So, I was just sitting there, trying to keep up with the onslaught of fantastic projects and people I was meeting at the Maker Faire Africa when the always fantastic Mac Jordan popped in with a fellow who wanted to do a quick interview with me about Maneno. The result is the one you see below, which hits on all the points of what we are trying to achieve. It's just too bad that YouTube makes me look like a snarling guy in the thumbnail.
This Friday (the 7th), I head down to Accra, Ghana on behalf of Maneno. This trip has many purposes. First off is for me to see Ghana for the first time. Secondly is to meet up with the local blogging scene, learn about their approach to blogging and their needs as bloggers, and of course, discussing Maneno. Thirdly is the biggest reason of all, which is to attend Maker Faire Africa on the 14th-16th. Of course given that I'll be there from the 7th-18th, this leaves room for a number of other things outside the fair, which I'm hoping will mean meeting up with as many people who are part of the Ghanaian tech/blogging scenes as well as the people coming for the fair.
Arriving in Accra on the 7th in the evening, I'll be staying until the 9th when I head to Cape Coast and stay until the 11th. On the 11th, I'm going up to Kumasi where I'll stay until the 13th when I'll head back to Accra to stay until the 18th when I fly out in the evening.
If anyone is available to meet around these dates, let me know. I unfortunately don't have a Ghanaian mobile number yet, but I'll get one once on the ground.
I'm excited to meet up with any local bloggers (or people potentially interested in blogging) in these three cities. While I have no intention of bashing Maneno over anyone's heads and telling that they must, under no uncertain circumstance move their blog to our platform. Instead I would like to show what the site can do for people who haven't been exposed to it before, and get their feedback and ideas.
I'm already set to meet Mac-Jordan Holdbrookes Degadjor who writes at Accra Conscious Fever and Kajsa Hallberg Adu who writes at Rain in Africa. Both of them are part of a greater Ghana Blogging Group which it appears have possibly moved their monthly meeting to the 13th this one time so that I could attend, which I am ever so grateful for them doing.
Maneno would very much like to have Twi, Akan, and Hausa language versions of the site in addition to the others that are already available. I hope to encounter people who might be interested in expanding the online presence of those languages, and that would want to help make those happen. If you come across this post and want to sign up to help or chat with me while I'm in Ghana, drop a line.
On Friday night, there will be a loose barcamp event where people can run a session. I'll be doing a short, informal version of the longer spiel I give about Maneno, but with the added bonus of talking to bloggers around Ghana first and being able to address local hurdles and successes at the session. Stop on by if you're around.
Beyond that, I'm mostly just going to be an observer of the event, taking in what Emeka, Henry, Erik, Lars, Mark, Nii, and Emer have started.
To that end, we've created the first of what will hope will be many Focus Pages for Maneno which is for Maker Faire Africa. It's a little bit aggregator with a little bit wiki, with what will be a little bit of general information that Maneno staff compile. You can view the Focus Page for the Fair at www.maneno.org/makerfaireafrica.
These will grow in time and we're hoping they will be another useful part of Maneno to spotlight African content.
It's been in the works for the last two months as we coordinated the translation work from the very adept Mr. Oumar Bah, who now blogs (in French and Fula) at Konngol Afirik. And now, we're happy to announce that the Fula language version is live on Maneno! It's the 'FUL' option at the top for those who may know the language via a different spelling, such as 'Peul' in French.
Fula (or Fulfulde as it is known in the language) is spoken primarily in West Africa with around 16 million speakers or so according to Wikipedia. Although, it is the case that the amount of speakers could be as high as 50 million, as a commenter mentioned below. Given the number of dialects and the spread of the language, hard, fast numbers are hard to come by, but it is generally assumed that the Wikipedia article is far too conservative in its total.
The amount of countries that this language is spoken in to at least some extent is massive (take a look to the left), which is why we're very happy to have it as a language interface option. We hope that there will be a far reach with this language as Oumar is extremely well-versed in the Fula language mechanics. He compiled the first Fula-French online dictionary, which he is also looking to publish.
If you look at this language version of Maneno, you can see that there are similar issues as with the Bambara version in that there are a a number of characters which are outside the typical ones in the extended Latin alphabet. These should all have native supported on the internet, but that can support can sometimes be lacking. Thankfully, due to the Bambara experience, this was much less of a problem this time around, although Internet Explorer 6 simply will not display these characters, so upgrade if you can.
Again, we thank Oumar for all his work as well as Claire Ulrich who worked to connect us with Oumar in the first place.
We've had it up and running for some time now, but we're happy to officially state that the Bambara version of Maneno is now fully functional. This is all due to the ongoing work of Boukary Konate in Mali. He has toiled constantly on this version to make it work and we thank him a great deal for it.
It hasn't been easy to get this working. Earlier, we wrote about the problems in implementing this language interface. If it hadn't been for the SIL keyboard, it just wouldn't have been possible. And this is a shame really as there is no reason for this character set not to work.
One other nasty thing we discovered is that the Bambara characters simply will not work on version 6 of Internet Explorer. This is bad as around 20% of the Maneno traffic uses that browser and as Boukary found out, a great many of the computers in Bamako still use this browser that was originally released in 2001 and has been a kick in the face to web developers ever since. Explorer 7 and 8 are fine as are any versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Leave it up to Microsoft to ruin the party...
If you happen to be visiting Bamako anytime soon, bring a new copy of Firefox to install anywhere you find a machine dragging along with IE6. It'll make life a lot easier from a linguistic point of view. Otherwise, take a look at the Bambara version of Maneno. Hopefully it will reach out to more native speakers of the language and open up access to get more of the language online as opposed to just French or English.
