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Every once in while I get reminded that some people have way too much time on their hands! In the past 12-18 months I have been slowly switching webhosting companies as I search for more reliable, personal and courteous service. The webhosting company I left was called BlueHost

and the webhosting company I now use is called A Small Orange.

(Some of you sharp ones will have figured out by now where this post is going!)

Bluehost’s primary colour is, naturally, blue. A Small Orange’s primary colour is, naturally, orange. Kibaki’s Party of National Unity primary colour is blue and Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement primary colour is orange. If this was not proof enough that I am Odinga’s number one fanboy, the mere fact that I choose a Webhosting company with the word orange in its name and now display a button with an orange is proof enough for some that mentalacrobatics.com is embedded within Odinga’s camp. Hehe.

People, sometimes a webhost is a webhost and not a declaration of political affiliation! Honest!

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What we are doing is revolutionary in terms of local news coverage and in generating local web content; imagine the impact we will have on coverage of the 2012 election. There are a couple of reasons why this blogging effort is important:

• We are showing that citizen media is alive and well in Kenya.
• We are showing that Kenyans regard the Kenyan citizen media is a valid source of information.
• We are showing that citizen media can react and publish faster than the main stream media in Kenya.
• We are showing that you do not have to be “on the inside” within the ECK nerve centre at KICC or within a major media house to report on what is going on with the election with authority.
• We are showing that the internet is a valid tool for spreading and sharing information.
• We are showing that the Kenyan street is aware and articulate.
• We are creating local and original web content.

And perhaps most importantly (for our brothers and sister in the main stream media)

• We are showing that citizen media and the main stream media can not only co-exist but even compliment each other.

Now a call to arms literary rather than literally, if you have a blog write your thoughts about this election. Whether you are in Kenya or not, whether you are Kenyan or not. We need more voices from the wanainchi writing about their country. If you have left a comment or sent an email and do not have a blog, please start one. If you can send an email believe me you have enough technical skill to write and post a blog post. Register at WordPress.com for free and you’ll be on your way. Then register on the Kenyan Blogs Webring (KBW), which is also free, and you will have a wide readership from your first post.

This is very important for those of you who have asked me to remove certain KBW members from the webring or remove their posts from the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator as you do not agree with what they are saying. Many of you already have own blogs yet I notice that your own blogs are silent on the issues you raise with me. If someone writes something you disagree with by all means let your voice be heard as you present your counter view, and the best place to do this is on your own blog (which if you are a KBW member will appear on the same aggregator where the post you objected to appeared).

Finally, I have been getting many requests asking if you can reproduce the content on this blog in your newspapers, aggregators etc. Everything on my blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.

This means you are free to:

• Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work to me. A link to the original blog post with a line saying written by Mentalacrobatics or written by Daudi Were should be fine.

I think that is fair. You can read a short version of the license here or if you are very particular about these kinds of things you can read a full version here.

kenyaelection07

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I have joined the Global Voices Advocacy team as one of the sub-Saharan reporters in their network of bloggers and online activists throughout the developing world that is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

I have also joined Global Voices as one of the sub-Saharan reporters. My focus on Global Voices will be to highlight blogs, bloggers and blogposts which cover any human rights issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In effect I am a foot solider under the joint command of two of the most engaging bloggers out there, Sami, Head of Advocacy at Global Voices, and Ndesanjo, the Sub-Saharan editor at Global Voices!

Global Voices Advocacy …
… seeks to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists throughout the developing world that is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online. The aim of this network is to raise the awareness of online freedom of speech issues and to share tools and tactics with activists and bloggers facing similar situations in different parts of the globe. The network is meant not only to provide support to its members, but also to produce educational guides about anonymous blogging, anti-censorship campaigns, and online organizing. By collaborating with software developers, activists, and bloggers, the network hopes to design new and more appropriate tools to protect our rights on the Internet.

Global Voices aims to

1. Call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, photos, podcasts, video and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.
2. Facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.
3. Advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

If you come across or know of any blogger, blog, blogpost I should be aware of please let me know, I will be very grateful.

If you are interested in writing a regular round-up of Kenyan blogs for Global Voices, following in the footsteps of brilliant pioneers such as Mshairi and Afromusing, please get in touch with Ndesanjo.

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These exchanges highlight the differences in the cultures involved and the different understandings of what initially looks like a very simple situation. When the Africans tell the colonialists that this land does not belong to anybody, the colonialists would take that to mean that the land is unoccupied. “It does not belong to anyone” is taken to mean it is ownerless. That was a misunderstanding of what they had been told. For when the African said, “This land does not belong to anyone”, what they mean is this land does not belong to any single person or family. This land is the property of the community under the stewardship of those who currently occupy it. The Elesi of Odogbolu, a Nigerian chief, told the West African land commission in 1912, that he “conceived that land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living and countless yet unborn”. In other words, “this land does not belong to anyone” meant this land belongs to everyone. It is occupied by us, but we do not own it, we are merely the current stewards holding it for future generations.

In my talk during the Digital Citizen Indaba I touched upon the issue of the African blogosphere and ownership asking, “Who owns the African blogosphere”? I used the above example of our ancestors’ attitude to land as the basis of my understanding. In my opinion the internet is a space through which discussion takes place and blogs are the tool through which we utilise that space for discussion. In other words this space we have carved on the internet is our land and bloggers are the occupiers of that land. Like our ancestors I believe that this land does not belong to any of us, it belongs to all of us.

Why is this important? First of all this space belonging to all of us means that there is room for all of us and for all our opinions in that space and we all have an equal right to it. For example those who feel unrepresented in the main stream media can use this space to get their message across. Those who feel left out of the national conversation can use this space to get their message across. Ndesanjo in his keynote address emphasised this highlighting that several Africans who happen to be gay had used this space to express themselves through blogs, several Africans who happen to be white or of Asian origin had used this space to express themselves through their blogs.

Another example, last year during the time of the first DCI there was a passionate, and at times, heated debate about whether a blogging conference organised largely by South Africans, who happened to be white, and held at a university named after Rhodes, had the right to call itself African. I felt then as I do now that, yes, they had the right to call it a conference of African bloggers. I feel no one has the right to stop other bloggers from organising themselves in a way they feel fit. Once you start putting restrictions on how bloggers organise themselves then you are on the slippery slope that ends up with putting restrictions on what bloggers can write about. For if you think that these guys do not have the right to organise a conference for African bloggers do they have the right to write about African bloggers or as African bloggers?

I should clarify the difference between those who objected to the content of the conference and those who object to the very notion of the conference. The DCI crew never claimed to be organising a perfect conference and gave us the opportunity to give our feedback on what they did right and what they could do better. This year you can see they took the suggestions on board. A big issue last year was the DCI venue did not have wireless internet access, this year we had wireless internet access. Last year we raised the issue of representation amongst the speakers in terms of geographical location and content. This year we have spent a lot of time examining the role of language which was led by Tanzanian bloggers with their central role in the Kiswahili blogosphere. We also looked at cyber activism is Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as well v-blogging, photo-blogging and open source. Space to give feedback and raise issues about the content of a conference should always be available. Feedback I have no problem with. What I object to is those who feel that the conference itself had no right to exist in any form.

That is not to say that all bloggers must agree with all other bloggers all the time or even most of the time. In fact we do not have to agree at all! I hope that having disagreements and differences of opinion does not mean we can not sit down together at the end of the debate and appreciate each other. But if that is not the case, the good thing about this space we are carving on the internet is that it is basically limitless. If you do not like the way people are doing things you can start your own thing. Just do not try to stop people from doing what they are doing by placing artificial restrictions based on your opinion of what is and isn’t for they have as much right to this space as you do.

digital citizen indaba | highway africa

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I spoke with on the Democratization of the Digital Citizen in the morning session on Fractured Identities. I shared the floor with my Tanzanian brother Ansbert Ngurumo. Our panel was chaired by Professor Guy Berger.

Check out the DCI wiki which is updated regularly throughout the day for a summary of all the talks, the DCI flickr stream for evidence that bloggers are the best looking people around!

digital citizen indaba

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But first I have to post The rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog and their 8 things and post these.
4. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose 8 people to get tagged and list their names (scared yet…..you better be!)
   Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they are tagged, and to read your blog.

And my list of 8 things:

1.) KenyaUnlimited is rocking a brand new spanking aggregator. Have a look and let me know what you think, how fast it loads where you are, and any problems you may encounter. I am especially interested on those who’s posts should up on the old aggregator but do not show up on this one.

2.) Related to number 1 above, KenyaUnlimited has a new aggregator help page. If you have any questions about the aggregator and aggregator policy, please read the help page. We have answered the most frequent questions we receive about the aggregator on this page. If you still have any questions drop the Admin Team an email.

3.) Facebook rocks! There is a group for Kenyan Bloggers on facebook. Other notable Facebook groups include the Afrigadget group and the Free Oiwan Lam group amongst others.

4.) The Digital Citizen Indaba blogging conference is on again at the Highway Africa Conference this year. Registration is open and it is free. You can also apply for a scholarship to attend. (Warning: this conference may actually require you to think and participate.)

Coming soon to a town near you an African Bloggers’ Conference and a Kenyan Bloggers’ Conference. Watch this space and get involved! Ask not what bloggers can do for you but what you … etc etc

6.) I feel like registering a group called the “Do More Collective” (DMC). Increasingly I hear Africans telling other Africans, to get up and, “do something”. I admit even I have been guilty of that. I feel that is wrong and here is why.

In the online world in general and the blogosphere in particular, just as in the real world, there are people who get up and decide to contribute and get on with it without a fuss. Because of their nature they end up taking more and more on and usually excel. This is not new, if I think back to my school days, my sports captains were usually amongst the brightest students, and were usually also prefects and probably sang in the choir and headed the school community projects as well. The Americans have a term to describe these characters: All Stars.

I find that instead of asking people to, “Do something”, to be fair I should recognise that they are already doing a lot and instead should be asking them to, “Do more.” Take the example of my brother Ndesanjo. This guy is the force behind the Kiswahili blogosphere starting it AND putting it on the map in a big way, he is also is pushing the Kiswahili Wikipedia, is Sub-Saharan editor of Global Voices, was one of the wise heads that formulated the Tanzanian Bloggers Association, is passionate about citizen media and developing tools to allow people to share their stories and still finds time to run his own collection of blogs (and I haven’t even mentioned his “real” 9-5 job).

It is ridiculous to walk up to someone like that and to tell him to “do something” what you really should be saying is, “we need your help to do more!” I am sure this is true of many of us online and I have many more examples I can throw at you.

We need to recognise that even though someone way not be working on our pet project or on what we may personally feel is THE most important thing around, they are probably already contributing in a big way to the empowerment of The Continent and Her People. Forget asking people to, “Do something” instead ask them to “Do more”.

7.) Since I moved back to Kenya a year ago the number of people reading my blog has gone up, but the number of comments has gone down. That in itself is not news. What is interesting is that some people who used to write comments before now send me SMS instead. They SMS within minutes of a post going up on the blog. I would say around 80% of the comments on my blog posts come via SMS. The Skunkworks team at the University of Nairobi Tech Day reported that a programmer was developing software to blog (and I guess comment) through SMS. Now that’s what I need! I tried the Email2SMS service by Safaricom but that died after a few days.

8.) The number one question I get asked by new bloggers is: How do I get more comments?

The easy answer:

1. Write original, good, content
2. Visit other bloggers and leave original and intelligent comments
3. Link to other blog posts in your posts
4. Use tags to get picked up by blog engines such as Technorati.
5. Be patient, it takes time to build up an audience

The less obvious answer:

Do your thing. Write your posts. Make your blog a reflection of you. Forget chasing comments. They are not a true indication of how popular, how widely read or how influential your blog really is. For example, if the first five comments on your blog are

1. I got here first
2. Damn I got here second
3. Boy oh boy number 1 and number 2 are fast, how did they get here first
4. hehe fast rhymes with first – written by number 3 above
5. I swear I was first but blogger ate my comment

And no one has commented on what you actually wrote or what issues you raised in the post, how do those comments add value to the price of oranges really? OK sure some people love getting those comments and it can be said they add to the sense of community, sure. But really, you should be chasing after those. However, this after all is my opinion.

At the other end of the scale check out Ethan’s excellent guides/blog posts/transcripts of the TED Global conference. Every blogger, journalist, columnist, researcher who writes about TED Global consult Ethan’s posts. They are an authoritative, well written, accessible online resource. Because so many bloggers link back to his blog, these posts are essentially the blogger equivalent of a peer reviewed professional article in a professional journal. Yet the posts do not carry a ridiculous amount of comments. The posts do carry a lot of influence though.

Forget chasing comments. Do your thing. Free your mind!

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Thank you to all KBW members for making this one of the most vibrant online communities on the internet. As always it has been an amazing experience.

The Year of Emergence

Emerge: become known or apparent;

The emergence of Kenyans built for blogging

When I think back over the last 12 months what I notice is that this year has been a year of emergence for KBW and her members. If you will forgive the farmer in me for a moment, in our first two years we were finding our feet, exploring this blogging thing, figuring out if we wanted to do it or not, we were germinating.

The most frequent support question we would be asked in the Admin Team during the first two years was, “Why should I start a blog?” or “What is a blog?” or variations on that theme.

In the last year we mainly get asked, “I have a blog, how do I join the webring?” or “How do I get your aggregator to syndicate my content?” or variations on that theme. They “why” and “what” questions are decreasing, the “how” questions are increasing.

That is a good sign and KBW members have played a big role in convincing Kenyans to blog. These days when someone asks me why they should blog I simply point them to the KenyaUnlimited aggregator. I can almost guarantee you that they will read something that they either agree with whole heartedly or disagree with completely, that fuels an urge in them to get to a keyboard and start typing to contribute to the debate.

In this way we have emerged from within ourselves. Where else will you find a community composed of Maasai Market traders, IT geeks, undergraduates, pastors, self styled “sex therapists”, financial journalists, university professors, professional sports players, political commentators, rural farmers, many times many of these all rolled into one person?!!

Emergence within KBW – Internal

This is where we crunch the numbers.

• In our first year we signed up: 69 members – for a total of 69 members
• In our second year we signed up: 171 – for a total of 240 members
• In our third year we signed up: 293 members – for a total of 464 members

293 new members. Remember this is not a web forum where we have one central site where each member writes a sentence here or a sentence here. These are bloggers, generating new and unique content (in the most part) every single time they write. 293 new people giving us their unique insight on the issues they feel are important, in the way they want. You are effectively talking, in web 1.0 terms, of 293 new webmasters and web content editors joined together in a single community. Now those are numbers to be proud of. This has been achieved without a single penny spent on advertising; the only emails we send out as KBW are to bloggers who are already members.

However what is increasingly clear is that the majority of these new members had heard about KBW either through word of mouth, through reading a KBW member or simply by bumping into us online. Many start a blog so they can join KBW rather than joining KBW because they already had a blog.

If this rate of growth continues soon we will be signing up more than 400 bloggers a year, that is over a blog a day!

On the technical side, we have moved from an ordinary shared hosting account, to a more advance shared hosting account, to our own VPS, and soon to our own full fledged dedicate server.

KBW in the world – External emergence

This past year has also been marked by KBW and KBW bloggers being recognised outside our own community and emerging as leaders in some of the most interesting projects that use web 2.0 Here are some examples of this:

1. KenyaUnlimited was Kenyan’s ambassador on Blog Day 2006.
2. KenyaUnlimited was nominated as a Finalist in the 2006 Black Weblog Awards.
3. At the Digital Indaba held at Rhodes University, South Africa KBW was frequently mentioned as an example of bloggers organising themselves into a online community.
4. At the Global Voices Summit 2006 in Delhi, India, KBW was again highlighted as an example of how to organise a blogging community.
5. At TED Global again the importance of the KBW to the African blogosphere was frequently mentioned and clear to see and on and on.
6. Three dedicated women, KBW Admin members Mshairi and Kui led by KBW member Sokari are the forces behind the African Womens’ Bloggers website and webring.
7. KBW members, lead by the indefatigable White African, together with JKE and Afromusing are pushing AfriGadget to amazing new heights.
8. The most radical, innovating forces in ICT in Kenya a.k.a the geekosphere a.k.a Skunkworks-KE are active members of KBW.
9. The Kenyan main stream media, while still feeling threatened by blogs (why??!!), are beginning to understand that ignoring us is a mistake, ironically the main stream media outside Kenya can not seem to get enough of Kenyan bloggers.
10. ICT magazines within Kenya have started carrying regular blogging columns for example KBW member Al Kags’ regular column in ICT Village magazine.

I could go on for hours about this, The Year of Emergence.

Remembrance

As we shared good times, as mentioned above, in these past 12 months we have also shared some sad times, in August we learnt that Kachumbari author of Kenyan Villager had passed on. As the tribute to Kachumbari on KenyaUnlimited reads, “Gone for now but forever a member of the KBW family, Kachumbari’s presence shall be missed.”

The Kenyan blogging community through the Pamoja blog on KenyaUnlimited led the online tributes for the victims of Flight KQ507.

KBW in the community

Sylkwan has used her blog to mobilise resources for St. Francis Children’s home in Karen/Langata, Nairobi and JKE has done the same for The Nest children’s home in Limuru. In the past 12 months I have been lucky enough to visit both homes in the company of other KBW members and it is fantastic to see what positive change a few individuals can make when they decide to take a stand. The staff at St. Francis and The Nest are an example to us all.

Challenges

As many of you know KBW and KenyaUnlimited are run by a team of three volunteers. This year, in many ways, we have been victims of KBW’s success. As more and more bloggers sign up and join the webring we spend the vast majority of our KBW time dealing with support questions and various sign up queries. It is not unusual for KBW Admin Team members to spend 2 hours a day everyday of the week dealing with various support queries. Then take into consideration that the three of us have full time jobs, are located in three different countries and in three different timezones! While the primary task of the Admin Team is to provide this support and we enjoy it (in the most part) we have noticed that other KBW projects, especially those which are manpower heavy have suffered.

For example, last year it took a team of 6 of us to run the Kaybees. Towards the end of the process four of us basically gave two full days to counting and verifying the nominations and counting and verifying the final votes, sometimes roping in boyfriends and girlfriends to help with spreadsheets! LOL. The main, in fact the only, reason we have not held the Kaybees this year yet is because we understand immediately that we would be spread too thin with the team as it stands. This has also extended to other KBW projects such as Kenyan Bloggers’ Day.

In the past we have expanded the Admin Team by sending out invitations to one or two bloggers. This time we have decided to do something different and instead send out an invitation to all of you! We shall soon be advertising Admin Team positions on KenyaUnlimited. If you are a member of KBW and want to contribute back to the blogging community, want to get involved in some interesting and innovating projects, like helping people and are dedicated we would be grateful to hear from you. Watch this space and the Admin Team blog as we shall soon be putting up a profile of what we are looking for and what you can expect as a member of the Admin Team.

Finally

KBW members – thank you!
Non KBW Kenyan bloggers – join us!
KBW supporters – members or not, especially those from far and wide who are always ready to lend a hand, share advice and are constantly encouraging us, thank you. An extra big shout out to the Global Voices crew, from php and cron jobs code, to translations, to moral support we owe you big!

Thanks

PS/ You would think that having had a year to prepare I would have started writing this post in good time instead of 2pm Nairobi time on the bleeding day eh! Any typos, missing links (no not that one), broken links please let me know!

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(*Ask Riyaz about the penguins)

Aside: It is hard not to laugh nervously when a professional photographer is taking your mugshot in one of your regular cyber cafes! That may (or may not) explain why I look strange in the photo!

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Blogs, email and text messages, while lending themselves to informing, also lend themselves to abuse.

… in his post that argues it is irresponsible for us to report the blast in Nairobi as bomb or indeed suicide bomb unless we have official confirmation from the police. Agreed, it would be irresponsible for us to report the blast without checking the sources of the stories.

When I first heard the story on local radio stations I turned to Reuters which is a reliable news outlet and generally has an impeccable record as far as the accuracy of its reporting goes.

Reuters report now reads (bear in mind these reports are constantly updated):

A senior policeman at the scene said the explosion, which also left a mangled corpse in the street and sent passers-by flying through the air, seemed to be a suicide bombing.

My own blog post on the topic is full of qualifiers, apparently this, apparently that. I even put a paragraph at the end of the post cautioning that this is all speculation at the moment as we await the facts.

A quick look at the KenyaUnlimited Aggregator shows many other Kenyan bloggers qualified their reporting too.

Let me bring in another angle. The most common complaint I have heard today from Kenyans abroad is that the the Daily Nation and East African Standard websites had almost no information for a long while. The most frequently updated Kenyan news website these days is the KBC website, however earlier this morning when I checked it was down.

I would argue that it is stories like this that rather than showing the danger of blogs, HIGHLIGHT the importance of blogs and other citizen media. While the MSM was stuck in its procedures, bloggers wrote about what they had heard, seen or were told. There is nothing wrong with quoting primary sources. The historians amongst us can confirm the importance with which primary sources are regarded on any historical event. The eyewitness account, the man on the street as it were.

If you wanted to know what Kenyans were thinking and feeling at the time the blogs were a very good place to start.

As for waiting for an official police statement before commenting on this blast, to that I would ask: where is the lengthy police statement on the Mungiki crisis? Where is the lengthy police statement on the Mount Elgon clashes? Both were major incidents in the past month which claimed more lives that the blast this morning, yet we haven’t seen the same coordinated response to dishing out information as we have on this blast. Are we to await the official statement on those events as well before stepping in with our take on events? How long are you prepared to wait?

Isn’t it telling that Police Commissioner Hussein’s lengthy statement appears on the website of the Office of Government Spokesperson (OGS) and not on the Kenya Police website which carries a 3 sentence press release by the Police Spokesman?

Why would the OGS jump in on this story when Mungiki and Mount Elgon were much more serious events yet he restrained himself? I would argue it is because the OGS quickly realised that this was an international story which would generate interest from around the world.

Their intention was not to inform, their intention was damage control. I will agree with the Commish on one thing, however, in my opinion, the disaster management procedures worked well, after the initial shock everything seemed to click.

I firmly believe that the take up of the story by Kenyan bloggers helped generate this international interest. Don’t believe that bloggers have that much influence? Then explain why the “Blog Search button” is next to the “Advanced News Search” button on Google News or why Reuters has started featuring African bloggers prominently on its news site. In a round about way, the noise bloggers generated about this story is one of the reasons The Commish and the GOS rushed to get out that press release.

Hopefully if Kenyan bloggers keep the noise up on Mungiki, Mount Elgon et al and the Commish and the GOS will rush to release a lengthy press release on those stories as well.

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