Startup Weekend Lagos Is On

The hall is large, the teams are clustered in different parts of empty space quietly working on their products. The quietness belies the intensity with which the teams are working. You can’t really tell at first glance what is going on. No company brand banners litter the room. No customer t-shirts worn by the participants. Nothing really shows that out of this room, out of this weekend could come Nigeria’s next internet phenomenon. This is Startup Weekend Lagos .

Elevating The Internet Industry: 3 Things We Need

Last week, we had the East/West Twitter Chat with Internet entrepreneurs from different parts of Africa and the Diaspora. You can find the transcript here, starting from the “2:01 PM” mark. The intense 90 minute session may not have quite fulfilled its mission, but it did provide valuable lessons. One of them is the lack of, and great need for, greater community among Africa's technology practitioners - whatever regional scope they may choose to exist in. Kenya has the iHub. Conferences and Unconferences are events where for a few brief moments like-minded individuals gather and share ideas and make connections. There are a few tenuous connections revolving around a few blogs and Twitter connections. This is not enough. I believe we need to put 3 things in place to strengthen what we are building.

Of Viruses and Acid Rain

I am one of the lucky Nigerians who don’t need to drive long distances to get to work. One effect of this is that I don’t spend much time listening to my car radio. However, one radio show I do get to hear and really enjoy listening to is the Daily Guide on Star 101 FM from 7.15 am and 7.30 am. I seriously love Moyo and Mofe Oyatogun’s take on the news. This isn’t because their reports are necessarily of scintillating intellectual content or breathtaking in vision. Instead, I like their news show because they bring texture to what is traditionally dry and monotonous. Their back and forth makes the news fun to listen to.

On two occasions however, they quite annoyed me. Late last year, December I believe it was, Mofe reported on a computer virus that was making the rounds. This virus was supposedly the most dangerous virus ever known. Microsoft and CNN were apparently both reporting it as the virus to end all viruses. For those familiar with such things, it was clearly a tried and tired hoax. And it was being reported as fact over a radio show that is listened to by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of uninformed listeners. This particular hoax has been recycled repeatedly since the last century. I wrote about it earlier in my blog post on hoaxes and talked about how to validate and verify those kinds of reports.

Act two. A couple of weeks ago, the Acid Rain hoax filled the airwaves. Apparently a text message had gone around Lagos that a rain of acid was coming and people should take cover. Again my second favourite (Dan Foster’s my first) radio personalities reported it as news. Let’s give them credit this time. They brought some skepticism to the story and followed up with a bit of journalistic fact-finding to “to see if these things were true”. Still, the results they came back with did much less that clear up the issue or expose it as the hoax it clearly was.

Both these incidents worry me because of several things. First, as I said wrong information was reported as news. The journalist apparently received the information about the virus in an email message. As a good citizen who wanted to make sure people she knew didn’t get their computers infected, she decided to let as many people as she knew know about it. For most of us that would have meant forwarding the email to as many people as we could and asking them to do the same (creating the flood of messages that was the hoaxer’s intent). My Daily Guide folks, being radio journalists, just happened to be in a position to share this hoax with all her teeming radio fans.

Most people in Nigeria don’t know computers. Beyond the basic uses they put their PCs to, they really know just enough to get into trouble. So those of us who speak to the public in any form or fashion (radio or blogs) need to be as sure as we can that we are not spreading misinformation. Because someone will believe us. The public sound of our voice gives us the fallacy of legitimacy. Consequently we have a greater duty to ensure veracity. I kind of hold myself responsible for not calling into the station or sending them an email debunking the first story. As a blogger and computer professional, I should have done what I could to get the word out over the same medium the hoax was spread.

The second incident is the more chilling one. This isn’t really a computer issue and the domain knowledge needed to debunk the hoax is different. Still secondary school encyclopedia reading was all the information I needed to be sure it was a hoax. The initial word went out over SMS before being picked up by the news media. Nigeria is a cell phone nation. The increase in our tele-density over the past decade has been off the charts. Many technology and developmental thinkers have recognised that the cell phone, for most of our population, is the equivalent of the computer and the internet. The great thing about cell-phones is that they are so cheap that most people independent of income or education can afford one. What makes them great also makes them a huge problem. If you want to reach most Nigerians as individuals you sent mass SMS. Those messages resonate more and somehow seem more authentic to many than a news broadcast. Possibly because text messages carry a sense of personal communications with them.

A similar, and worse incident, was the text about a large influx of northerners into Lagos with nefarious intent. I didn’t get that text either, but I did get the text debunking it. I must commend the security services and whoever they partnered with in getting the word out. Still, how do we know the first wasn’t true and the second wasn’t a lie to deceive us? You see the problem? We are now in age where mass communication can be done anonymously with near impunity that can have all sorts of impact on our populace.

Which is why I am concerned about what our radio and TV broadcasters present. They are in the unique position of being able to instantly spread the word to counteract false information or become the unwittingly agents of a wildfire of misinformation. They need to know and use the tools available to get the right information into people’s hands when someone else is doing their best, whether maliciously or misguidedly, to rain acidic information on us all.

Dej.

Photo courtesy of Eremi at flickr.com

Ignore Us At Your Peril

  Last week I wrote about the multi-storey car park at MMA2 and used it as a point to express my concern about what could potentially be the beginning of decay at that airport. After writing that post, I went over to MMA2's website and submitted a complaint on their help page. In the week since, I have not been contacted by email.

A few weeks ago, I did a piece on MTN in which I criticised their mobile Internet service. Now I didn't send a link to them to them via email, instead I sent them a link on Twitter. I never got an response or a comment and shortly afterward @mtn_nigeria disappeared from Twitter.

One of Nigeria's greatest shames is the abysmal electricity situation. A movement called the Light Up Nigeria Movement (or LightUpNigeria) was started on Twitter and now has its home at www.lightupnigeria.org. LightUpNigeria is intent on using the Internet and other media to raise a groundswell of voices putting pressure on the Nigerian government to address the electricity problem. In fact several events are planned by LightUpNigeria to mark the upcoming Independence Day anniversary.  The movement has even drafted a Proclamation. I have not been able to find any indication that this effort has been acknowledged by the government.

These three examples, particularly the last one, show the ability to use the Internet and its technologies by Nigerians to engage service providers and governments. The problem is the service providers and government are not engaging us in return. Twitter and it’s home-grown clones like NaijaPulse and Kukurooku in particular are excellent tools that can be mined to find out what web-savvy Nigerians thinking and focusing on are and Facebook, is a great place to engage one on one with customers and constituents.

Aside from these tools, there is the Nigerian blogosphere where the more eloquent Nigerians engage in conversations in their blogs on politics, technology, faith, their loves and their pain points. The wealth of Nigeria’s brain trust is freely available on the internet for every business, institution, and government agency to harness for product development, process improvement, idea generation, crime prevention, technological advancement, and societal transformation.

However, they are not listening.

There are over ten million Nigerians – people living in Nigeria – on the Internet. Not to mention the vast number of Nigerians in the Diaspora who remain very relevant to the Nigerian story.  That may account for less than 10% of our population, but we are growing everyday. You can’t ignore us. And I don’t mean filling our inboxes with unsolicited email messages or taking over every whitespace on Facebook. Loy Okezie pointed out that more and more Nigerian businesses are engaging in the use of social media (Facebook, twitter et al), but I am unconvinced that they are using these tools the right way. The day of the one-way blast of adverts is at an end. Mashable recently did an article on how to use social media to collect feedback from customers. Our political and business organisations have to engage us. Hear what we have to say. That encourages us to listen to them in turn. When our voice finds its way into products or processes and we see evidence of that, it wins and keeps our loyalty.

It seems like Barack Obama has been US President forever, but it was only a year ago when he won the election by, amongst other things, engaging the minds and hearts of the Internet generation in the US, a strategy he is continuing as president. Assuming the Republicans were doomed to lose the elections, the other Democratic hopefuls lost out, in part, because they did not realise just how vital it was to capture this demographic. Instead Obama turned them into his army of volunteers. He used the Internet to tell them his vision for the country, and by listening to them, he made them his voice.

We know what Nigeria is now, we are no USA, we do not have the depth of internet penetration that the Americans have. However, a savvy governor or a smart brand can use the Internet to create a movement for unstoppable positive public action or to exponentially extend the power of their brand. LightUpNigeria is doing the reverse – letting the leaders know what we are agitating for, keeping the pressure on. It is extremely unwise for the government not to figure out some way to use this ready, willing, and eminently able movement, virtually presented on platter of gold, to tackle the electricity problem, to “crowd source” the solutions. Nigerians are the among scrappiest people on the planet. We have shown our ability to adapt to the worst and thrive. We can figure it out and show the world a solution that will amaze. The relevant government ministry should actually sponsor the conversation on www.LightUpNigeria.org, give regular updates on progress, highlight the various contractors doing specific projects and inform Nigerians of setbacks.
At the very least they should soothe the beast before it becomes savage.

This post is not about electricity or infrastructure problems. It is about the fact that the coming of the internet age to Nigeria is an end to the inability of the people to speak and be heard. We will speak with our tweets and our blogs and that will eventually become our speaking with our votes and with our money. Listen to us now and one day, when our voice is powerful enough, that will be the sound that will carry you in our high offices, or to the highest pinnacles of business success.

Ignore us and you do it to your peril.

Dej.

Photo Courtesy of mattinnigeria.wordpress.com/