Africa

I’m not very active in local politics. I follow international news more closely than the news of my hometown. In my defense, Western Massachusetts is a pretty sleepy place in political terms – this part of the state is so blue that the Democratic primaries tend to be the only elections that matter, and often major offices go uncontested at that level.

The following videos provides impressions of the Maker Faire and gives some Makers the chance to present their projects.

Emeka Okafor is a venture catalyst and entrepreneur. He lives in New York City. He is the Maker Faire Africa curator.

Emeka is pointing out some very interesting facts on Makers Faire among others:

• create awareness for African innovation
• building a “productive class” whose foundation is laid on building problems solving systems
• celebrating existing knowledge Africa already has and connect it to knowledge outside
• building a community is a basis for business
• African makers focus on things for which there seems to be an immediate need (= market)
• the biggest market is the indigenous

Steve Song is founder of VillageTelco, based in South Africa and he is one of the makers at Makers Faire 2010.

A Village telco is a community based telephone network. It is based on a suite of open source applications that enable entrepreneurs to set up and operate a telephone service in a specific area or supporting the needs of a specific community [1].

The first village telco has been established by Dabba at Orange Farm, a township near Johannesburg, South Africa. Users can make free local calls to other Dabba subscribers, as well as use pay-as-you-go vouchers to make calls to ‘phones on other networks [2].

Technically, a village telco consists of: