SA Rocks

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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If you don’t know yet then I’m about to tell you. Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and it seems a host of offshoot companies stemming from Wikia (I think).

Heather Ford kindly invited me to the very first of the Innovations Series held yesterday at the Grace Hotel.

Firstly, the Grace is a wondrous venue and a gem in the heart of Jo’burg that everyone should try and have tea at sometime!

I think that this post is going to take a different point of view to the others. This event was the first that I was invited to in my capacity as the SA Rocks editor. That alone was a great feeling. The next thing was that I was in the presence of some serious geek-champs. Matthew Buckland spoke at the event along with Louis-Mark. And to top it all off, Jimmy Wales, the innovator behind Wikipedia was the Keynote speaker, if I can call him that.

Without many of us knowing, yesterdays event was actually the launch of the ICommons Innovation Series. This series will be a regular occurence that brings together like-minded innovators and features some of the greatest minds around today.

The first featuring Jimmy Wales was not dissapointing. Matthew Buckland hosted a rapid-fire talk that focused on where he thinks things are going. A heavy focus on internet access via mobile devices and an open and free culture that is safe as houses because EVERYONE’S information will be equally and readily available.

Louis-Mark spoke about the three phases of the web, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 and how they correlate to us learning lessons at each point. Very interesting when he juxtaposed this opinion with the recent past of the net and the 128-bit encrypted-something-or-another that was banned in the US or something. See I’m really not a geek deep down!

Jimmy’s talk was more relaxed, explanatory and then a revelation of the plans for Wikia in one way or another. We were privelaged to see the very first screenshots in the world for the new search engine that might possibly, maybe according to some, rival Google, maybe.

The search engine will more than likely take on a Facebook approach to search. Matt wrote a more detailed post and this is what he had to say:

But the screenshot that Wales briefly showed the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page.

Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?

Described as “Google’s worst nightmare”, Wales said the main “failing” of search engines out there like Google was that they were secretive about the way they ranked search results. In stark contrast to the Open Source movement, these search engines kept information about their algorithms and code close to their chest.

Matt is right, the search/social network integration could be interesting and open up an entire new world of what could be hybrid sites that link, educate, socialise and bring together everything on one platform.

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

All in all I think that it was a great event that kick-started an even great long term concept. We are sure to see more great minds, innovators and hopefully billionaires (local ones ofcourse) emerging from and speaking at the event.

Congratulations to the ICommons team and everyone else involved. A great event.

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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.

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