On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 9:29 AM, Clark Robinson <robinsonchicago@gmail.com> wrote:

Held recently in South Africa

Writers about the conference stated: Africans mostly experience the web through mobile phones.

Conference website: http://www.tech4africa.com/

Comment by organizer: http://memeburn.com/2010/06/tech4africa-conference-driven-by-anger-and-pride/

Comment by attendee: http://www.webfoundation.org/2010/08/tech4africa-conference-can-do-a-better-job/

From the Guardian's Africa columnist: I have copied out the conference-related section of a longer article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/23/david-smith-letter-heart-transplant

Thursday brought the first Tech4Africa conference, a geeky gathering of around 400 internet and mobile entrepreneurs and developers. Most of Africa's iPads were probably in one room. The conference delegates, talking and tweeting simultaneously, were predominantly white and male, but I met a young Cameroonian who is playing to Africa's strength: mobile phones.

Fritz Ekwoge offers directory services and language tuition via text message, the latter by sending one word a day to help the English-speaking minority learn French. He could have joined the African brain drain but, he said, he is a proud Cameroonian and wants to help the country. "Google should be afraid of me," he joked.

The star speaker was Clay Shirky, the New York academic, author and social media visionary. Wearing a yellow "Bafana Bafana" shirt and jeans, he reeled off some dazzling aphorisms and startling examples of how co-ordinated action on the web is changing the way we live.

Shirky's speech was largely an optimistic dare-to-dream affair characteristic of Silicon Valley, but with a dash of hard-boiled New Yorker: "The ANC media tribunal? That makes me nervous," he said. "I don't want to be that guy who says, 'I've been in South Africa 17 minutes and I'll tell you what you ought to do.' But that strikes me as exactly a reaction to this spread of the capabilities of the press both in terms of citizens doing the reporting and people being able to access the results.

"I will throw out a prediction: whatever winds up with the media tribunal, WikiLeaks is likely to become an increasing source of South African whistleblowing."