I spent a good part of my afternoon yesterday following the proceedings at the Connected Kenya Summit which is aims to establish a platform for collaboration, capacity building and priority sharing between government and the IT sector with a view of linking and hastening implementation of government IT projects to world class standards.

One of the sessions, “Knowledge Diffusion & Open Data” focused heavily on the Kenya Open Data Initiative - its challenges and opportunities. The panel for this session was made up of the following people:

• Cam Cadwell, National Account Manager, Socrata
• Dr Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information and Communication
• Dr Katherine Getao, ICT Secretary, Directorate of eGovernment
• Marisella Ouma, CEO, Copyright Board
• Chris Finch, World Bank
• Paul Kukubo – CEO, Kenya ICT Board

Almost every one of these guys called out techies to make use of the open data portal by creating apps etc.

Techies reacted naturally: update the data.

Simple argument: Techies thrive in an environment that’s constantly moving fast with new technologies, new knowledge and new skills. So data that’s dated 2009 is very unappealing to this group.

That’s the boring stuff. Here’s the exciting part.

Rather than focus our efforts on asking the Government & other open data stakeholders like the World Bank to update their datasets, why don’t we participate in the open data movement by ‘creating’ open data? Here’s an example: setting up sensors on a public road to monitor and gather traffic data.

Chris Finch from the World Bank spoke about personal data and its value towards improving people’s lives if strategically mined to do so.

Why not?

Why not build an open data portal and apps that aggregate citizen generated data?

The major value add here is that the data is real time and in that sense timely. This is critical because data made available as quickly as necessary preserves the value of the data – a core principle according to the Open Government Data Principles.

This also addresses the frustration of ‘old’ data on the existing data platforms.

Build on this?

Photo Credits: toolmantim - CC-BY 2.0

I read an article on the New York Times this morning - Computer Science for the Rest of Us. It starts off from a common foundation:

Many professors of computer science say college graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals. They don’t argue that everyone needs to be a skilled programmer. Rather, they seek to teach “computational thinking” — the general concepts programming languages employ.

I think we all agree on that. What seems to be rousing debate is what exactly are the core elements of ‘Computational Thinking’ and the definitions of computer literacy.

I particularly have an issue with the following statement from the article.

“ ‘Literacy’ implies reading and writing, so ‘computer literacy’ suggests that writing programs is a required skill for activity under this name,” says Henry M. Walker, a computer science professor at Grinnell. “However, general citizens may or may not have to write programs to function effectively in this technological age.” He prefers to promote “computer fluency,” attainable without assignments in programming.

I think this is stereotypical.

Stereotypical in the sense that the ‘writing’ part of computer literacy has been skewed towards programming yet there are so many other aspects of computing that could count as ‘writing’.

I just peeked at the Computer Literacy article on Wikipedia (thank God for collective intelligence) and even they have a better understanding of it.

Computer literacy is defined as the knowledge and ability to use computers and related technology efficiently, with a range of skills covering levels from elementary use to programming and advanced problem solving.

You see, with computers in general, its both the strategic use and the skills necessary to do so – not one over the other. We shouldn’t want to screw over some guys because they don’t know how to code basing this on the argument that its a ‘necessary’ skill. I don’t think so.

I’m not going to insist on defining what ‘basic’ and ‘necessary’ skills are with regard to computational thinking and computer science but I do believe we need to have these conversations to avoid benchmarking wrong assumptions to popular stereotypes.

In 2010 I participated in a workshop organized by Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore dubbed “My Bubble. My Space, My Voice”. This was part of a series of workshops in three different regions that resulted into a knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?”

Photo Credit: Maureen Agena

Fast Forward…

I run digital literacy camps through The Kuyu Project initiative one of which was with a group of girls who created a social network to consolidate the efforts of high school students around community service. I used the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Book (download free here) as one of the training tools and we had lots of fun with it.

The girls found the title of the book “weird” for some reason and made a lot of fun about it. Eventually the idea of the book sunk in their minds and one of the girls, Kasyoka Salim, eventually linked it to my character and beliefs: she called me a “Rebel with a cause!”

The Link…

In her own words…

The idea here is the belief that everyone has within themselves the ability to challenge the existing stereotypes and dogmas in pursuit of something they strongly believe in and identify with…and that’s the boring part!

The exciting part is the undertaking process and its manifestation which make a huge contribution to the strengthening of your character. (I see this everyday in the girls that I mentor…and oh is it a joy to watch!)

Its a task…that I know experientially  for sure! But for all its worth, count me in!

*****

The inspiration for this post came from Wangechi Mwangi, a recent high school graduate and founder of AZMA, a social network that aims to consolidate community service efforts among Kenyan high school students.

Now that that’s out of the way…

We are caught in a rat race – and if you stop one of the mice and ask them why they are running around in circles, they will not give you a definite answer!

That’s the culture we’re adopting in the local tech ecosystem…hot on the heels of our American Silicon Valley counterparts. We’re so indulged in activities that we perceive to be crucial to our ideas’ success yet after giving it much thought, we’re really wasting time on unimportant things.

I’ll give two examples.

Last week I ran an event at the m:lab called Wireless Wednesday which focused on User Experience research for startups with mobile products. The lead discussant, Franco Papeschi of the World Wide Web Foundation (LOVE these guys!), went on and on about how weird it was that local (and some international) developers didn’t spend at least a morning to ask people to test their app with a real audience and give them feedback. (Kindly note that the test referred to here are in the UX context).

I had an answer. In my understanding of the dev mindset, most people would rather spend that time chasing after venture capital and as soon as they get it, they’ll pay off some UX professional to do the necessary tests and research and give feedback.

Notice something flawed about this? Look at it from the flip side. Instead of wasting time and energy seeking venture funding, why doesn’t the developer invest that time in UX tests that will ultimately result into an app/service (whatever) that people will love, use perhaps because it fulfils their needs or solves a problem? Won’t users be more willing to pay for it if this is the case?

Example two.

University education is weird!

I did a Bachelor’s degree in Business Information Technology in college (and I spend every night wishing I had dropped out!) and I do remember one of my lecturers telling me that one core principle of software development was to solve problems – and this was well illustrated using the software development life cycle diagrams. I found the diagrams boring…but I now realize their importance – something that has continually been sacrificed for what people keep chasing after in the rat race.

While coursework hasn’t changed much, a lot of co-curricular activities supporting coursework has. We’re increasingly seeing universities shifting their focus on their core goal (i.e. research) to looking for grants left right and center.

I recently attended an event at Strathmore University‘s iLabAfrica where the patron (or whoever he was) went on and on about all the grants they had received in excess of hundreds of millions of shillings. I had one question for him: how many smiles have you put on your beneficiaries faces and does it justify the sum of money you are the chest thumping about?

Here’s the bottom line.

Unless you are directly making an impact in someone’s life with you apps and all the hustle around them, you’re really doing nothing meaningful. I’ve said this over and over and over on this blog and in others I contribute to.

For some reason, no one seems to be listening…yet, none of these seem to know what they are doing.

I recently had a chat with two people I have a lot of respect for: Jay Bhalla and Phares Kariuki. We went back and forth about how devs have no clue about how venture capital works, business model innovation or even basic pitching skills. That isn’t the striking thing though.

What shocks me about this is that despite the lack of insight into these and other fields, a number of guys are plunging themselves into the ecosystem! Why would anyone do that!? So far, my answer is simply for the money…and two, coz every other mouse is doing it!

Get real people!

Money is driving people in totally wrong directions!

Sober up and think about it for a second.

What’s more meaningful and worth your hustle? Money or impact?

Vint Cerf

As the interview continued, Vint mentioned something that caught my attention. Well, its not exactly what he said but how he contextualized it. Vint focused our conversation to his latest passion and current work: building an intergalactic internet infrastructure backbone. He explained the intricacies of how this will work and that’s when the “light bulb” moment hit me!

Here was a guy looking at the next best thing, not in the short term timeline, but an achievement he hoped would be realized in the next 25 years! There’s only one word that can summarize this and at the same time add a waft of class to it: VISIONARY! What I see in Vint is a guy willing to delay gratitude and short term economically oriented gains for something much greater – and to be honest, very few posses this quality…especially with the current trend in East Africa’s tech circles.

You see, locally, we’ve perfected the model of consumer -facing apps and tech products whose ultimate goal is the app store. This model has two problems: one, its not sustainable as a business. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any successful business that makes its money purely out of selling apps in various app stores (unless their core business is developing the apps themselves). Secondly, it doesn’t contribute much to innovation. This model fans the furnace that drives the “re-invention wheel”. Lastly, it doesn’t solve problems. Those of us who we’re lucky to have gone through formal university training know that problem solving and meeting people’s needs is a core pillar of software engineering. I know very few apps that we’re coded in two days that do this. A good number of them ride on a “popularity wave” based on technology (as evidenced by the Android platform) among other factors.

I strongly believe that the East African developer community should start to look towards long term, practical projects and I might add that the core focus be on the back end of the innovation and not necessarily trying to please consumers in order to get them to write you a cheque. Let’s be visionary…like the ones who went before us: Vint Cerf, Tim-Berners Lee, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. All these guys anticipated a need and moved to fulfill it…not in a week. Most of these guys’ achievements span their entire lifetime.

Anyone re-thinking their goals yet?

A couple of weeks back I met a developer who was working on an app for the Sub Saharan Android Developer Challenge. It was the last day for submission and this guy was struggling to get his app fine tuned before submission.

A minute or two later, a couple of his friends walked into the room and they had a discussion that in part led me to write this post. The guy developing the app told his other two buddies about how he hoped to win the cash prize for the Android challenge and what he would do with the money. A lot of it centred on getting popular gadgets etc. To this point, nothing he said really bothered me.

A little further down the conversation,  the developer made clear his intentions. He went on and on about how he would enter the app in a number of ongoing and upcoming developer competitions with a clear emphasis on winning the grand cash prize or winning gadgets.

My heart sunk.

A number of developer types are using their skills to earn a living…and don’t get me wrong – I fully support this. We live in a context where a developer is a “hustler” and writing code is a genuine way of sustaining oneself.

…and while this is true, most abuse it…and even worse, most sacrifice innovation by doing this.

What I mean by this is that a great amount of our efforts are spent satisfying our passions instead of pushing the limits as to what we can do with code. If the reverse were true, I strongly believe we would be making solid strides in tech innovation and not re-inventing the wheel as I see most people doing.

Here’s a different story to illustrate this.

When Google developed Chrome, it was basically viewed as a challenge to Firefox and came off as re-inventing the wheel. Google then later announced they were going to attach a kernel directly to a browser in a bid to create an operating system of a different kind. Look how that has turned out.

A couple of years down the line, Google has two flagship devices running Chrome OS that creates a new revenue stream for them and a world of possibilities for innovation in Cloud Computing spheres as well as in various digital domains.

Had they focused their entire efforts in marketing chrome to”satisfy their passions”, Google would have lost an opportunity that very few had seen.

Innovation spurs opportunity…including economic opportunity.

Opportunity does not extend innovation…rather it kills it – and this is the role “sufuria economics” is playing in the local (Kenyan) Tech scene.

Think about it.

Two words: Academic Inflation.

Citing Wikipedia:

Academic inflation is the process of inflation of the minimum job requirement, resulting in an excess of college-educated individuals with lower degrees (associate and bachelor’s degrees) competing for too few jobs that require these degrees and even higher, preferred qualifications (master’s or doctorate degrees). This condition causes an intensified race for higher qualification and education in a society where a bachelor’s degree today is no longer sufficient to gain employment in the same jobs that may have only required a two- or four-year degree in former years. Inflation has occurred in the minimum degree requirements for jobs, to the level of master’s degrees, Ph.D.’s, and post-doctoral, even where advanced degree knowledge is not absolutely necessary to perform the required job.

…and that’s just half the story.

Last night I was driving home with my mum and we chatted about my finishing school and future plans. As you probably expect we argued about my decision not to pursue a masters. While academic inflation was my primary reason, I also argued from the point that I’m not the kind of person who would go about looking for a job. I’ve always cherished the ideas and skill sets I have and always determined to make something out of them (and I might add at this point that a job doesn’t qualify).

Academia is honestly in my opinion biased towards getting people prepared to work in the “real world”. Its aims are to equip students with knowledge and skills that will enable them to tackle the challenges they will come across outside academic circles. To paraphrase it, it makes a lot more sense to have real world success as opposed to handing in homework!

I’ve got a problem with this.

Who says that academia is not a part of the “real world”? Are we fencing off students from the challenges they should ideally be tackling? My answer? YES!

We spend almost 20 years putting kinds in boarding schools and universities teaching them about ideals of the world and setting these ideals as the default standard when in reality, the “real world” is a complete opposite. Proof of this is the fact that most organizations have to train new recruits for almost a year before they can actually begin working tangibly.

Academia’s biggest problem is the fact that it doesn’t exist together with the real world!

I will go ahead and propose a solution: self-directed learning!

I recently cam across Uncollege.org which advocates self-directed learning based on three things; introspection, passionate action and self-motivation (words I rarely hear in academic circles). I believe this is true and I strongly advocate for this. We should focus our learning efforts in the real world rather than hiding behind “academic walled gardens”. This way our learning is practical and realistic with a direct impact on our world.

Sort of like this one:

It should be pretty easy to figure this one out. Its a simple “answering machine” for SMS’s.

What really strikes me about this app is not only its simplicity, but the fact that it was built by an English major with no prior programming skills!

How about that?

Here is someone who notices a problem or rather a need and without effort, finds a solution using technology…and I believe this person was able to do this because he understood the value of technology and used this value to seek out opportunities for solving this particular problem.

…and that leads me to think that its about time we ‘democratize’ programming.

Its about time we lowered the barriers to creating tech based solutions for our needs and problems just as we did for consuming tech based information (Think tablets, Cell Phones, Portable Music Players and related items).

Quoting the authors of App Inventor;

Imagine a world where you can transform ideas into prototypes without hiring programmers, where you can make apps that work specifically for you, where you can adapt mobile computing to fit your personal needs.

I’m calling out to the developers among us and challenging them to take initiatives (such as the afore mentioned) to empower non-programmers to find tech based solutions that suit their personal needs.

Any seconds?

The discussion mostly centred on being champions in various communities whereby these people serve as a link between the beneficiaries and the benefactors. Its pretty much a standardized role in the development sector. (And while bridges are awesome, they break!)

A little in depth thought to the role of ‘champions’ made me re-think the concept.

My train of thought starts from the fact that every community has needs and problems that need to be addressed with some sense of urgency. I believe that members of that same community are capable of finding solutions to their needs and problems. They don’t necessarily need someone to come around and craft solutions for them.

The one thing that these communities may not have is the means or resources needed to effect their solutions.

This strikes a chord in my brain.

While they can define their needs, they can also use the same to define what roles/tasks need to be accomplished in order to meet their needs and solve their problems. TO paint a picture, this looks like a crowdsourced model where many people with ideas or skills are tasked to a particular role instead of having one person take on the entire weight of achieving the community’s objective.

A single person’s knowledge and skills are limited as compared to what a community can offer if they knew what to do and how to go about it.

…and that’s why I propose we re-think the model of champions in development work.

I believe that we should take on the solutions and ideas presented to us by the community and use that to define roles that various people with various skills can take on to achieve the desired objective.

…after all, we’re in this together!

Deb, Vic and I - The Kuyu Project Core Team

Deb, Vic and I have worked on various initiatives in different capacities in our organization and we have done this virtually for a little under a year. For many, this is unreal!

Reflecting on this achievement, I now understand the ‘forces’ that have enabled us to work together virtually with concrete progress and achievements.

Of course a major ‘force’ is the tools that enable us to communicate and work together. I’ve talked about this in a previous post. Tools such as Email, Productivity Suites, Apps on various platforms etc have enabled us to make solid advancements in our work.

The less obvious ‘force’ has surprisingly nothing to do with technology…well, at least not directly. I believe that there are shared values in digital spaces that connect people together around various causes and efforts.

I often study people’s behaviour online and there seems to be some binding values that effect this. Values such as openness, net neutrality, privacy etc. We seem to be more ready to trust people we’ve never met in person when we base our trust on the assumption that these people share the same ‘digital values’ as we do and our every interaction is built on this foundation afterwards.

In the last year I’ve used this foundation built on shared values to incubate and grow an internet based organization…and this is one of the simpler things.

Based on my experience, I think we as a global digital community should strive to protect, develop and grow the values we share in digital spaces so as to provide a solid foundation and framework to capitalize on the Internet’s power and resources…people included.

What do you think?