Mary Wafer, my Research Assistant for the trip, with Nairobi and a imminent thunder storm in the background.

October / November 2012 I was in Nairobi and Kampala interviewing a individual experts in the arts field, the communications technology field and the few wonderful people who straddle both these worlds.

A Culture of Technology

The purpose of the interviews is to identify discussion and inquiry what a “culture of technology” is when described by people in the field. In addition a very good look at what the tech, innovation and arts scene’s look like in Nairobi and how the main players in these fields understand it.

From here I will be drawing themes and strong impression on which I will begin a closer study of cross-over practitioners in their particular “culture of technology”. These results from Nairobi and theme’s are still being assessed and will be going online as live visualization by Weekday Hero’s – our deadline looks to be by April this year.

Snowballing

A large part of the interview process was a snowballing and referral process:

a) To understand the influences and and impact of other people.

b) As a mechanism to better understand how the environment is organized and grows. Between the arts and technology environments it is often a very strong professional or personal bond that allows for a cross-over project to come about.

In process exploratory sketch for a map of referrals from the Nairobi Interview session in 2012.

KAMPALA !

In Kampala I had the fortune of meeting Barbara Birungi and Jon Gossier. Barbara is a feisty female incubation master who heads up the Hive Colab space in Kampala, she is deeply dedicated to education and driving entrepreneurship in women in Kampala. Jon Gossier is the founder of the Hive Colab and of AppAfrica. Though living in the USA, most of the time Gossier is entirely dedicated to innovation and communications technology in Uganda.

Though Kamapla was literally one of my favorite cities it unfortunately does not have the impact that Johannesburg, Nairobi or Lagos have and I will have to save including Kampala as a primary case in my study. This does however mean that I do not think that they are really inspiring and interesting – this is one of my favorite Apps in Kampala: BodaPay not only because it was developed through the HiveColab but because I used the Boda Boda taxi alot!

Boda Boda taxi drivers waiting for clients in Kampala.