Many people don’t realize that back in the 80’s and 90’s a lot of missionaries were further along the computer-use curve than their counterparts in the US and Europe. My dad had a computer when I was growing up in Kenya and Sudan, so I got started playing DOS-based games and became comfortable with computers at in grade school. The web came later, when I came to the US and went to visit a friend at Cal Poly – I just was mesmerized by the computer lab there with this whole internet thing. 1993 was a mind-blowing year for me and the realization of what the web meant for information.

I didn’t compare my life in Africa to anything else, it’s all I really knew. So, a lot of people tend to think of growing up in Africa as an exotic thing – for me it was just my life. Like most families living in Africa, most of your parent’s income is spent on school fees, mine was no exception. There was only one American curriculum boarding school for me to go to, Rift Valley Academy – a school tucked away into the highlands of Kenya, sitting on the side of the escarpment to the great Rift Valley. It’s a great school both academically and has good sports teams, which I kept myself busy on. It’s also the oldest school in East Africa with a long and deep history, with it’s cornerstone laid by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.

My life in the web space got its start while working at a web marketing firm. I had a number of my own domains and wanted to try out this “blog” thing, but didn’t really know what to write about. I chose WhiteAfrican as a little poke at myself and everyone’s comments about my African background. Quickly enough I found out that there were only a few of us blogging on technology in Africa, and that led me to search out new and interesting information about tech in Africa that would be useful to myself and others.

AfriGadget was born from some conversations with other Kenyan bloggers (Afromusing & Kikuyumoja). We had been discussing this “jua kali” work that gets done on the side of the road all over the continent, but that no one really pays attention to. It’s creative and entrepreneurial, and we thought it would be fun to right about. My break came when my wife was away for the weekend with the kids and I got a chance to create the site.

Finding AfriGadget type stories is an interesting task. Much of what we find and write about is commonplace in Africa, so it’s easy for us to just walk by and not really notice it. What that means is that when we’re walking around and talking to people that we really look. It’s actually quite a skill to develop. We also get about 20% of our stories from people sending in pictures and stories of their own that they see in their travels or in their neighborhood. It’s quite a community site, and has become increasingly popular over the years.

We’re actually helping to put on Maker Faire Africa this August, which stems directly from the work done on AfriGadget over the years.

I’m a big fan of Philip Isohe’s working model airplanes. You have to see them in person to get a real understanding of the love and detail he puts into each one. The neat thing was that through the story on him, he was able to sell one to a conference in Wales that paid him $400 – quite a big win for him, as it’s a hobby.

There are a couple, namely bandwidth, power and density – the last being a pretty big barrier.

A lot of people like to compare Africa to India. However, they’re missing a very big point, that being the population density of people over the continent. We have the same amount of people in Africa as India, but 10x the landmass. It makes that “last mile” issue a real problem, as the costs associated with growing mobile or internet coverage cannot be recouped as easily or quickly.

I like it. I like it because it acted as a catalyst for change in a stagnant industry that was happy to ignore Africa and other developing areas of the world. Because of the OLPC we have Classmate and the netbook industry. I also like the idea of getting digital devices into the hands of young people. Just like the present day programmers in the West (and people like myself) got started young, which led us to doing bigger/greater things with technology today, Africa too needs that same base built with the youth.

You can’t, nor should you try. Not only do we have different countries, but we have massive language barriers just between Francophone, Anglophone and Arabic speaking communities. The approach should be regional at most, country-level at least. Social media is useful in the same way that real estate and politics is – that it effects you on the local (geographic) level.

Phew, so many… I’m alway juggling too many things. I guess I can narrow it down to 3 things:

1. I’m fascinated by mobile usage, especially in the mapping and location-based context. Of course, this grows out of my work on Ushahidi (a crowdsourcing crisis mgmt. system) and the realization that basic level SMS type messaging can have a huge impact if you translate that same data to and from the web.
2. Modular, hackable hardware, like the Bug from BugLabs, intrigues me to no end. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’s my fascination with gadgets married to my childhood love of Lego. I like to think about what can be done when we cross fertilize one type of technology into another, and the Bug is just that sort of thing. Of course, it’ll be even more interesting as the components get cheaper and usable in the developing world.
3. I’ve gotten into photography over the last couple years, which as led to much better pictures and video for sites like AfriGadget. However, I’d also like to get my hands on a Gigapixel setup and do some traveling with that around Africa. It would be a great tool to capture a lot of interesting settings, both rural and urban, around the continent.

• Ushahidi Mentioned just a minute ago, is about crowdsourcing crisis information. The platform we’ve built has fairly big ramifications on the democratization of information.
• Maker Faire Africa The event we’re putting on in Ghana in August to celebrate ingenuity, innovation and invention in Africa.
• African Signals A wiki-based approach to gathering the information on mobile and web costs in every country in Africa.
• Nairobi Innovation Hub This is still in the works, but our goal is to help put together a physical nexus for the thriving tech community in Nairobi.
• The WhiteAfrican Job Board I was getting a lot of requests from people in the US and Europe to hook them up with good devs and designers in Africa. This job board is my experiment with putting those two parties together more efficiently.

I’m a “status quo challenger” and I’m also a “bridger” between cultures. That’s hard to do in one word…