Google is nothing if not resourceful in creating new resources. Two days ago, those crafty buggers announced a very large expansion of search languages for their African portal pages. From the site, the rundown was:

Ethiopia got Tigrinya, Oromo and Somali

Nigeria got Yoruba and Hausa

Ghana got Hausa

DR Congo got Lingala

Congo got Lingala

Rwanda got Kinyarwanda

Burundi got Kirundi

This is good news for those who don't necessarily speak the already established Google search languages of English, French, and Swahili that they offer in some capacity to these countries. Naturally, it doesn't solve the issues of connectivity to just get on the internet, but it is definitely something good and I'm pleased to see it. This should of course be no shock to anyone given that when not blogging, I'm busy working to get as many languages as possible running for Maneno.

The biggest thing to me about this announcement from Google is the fact that it was all done by volunteers. This may at first seem quite cheeky given that Google has literally billions of dollars (yes, Dr. Evil would be proud) and they could quite easily pay folks to create these translations. I at first was a bit taken aback by this seemingly crappy way to save a buck, but then, I thought about how it is to run a multi-lingual operation. Yes, you can hire someone to work on it fulltime if there is the need and the money to pay them, but this is more of a piece of occasional work here and there. Plus, you get in to dialectical issues. While I've heard that Tanzanian Kiswahili is said to be better than Kenyan, who am I (pretend I'm someone with an O in my title at Google when I say this) to know the difference? I'm not. So... how do I choose the "one" person to create the translation.

There really are strength in numbers when it comes to these things and instead of having one, single voice that might be wrong for some people, you can potentially get a group to compromise on something that generally works for everyone. Yes, okay, they're "crowdsourcing" the translations, but I have a bit of trouble with this word as it's overused these day and often stops short of the true gravity of a project. While there are groups (maybe not crowds) of people working to create these translations, it doesn't stop there. They are creating a community of their language on the web. And I admit that this is another one of the things that Maneno is trying to do in that we know, as does Google, that there needs to be more content out there in African languages, and it takes a group to make that happen.

In closing, I just want to add that if anyone out there who worked on these Google pieces would like to volunteer their time to work on the Maneno language matrix (it's maybe two hours of work), we'd love to have an Amharic, Akan, Hausa, Lingala, and/or Yoruba version available. I'm just saying!

A cross section from the much much larger and more complete map showing a breakdown of African language families

However, Kinshasa is all the way on the western side of the country and in the eastern area, especially the North Kivu province, Rwandan and Ugandan troops ruthlessly hunted down Hutu forces and killed any village or people that got in their way. They also tried desperately to strip this rich area of all its valuable resources and sent them back to their respective countries. There no doubt that genocide, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing occurred during this time and the world again shut its eyes to these atrocities.

At this time, Congolese Tutsi’s and the governments of the Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi relied upon the presence of the Rwandan army to continue with their exploitation of the resources of the area and to protect them from the hostile peoples of the area who rejected this sudden influx of uncontrolled refugees.

In this area of eastern DRC after the overthrowing of the Mobutu regime, five different armed forces were present. Firstly, there was the Interahamwe, made up of ethnic Hutu’s who were fighting against the mostly Tutsi controlled government. Secondly, there were Hutu soldiers formerly apart of the Rwandan Armed Forces in the area. Thirdly, the Alliance of Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel group supported by the Sudanese against the Ugandan government was present contributing to the chaos. Fourthly, you had a few Hutus who were from Burundi fighting the Tutsi controlled government of Burundi. And lastly, the Mai Mai, a group of loosely united local militia men who fought against the entry of Rwandan immigrants regardless of tribe. They did this because the government had limited capability to control these people and there was much looting, rape, and destruction that occurred following their incursion. They had also supported Kabila from the 60’s up to his re-entry into the Zaire with the foreign troops. Some saw that move as a betrayal and it fuelled their revenge and resentment of the foreign people they saw as invading their country. In other words, complete pandemonium bordering on anarchy.

The west turned a blind eye away from the practices of the Tutsi controlled forces because of the guilt of them not acting in the Rwandan genocide. Just as they allowed the Jews who survived the Holocaust to oppress and repress the people of Palestine, the west allowed wrong to be committed against others because those doing the wrong had wrong committed against them.

However, while the west was content to allow this exploitation of the DRC, Kabila was not. In July 1998, he demanded that his backers leave the country and cease with their exploitation of his country’s resources and the murdering of his people. Enraged that the man who they thought was their puppet turned on them, Rwandan, Ugandan, and Burundian forces plotted to now overthrow him. They sent fresh troops into the country and came very close to replacing Kabila in a coup. However, Kabila had appealed to SADC for help to fight his former allies and although SADC as a body could not intervene, individual members did. Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Angola immediately sent troops to help Kabila and they pushed back the invading army.

During the ensuing conflict, the DRC unofficially split into three large spheres of influence. Each area was controlled by a group of forces and the DRC truly did become a failed state. Although the allied forces of the DRC were very successful in winning battles against the invading forces, there were not enough troops to completely dislodge them from the DRC. So, although they were victorious, there was still a standstill as the majority of the military operations had to be carried out as quick strike missions instead of conquering territory piece by piece. A cease-fire was signed in July 1999 by the DRC, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Uganda, and Rwanda but seemed to only exist on paper and not materialize in reality. The terms of the treaty that was planned on being signed was that all foreign troops would leave the country, a UN peacekeeping force called Monuc would be deployed to the region, and an Inter-Congolese dialogue would be launched to help form a transitional government to build up to the eventuality of free and fair elections in the DRC. However this wasn’t realized immediately and each side blamed the other for violating the terms of the treaty and fighting continued albeit on small frenetic scales.

Then on January 16, 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated and his son, Joseph, succeeded him. Dialogue continued despite Lauren Kabila’s death and finally in Pretoria, in October 2002, an agreement was reached to implement the previously failed Lusaka accord. The terms of the new Pretoria Accord, signed in 2003 by all parties, were the same as those stated by the Lusaka Accord with the slight adjustment that Ugandan forces could leave a few months later.

A few years of relative peace and restructuring occurred from this point until late last year of 2007. During this time, although the allies of the DRC were honoring the agreements made in the Pretoria accord, the non-state actors, whom were supported by the Rwandan allies, were not. On a small scale, they were continuing their actions and still causing chaos and destruction to the areas they controlled. Local people suffered and to many of them, things did not change with the signing of the Pretoria Accord.

Furthermore, these non state actors were still being supplied by their Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian allies although they fiercely denied these claims. The government of the DRC’s army had been largely neglected since Mobutu regime but even more so after the peace treaty was signed. Their soldiers were being paid slave wages, were poorly equipped, had poor untrained leadership and thus were completely undisciplined. In addition to this, many local armed forces owe their allegiance to local warlords who aren’t necessarily loyal to Kabila. This meant that the government was largely unable to control the entire DRC territory which meant that small scale violence was allowed to grow into something bigger and more deadly.

So this was the situation southern Africa found itself in prior to recent hostilities. Facts have been given so in Part III, I will turn to my theories and arguments in support of a prolonged military presence in the DRC and highlight arguments that disagree.

President Joseph Kabila, how hard is his job as the leader of the DRC? That, we can never know, but what we do know is that the hopes of millions rest on his young shoulders.

Lately, the words have been hitting the fan with a large flap over the value of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization and the laptop that they make. Cory Doctorow wrote a very nicely thought out article on the whole issue. Walrus started with some shots across the bow. OLPC News answered back. Then of course Africano Blanco, Steve Song, and MobileActive added in to the discussion as well.

I find the discussion to be a worthy one. I really love Jon Evan's points on Walrus as well, with the second one being the most to the point and sadly humorous:

The XO laptop is a piece of crap.

I'm not going to judge the OLPC laptop though. I've never used one and I have nothing to do with the project. I have met a number of people who were involved in the project that have nothing but bad, scornful things to say about it now. I'm not sure if these naysayers are all large personalities who felt they weren't being listened to (and this could easily be the case) or that the OLPC was dead in the water before it even started to rain. Honestly, I think that it could be the best product in the world that all of us wanted and it would still fail. I feel this way because of three things: products such as the relatively cheap CrunchPad, African innovation, and Web 3.0 which I'm officially calling 'Web Free' from this point on.

All Things Simpler

I think a problem with the OLPC and the reason that people are wanting to say it will fail, because mobiles are the device of choice in developing nations is because a laptop is too complicated for these regions. No, I'm not saying that people can't figure one out. That is ludicrous as they're quite simple when you get down to it. I'm more thinking along the Apple lines that simpler is better. Something along the lines of a CrunchPad is a simple, all-in-one device that is overbuilt as far as durability is concerned. This is what you need. A laptop has too many moving parts and too many points of failure. Sure, you can build to ward off issues that spring up from having a hinged screen and a keyboard, but really, laptops are doomed for failure in demanding elements.

This is one of the reasons everyone turns to the mobile as the "obvious" alternative to the OLPC. We know they're rugged. They stand up to most anything. When I was in DRC last year, my friend, Cédric could whip out his Nokia N95 and check his email anywhere in Kinshasa, whereas I was offline because the humidity had blown out the LCD on Thinkpad X40; not to mention wifi networks aren't just floating around Boulevard du 30 Juin like they are in San Francisco's Mission District.

Needless to say, a mobile is not a laptop. Even my Blackberry Curve 8320 with a full keyboard pales in comparison to even the most basic of laptops. But, with the Nokia N97 or the Apple iPhone, the convergence gets more and more blurry. This is why it will not be strictly a mobile or strictly a laptop that makes information the most available in developing nations, but something in between, which brings me to my next point.

If you see a Dark Continent, then Open your Eyes

The wealth of information about regions like Sub-Saharan African is biased, based upon "l'atrocité du jour". To say it's unfair is an understatement. Unjust and disgusting would be more fitting words for how I feel about the general coverage of events in Sub-Saharan African by media in developed nations. This is part of the reason why a project like Ushahidi gets so much attention. They're Africans (Kenyans for the most part) who are creating an innovation sourced from Africa. It's also part of the reason I was so happy to see the bus article I wrote about previously.

Africans are incredibly resourceful and when given the opportunity, they create products and tools that work great for where they live. And this is what I see as the main problem of the OLPC in that, from what I gather, while they conduct their needs studies and probably write up those "blessed" white papers, there appear to be no Africans working with them. There are some folks who, based upon name are from South East Asia, but it would have done them well to have real Africans working on the project.

Maybe this was too hard to accomplish or just didn't cross their minds. Whatever the case, they really short-sheeted themselves on this move. Without having people on the staff who really know what works on the ground, they're just working in a vacuum. It harks back to my first point and this is just the observations of some dude who doesn't even live in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it's quite easy to see what works and what doesn't. Again, mobiles work. Laptops are hit and miss. When it comes to the internet, mobiles are king, even if that access costs something and is subject to government censorship. It will be a melding of these two that I inevitably predict some Africa man or woman will pop along with someday. And won't seem like any big thing with a PR campaign around. It will just make sense.

Web Free

By 'free', I don't mean that the internet is going to be free of charge, but more that it's going to be free to roam. All our flirts with wifi and "cutting the cord" are going to come in to full fruition over the next 1-2 years. This will ultimately give birth to the next iteration of the web, a Version 3 if you will. I don't really like the term 3.0 as I never liked the term 2.0 because 2.0 was a gimmick and was really Web 1.5. 2.0 was a maturing of all the initial technologies we created in the late 1990's, but were impossible to really envision due to bandwidth sucking on very narrow pipes.

Web Free will take everything from the first two generations of the web and make it not only wireless, but mobile, and create a new approach. It's not my web developing ilk who have brought this about though. It's the likes of Apple and Nokia creating true mini-computers which, while not able to run Photoshop (yet) allow easy, mobile interaction and the exchange of knowledge, which is cornerstone of the internet.

But, these companies and the marketing people who will glom on to Web Free aren't the ones who have really brought it about. It's established markets like the highly unwired Japan and Korean markets and the soon to be developed markets such as Sub-Saharan Africa. I know it seems like a sellout to look at Africa as a "market", but money (and to a lesser degree, physics) unfortunately makes the world go round and when it comes to creating new wealth through expansion, that means creating a new market base. The web markets of Europe, the Americas, and Asia are mature. There is little way to create new growth in these. You can add to it, but to stand out from the crowd with a product that improves upon what is there is about the only way you can make it. Africa provides something entirely new. This is the reason Google is quite excited about expanding there. There are literally a billion people who have had extremely little exposure to the web. Only 5.3% of the population has been on the web. This is massive. This a place where businesses can expand. This is a place that calls for Web Free.

There is no possible way to open markets based upon current America/European IT ideology though Computers, let alone electricity, and internet, are hard to come on the continent at large. The mobile rules there for information delivery and communication exchange. But, what does a company do? They're so used to the Web 1.0 and 2.0 models to develop a site. Simple. They go mobile. They deploy for handheld devices which are mobile phones for now and some kind of CrunchPad entity later. They free their sites from the constraints that we've all learned to know, love, and hate. It will truly be something new, not just a rehash of ideas.

Most importantly in all of this though is that they will involve Africans. There are so many qualified people there, who know how to solve the obstacles that they run in to with the kind of fresh thinking that Web Free will need. Don't just grab a fleet of hipsters from the US, send them to Lagos for a week and have them come back ready to "innovate for Africa". No. The solution will rise from people that are there and for the first time in the history of the internet, this Web Free iteration will be all-inclusive, connecting all the world in a fashion that will approach near equality, or better yet, will have Africa as the leading continent in internet usage due to an explosion of new users.

This is what I hope for. How it will materialize remains to be seen. Whatever the case, Web Free will be a mobile web and to some unknown degree, Sub-Saharan Africa will be part of this. 2009 will be a telling year in all of this.

The Nokia N97, CrunchPad, and OLPC

The omnipresent Eve Ensler of Vagina Monologues fame wrote a list of "10 things you can do about the war in Congo" in The Nation, which roughly summarized goes like this:

1. Educate yourself about Congo's history

2. Support a women's movement in the DRC and around the world

3. Demand a tenfold increase in UN peacekeepers

4. Demand that women be involved in any future peace talks

5. Demand the arrest and prosecution of war criminals involved in sexual violence, child soldiering, etc.

6. Demand that Obama's administration pressure Rwanda & Congo leaders to stop supporting Nkunda and the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda)

7. Pressure the DRC government to make ending sexual violence a priority

8. Help provide resources to raped and violated women

9. Write to your local editorial boards and ask them to cover the Congo war. Blog about the Congo war.

10. Attend the Turning Pain to Power Tour

The list should clearly have been called "10 things you can do about sexual violence in the Congo", since that's what Ensler is focusing on. She seems to not realize, like so many other feminist activists, that ending sexual violence in the Congo is not going to end the war in the Congo but more the other way round. I'm all for ending sexual violence in the Congo, but what about the more general war happening there? That's why I find point #6 actually the most useful on the list - as useful as demanding things from elected officials by writing to them.

Personally, the items that I like the most on the list are #1 and #9: educate yourself and educate others. I think it was Plato who said that in order to try to change the world first you have to attempt to understand it. The conflict in Eastern Congo is a very complex one, and to draw attention to the "rape epidemic" alone and in its most sensationalist aspects is an oversimplification. Amidst the generalized ignorance about Africa in most of the rest of the world, reading and writing about to understand the roots of what's happening is a very good way to start helping the Congo.

Group of victims of sexual violence in the Ninja area in South Kivu waiting to go to Bukavu hospital for treatment.

One of the main pillars of Maneno is to have a small download footprint due to the fact that the target group of users will either be on a) slow land connections of b) slow mobile connections. Obviously, both of these points will change over time (with point b being the most likely one to improve, which is why a mobile version of Maneno is in the works), but for now, we've got to work with what we've got.

While always designing the site with this factor in mind, we've just leveraged a bit of the inherent technologies available in code to make the site even smaller. What we're doing is compressing the site. This takes all of the text that's coming to your browser and mashes it down in to a machine-readable format which is then unmashed when you open up the page.

The net result of this is that all the pages are at least half the size that they were previously. The home page is quite below 50kb as well as the main page in the admin where you write your articles. While this should provide even faster access to the site, it has two potential downfalls. One is that there may be browser incompatibility issues. While we've tested this thoroughly on everything that we can think of, there is still the off chance that someone out there could have problems. Obviously, we'd love to know if that's the case. The second issue is that this taxes the server more. Because there is the "mashing" work to do, every page on the site takes just that much more horsepower to create. This just means that we'll have to monitor the site and see what comes about and adjust things as they happen. All part of the whole Beta process.