Blogging The Continent
This year marked the 10th anniversary of the Highway Africa conference held at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Over the years, Highway Africa has become one of the biggest ICT conferences in Africa with more than 500 delegates from all over the world gathering to discuss internet governance, ICT policy, media and democracy in a town where bars nearly outnumber churches.
One of the highlights of this year’s conference was the first Digital Citizens Indaba (DCI), a blogging conference with a specific focus on Africa. This free conference (delegates, for the most part, just had to cover their transport costs) was, according to co-ordinator Colin Daniels, “…a gathering of African bloggers, media practitioners, and civil society” and was less of a conference on blogging, and more of a bloggers conference.
Over 80 delegates from across Africa and 20 speakers from across the world debated issues such as misrepresentation and underutilisation of the ‘blogosphere’, particularly in Africa. One of the challenges facing African bloggers, cyberactivists and blogstivists, according to Colin, is the repressive nature of the regimes they’re critiquing. As a result, many African bloggers were unable to attend the conference, because of the risks to their anonymity. Alaa Abd El Fattah, the Egyptian blogger and activist and the Zimbabwean Pundit, both of whom have first hand experience of blogging in countries where rational criticism and debate are not exactly welcome.
Not all the discussions however were around how hard it is to be a blogger in Africa. Growing out of keynote speaker Ethan Zuckerman’s address, lively debates broke out between panellists and audience about the notion of ‘Citizens Media‘ (a debate that, probably, will never be resolved) and the impact and potential impact that blogging has on the South African media landscape.
Marketing and entrepreneurship was another topic that sparked discussion, particularly around the possibility of blogs to be revenue earners, as well as networking tools.
Creative Commons, of course, was also part of the discussions. “It’s alive and well,” says Daniels. “I didn’t meet many people who were unfamiliar with open licensing, and we also had a short workshop on the first day to show delegates how to add Creative Commons licences to their blogs and projects.”
The response from delegates has been overwhelmingly good. Andrew Rens, a South African delegate who sat on the Civil Society panel said, “It was a cutting edge event, I doubt that there has been anything like it Africa before. I have recently returned to South Africa and it was on a par with what I saw in California. There was a such lot of energy and interesting conversation between commercial on-line media types, political bloggers, old school journalists and hacktivisits.”
“There has been incredible interest in the DCI and words of encouragement from people all over the world, and we hope that it will become a regular fixture and inspire other locales to start up similar initiatives,” says Daniels.
Grahamstown being a university town, there were also a number of discussions around the wisdom (or lack thereof) of blogging under the influence of beer, and whether a bar is a suitable venue to blog from.
For summaries of these and other DCI discussions, have a look at the DCI wiki, blog and moblog.