We're happy to announce that we have now deployed a version of the Creative Commons license for use across Maneno. While all aspects of www.maneno.org are covered in the license, individual blogs have the choice of using the license or not which is controllable in the blog admin section for users who are logged in.
Let's back up a couple of steps though and talk about why this is important by first asking: What is Creative Commons? Creative Commons (or CC) is born of the "copy left" movement which means that they work to release broad copyright licenses focused more on providing replicable access to works as opposed to shutting them off to replication as previous copyright laws did. Basically, instead of having to write up a legal agreement for everything you do, you can apply a CC license based on how many rights you wish to retain and how many you wish to release. In a nutshell, these are licenses for the digital age where everything is infinitely reproducible.
These licenses are a great thing to come about, but they have a couple of problems which we are working with at Maneno and I talked about at the Creative Commons Salon. The first is the linguistic problem. As you can see, this license exists in a great many languages. We are working to have more translations based on the African languages that Maneno has available. That problem is the easy one and should be dealt with in time.
The bigger problem is that for these licenses to be enforceable, they have to have be legally ported for each country in the world as each country has different laws. Given this map, you can see the problem we face given the geographic focus of Maneno. With the exception of South Africa, there are no other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with a CC agreement in place. So, technically there would seem to be no point in having these licenses on Maneno. Why did we do this then?
We did this to try and spread CC licenses to more languages so that not only do these languages have more traction on the internet, but so that CC also has more traction in these languages. We are hoping that this will then lead to the more important step of these licenses being ported to these countries. It's a chicken and egg problem wherein we're hoping that the more exposure Maneno gets in these countries, the more exposure CC will get, and both will gain a gradual foothold for the blogging communities of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The primary agreement we have deployed with links to the various translations of it is the Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported. We chose this license as it is a very protective one once implemented in a country. Also, as far as we know, specific country licenses supersede the unported version, so even though someone in say Zambia opts to use this license on their Maneno blog, their works are protected in a full legal sense in somewhere like the United States which has ported the license to the country properly. The license we chose is one of many options that CC offers. If people wish to choose others, let us know and we'll see what we can do to make this happen.
In the end, it's all about creating better access for Maneno bloggers to tools which should be shared globally.
It has been some time since we posted our original Theme options for blogs on Maneno. Since then, we have gone back, looked at them, deleted the ones that weren't very good, and added a great number of new ones that we think are a lot of fun. You can view them all on the Themes page and change the option for a blog by clicking on 'Your Blogs' in the admin menu.
As you will note, we chose names that have a meaning in different languages, mostly African languages. Here's a quick explanation as to what these all mean:
It's a very distinctive type of tree that is native to Africa, found particularly in Madagascar and that was made famous by the book The little prince.
The color 'blue' in Lingala and is a simple, blue theme.
It means 'bird' in Zulu.
It means 'far away' in Spanish.
Is the color 'yellow' in the Wolof language and this is a simple yellow theme.
Is the Kiswahili word for 'ostrich'.
It means 'lime' in Lingala and this theme is simple, bright greens.
Okapis are adorable four-legged animals living only in the DR Congo related to the giraffe.
Serif is the name for a type of font and is the basis for this elegant theme.
Lastly, there is the theme of 'none' which is very basic and has little decoration, but is useful for people who are working on a low bandwidth connection and don't need one of the fancier themes. It's the one we use in this Site blog.
We hope you enjoy this new supply of theme choices. If you want to tell us what your favourite is, you have any suggestions or would like to contribute a theme, please contact us!
Last week Maneno participated in the San Francisco Creative Commons Salon as we are in the process of deploying Creative Commons licenses to Maneno blogs for the authors choosing. The CC Salons, which take place in more than 15 different cities around the world, are open forums for people who are interested in global participatory culture, and are usually focused on building a community of artists and developers around Creative Commons.
In this Salon, that took place on April 15th at the coworking space PariSoMa, we presented Maneno to a diverse audience that seemed to be quite excited about what we are trying to achieve. We talked about how African bloggers are largely not part of the conversation about Africa, and about the skewed portrayal of Africa in mainstream media as shown by comparing the coverage of Europe and Africa on any given day on a random news outlet. Because of that we wanted to make blogging a lot easier for Sub-Saharan bloggers with a platform like Maneno, as well as promoting their content for greater exposure.
This brought us to what makes it different from other existing blogging platforms, which is a question we always get when introducing Maneno to any audience. So we described the the technicalities of Maneno and how well it works in slow internet environments. People seemed very interested in our upcoming feature that will allow blogging through a mobile phone either via SMS or MMS, since in Sub-Saharan Africa a lot more people have phones than internet access.
We also talked about the multilingual nature of the platform, of course, as it is something that is very important for use. There are over 2,000 languages Sub-Saharan Africa, but sadly most of them have little or no internet presence. Also, having realized the big divide that exists between African bloggers that write in different languages, we wanted to make it easy for authors and readers to translate interesting posts in more than one language. In this day and age, with the globalization of internet, there is a danger of linguistic isolation which we'd like to avoid by bridging the gap between different language bloggers.
At the end of our presentation many people wanted to know more, and so we answered quite a few questions. One that we've been getting quite a bit and that we find a little amusing every time is about what would African bloggers write about. It reminds us of that talk that Kenyan businesswoman Jane Arunga gave in a conference about aid evaluation, in which she explained how somebody in the US had asked her something like "Africans Have Cell Phones? Who Do They Call?". In case our answer isn't obvious, we said that we expect African bloggers to write about the same things that bloggers in North America or Europe write about: what's important for them.
Alongside Maneno, two other projects that are global in reach were also presented at the CC Salon. Although they both have the word Global in their news and are both focused on video, after listening to them we realized they are actually quite different. Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee presented Global Oneness, that offers a library of short films as educational or advocacy materials, and David Harris presented Global Lives that is filming 10 people from different countries around the world for 24 hours straight to screen them simultaneously in a dome-shaped, Burning Man-esque video installation. Check them out, they are quite cool.
If you want to see some more pictures of the event, we have uploaded them on our Flickr photostream.
If you read as many blogs about Africa as we do, you might have noticed that a great number of them are written by expats. Some of them are traveling there for just a few weeks or volunteering for a couple of months, while others are working there for a longer period of time typically for some kind of non-profit/development organization or humanitarian/aid group. These blogs can be a great introduction to Africa from outsiders describing their first impressions and cultural shocks, but they often have a very short life span and they rarely reach a very big audience beyond friends and relatives of the author.
We designed Maneno to be the most useful and effective for bloggers in Africa. And while we hope to attract mostly local bloggers to write about their countries, we are aware of the popularity of blogging amongst expats as a way to keep in touch with their homes. With all that in mind, we decided to create a collective blog open to any expat based in Africa for a shorter period of time that would like to blog about his or her experience while there. Instead of creating a blog that will die after a little while, why not write for a group blog that will be around for much longer and that most likely more people will read?
This blog is Expatria, and you can easily join it when you sign up for a Maneno account. So far there have been two contributors: Jaya Murthy who wrote an Ode to the DRC after spending 5 years working in the Eastern part of the country, first in South Kivu and then in North Kivu; and Lunatrix who is currently in Senegal for some PhD research and is writing about her experiences there both in English and in Spanish. Check out for example her latest post on Gay Rights in Senegal.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one of the main goals of Maneno is to have a lightweight download footprint. We been making good strides in keeping the site small to download, yet fully functional. Of course, this might not be enough for some folks who are having to make do with extremely narrow internet connections and high latency. It would seem to be a simple thing to just get rid of all the images on the site or take away functionality to make it lighter to download. But, not everyone has the same needs when it comes to a light bandwidth site.
Because of this, we have introduced a connection speed selector. You can choose your speed when you join or modify it through your profile page. This a very new feature and it will evolve over time to best fit peoples' needs, but currently there are four settings:
1 Fast (>256kb) - All of the site functions are available.
2 A Little Slow (128kb-256kb) - This blocks a couple of minor scripts and some other items. There are no visible changes, but the download size is a bit less.
3 Slow (56kb-128kb) - This takes out a great deal more in addition to #2. You won't see the individual blog themes. Images on the home page are taken out. Site graphics are removed. Articles will only have a small, thumbnail image. The WSIWYG editor for writing articles is removed as well.
4 Very Slow (<56kb) - This is quite extreme. In addition to everything from #2 and #3, you won't see any article images (unless a user embedded them in the text). In time, more components will be reduced to have Maneno still be functional, but be quite plain and work almost completely as text-only with a target page size of around 5kb.
All of these settings are available now, although #4 isn't complete yet. Play around with them and see what you think. Like I said, we're still working on it and will be refining it, but soon, it will hopefully allow access from even the smallest trickle to this platform of an internet connection. As always, send us a line through the Contact page if you have any feedback.
In constantly striving to create a more accessible platform, we at Maneno are always on the lookout for new languages to make the site available in because let's face it, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish versions are great, but we feel that the true strength of the site will be having the native languages of Africa available as well. Because of that, there is the Swahili version and soon (hopefully very soon) we will have a version in Bambara. In case you haven't heard of this language, let me assure you that this is not an April Fool's. This is a West African language that is spoken by around 2-3 million people. Naturally, it doesn't have a strong online presence, but we're hoping that this can change in the future because of efforts like this. I mean, if Slovenian, which is spoken by 2.4 million people can have a Wikipedia with over 100,000 entries, why not Bambara?
When it comes to integrating African languages in a website, one such as Swahili is overall, rather easy to implement. It uses a strictly English, Latin alphabet for the base of its characters. Bambara however gets considerably more complex. There are a number of characters which are in addition to the Latin base such as ɛ, ɔ, and ɲ (or ŋ depending on the dialect.) Typing these characters is a problem because there is no native support in Windows or the Mac OS.
By way of my pain, I would just like to point people to Sil, a group which has created a keyboard for Bambara and other languages, albeit a keyboard that is only for Windows machines. That takes care of the typing. There is still the issue of the displaying. For that, you need to encode your pages as UTF-8 which amazingly, actually supports these characters, although possibly not in every font for the web, so your kilometerage may vary. There is also the issue that any translation file needs to be created, from the start as a Unicode file. Regular files will just end up mashing up the extended characters.
That is a quick overview of the problems. I hope that it helps others who might be trying to do something similar with Bambara or other languages on the web. Obviously, once we launch this version of the site, you can be sure that we'll let everyone know about it as we think it will be pretty darned cool to have!
