platform and installed hastily on a new server. Can you help us get our current functionality working smoothly as a coherent PHP/ Drupal/ MySQL system, so we can then be in a position to expand our model to multiple languages of Africa?

If you can volunteer, please contact CodeAfrica {at} kamusiproject {dot} org

Specifically, our task list includes:

• Converting all our Perl code into PHP. The Perl code is old school, poorly commented, and doesn’t play well with Drupal. This includes four major features: (1) the Edit Engine, through which participants contribute to the dictionary and submissions get processed for the MySQL database; (2) the Grouping Tool, through which users can sort dictionary entries; (3) the Photo Uploader, through which users submit images to illustrate dictionary entries, and (4) the Bantu languages Verb Parser, which makes it possible to look up ridiculously complicated conjugated verbs such as “nitakapomsomesha”.
• Perfecting and enhancing our new Drupalized search engine. We’ve already designed a new PHP dictionary search engine to replace the fossilized Perl system you can see in action now, but we have some distance before the new version is ready to go live. The main challenges are: (1) reflecting live database updates from the Edit Engine; (2) presenting results to match the current format; and (3) building in some kick-ass advanced search features. We expect to go from 1 million searches per month today to tens of millions when we go multilingual, so we need a really robust search engine.
• Making Google behave. The search engines were eating us alive on our old server, crawling nonstop with repeated wildcard searches and any term any user with Google Toolbar had ever typed into our search box. We want the search engines to index the site, but we need to figure out how to prevent them from taking over.
• Organizing our log files. We want to sort our search logs so that we can rank our most popular searches in descending order, with the goal being a tool that can feed the 10,000 most searched for terms (from 45,000,000 searches) to the editors for the languages we’ll be adding. The challenge here is to deal efficiently with the sheer bulk of the dataset.
• Improving the Learning Center code. We have a nice skeleton for a multimedia Swahili learning center, but our funding situation never allowed us to finish developing the online exercises and lesson templates, completing features for interaction between students and instructors, and integrating the exercises with the dictionary and media uploader. Now we have been asked by a university in South Africa if they can use our learning tools for some of the 11 official languages of that country, and we would like to say yes. These tools are already within PHP/ Drupal.
• Widgets. We would like to display a variety of information as a toggled sidebar widget, similar to the “Most Recent Searches” infobox now installed (which needs to be made scrollable, since it changes too quickly). Widgets will include recently updated entries, recent photo submissions, most popular searches of the day, etc. We would particularly like a widget that displays results from a log file query for the most popular searches that are not actually in the database, then lets a user “check out” a missing entry in conjunction with an Edit Entry submission. We would also like a slide show for the homepage that displays images from the Photo Uploader in the context of the associated dictionary entry. The widgets are low urgency, but an easy and fun way to help out.

Once we accomplish these Code Africa tasks, we will be in a position to put the project on steroids, going from two languages to two dozen in a couple of years. Future work will involve re-engineering the database to accommodate multiple languages spoken by over half a billion people, modifying the Edit Engine for each new language, and building a linking tool to join the languages together. In order to accomplish these multilingual goals, though, we really need to get our current code in order.

If you can help, please contact CodeAfrica {at} kamusiproject {dot} org – we look forward to working with you!

“Availability of affordable bandwidth, growing synergies between IT industry and academia, government policy reforms and emerging opportunities in the IT sector have led to growth of incubation labs outside the orbit of the corporate giants in Africa.

Big companies like Nokia and Google have done extensive work with developers in the region but the growth of smaller labs financed by smaller companies and individuals in Cameroon, Senegal, Kenya, Ivory Coast and Uganda have underlined the opportunities presented by availability of bandwidth.”

More can be found at the original article. Hat-tip goes to Timbuktu Chronicles for the find.