Category: Social Media

bosco.

Why BOSCO?

BOSCO-Uganda is a local, grass roots, organization working to implement collaborative ICT solutions in the rural, post-conflict, communities of northern Uganda.  We deploy our network of solar-powered PCs connected to long-range WiFi Internet and VoIP telephony services in former IDP camps, schools, health clinics, local government offices, and rural CBO/NGO offices.

BOSCO currently organizes community ICT training sessions centered on a Train the Trainer (ToT) model.  Our philosophy is to begin teaching people collaborative, Web 2.0 ICT skills that will be immediately useful to their line of work.  We begin with email, move to blogging, and then encourage users to use our Wikispaces forum and our Intranet forums to post relevant, local, content centered on their needs.  We are seeing schools and farmers post small scale funding proposals in these spaces while others are documenting their surroundings and the post-war resettlment process through digital ethnography.

We also connect local institutions to our network (e.g. health clinics, local government offices, rural CBO/NGO outposts) to better facilitate them in their work and help them to collaborate with their stakeholders.  We are about to double our presence in northern Uganda over the next two years in a newly established partnership with Unicef.

More information can be found at www.bosco-uganda.org or at www.bosco-uganda.wikispaces.net where you will find user-generated content arising from each site.

KQ on social media marketing.

Kenya Airways is leading in social media marketing. Is Twitter be one of the more effective ways for African companies to learn from consumers? It’s cheap to use, in the right demographic for companies like KQ (middle class), and viral: both complaints and compliments can be addresses rapidly and at little cost.

of twitter.

The riots in Kampala gave me a real-time understanding of the purpose of Twitter. Within minutes, I knew more about what was happening on the ground than all the mainstream media combined. While I still think Twitter is prone to exageration, I look forward to seeing how this tool is deployed in the upcoming elections.

And now, some links for the Monday morning:

1. The NY Times Freakonomics blog featured some leading African enterpreneurs a couple of day ago. Here’s a response from AppAfrica. A nice dive into the intricacies of stereotypes and expectations.

2. Riots!? In Kampala explained by Joe Powell.

3. Crisis mapping in Uganda: harnessing & improving the current technology.

of twitter-ing.

While I remain optimistic, lots of people are telling Twitter off for its role in Iran. There’s definitely a few points to be made in this post (and those she links too). However, while there is much room for exaggeration in Twitter, I think it is possible to accurately deduce the atmosphere in Iran through the constant stream of updates.  Most importantly, it means that this general atmosphere is converted into a forefront ‘global event’ which survives the media’s ADD.

Without this, the movement in Iran would be bogged down by reports about puppies being flushed down toilets or CNN’s write off of the whole thing. While journalists are trained professionals, they have a whole host of problems that many believe social media can fill quite nicely. Journalists are generally distanced from the events themselves, parachuted in, unable to access what’s really happening on the ground, equally prone to exaggeration (but without context), and the list goes on. I don’t think anyone is trying to discount the role of journalists in Iran, but I do think that most of us see a new avenue here which journalism can’t fill.

And, I say this as someone who freelances in the industry and who one day wouldn’t mind joining a newsroom.

the daily me.

I look forward to posting a long essay on how the ritual role of journalism inculcates folks like you and I into believing political actors and ultimately agreeing with the decisions. However, in the meantime, consider helping yourself:

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

One classic study sent mailings to Republicans and Democrats, offering them various kinds of political research, ostensibly from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that strongly corroborated their pre-existing views.

out of loop ideas.

Still hatin’ on Twitter? Don’t be!

Over the last two years, but especially in the last few months, Twitter has become an extremely efficient way of sharing information. You can follow people whose interests you share, learn from what they link to, and if you really like what they are saying you can share or retweet it. Only having 140 characters to communicate with forces people to become more and more succinct and it leads to very interesting behavior. This limit has made it OK to simply post a link combined with a short comment, something people are far more likely to do than write long blog posts. If people like it they will retweet it and people who see these retweets will do the same resulting in an extremely quick transmission of information. More importantly a search over that conversation will quickly let you see what people are saying and thinking about something – down to the last second.

I started out a skeptic and now, without lifting a finger, I’m being provided with at least a dozen out of loop & hard-to-find ideas a day on specific themes like development and social media.