SA Rocks

OpenSA! launches in Johannesburg today with a pilot project to make South African heritage more accessible for remixing and re-publishing by online creators. In collaboration with SA Rocks and the African Commons Project, OpenSA! is collecting, tagging and managing donations from people who are willing to make their material freely available online. OpenSA! will also be helping to coordinate outreach to South Africa’s young creators to enable them to learn more about how to find open content that they are free to remix and share.

As access to the Internet grows in South Africa, so too does the range of creative activity by a new generation of active online citizens. Internet publishing in the form of blogging and citizen journalism, online publishing of photographic, video and music publishing are all part of a wide range of democratic speech that we as a young nation are trying to encourage and nurture.

There are some moments in the history and culture of South Africa that are part of our shared heritage – such as Nelson Mandela’s speech when he was released from prison in 1990 or Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech. For the first time in history we have the means to make those moments available to more than just the professional journalists, filmmakers and researchers who were traditionally authorized to re-publish them.

OpenSA! is a pilot project dedicated to the growing number of young South Africans who are finding their voice online. The project was started in order to nurture this creativity by making it easier for young creators to find and share media about our heritage safely and legally.

Gregor Rohrig appears to be one of the first to contribute to OpenSA!. This is a great move for us as Gregor’s photography is some of the best that I’ve seen of South Africa and its people.

One of the main concepts around this project is the public domain. To find out a bit more info about public domain, what it is and what it means check out the blog post on iHeritage.co.za.

For additional information, please contact Heather Ford
Phone: 011 327 3155 or 082 872 7374

Email: heather@africancommons.org

The African Commons Project is a non-profit organization based in Johannesburg with the goal of mobilizing communities through active participation in collaborative technology (www.africancommons.org).

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I have finally received the answers for the SA Rocks interview with Heather Ford. It’s taken her months, nay, an age (that’s a long time) to get back to me and I have really glad that Heather was able to send through her answers.

She is incredibly busy and traveling all the time all over the world, but SA Rocks eventually tracked her down and got the goods:

So tell me a bit about what you do and how got in to the online market?

I work for iCommons – an international, high-tech non-profit organization based in Johannesburg.

You’re involvement with iCommons has allowed you great opportunities, what’s the coolest thing you’ve done recently?

Meeting the Mayor of Sapporo in Japan and going to see the snow and ice sculptures at the annual Sapporo Snow Festival.

You have been promoting an event with Jimmy Wales here in SA, The Wikipedia Academies. Give us a brief idea of what this is and why, as South Africans, we should care?

The Academies were started by Wikipedia Germany as a way to teach students how to edit Wikipedia. What we want to do here in South Africa is to develop an appreciation of how empowering it is for us to build our own encyclopedias in languages other than English. Growing up with Encyclopedia Britannica, I find it pretty incredible how we now have the potential to learn about Africa through our own eyes, to develop our own expressions of the truth, and to understand that truth is dynamic, always changing.

Now down to the serious stuff:

Why do you love South Africa?

I can’t help it really. It’s home. But I guess more than that it’s a place where the energy is tangible, where people come to make try and understand their humanity, where you can really make a difference and see that difference in the world around you.

You’ve been around the world, which country comes close to matching our cultural diversity in your experience?

It’s difficult to say. In terms of diversity, I guess I’d have to say the United States or Brazil.

Do you think that we have an open and free culture here in SA? If not, why not?

I think it could be more free. Free culture is a culture that is open for people to remix and share – a culture that enables us to become active creators rather than passive users. It’s the opposite of a couch-potato culture. I think that – for a variety of reasons – we South Africans still accept that our culture and our knowledge should be dictated by the West. Digital creativity – where the real potential lies – is still mostly in the hands of a wealthy elite who use the law to try and lock the people out of that potential. So I think that there is lots of room for improvement so that we can turn our incredible diversity, energy and agency into real innovation.

Your presentation at the 27 Dinner a few months ago centred around the free culture of music. Do you think that this is truly the way forward for SA artists? Can this openculture/freeculture really be applied across the board? And would the Radiohead experiment work here in SA for local bands?

Well, I don’t think that having a freer, more open culture is very controversial. A free culture in any sector stimulates innovation, improves competition and quality, and should enable us to hear music beyond Britney Spears (and I’m a fan of Britney Spears you hear!). The point of disagreement I guess is how you enable a freer, more open culture. What we at iCommons say is that finding ways to share your intellectual property with the world is the main path to innovation, and that for the first time in human history, we have found a technology that enables us to share in a way that benefits everyone – the artist, the producer, the fan, the distributor and most importantly, the budding artist in all of us.

With regards to the Radiohead experiment, I guess that’s why it’s called an experiment: because there is still no three-step process to follow here. It’s a matter of crunching the numbers, being really analytical about it, and then taking a small leap of faith. I definitely think that local bands should be experimenting a lot more with new business models, though – and using the potential of new (and old) technology to become more independent from the industry – because the innovation is not going to come from the big players – it’s going to come from the musicians who want to stay true to their music and their fans, and who have less to lose.

Do you believe that SA is competing on a global level when it comes to innovators and great minds online?

I think that there are some incredible people out there doing really great things online in SA (SARocks is a case in point ) and that this is definitely on an upward trend right now. I passionately believe that if we really prioritise digital innovation as a nation, then we could very well see this turning into the widespread flourishing of unique, home-grown solutions on the Internet and that this could have an incredible impact on the empowerment of Africa in the Information Age.

Again, thanks go out to Heather for participating and I hope that she keeps rocking the world with the SA flag flying high!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa License.

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Heather Ford has offered up the below post as a contribution to SA Rocks. This post also serves as promotion for a fantastic event being held by M&G, icommons and others. Thanks Heather! Keep your eyes peeled for my interview with Heather coming up pretty soon!

One of my favorite board members, Jimmy Wales, will be in Johannesburg in exactly 11 sleeps. Jimmy is in the country to launch the African Wikipedia Academies – a series of Wikipedia sprints, workshops and boot camps to encourage the local celebration of Wikipedia as an amazing tool for education, culture and enterprise in Africa.

As I continually say, Wikipedia is not exciting because its the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Its exciting because it gives us the opportunity to write our own history, our own textbooks, our own view of the world. Wikipedia is a practical expression of what makes the Internet special. And practicing contributions to Wikipedia is what makes us realise what the Internet is really for. It’s not just about using, its about being active participants in the creation of meaning about the world around us. It’s about valuing a resource that is powerful because it is in the commons – free for anyone to reuse, remake and remix.

Jimmy is coming to South Africa because he is passionate about his goal of ‘Wikipedias in every major language in the world’ – and this is where he’s starting the experiments. I’ll never forget how kind he was in drumming it into me that the Wikipedia way is not to just translate English articles into Afrikaans articles (even though it might start out that way). The idea is that a local language community can build its own Wikipedia completely separate from the English version. It is this autonomy and the community spirit that has enabled Wikipedia to thrive on the back of volunteer contributions by over 50,000 active users.

A number of schools in South Africa use Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia copyright license enables anyone to freely copy and share the resource in textbooks, lesson plans etc as long as it is attributed. In terms of local language Wikipedias, Afrikaans Wikipedia has an active community of contributors. But contributors are hardly applauded for their work in the local press, and a lot needs to be done to encourage the smaller local language editions of Wikipedia.

This is the goal of the African Wikipedia Academies. iCommons is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring people like Ndesanjo Macha, considered the Father of Swahili Wikipedia, Ian Gilfillan, a great contributor to the South African local language Wikipedias, as well as Frank Schulenburg who conceptualised the first Wikipedia Academies in Germany.

Better yet, we’re having a fabulous cocktail party during which Jimmy will talk about Wikipedia, Wikia (the business application of wiki software) and a vision for the Academies. Everyone is invited to that one. All you have to do is shell out R500 in aid of the Academies, and join the party at 4pm on Tuesday the 13th of November at the Grace Hotel in Rosebank. Register here. Everyone who is anyone on the SA Internet scene will be there. I promise.

Picture of Jimmy Wales (above) by Chrys on flickr.com, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.

This post is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 licence.

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