It's latest tweets, posted yesterday on @hsmpress, include photos and descriptions of two Kenyan government officials they've kidnapped, Fredrick Irungu Wainaina and Mule Edward.

The terrorist organization, known in full as Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen, had been accused of kidnapping tourists from coastal Mombasa and other locations in the lead-up to the October invasion. One of the tourists, a French national, died.

Al-Shabaab has been using Twitter since early December.

Kenya-based TechMtaa commented:

"The account seems to be run by someone who is taking lots of caution on how he/she logs in. The language looks so American stoking the fear that some US Islamic extremists are aiding the organisation in its terror activities. The account is mostly active at night and the user does not posts for a long time before abruptly logging off."

The New York Times reported that the U.S. government was considering an attempt to shut the organization's Twitter down. That has not happened. Whether holding off is a function of the ease with which a new account could be started, legal issues with a shut-down or because the account is a source of intelligence is unclear. I think the latter might be most likely.

I spent a day talking with leaders from IBM, Microsoft and Google about their operations and goals in Africa. We spoke in their offices in Kenya, increasingly important as a gateway to East and Central Africa, as well as to the content as a whole. It turns out that each company's culture has significantly tinted how each sees Africa, and how they operate.

IBM was the only company that gave us a presentation during our meeting. The presentation, riddled with typos, was nonetheless almost painfully professional. It listed assets and plans and platitudes. It focused on the past, specifically, Africa's. The meeting, carefully planned, more mannered than polite, was also overstaffed, with four people representing the company.

IBM was depicted in an introductory slide as being present in Kenya since 1959. In reality, they were in Kenya for a couple of years before leaving for almost six decades, to return only in 2009, once the election violence was well and truly past. Their presence was maintained in the interim by sales representatives. Now they staff a full-fledged subsidiary office.

Charles Munyororo, Global Technology Services Leader for IBM East Africa Ltd., and Vincent Njoroge, Global Business Services Leader (I still have no idea what those titles mean), took us through the set of slides.

The long and short of it (mostly long) was that IBM is a firm believer in an Africa made up of refineries, mines, ports and governments. For IBM, this suits its strength as a large-scale, well-entrenched firm with a focus hardware and consulting. The realities of African tech strengths and needs were touched on by, but seemed lost on, the company.

One of Kenya's best known social web innovations is a bankless mobile money transfer system, called M-Pesa. M-Pesa, although allegedly developed independently, was subsequently managed by Vodafone affiliate, Safaricom. IBM now runs it for Vodafone. It is popular because banks have very little to do with the way it works, person-to-person. Most users will never interact with a bank as long as they employ it. Since most Kenyans, and most Africans, do not have bank accounts and credit cards, M-Pesa is a popular product. IBM, however, plans to develop bank-specific payment tools so that all the banks people aren't using can, as Njoroge put it, recoup the fees they aren't getting from the people who are using M-Pesa. Good for IBM and its customers, possibly, though it is hard to see the gain for M-Pesa's existing customers.

As we took our leave, I asked Mr. Munyororo whether IBM had a relationship with the de facto geek HQ of East Africa, iHub. "No."

IBM's agreement to manage the large African mobile provider, Bharti Airtel, will make it a mobile player for some time to come. But its apparent disdain for the rich ecosystem of geeks in its midst may indicate a time of difficulties to come when its tech equivalent of a resource extraction economy falters.

Microsoft

Microsoft's General Manager for East and Southern Africa, Louis Onyango Otieno, met us in an office with a lengthy boardroom table that would have not been out of place anywhere from Osaka to Redmond. In fact, nothing in the room would have led you to the conclusion you were in Africa aside from Otieno himself. As General Manager for East and Southern Africa, Otieno has led the software company's efforts in the region in recent years.

"What I'm most proud of," he said, leaning back in his padded chair, "what I hope I'm remembered for, is our localization of all of Microsoft into Kiswahili." Kiswahili, an Arab- and Bantu-based lingua franca for East Africa, is Kenya's national language. Microsoft agreed to a project that would allow everything from software help copy to the Windows operating system itself to be expressed in that tongue.

Otieno created a list of 3,000 tech words that Kiswahili did not already have - CPU, web browser, Windows - and assembled a group of linguists and charged the latter to translate the former. They did so with great pride, he said. It was their, and his, legacy, and a formidable legacy for Microsoft in Africa.

One gets the sense after talking with Otieno about Microsoft, that the company is under no illusions as to the importance of the market, which is 1-billion strong and is assiduous in its work toward understanding and appealing to it. Nor do they underestimate its capacity for growth. 40% of Africa's people are currently under 20 years old. That is a huge growth market.

There is also an effort made to welcome African interns and high-performing graduates into the company. Clearly, Microsoft is paying attention to its customers and to the culture (and language) of its future customers. How much are they learning from Africa however is impossible to say. Focus is still, in Africa no less than Redmond, on Microsoft's successes, namely, its operating system and its Outlook business suite. But the former is 30 years old and the latter debuted well over a decade ago.

Google

One of the things I asked the representatives of all three companies I visited was how the African tech landscape would look in five years. Specifically, how would Africa enter the world's tech consciousness on a big scale?

Both IBM and Microsoft demurred. But Joe Mucheru, Google's regional lead for Sub-Saharan Africa, launched right into his vision of the region with no reservations.

"It won't be five years," he said, leaning forward in one of Google's small conference rooms in Nairobi. "I don't even think it will take two." In Mucheru's future, Africa's contribution to the social web will be in the creation of a "social labor marketplace." In much the same way that eBay enabled a globalized individual marketplace of things, Mucheru believes that African geeks will help to create a similar marketplace for labor.

"Africa needs more jobs than it can import," he said. With a distributed one-to-one and one-to-many marketplace, the growing number of increasingly educated African youth will be able to sell their skills - coding, translating, journalism, piecework manufacturing and assembly, whatever it might be - on a worldwide market at the rates it will bear. This, he believes, will mark the beginning of a new kind of marketplace, used by both sellers and buyers of work around the globe, and it will bear the unmistakable mark of its African developers.

Google is counting on the African developer ecosystem to make its market work, but it is still focusing mostly on nurturing the market and not as much on nurturing the contributors. Its current push is to get all local and regional businesses online, using Google products. It is donating expertise in training and materials such as computers to local universities.

Mugu Kibati, Director-General of Kenya's Vision2030 program, described Kenya's government as "grateful" for the company's decision to locate its primary Africa office there, despite the 2007 election violence. Google has placed a long-term bet on Africa in general and Kenya in specific, Kibati said Google officials had told him. They see Kenya much as Kenyans do, as a place with ups and downs but whose overall course is straight and fruitful.

Despite the Googleness of the offices I visited, those working there were nonetheless far more formally dressed than their counterparts back home. One resident journalist remarked that Kenyan businesses were unfailingly professional and "procedural" than an analogous workplace in the States. This is in part a function of the formality the country's inherited from its colonial British overlords upon declaring independence in 1963. In fact, Kenya's former president Daniel Arap Moi was nicknamed "Nyoya," or "footsteps," as in, people should follow in his, with alacrity and a minimum of fuss. Those who didn't wound up in Nyoya House, the basement of which was famous for its torture chambers.

Kenyan business places are hardly torture chambers, but they are stiff and that stiffness may not put them in as good a position as they could hope to be in, so that they might quickly shift and catch new currents in the continent.

Qui Bono?

But the workplaces of giant tech companies may not, in the long run, be where the business of the nation is conducted. In a later story, I will examine Kenya's entrepreneurial geek culture and the private organizations that incubate them.

The "corporate culture" of these three big high-tech companies has not changed with its change of scenery. I suspect it is much the same for Cisco, Samsung and the many others currently lighting out for, or landing in, Africa, with its increasingly educated and gradually more affluent consumer base. In fact, they are as likely to change Africa as much as Africa changes them, unless, of course, the real engine of Africa's growth is found somewhere else, in, say, the native expression of an international constant: nerd love.

Otieno photo via Nairobitech, other photos by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

The self-taught indie security consultant, who specialized in shop security for small businesses in the Kenyan capital, made his house fully mobile-phone controlled. If someone broke in while he was out, for instance, his house would send an SMS message to the local police. But most important of all his innovations was the tea machine.

As Dr. Kamau Gachigi, director of the University of Nairobi's Fab Lab said, "Some day, when Simon is a millionaire, that tea machine will stand proudly in the lobby of his building."

After seeing Mr. Mwaura's home on the local TV news (see video below), Gachigi pulled in two of his students and pointed at the paused picture on the screen, showing Mwaura in front of his large, makeshift circuit board, about the size of a kitchen pantry.

"Go to the TV station," he told them, "and don't come back without that man." Now Mwaura has been brought into Fab Lab. With student help, his pantry-sized circuit board is now contained on a single computer chip.

Gachigi heads up the MIT-allied Fab Lab, as well as the University of Nairobi Science and Technology Park. The Fab Lab, like its global counterparts, is one in a network of hands-on high-tech construction facilities, allowing students, faculty and the public to create working prototypes of high-tech, and low-tech, ideas. It also serves as a business incubator and an applied technology, marketing and sales consultancy. The network as a whole is operated according to an open source ethos. Every partner lab is obliged to share new innovations with the network and any lab may build anything another has as a prototype.

"Necessity is the mother of innovation," said the professor, "and ours is a value-added culture."

This "value-added cuture" is so much a part of the Kenyan sense of self that it
has a name in Kiswahili, "jua kali." (In English, "hot sun.")

So far the Fab Lab is incubating 17 small companies. One of them was built off of the MIT Media Lab's innovation, a Wi-Fi amplifier built of locally-sourced materials, in Nairobi's case, plywood and chicken wire. By bending the plywood in a certain way and attaching chickenwire to the concavity, rebroadcasting towers can be created that extend the reach and power of Internet connectivity.

Dr. Kamau Gachigi, director of the University of Nairobi's Fab Lab, and staff

The local "estate," or neighborhood, of Mountainview, has had a 13-month trial serving 10,000 people. Three students manufactured and implemented the system for their senior project. They formed a company to re-sell the Internet connection and the Fab Lab has helped them find seed money and advised them both on the technical and marketing elements. The same system is already in use, as a going concern, upcountry around a store and school complex.

It's important to remember, and Kenya has reminded me, that technology is not the exclusive domain of eggheads, or even propellerheads. The word itself comes from the Greek for "to make" and making is one of the essential urges of the human spirit.

Don't worry. I haven't drank the Kool Aid. There are plenty of obstacles here in Kenya, in the region and on the continent that continue to militate against the success of technology in improving people's lives and in nudging the human family toward some sort of elemental parity. I will cover those as well, as the series progresses. But finding people with the desire and ability to create, with the insistence on making regardless of the resources available, is not one of those obstacles, as Kamau Gachigi, Simon Mwaura and the Fab Lab demonstrate.

Photo of Mwaura's tea machine courtesy The Standard, tea cup photo by thesaint, photo of Gachigi and students by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

In the years since, I've realized that Kenya, and the other 45+ countries of Sub-Saharan African, have something else. Technology. Kenya's capital Nairobi is the capital of tech in East Africa. Unfortunately, the sheer weight of media imagery featuring charismatic megafauna and famine overwhelm any clear and nuanced picture of the exciting present and possible future of Africa. So I'm going to Kenya to see if I can't capture some small part of that bigger picture.

What's Tech About Africa?

Africa in general, and Kenya in particular, has turned its liabilities (the abiding lack of infrastructure, a surfeit of young people and persistent economic challenges) into a strength: a hard-to-rival mobile entrepreneurial culture.

But the only image that came to my aunt's mind when she found out I was going out to Africa was of the Masai. When I stopped by the St. Vincent de Paul to donate some clothes and got to talking to the attendant, he asked, "What's tech about Africa?"

The Republic of Kenya and the many government and non-profit groups, businesses and entrepreneurs focusing on tech in the country want to change this. So while in country I'm going to have the opportunity to speak with Kenya's Information and Communications Permanent Secretary, Dr. Bitange Ndemo; members of the ICT Board of Kenya; Mary Kimonye, CEO of Brand Kenya; Mugo Kibati, Secretary General, Vision 2030. I'll also have access to Africa executives from IBM, Google and Microsoft, and to executives from Kenya-based Safaricom, Zuku, as well as academics from Strathmore University and elsewhere.

I'll also visit the site of the new 5,000-acre new tech development park, Konza Technology City, and the iHub tech and business incubator, which I'm really looking forward to.

If you'd like to read about Kenya's vital and entrepreneurial tech scene here are some of the stories I've written about African technology.

Africa is gigantic (see graphic above) and multifaceted. A story about Kenya can no more represent all of Africa than a story about Moldova can stand for all of Eurasia. But Kenya is, in fact, an African country and examining it will give you a sense, a hint of the obstacles and promise of the continent as a whole.

As this posts, I am flying to Kenya. Over the next week, in the TECHNOTRANSECT series, devoted to the present and future of African technology, I hope to be able to give you some pictures that counter the notion that the continent is a cross between a game park and a slum. It is my suspicion that Africa in general, Kenya in particular, will figure heavily in the whole world's technological future.

Kenya Backgrounder

Click here for more of our extensive continent-wide African technology coverage.

Kenyan flag photo by Kevin Walsh | True Size of Africa graphic by Kai Clausen via Information Is Beautiful | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

"The Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) goes live this morning," White African wrote yesterday, "in a big event that includes President Kibaki, as well as many politicians, government officials and local technologists."

The Data

The data is being made available via the Socrata platform. Socrata calls the Kenyan initiative, "one of the most comprehensive open data projects anywhere in the world" and writes that its goal is "to create enabling infrastructure that can accelerate human and economic development throughout communities in Kenya."

Data has been pulled from national census, the ministry of education, ministry of health, CDF projects, the World Bank and other sources, according to White African and Socrata. The data is organized under six types: education, energy, health, water and sanitation, population and poverty.

Paul Kukubo, CEO of Kenya's ICT, the state corporation in charge of the development and marketing of the information, communications and technology sector in the country, outlined the hopes for the program in greater detail.

"For the first time ever, people in our communities will be empowered to choose the best schools for their children, locate the nearest health facility that meets their needs, and use regional statistics to lobby their constituency representative for better infrastructure and services in their county. The research community, on the other hand, can use this consolidated resource of valuable new data to discover practical insights that can guide economic and human development in Kenya. For example: What effect does access to drinking water have on school attendance in children? What is the correlation between access to healthcare and school grades? Where does it make sense to build the next hospital? School? Irrigation project? All Kenyans can now participate in finding solutions to these crucially important questions."

Data-Inspired Projects

The Ministry of Information and Communications is awarding grants to support the development of native and mobile apps that use the data, through iHub, a Kenyan tech hub and community of 4,250 geeks.

Ushahidi, notorious for not sitting on their hands when there are data to crush, have already created a health-based project. They have taken the census data and overlaid it with healthcare institution data on their Huduma site. "It's still very beta, but it shows what can be done in just a few days."

Other projects include the Msema Kweli mobile app, "that allows you to find CDF projects near you, and for you to add pictures of them" and an app by Virtual Kenya "that shows which MPs refuse to pay taxes."

Almost 30% of Kenyans have Internet access and just over 63% have mobile access.

Nairobi photo by Brian Snelson | thanks to Rassina

Well, the entire continent of Africa begs to differ with that cartoonish picture. Having covered African technology extensively here, and having been invited to speak at the continent's largest digital technology conference, I wanted to find out what Africans themselves were doing in terms of utilizing the social web to short circuit the abiding desire of the West to draft Brad Pitt and Bono as the voices of Africa. I found the Kuyu Project.

I became aware of the Kenya-based Kuyu Project through one of my Twitter follows, Rassina Hassan, who works with the group. She introduced me to the Kuyu's Founder and Executive Director, Simeon Oriko.

Kuyu's focus is teaching high school students in Africa how to use social media to affect change in their communities. As they say in their mission statement:

"We deeply believe that by offering an open platform and teaching digital techniques we are fueling the dreams and aspirations of these young minds which might one day lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change Africa and the world."

One of their initiatives is StorySpaces, "a mobile and web based social media application aimed at enabling different communities to interact and participate in global conversations online." Their hope in building it is to allow users to transform their online conversations "into offline tangible actions that make an impact in the local community."

They're currently in the process of setting up a StorySpace for citizen journalists and hacktivists in Uganda "to respond to the escalating protests about food and fuel price increases in the country" and raising funds through IndieGoGo, a crowdsourcing funding tool.

I interviewed Oriko, a senior at the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton, via email about the project, its goals and the utility of the social web in an African context.

The ReadWriteWeb Interview: Simeon Oriko

I started The Kuyu Project in June 2010 after conducting a series of digital literacy camps in various high schools around the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton as the chairperson of the local computer science students association. The camps were mostly built around training the kids on how to use web based tools such as Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha for their education. As the camps grew bigger and became more popular, we increased the training and materials to include personal objectives and social change. The camps were primarily targeted at senior high school students.

What inspired its creation?

The inspiration came from the impact I saw in the youth I was teaching at the digital literacy camps. One girl in particular was inspired to use Google and later social networks on her mobile phone to seek out information to achieve her dream of becoming a pilot. For her and a number of other kids, they quickly learned the value of technology and using it as advantage to seek out new opportunities for effecting change in their communities as well as achieving their personal objectives.

Reflecting on this, it became clear to me that we could create a dynamic framework for scaling a youth initiative based on the learning value of technology to address the unique social, cultural and economic challenges that face our continent. I decided to use the interesting new realities the social web and mobile technology presented in Africa as the foundation to build our grassroots youth technology development project.

Next page: Digital literacy

How important is digital literacy to the future of Africa's youth, its economy, etc?

Digital literacy helps create mind share, intellectual capital and capacity, as well as innovative solutions which will empower and include African youth in fully participating in the 21st century. It is also critical to the growth of knowledge societies and ecosystems in the rapidly changing technological landscape of Africa. Africans are already next generation web users accessing social networks and the mobile web through their phones. This remarkable social mobile revolution across the continent is creating explosive new opportunities ranging from politics, governance, entrepreneurship, commerce, banking, media and moving towards disrupting all other industries. We're seeing some of the adaptive issues that occur when youth aren't adequately prepared to enter a workforce, motivated to vote or start their own ventures which largely depend on their digital literacy and participatory skills. As evidenced in recent world changing events in Tunisia, Egypt and other parts of the continent, Africa is ripe for a transformational technological youth quake that extends beyond social media and mobile technology as revolution tools towards encompassing all other aspects of our lives.

How will your project help?

Primarily, the Kuyu project will create a digital literacy framework to build on:

a. Greater visibility and multimedia opportunities for African youth who are under-represented and marginalized in their societies to share their unique stories and join the global conversation

b. Upgrading the digital and creative skills of African youth to include mobile and cloud computing technology

c. Mind share and dynamic participation in various situations concerning the current seismic social, economic and political changes occurring all over Africa

d. Intellectual capital, creativity and the capacity for technology transfer skills among peers

e. Scaling informative and tested solutions as a direct result of facilitating knowledge sharing, collaborative and collective problem solving

f. Critical mass of stronger connected communities with a pool of champions growing solidly behind relevant causes and firmly dedicated towards advancing them.

g. Accumulation of valuable resource base from tapping into the virtual and physical cognitive wealth of actively contributing communities sharing and applying ideas

h. Viral network of talented African technologists and developers spreading digital literacy and innovation in an open crowd sourced platform

What other projects using, or about, digital tech, in Kenya, and in Africa in general, do you find interesting?

I'm biased toward mobile and social change projects. The ones I find interesting in this field include Voices of Africa, (specifically Haki Zetu and SPARC which is a solar powered Internet kiosk aimed at helping rural communities get digital connectivity as well as creating local economies) and Revoda, a social election monitoring tool.

What does the future hold for Kenya, and Africa in general?

I believe Africa's future greatly relies on technological advances and brain-gain currently driven by social media and mobile technology with increasingly-connected African youth and diaspora recreating and re-imagining its immense potential by deviating from existing story lines to establish a new powerful vision of change across the continent. Social technologies such as the one we're building at StorySpaces are radically changing the narrative and fueling the dreams and aspirations of young minds which might lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change and benefit Africa and the world.

Can you describe how you conduct your digital literacy campaigns and the scope of your digital literacy camps?

Our digital literacy campaign consists of conducting digital camps for our trainees to acquire relevant digital skills particularly in the areas of citizen media, hacktivism, youth empowerment, government transparency and accountability. Trainees will be specifically taught to share their acquired skills and join our Youth Mentorship Program designed to increase their teaching output to peers. This will ensure a wider reach for our project to gain and build a viral grassroots movement of digitally savvy youth starting in Kenya and scaling to the rest of their population in Africa.

To date we have trained high school students in the following schools in Kenya:

● Kapsabet Boys High School
● Kapsabet Girls High School
● Mwiruti Secondary School
● St. Joseph's Chepterit Girls Secondary School
● Chemundu High School
● Terige Boys High School
● Baraton Adventist Secondary School

The training camps at these schools have been conducted in partnership with the Baraton Information Technology Students Association, BITSA. This organization includes all the Information Science and Computing students at the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton.

We plan to expand our digital literacy camps to Uganda and Ghana in the next half of 2011 with a target goal of reaching out to another 2500 students.

How does StorySpaces work and where are you on the project?

StorySpaces was recently demoed at the Media 140 conference in Barcelona.

StorySpaces is envisioned as an open platform web and mobile based social network where youth can share stories and quickly see the important news and stories in their social network. StorySpaces is based on the idea that users relate better to experiences and identify with actions and want to participate rather than just consume information. This provides them with raw material as a foundation for transforming digital conversations into practical offline actions. In the social web it offers an alternative from the limits of Facebook and Twitter in documenting full length stories.

StorySpaces will hold a collection of multi-media story snippets composed of relevant topical themes that are easy to set up; youth, aspiring journalists, and other users can add a post (story) without having to set up a blog or worrying about those things that set barriers to entry of stories in other words, promoting transparency, security and ease-of-access.

StorySpaces can be used for all types of web and mobile blogging from modern storytelling and traditional storytelling techniques to citizen journalism. One of the ways we plan to use it for The Kuyu Project is to give youth a place to connect with others who are seeking to effect positive social change to find peers, mentors tapping into a resource base to guide them in their paths.

We are working on creating StorySpaces not only as a Web application but also for a variety of mobile handsets including iOS and Android. In addition SMS/MMS capabilities will be a part of the design. The mobile app will allow citizens to subscribe to news feeds from trusted sources and to search for news stories by keyword and download those stories. Some of the underlying problems with the current solutions is that while many are using blogging to take active roles in providing news about local communities, many see setting up a blog as too complicated. Additionally, social networking tools like Facebook have their own culture and meaning to youth, but are not specifically designed to encourage promoting stories of social good. While other tools such as Twitter offer microblogging, but not the opportunity for extended stories, StorySpaces is designed to give youth a place to connect with others who are seeking to effect positive social change and to find mentors to guide them in their paths.

Next page: Creating a team

How did you put your team together?

The team met on Twitter actually. I was connected with Deb Elzie (@debelzie) and she had a strong interest in the implementation of The Kuyu Project. When I shared with my vision with her and my desire to create a mobile and web application, she thought I should meet Victor Miclovich (@vicmiclovich) a talented programmer based in Uganda. We had a 7 hour Skype session one weekend and our core team was formed with Rassina Hassan (@rassina) joining us later. We are building a pan-African virtual startup with global ties and our team of 20+ smart volunteers continues to grow. The idea for StorySpaces was formed through collaboration. A majority of the team is based in Uganda and Kenya with a number of others in West Africa - Emeka Okoye (@EmekaOkoye) in Nigeria , Alfred Rowe (@Nukturnal) in Ghana - and in the United States. We all meet via Twitter or through our regular Skype group sessions and it has been a great experience so far, the entire team is very committed to seeing the project launch successfully.

What is your background?

My background in tech began as a child and picked up with the advent of mobile and social technologies. My interest in these fields led me to an early conceptualization of Mobile Cloud Computing and interest in ICT4D. I've since focused efforts on creating a mobile cloud computing platform and digital literacy initiatives.

I also have a strong attachment to the African tech industry. I've previously been a Microsoft Student Partner and also partnered with under sea fibre-optic organization, SEACOM on a number of projects.

I'm currently involved in the "Digital Natives With a Cause?" program which is a joint program by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, and Dutch development organization, HIVOS. My contribution to the program involves participation in a number of workshops that culminate in a book documenting the role of youth and technology in social transformation processes.

I'm also a member of the iHub, a tech incubator and innovation hub. In the coming months, I'll be interning with m:Lab, a consortia of four organizations that aims to facilitate demand-driven innovation by regional entrepreneurs, ensuring that breakthrough low-cost, high-value mobile solutions can be developed and scaled-up into sustainable businesses that address social needs.

***

Although Simeon and his crew are creative and motivated individuals, it hardly takes away from their uniqueness to point out that such young people are far from impossible to find in Africa. In fact, Africa, with its adventurous spirit and entrepreneurism, especially as regards the mobile web, is one of the most exciting areas of the world when it comes to new technology.

There are doubtless places on the continent that need help with food and clearly too many places that need health assistance, professionals and teaching, but there are also many places and tons of people like the Kuyu crew, people who are working hands-on to move their people and countries forward. They do not "deserve your help" as much as they should inspire your admiration.

Keep a weather eye on Tech Africa. These days, if you blink, you're liable to miss something cool.

The women used Google Map Maker, and their specific local knowledge, to fill in schools, health centers, market centers, community development projects, restaurants and roads in a country too often neglected by cartographers.

"We had a mix of students, web developers, Non-profit CEOs, an advocate and even an editor. Their backgrounds were quite an interesting mix as we had Computer Science students and Geography students, participants with an environmental background but the common factor is that they had an interest to improve the Kenya maps. Either where they live, where they have projects or areas they frequent."

This is hardly the first time Google has invited people to an intensive mapping party. Not unlike the independent Map Kibera experiment, Google invited the inhabitants of Korogocho to put themselves on the map. A Pakistan project brought people together last year to map changes after that country's horrific mudslides.

Google is hardly a non-profit. All the information entered is available for further iterations of the company's maps. However, Rajuai says this undertaking extends beyond making a profit.

"The bigger aim of all this is to make the world's information accessible, and also to make sure that we get more African content, and to make the internet useful and relevant for Africans."

Any readers involved in other crowdsourced mapping projects? Let us know in the comments.

Most people outside the continent imagine Africa as being the size of a France or two. (In reality it's the size of the U.S., China, Japan and most of Europe.) So it's a big job for a big company that has big plans over a big area of the world.

On her blog, Okolloh described the new position of Policy Manager for Africa.

"The role will involve developing policy (and) strategies on a number of areas of relevance to Google and the Internet in Africa and will involve working with different parties including government leaders, policy makers, regulators, industry groups and so on. It is a huge opportunity to bring Google's resources to bear as far as the growth and development of the internet in Africa (and hopefully a reminder of why I went to law school in the first place!)."

Jon Gosier, Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi told us he thinks Okolloh might help make Google's actions on the continent more coherent.

"Google Africa hasn't really been as focused as it has been in other parts of the world. I think hiring Ory is the right move as she's a lawyer, so she understands the policy side of things, but she also founded and ran a technology company for three years. There isn't a better a choice for the position, although it's bittersweet to lose one of my colleagues."

Okolloh told ReadWriteWeb she would be based in Johannesburg, RSA, starting in mid-January, with a portfolio that includes the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

"Overall, I'll be working to get more people online and policies favorable to that, also (cultivate) support for local content and an environment which supports innovation."

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of Google and of Ushahidi.

Okolloh photo from World Economic Forum | other sources: Los Angeles Times

Using OpenStreetMap (that thing is fast becoming the phlogiston of social entrepreneurship), the 170,070 inhabitants of this slum adjacent to Kenya's capital Nairobi have rewritten the nation's official maps and in doing so, have made their own recognition a fait accompli.

Social media gave the people of Kibera a way of insisting they not just be serviced by their government but recognized by the country as a whole. Why is summed up in the Map Kibera wiki.

"Kibera was literally a blank spot on the map, its patterns of traffic, scarce water resources, limited medial facilities, etc. remain invisible to the outside world, and residents themselves. Without basic knowledge of the geography of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents of Kibera."

Though the project was defined and funding found by Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron, a core group of about 30 Kibera locals mapped streets, public buildings and more. In the wake of a flood this last May, Reuters AlertNet notes, the Map Kibera folks were able to quickly create a map that showed which areas were under water. The dynamic, user-updated map also helps service professionals and NGOs like the Red Cross respond to needs occasioned by the area's constant fires.

The latest step for the group is a citizen reporting site called Voice of Kibera. VoK aggregates the mapping information from Map Kibera and elsewhere, as well as streaming in SMS reports on Kibera news from locals and collects area news from other sources.

We'd love to hear of any other examples you can think of in which acts of location have helped people to become more fully present in their worlds.

Kenya introduces toll-free SMS to report hate speech. In advance of the August 4 elections, the Kenyan government is prosecuting hate speech. Given the horrible inter-ethnic violence, it's understandable. But given how every thing becomes a weapon in this sort of a fight, it's worrying. When the next election's done, who believes such a thing will be rolled back?

China now plans to "deanonymize" cell phone users. China is attempting to destroy all anonymity on the Internet. Week after week of this, I don't even know what more to say. The Chinese government is just wall-to-wall creeps.

The United States plans to "deanonymize" the Internet. Really? Really? Are you people doing this just to embarrass me? Saying "there's no difference between the U.S. and China" is stupid. But saying, "It looks like there's less and less difference" is, unfortunately, not.

Saudi arrested on the most ridiculous charge yet. My hand to G-d I thought I had seen every knuckle-headed "charge" a person could be brought up on. But the Saudis, bless their black little hearts, have raised the bar. For criticism of religious and political leaders in his country, Sheikh Mekhlef bin Dahham al-Shammari has been arrested on the charge of "annoying others." I swear to you I am not making that up. Just click the link. I mean, are the KSA's torture squads even trying anymore?

Turkish citizens hit the bricks to protest online censorship. Thank you, my Turkish brothers and sisters, for allowing me to end on a note of hope. Though the increasingly autocratic Turkish government is cinching down more and more on its people, those people aren't taking it lying down. Thousands of people took to the street. Down with Law #5651!

Injustice photo by Dustin & Jenae DeKoekkoek
Instanbul photo by Neil Sequeira

In a recent and potentially devastating polio outbreak in Kenya, EpiSurveyor's new mobile platform was used to track virus carriers and immunize affected children. The campaign targeted around 2 million Kenyan children. Mobile tech will be used exclusively for new nationwide initiatives in children's healthcare, and the World Health Organization has made EpiSurveyor the standard for data collection in sub-Saharan Africa. Screenshots and video included below.

The EpiSurveyor program began using donated Palm Pilots to gather health data in Kenya and Zambia less than two years ago. Currently, DataDyne is migrating the program to Java-based platforms for mobile phones. Beta testing began in April 2009 with Nokia S40 series devices and will expand to support other devices in May.

There's an interesting and rather basic tutorial video for field workers here which demonstrates some of the uses of EpiSurveyor's data collection tools. Much more interesting is this video, an interview with an EpiSurveyor mobile developer in Kenya who had been working through the night to prepare a stack of phones for data collection in the field:

Interestingly, DataDyne's Coded in Country (CIC) initiative puts at least 50% of the coding duties in the hands of local developers, helping to bolster both local tech communities and local economies.

Since most developing areas have far greater saturation of mobile devices than of actual computers with Internet connections, these devices are of the utmost importance for collecting, storing, retrieving, and transmitting critical and even life-saving information.

Last year, EpiSurveyor training took place in nine countries (Benin, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, Rwanda, Senegal, and Uganda). This year, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, Eritrea, Gabon, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Togo will also have training programs. Overall, more than 800 health officers throughout Africa will have been trained on the EpiSurveyor program with potential to reach over hundreds of thousands of patients throughout the continent.

Datadyne founder, pediatrician and CDC epidemiologist Dr. Joel Selanikio, also recently won this year's $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability for his contributions to public health and international development.

(Photo by Joel Selanikio/DataDyne.org.)