BarCamp Kenya

Frankly, I had no idea of what to expect at the event. I’d read the Wikipedia entry (terms like ‘unconference’ just don’t help at all!), browsed  the  wiki  topics of  past barcamps and I just still couldn’t get a clear mental image of what to look forward to. I’d basically resigned to the fact that I’ll have to just see it for myself and I did just that.

I’m glad I attended especially because of the following:

• Reading about a tech topic gives a limited understanding of the topic. Listening to people who have done things in an area is a far more enlightening experience and the barcamp did that for me.
• It was amazing to see a room packed with techies ready to share … in Nairobi!
• I got to meet two bloggers who’s blogs I read often: Daudi & Josiah

The HalfWay Proposition presentation by Riyaz really got my attention. I’d read the paper a day before and I thought I’d basically got it i.e. aggregate traffic and then we can have enough volume to negotiate with the IBPs. Riyaz suggested something completely different and it made quite a bit of sense. He talked of focussing on generating local content hosted locally to drive up our volumes. Have people find local sites when they search for kenya at google and instead of struggling with uploading photos onto flickr, how about creating an alternative for that here? We just need to make it easier for people to generate content locally. He had some graphs from kixp and wananchi showing how their traffic spiked on the days KCSE results were released. I was seated at the back but I think I saw traffic of 15mbit lasting a day.

A lot of great ideas were presented on the day and all that is required now is action. All eyes are on skunkworks for this.

Write ups on the presentations can be found at the skunkworks blog (here’s the first one), Hash has a video on the “Equal Opportunity Manufacturing” presentation here and Afromusing has a list of blogs to watch for reviews here.