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.