I am not going to repeat what already has been said, but I am going to collect some of the things other said about it. The problem of election monitoring is a serious problem, UN or EU has developed the principle of sending important people to important places and put an official stamp on election by saying: we are watching you. I do not have enough information about if this worked or not but I know that there were never enough people to watch everything. The election in Kenya caused riots, killings and turmoil in the after-match the elections so official not part of foreign monitors. Ushahidi was developed in the after-match of those incidents and could be the basis of election monitoring as well where the crowd has power over the process. This was the background for Hivos to bring partners from the Human right sector together with partners from the tech sector and to start an election monitoring plan for East Africa. Elections will be taken place in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in the coming two years and it is important not to focus on the one event of the election itself but also on the process towards the elections and to build bridges past the election day. This was the idea behind Uchaguzi as well as you can read from this post: Uchaguzi
Where it says: Uchaguzi (“decision” in Kiswahili) is a customized version of the Ushahidi platform to monitor incidences of electoral offences, violence and even peace activities during the August 4th Constitutional Referendum vote. More on this in the short movie:
And here is the website itself: Uchaguzi.co.ke which in itself was accompanied by Uchaguzi.info a repository for tools used for election monitoring. The latter is not complete yet and the question remains if such a website should not work together with something like Socialsourcecommons which contains all the tool already and should make clustering possible and there is already a social network behind it.
I know I posted these on twitter as well but I think it might be interesting to highlight my own tweets again there were I really find them interesting or relevant to what I am doing.
It started with the Tech4Africa this year, the first Tech4Africa Conference held at The Forum in Bryanston last week and it proved to be a refreshing and vital addition to the conference circuit. A lot of people tweeted about it but I found this blogpost with the seven highlights of the conference: 7 Takeouts from Tech4Africa.
The other thing was a story on Computerworld: Humanitarian organizations venture into Africa tech scene written by Rebecca Wanjiku who I met in Nairobi on the meeting where I wrote about below. She hit the nail on the head: Lack of seed-stage equity funding and few debt financing avenues have allowed humanitarian organizations to invest in Africa’s technology scene, hoping to build on the growing “techpreneurship.” But it was not and still is not without discussion.
The second quote from that article: “The U.S. Department of State; Hivos, the Dutch humanitarian agency; the Omidyar network and the World Bank are leading supporters of Africa’s technology initiatives through direct funding, competition and grants, among other partnerships.” shows what humanitarian organisations are ment by the title and and it is an interesting combination.
Again there is a tendency to shift away from the former benefiaciary of donors: NGOs. A while ago it started with the citizen centered approach combined with a buttom up action to create change. A great example of this approach is Twaweza currently working in Tanzania and Kenya. Another example from the same source is Uwazi focussing more on education. This week a blog was opened on a project of Uwazi: The idea goes like this: find ways of gathering data about people’s opinions, beliefs and living conditions in regions where this information is painfully lacking; and when you do, make optimal use of existing information & communication infrastructures. Read more about this: MobileDataGathering.
I also wanted to add something about Uchaguzi, but that has to stay until the next time, to be continued…..
Twitter has just released a new online tool called Blackbird Pie that can turn any tweeted message into an embeddable quote for Web sites and blogs, complete with clickable links, hashtags and profile photo, like this example:
Blackbird Pie is an experiment from Twitter Media, the Twitter blog that tracks “cool, meaningful uses of tweets in media and journalism.” Here at the newspaper, we call these “drop quotes,” used to emphasize a particular point in a story. Twitter proclaims “tweets are the new quotes.”
Kind of extreme busy week last two weeks, first week was interesting filled with Media coverage, first a visit to TrosOnline, so on national radio, also coverage on RTL news, VPRO radio and the docuvideo below. So the twoday conference had quite some coverage.
The second week included a two days visit to Geneva which was useful. One day visit to Dgroups to discuss support and the new design and more important a joint ownership initiative with WHO. Second day was a service session on the use of Dgroups or Ning for the Small Producers Agency. Rest of the day and more than was really left was occupied by the writing of Context Country Analysis.
Twittergids developed a guide on the most active dutch people in the field of development aid. Ranked on the basis of followers so I made in into the top twenty. At the same time I discovered that it is also enough for a ranking at cms.twittergids.nl and webontwikkeling.twittergids.nl.
I think the real guide only will be interesting if it is on a international level or maybe to organise a distinction between organisational twits and individuals. There is to much of a difference in entities on this list.
Twittergids developed a guide on the most active dutch people in the field of development aid. Ranked on the basis of followers so I made in into the top twenty. At the same time I discovered that it is also enough for a ranking at 
