We at Maneno are very excited to announce that BarcampAfrica.com has now been moved over to the Maneno platform. With this partnership, Barcamp Africa takes on a new form where the website becomes a hub for all Africa-related BarCamps on the continent as well as globally.
The barcamp is a fantastic, personal, impromptu meeting format that has lent itself well to fostering communication, especially in the African tech & blogging scene. These "unconferences" are able to work outside the bounds of the typical, structured conference format to allow discussions, initiatives and ideas that might not have come to light before.
Using Maneno as an information hub and a meeting point for barcamps in Africa is a natural fit for a great many reasons. Maneno is a blogging platform built specifically for the African blogger. It is a lightweight website to download, even in low bandwidth areas. Maneno is available in local African languages that have traditionally had little web presence. Articles can be easily translated between multiple languages and sit atop one another to overcome the linguistic divide facilitating open communication between the different communities. In addition to this, we have integrated a calendar on the site to keep track of all the upcoming African barcamp events.
The primary objective of the new BarCamp Africa hub is to encourage a continuous stream of participant driven content from African barcamps before, during, as well as after the events take place. Barcamp Africa allows each barcamp to have a simple, hosted, lightweight site specific to their event with a custom url. As an example, check out the recent http://barcampafrica.com/swaziland, http://barcampafrica.com/madagascar, or the upcoming http://barcampafrica.com/abidjan Stories published on this site as well as others on the platform aggregate to the main BarcampAfrica.com page (as well as the maneno.org home page) and are exposed to the larger audience of barcampers all over Africa.
BarCamp Africa is open for anyone to contribute (they just need to sign up here), and we're hoping it will become a true meeting point for organizers and participants for all African barcamps where continued conversations will develop. We look forward to seeing this community grow and prosper as more barcamps take place in and around Africa, and the voices of bloggers and technologists from the continent become stronger.
If you would like to receive additional details or have any questions, please contact us.
-The Barcamp Africa & Maneno Team
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.
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.
When we initially launched this site, it was on a less than stellar hosting system. In addition to being pretty slow, it would often crash, and it would do this in the middle of the night for us, which was the middle of the working day for everyone in Sub-Saharan Africa. Not good. Not good at all.
So, we've upgraded to a faster, more reliable system. So far, they've been pretty good. The move has been relatively pain free as these things go. For me, the site seems to run immensely faster, but I'll let everyone else be the judge of that. Hopefully we'll be nice and stable as we keep getting more members with more articles being written. Down the road, we'll probably need to do another upgrade, but for now, I think we're in a good spot.
As always, let us know if anything goes berserk on you while using the site in what would seem to be a normal fashion.
A couple of weeks ago we announced the Beta release of Maneno after a month of frantically working of a lot of small details that needed refining. And while Beta is still a work-in-progress, we are fastly progressing on a better functionality of the site and on translating the whole platform in a bunch of languages.
Today we are extremely happy to announce the Kiswahili and French versions of Maneno, which we hope will become two of the most popular languages of choice of Maneno users in Sub-Saharan Africa.
For the Kiswahili site we have to thank profusely our dear friend Deogratias Simba, based in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), for translating everything into his mother language in such a generous way. We'll tell you more about him soon, since he's not only a professional translator and an editor with his own publishing house, but also an author and a terrific blogger in Swahili.
The French translation was done by ourselves, so please get in touch with us if you find misspellings or inaccuracies as it is bound to happen.
And if anyone is interested in translating Maneno in other languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa, even very small ones, we would be very proud to add more versions to the site. So again, please get in touch so we can give you more details!
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.
