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.

There was great media coverage:

Fast Company – While Kenya Votes, Ushahidi Does Its Part
Newsweek – Needles in a Haystack
UN Dispatch – Kenya Votes
Remarks At The President’s Forum with Young African Leaders
The Christian Science Monitor – Kenya referendum monitored by SMS and Twitter
All Africa – Kenya: SOS by SMS
El Mundo.es – Una revolución móvil a tiempo real en el referéndum constitucional de Kenia
The Week – How Twitter saved Kenya’s election
Kenya Business Daily – Digital shift transforms Kenya’s electoral process into an efficient exercise
CNN I-Report – Kenya’s Vote Peacefully
Read Write Web France – Les élections au Kenya : une révolution mobile en temps réel
The Standard – You cannot pull clergy out of current dirt
Sydsvenskan – Nätvittnen ska hindra valvåld

And there were two hivos Blogs about it:
Hivos Blog Else Rijke: Observations from a peaceful referendum
Hivos Blog Ben: Text 3018 – Kenya votes in referendum on new constitution

One thing that surprised me was an article on the ICTworks blog: ICT Enabled a Safe and Clean Constitutional Referendum in Kenya which was in itself a copy of the AudienceScapes article: Kenya’s Referendum Shaped By Technology which referred to this website: Peace Committees in Kenya, a terrible non transparent flash website. So still more work to do to get good initiatives connected.

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…..

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.”

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.

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 Ontwikkeling Top 100.

Social Media: The Next Revolution #11 Social Media Tools Series « ICT-KM Program.

Black Looks » VOTE FOR PAMBAZUKA NEWS!.

What are the different forms of engagement and who takes part in them?

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