MoMokla, M4D 2010, and ICT Life in Kampala

MoMokla, M4D 2010, and ICT Life in Kampala

Following our week in Nairobi, I moved to Kampala (Uganda) to attend a couple of events, and sync back with all the people we met last year when we came with Tim. The week started with the Mobile Monday Kampala, aka MoMoKla. Impressive attendance, probably more than 100 people. I was a little a frustrated because the event was organized in collaboration with the M4D event, and therefore all speakers were foreigners. Surely a great opportunity for the local crowd and the format is fully understandable, but I would have loved hearing about local stories!

That said, I really appreciated one particular talk from Matt Berg, and specifically one point he made around cooperation between different tools and the need for open standardized format. In few words, there are tons of different tools, some are open source, some are free, etc. What’s critical, overall, is that all these tools are using standard interface, and open format so that it is easy to build your own infrastructure by adding different tools together, and to plug something new in an existing setup. At the Web Foundation, we are pushing for such an approach, but this is the first time I’m hearing someone else making such a point.

I personally believe that open format, and open data/api is more important than open source, because it enables the co-existence of different tools in an integrated world.

It was a real pleasure to meet again the IT scene in Kampala, who is largely driven by a small group of very enthusiastic geeks: Kyle Spencer, Simon Vass, Reinier Battenberg, Daniel Stern, Matt Griffiths. I’m impressed to see how committed they are to make Kampala active and up to speed on the IT front. The amount of energy they are putting in for the community is also amazing, from organizing MoMokla, to help watching the 2011 election, from building the internet exchange point, to setting-up Hive Colab, a concept similar to iHub in Nairobi. I really enjoyed meeting again all these people and spending time with them. It was also a real pleasure to synch up with the Grameen Foundation App Lab, and its new head, Sean Krepp, who i knew before from his Nokia time, and who has lots of exciting projects.

So, as you can see, it was not wasted time for me, and I really hope that we will be able to launch activities in this wonderful country in a very near future. Via: World Wide Web Foundation