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.
We've just recently renewed our About section to be a lot more helpful. Instead of the one line summary of what Maneno is trying to do, we've broken down the core elements of what we're working on here. This is so people can see why we're not just another blogging platform, but a new approach to age-old problems which have never really been solved by other systems.
We've also moved our Spread the Words section in to About as it seemed like a more proper place for it. Other Projects are some of the smaller things we're working on, which are either augmented by or provided support to Maneno. And of course if you want to know a bit more about the people behind Maneno, there is a full Board of Directors section. We are a non-profit by the way. That was never really fully talked about as much as it should have.
By far and away, the most important section in all of this is Support Maneno. There are a number of items in there which lay out all the ways that people can help support our cause to get more African voices on the web. A number of these aren't even Maneno specific, such as starting a BarCamp in your area, which can go a long way to promote all of the issues like African linguistics and connectivity to people that you know.
Anyways, just a bit more transparency to the project. We hope people find it useful. Oh, translations for the entire About to our other languages are coming shortly.
While the holidays have been going on, we took a chance to sit back and look over what we've built with Maneno. As is often the case when you're rapidly prototyping and building out a brand new system, you're often more worried about getting it working for user rather than getting it working the best that it can for the user. This was the situation with entering and editing articles on the site.
As was cited in Erik Hersman's email interview with me, this site was originally built on components for a blogging system that I had created for use while traveling. It was designed to be extremely lightweight and simple for slow internet connections and dangerously out of date web browsers wherever I got web access. This worked quite well for Maneno's purposes when we set down this part, but then there were the functions such as: localization, multi-author blogs, GMT orientation, and country categorizing to deal with.
When everything got tossed together, a bit of the user experience was lost in the process. I was not happy with this and so, we all sat down, looked over what we had and thought up ways that it could be made better. The end result is a much more streamlined, focused, and intuitive interface for writing and editing articles on the site. The system now takes in to account all the items that needs to be there and orders them in a manner which seems to make the most sense based on how a user would approach the site.
I'm feeling quite good about it and I hope that folks will take a chance to write a bit and see what they think of it (of course, you have to join to get at these pages.) In the process, we managed to shave a few extra kilobytes off the download footprint, which is always good. And most importantly, there is now room for future features that we're currently working on, which will make that 'task panel' in the admin quickly become a very useful friend to authors on the site.
The always great, App+Frica posted an article today in regards to how web services are failing the world market. Take a look at the article, it's a fine read and even though it's just opinion, for anyone who has traveled outside the US and Europe (especially the US) you know that a great many sites simple drag along or fail altogether (as Meskel Square noted awhile back) when you try to access them from abroad.
For being the second most populous continent in the world with nearly one billion people, it's amazing how, as it becomes crunch time for all the Web 2.0 endeavors, that they're blunting their efforts in Africa. They obviously see no market there because they view Africa as poor, or hopeless, or [ergh...] the "dark continent", or one of the countless other cliches people pick from. Not all industries don't see it this way though. For instance, the mobile phone companies see a region where there is the potential for tremendous growth because every single person doesn't have a mobile phone yet.
While not wanting to beat the topic to death, I refer back to the previous post about Proudly Entering the Beta, wherein I laid out the goals that we're trying to accomplish with Maneno. We're not approaching this from the standpoint of developing a platform for the US and EU first and then, maybe if it works, let Africa have it. If it doesn't work there, well, too bad. This thinking doesn't work and it's why so many companies are caught off guard and suddenly need to pull back.
Beyond the points made in the previous article, I would add that we're working towards being a non-profit. We're not doing this to make a buck or corner a "developing market". That business plan doesn't work. It's broken and will most likely continue to break more over the coming years.
We're also working to promote this site and to actively pursue readers, exposure, and participation. We're not passive about this, because as App+Frica's timely article shows, it really is time for new thinking when it comes to web applications for Africa.
While the term "beta" has been massively overused in the whole Web 2.0 shebang, it still has it's purposes. For instance, the version up to this point was Alpha. It was rough and there were a lot of things still unknown about it. With this Beta release, people who might have checked it out before should check it out again. The site looks and interacts on a completely different level now. It is much more complete and now we are working to refine elements to it.
The focus of the site has been honed as well. In what we're deeming, Stage 1, we're focusing on creating a blogging, communication, and media platform for Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people might be asking, "Why? There's already Wordpress, Blogspot, and a slew of others." This is true and when it comes to large blogging systems, many of these do an excellent job. The main issue with them is that they're for the web at large as viewed from developed nations. The web in developing nations is a much different beast.
To that end, we're really focusing on a few key points:
- Number One is localization. We're really working like crazy to get Maneno translated and functional in six languages. And by localized, we mean every part. Someone will eventually be able to only speak Swahili or French and be able to use the entire site without anything popping up in English. It's not as easy as it sounds because the internet by definition is English-centric (due to the parts that make it being developed in the US in English), but we're working to make this possible.
- Number Two is download speed. Web 2.0 came up with the brilliant plan that any website can have pages that are up to one meg to download. While this can work for those in the US, the further away from the server you get, the longer the website takes to load. And of course, if you factor in that most people in the world are not on broadband internet, then you run in to real problems. With Maneno, we're working to keep the pages as small as possible in order to keep up accessibility for everyone. Right now, the home page is about 60kb and we're striving to shave even a little bit more off that if possible. Compare that to a normal Wordpress blog home page, at about 225kb (if there aren't any images to the articles) and you understand why we're trying to make this difference.
- Number Three is an eventual plan to allow alternative updating to the site. In other words, users won't have to use the web to write articles. This is also a very key point as internet connectivity is paltry over the vast majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are a few options out there which we're exploring now, but this will be an eventual feature that we'll add to the site, so more on it later.
- Number Four is article translation and refers back in part to the localization aspect, but is its own entity. We're working to create a better blogging translation system. We know that people in Sub-Saharan Africa usually speak at least two languages and usually a great many more. We want to be able to have the Maneno community be able tin interact and help share articles to as wide a public as possible.
There are all kinds of smaller details but these four points are the main ones. We're working to have all of this come together in to a system that will work to inform better than any before it and have the ability and elasticity to not only last for awhile, but be able to change and incorporate other good things that come along on the web. After all, this isn't just an installation of Wordpress, Typepad, or Drupal; this is an application for Africa.
You are seeing the initial launch of our new site. You may be wondering who we are and what we do? Take a look at our projects for more information on both those fronts. In there you'll find a list of our recent ventures as well as some of our new ones as we work to give space to people who need a voice.
What you see here is the culmination of work to create a site for anybody to publish articles related to Sub Saharan Africa and raise awareness about lives in these regions. If you are someone who would like to make use of the site, please join and submit your articles.
Our advance apologies for the mono-linguistic interface for the site. We plan to have it available in French and Spanish within the next month. If you have any feedback or just want to ask just more, feel free to contact us us.
Cheers and we look forward to your participation and patronage.
The Maneno Team
