Ethan Zuckerman on African web entrepreneurs

Ethan Zuckerman on why we should care for Africa

URL = http://www.siconversations.org/shows/detail753.html

Description

"As a technologist, Ethan has spent much time on the ground working with the new generation of African entrepreneurs, programmers, organizers and young people who are hooking up the countinent to the web. These new netizens are changing the way that villagers and urban dwellers learn, organize, network and face the challenges of poverty, AIDS, political strife and making a living.

Natural catastrophes and their recovery efforts have overtaxed national and global organizations. In the void, Ethan Zuckerman sees networks of concerned private citizens self-organizing on the ground and on-line. As the patterns for collaboration form from the bottom-up, Ethan sees new possibilities in the application of IT to disaster recovery; these flexible models can also be replicated and evolved to address larger, more complex social dilemmas.

Ethan was intimately involved in leading some very interesting efforts combining online communities who used pretty simple technologies to address Hurricane Katrina and the disaster, namely the People Finders Project.

"What a lot of us are discovering in this open source and distributive-effort world," observes Zuckerman, "is that one of the most critical things one can do is hand off projects correctly." (http://www.siconversations.org/shows/detail753.html)