there are quite a lot of things worth following up on this, for international development matters and the sorts of things which arose during the world summit on the information society, wsis which might now change


I have put my classifaction up on wordpress which follows the hague meeting and my stuff in Ethekwini


I'm now doing a L'Angewhite which I'll put somewhere soon


the references to wikispaces tho mean we have to join several things together, and I think that is a knew matter





________________________________________
From: BCS Knowledge, Information and Metadata Management [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Conrad Taylor [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 14 November 2009 11:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [KIDMM] A report-back from BarCamp Africa UK

Exactly a week ago I was on site at Vodafone's offices in West London,
getting ready to start the BarCamp Africa UK event. As I explained in
an earlier post, helping to organise that event has taken up a lot of
my time and energy recently, and the job isn't over yet. In the run-up
to the event I used Wikispaces once again to set up a reference Web
site, listing the workshops which people were offering; now the event
is over and aspects of it are digitally "in the can" in various media
formats, I and my BCA-UK colleagues have been gathering in slide shows
and papers, video and audio recordings and putting them onto or
linking them to that web site.

Indeed as I started to write this email, I was capturing to my hard
disk a video recording of the workshop about the One Laptop Per Child
computer and its Sugar software suite, given by Cornelia Boldyreff on
the University of East London (and KIDMM).

So as the video streams onto my disk and the rain streams down the
bedroom window I thought I'd take the time to "report back to KIDMM"
about BarCamp Africa, at least, those parts that are likely to
interest KIDMMs. The other two KIDMMs who were there were Cornelia,
also Peter Murray of CHIRAD and BCS Health Informatics, and perhaps
they can add their perspectives, because such was the fragmented
nature of the event that nobody could easily get an overview.

The BarCamp concept: well, BarCamps are a form of unconference where
you typically have announced an easy-to-grasp theme but you don't set
an agenda. You encourage everyone coming to be prepared to help make
the agenda by presenting or leading a discussion on a topic around the
defined theme. The idea of holding BarCamps specifically themed on
technology in relation to African development started a bit over a
year ago, with a BarCamp Africa in the San Francisco bay area. Since
then there has been one in Ghana, one in Madagascar, and a few other
Africa countries, and parallel to the London one there was a BarCamp
Africa in Cameroon.

My first experience of a BarCamp was a spillover to BarCamp London 5
that was hosted by the British Computer Society, I think at the
initiative of David Evans, the BCS's public relations officer. He
managed to swing a budget somehow to lay on lunch for a hundred,
though nowhere near as many as that number who had signed up actually
showed up on the day. There I met a young Ghanaian programmer, Ethel
Delali Cofie, who is also active around BCS Women and Women in
Technology, and who set up an electronic forum for Ghanaians in ICT.

This year, Ethel was inspired to run a BarCamp Africa in the UK and
contacted various friends. As it happened, the six who ended up
working as the active committee were all Ghanaian apart from me. And I
think all but one were BCS members too. Some of you for example will
know Richard Tandoh, who is active in organising events for the BCS
North London Branch.

We did make approaches to the BCS to see if there would be an interest
in hosting, sponsoring or otherwise supporting this event, but I'm
afraid our correspondence wasn't even replied to. But we did quite
well in terms of sponsorship and support anyway, in the end. Vodafone
let us use their meeting rooms and touchdown space for free, and were
very welcoming and helpful. A Vodafone R&D unit called Betavine paid
our catering bill, CHIRAD sponsored the printing of T-shirts and some
other companies chipped in here and there. Thus we were able to offer
the event for free. 140 signed up and I feared a repeat of the BarCamp
London 5 spillover low attendance, but my guess is that we certainly
had about 80 people there.

I confess we were actually nervous about not having a predefined
agenda, so as people signed up we sent out emails to elicit offers of
workshops, and as the offers came in we put them up on our wiki. So in
fact all of the workshops on offer were already stuck up on the wall
as people arrived, and they could sign up to whichever they wanted.
One nice thing about the Vodafone space is that they have quite a lot
of surfaces which are either glass or melamine, and they hadn't the
slightest objection to us taping up sign-up sheets and posters.

We ran five session slots of about 45 minutes each, typically with
four workshops running in parallel.

What with being one of the key "fixers" on the day, taking photos and
running two workshop sessions, it was almost too frantic for me to
have lots of quality conversations, but in little snatches and at more
length in the pub afterwards I did make contact with some interesting
people including two African ladies who these days run the Usability
Professionals Association, and I discovered that one of my
co-organisers has a thoughtstream on cybernetics for Africa, so those
will be threads worth pursuing.

I liked Cornelia's workshop session about the One Laptop Per Child
initiative and the Sugar Labs software which supports it. Cornelia
rightly placed the focus on OLPC as an education initiative more than
a technology one, and one that is linked to a constructivist model of
education by experimentation and making. She got lots more interest
for this workshop than she expected, and many people at least stopped
by to look at her XO laptop. The word 'cute' was used quite often in
this context.

Education and information was also one of the focuses of Vinay Gupta's
workshop session on "Open Hardware". Essentially, Vinay was drawing
attention to the important role that can be played by non-patented
hardware solutions to typical life problems such as shelter,
sanitation, cooking and so on. I did manage to use my "radio room"
set-up to do an audio interview with Vinay, which you might like to
listen to: see...

http://barcampafrica-uk.wikispaces.com/Podcasts

I've learned quite a bit more about running a Wikispaces site as a
result of doing first our own KIDMM wiki, then this one. In general I
am finding that Wikispaces' "acclaimed" visual editor is quite
unpredictable, and if you are at all ambitious about formatting and
styling it is better to use the Wikitext editing mode. Which isn't
really good news, because mass participation in a wiki system is
thwarted if the system is hard to use. And also, one runs into that
old dilemma about wanted to use mark-up that is about designating the
structure of content rather than shaping it visually, which should be
taken care of some other way. So, I have been reverting to the old
sinful practice of using table mark-up to get photos and text to hold
together in neat blocks (the "Organisers" profile page of the site is
an example. Of course I wash my hands carefully afterwards.

One thing Wikispaces is really quite good at, is allowing content to
be embedded from other sites. I have placed two slide sets on
Slideshare.net, an audio recording on Podbean, and my workshop paper
on Scribd, and embedded the viewers back into the Wikispaces pages.
Julius Sowu has been doing something similar with the video footage he
captured and streamed through Twitcam. And it works, so long as you
view the site from a location that allows access to social media. When
I am working at Thomson Reuters, which these days is quite a lot, most
of these features don't work because of the company's access
restrictions policies. Anything ending with .mp3 is strictly
off-limits! Even Slideshare is banned, which surprised me. Scribd
flashpaper works, though.

But Wikispaces doesn't support conversation, community filesharing and
the like, so there is pressure within the team to move over to some
more grown-up CMS framework for BarCamp Africa UK. Sound kind of
familiar? Like, where we were a year ago? Drupal 6 has been mentioned.
Life could get interesting.

So -- that's what has been eating my time and energy for the last
couple of months. And it's been nice to work with these people.

Conrad

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