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I had the opportunity to correspond with Ethan Zuckerman, just back from a trip to Zimbabwe and the Digital Citizen Indaba conference on blogging. In part one of the interview, Ethan talks about his involvement in international development, blogging, the lack of media coverage on foreign investment in Africa, and the prospects of an African blogging conference.
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I came across your blog and Global Voices through being an avid reader of Sokari Ekine’s blog Black Looks. Now it seems that whenever there’s a topic I find interesting either you or Sokari is involved! How did you first get involved in international development and technology issues?
I came across your blog and Global Voices through being an avid reader of Sokari Ekine’s blog Black Looks. Now it seems that whenever there’s a topic I find interesting either you or Sokari is involved! How did you first get involved in international development and technology issues?
Sokari is one of my favorite reads as well, and one of the bloggers who’s helped convince me of the power of this medium to build friendships across barriers of nationality, race, gender and other obstacles. I’m very grateful to her for the work she did as the founding Africa editor for Global Voices.
I’ve been interested in international development since I lived in Ghana as a student in 1993. But I didn’t think about getting involved in development issues until my work on Tripod.com. Coming out of the experience of helping to run a successful dot.com, I wondered whether any of the lessons I learned could be applicable in building technology businesses in Africa. I was lucky enough to have the mentorship of Professor Dick Sabot, who was a brilliant development economist as well as an entrepreneur, and who helped encourage me to channel my interests into Geekcorps, the NGO I founded in 1999 to work on technology transfer in the developing world.
I’ve been interested in international development since I lived in Ghana as a student in 1993. But I didn’t think about getting involved in development issues until my work on Tripod.com. Coming out of the experience of helping to run a successful dot.com, I wondered whether any of the lessons I learned could be applicable in building technology businesses in Africa. I was lucky enough to have the mentorship of Professor Dick Sabot, who was a brilliant development economist as well as an entrepreneur, and who helped encourage me to channel my interests into Geekcorps, the NGO I founded in 1999 to work on technology transfer in the developing world.
What has been the response to projects like BlogAfrica and Global Voices Online?
The two projects have had very different responses, probably because they’ve had very different purposes. BlogAfrica was designed to be a tool useful to a small group of people - folks who follow Africa closely and want to keep up with a large number of voices for the continent. For those folks, it’s a little rough around the edges, but functional and basically useful. But it’s not a site I spend a lot of time promoting and celebrating - the folks who would find it useful generally already know about it.
Global Voices, on the other hand, is a site that I’d love everyone to read. It’s designed to pull people into stories they’d otherwise miss, broaden their worldview and introduce them to people they otherwise would never get to know. It’s been amazingly successful - we were just honored with the Knight Batten award for innovation in journalism. Technorati ranks us as the 175th most popular blog in the blogosphere… which is pretty good for a blog that doesn’t focus on technology, popular culture or US politics.
Why do you keep a blog? What are some of your daily reads?
I keep a blog because it makes me a better writer. Thinking about the different projects I work on and the demands on my time a few months ago, I realized that I had absolutely no regrets about the time I’d spent on writing, and more than a few regrets about meetings attended, trips taken and other ways I was spending my time. By writing almost every day - and getting feedback on almost every post - I find that it’s getting easier to write pieces I feel good about.
I also keep the blog because I’m the sort of person who’d otherwise shout at the TV. This is more productive. When I write about Congo or Somalia, there’s a decent chance that my post will end up being in the top 10 of search results on Google. That gives me a chance to share my opinions - well informed or otherwise - with folks searching for information on those topics. Perhaps it would be more productive to put the time into endless letters to the editor, but this seems to have a higher success rate.
I’ve got about 100 feeds in my aggregator, the majority of which get checked every day. Ten are ego feeds in one fashion or another - searches for news stories or blog posts about the various projects I’m involved in. About twenty are mainstream news sources - BBC, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, AllAfrica.com - focused on the countries I follow most closely. Twenty are African bloggers I read every day - Ory Okolloh, Sokari Ekine, Ndesanjo Macha, Emeka Okafor. Forty are other bloggers I respect and learn from: David Weinberger, danah boyd, Bruno Giussani, Foreign Policy’s Passport blog. And the other ten are friends who I follow through their writing - my wife’s blog fits into this category.
What do you think about the media covering Chinese investment on the Africa continent?
What do you think about the media covering Chinese investment on the Africa continent?
I think Chinese - and Indian - investment in Africa is one of the great untold stories of this decade. After cold war struggles for the love of unaligned nations, it seems that the US has stopped courting African nations. China hasn’t, and the politics of African nations may start being shaped by China’s interest in natural resources. We’re already seeing Chinese influence in Zambia’s electoral politics. I think there are economic and strategic reasons for the US to continue pursuing new relationships with African nations, and I think China is taking an opportunity the US and Europe are currently missing. So I think it’s great that some media outlets are taking the story seriously. I’d like to see the coverage take on a bit more nuance and a bit less China-bashing, but I am grateful to reporters who are taking the story seriously.
You mentioned in your blog on the Digital Citizen Indaba conference that you would really like to see a truly representative continent-wide African blogging conference. What do you feel is needed? What are the impediments to achieving it?
You mentioned in your blog on the Digital Citizen Indaba conference that you would really like to see a truly representative continent-wide African blogging conference. What do you feel is needed? What are the impediments to achieving it?
The ethos of blogging suggests that you can’t have a conference of bloggers without a radically open policy on attendence. David Winer set the tone with his blogging “unconferences”, with no invited speakers and an attendance policy that let anyone sign up to come for a very low cost.The complication for this model with an African blogger conference is the cost - travel on the African continent isn’t cheap, and many bloggers don’t have the means to make it to Grahamstown or Nairobi, so any conference is going to need to provide substantial scholarship funding. This then raises issues of who gets scholarships and who doesn’t, which was one of the questions raised about the Digital Citizen Indaba.
I think it’s critically important that we have a gathering of African bloggers to talk about the issues bloggers on the continent face, ways blogs can expand to a larger readerbase, ways more people can find their voices online. I’d like to see it organized by Africans around the continent and in the diaspora, and I hope that other bloggers from around the world would have a chance to participate as well.
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