Our project “The Social Business Forge”, which has been running for quite a while now is now about to finish! IT’s a book about our experiences, knowledge we gathered on the way of becoming and being ICT4D.at. Project leader Paul puts it into words:

The Social Business Forge Project is initiated by ICT4D.at with the aim to collect and disseminate knowledge about ICT4D, social enterprises and the implications for setting up an association in Austria to support these developments. We would like to share what we have built up here at ICT4D.at together with guest postings by providing a solid handbook [from the Social Business Forge page].

The whole thing is a book which we will realease online and which you can also order as printed version. We want to release it in October. Additionally to many general chapters on running an organization like ours, Chapters on our projects Hello Africa and Zanzicode are included.

As it should be an ingoing project with updated and new chapters periodically, you can now even apply to beta-read the book and have your comments included in a coming version.

So check the Social Business Forge website and we’ll notify you again when the book will be finally released.

Later this month (23.3.) the Austrian Social Business Day takes place in Vienna the second time. The event brings together Austrian and international NGOs, social entrepreneurs and businesses to find possibilities to collaborate and work together.

Der austrianSocialBusinessDay bietet innovativen Unternehmen, gemeinnützigen Organisationen und Social Entrepreneurs die Möglichkeit zu Begegnung und Präsentation. Gemeinsam werden zukunftsweisende Kooperationen entwickelt und erste Schritte zur Verwirklichung gesetzt. [German promo text from the aSBD page]

ICT4D.at will be present there and we’ll present our Zanzicode project. The course is running smooth and all our 12 students are motivated and digging deeper and deeper into HTML, CSS, JavaScript, …

Hopefully we can find interested organizations and possible partners at the aSBD to team up with and help us with the project and develop it further in the future. We identified some sectors where we’d be happy about assistance:

• marketing & PR know how
• possibilities to address volunteers
• graphic designers
• possibilities for printing
• sponsoring & funding

I’m very curious what the event will be like and I’m looking forward to interesting encounters.

Spurred by Poncelet Ileleji’s (from YMCA The Gambia - we got to know him at ICTD2010) request if we can help him find a volunteer for their multimedia lab I looked through our jobs wiki site and updated it.

So here’s which people we are currently looking for:

• Volunteer for YMCA computer lab in The Gambia
• Web Designer
• Fundraiser
• Research on available grants
• Public relations person
• Conference coverage
• News tracking
• Wiki Editor

If you have these skills want to help us doing advocacy and projects in ICT4D we’re happy to have you in our team!

I also looked through our projects and again, here’s the current list:

• Zanzicode
• Zanzicode Business Incubator
• addICT film project
• Social Business Forge
• Hello Africa
• Media Work
• Images FOR Africa Flickr Group
• Theses and Papers
• True Austria

For any questions, suggestions or inquiries about them or the jobs, please contact us.

Some more videos from ICTD2010 we’ve uploaded to Youtube in the mean time.

First day - opening panel:

First day - pre-conference platform session:

Third day - wrap-up:

Interviews are constantly being uploaded, so check the ICT4D.at Youtube channel or watch them here:

It’s an anniversary! Our 10th official ICT4D.at Stammtisch meeting is coming up. And this time there’s much to tell. Zanzicode is running great, we have two exciting projects in the pipeline and we are searching for partners for our next grant application. If you want to find out more, just come by!

What: ICT4D.at Stammtisch

Where: Cafe Benno, Alser Straße 67, Wien

When: Wednesday, 17. November 2010, 20:00

We’re happy if you come by! Please notify us via mail or RSVP on in that case.

ICT4D.at is happy to announce that we are about to start a second course within our Zanzicode project. The Incubator Course - a joint venture of ICT4D.at with Chembe Ventures - will run in parallel to our initial initiative, which we will refer to as Basic Course from now on.

The aim of the program is to provide talented young would-be entrepreneurs with the
tools they need to launch and maintain their own web ventures.

Here is the Incubator Course description as stated on the Zanzicode website:

The 12 month Incubator Course measures up to the entrepreneurial spirit of graduates of the Basic Course. Strong programming skills and the goal to set up an own real world online business are prerequisites for this course.

Students are guided through the process of realizing a business, from the idea to the running software and the working micro enterprise. We also stick to Open Source Software, but we optionally switch to Java and Google technologies as industrial standards. After the course the students will be owners of their own business. The course hosts 4 students.

Having conversations with our graduates and students, we got excellent feedback about their progress within the web development community in Zanzibar. The most rewarding statements for us are that graduates are working in the software industry and are keen to move on with their skills. They are searching for ways to educate themselves further. So the idea of an advanced course came up. We proposed approaches and got the commitment from possible future students.

After the experiences we gained so far, we agreed that the students should work on one big ongoing project during the course. The discussion with Sean Murphy (We got to know him at Africa Gathering April 2009 in London) led to the resolution that the best idea would be that students should not only develop plain software solutions, but also business models around the software and then eventually - at the end of the course - become business owners and run their venture. Sean offered to substantially fund this course through the company he is running, Chembe Ventures, which is specialized in seed funding and organizing tech events for African IT startups.

So after successfully acquiring complementary funding, the budget is set and the agreement with Chembe Ventures is signed. We are hereby going to the public and are very happy to announce this.

We are open for applications for this course via office (AT) zanzicode.com and are happy to send out detailed informations upon request. Applicants should not hesitate to call Salum Rashid (Zanzicode Lecturer) on his Zantel line: +255 777 755443 to get the details in Swahili.

As main part of our internal re-design, re-focus and re-formulation efforts (which are also part of the reason why it’s currently so quiet around here) we had the ICT4D.at vision meeting last weekend. We talked about many urgent topics there and on our aims and how it will go on with ICT4D.at in the future.

An important thing we agreed on was a first draft of our vision, which should comprise all of our activities, present, past and planned. It should help us to explain (to interested people, possible sponsors, possible members, …) what we do in a short sentence. What we came up with was:

“People in ICT4D.at provide a platform/network to create an environment to enable sustainable projects in the ICT sector to make positive impact in less developed regions all around the world.”

If you have opinions or ideas on that vision draft, please comment.

Our main activities to come closer to this vision are awareness raising (about ICT4D), capacity building (= project work), research and networking.

Our “flagship” project currently is Zanzicode (http://zanzicode.com/), where we provide cost free programming lessons to motivated young people in Zanzibar. We are definitely committed to staying there and also thought of ways how to improve our engagement - for example by providing more advanced lessons for a small fee or introducing an Ashoka-inspired mentoring process for selected alumni.

As we strongly encourage our members to act independently in projects which are in line with our vision, we are definitely also open to possible future projects in other areas of the world. As a first step we’d definitely open our platform and our international network for interesting projects.

Slowly but constantly we are gaining members - and to manage this process better we now set up a process to become a member of ICT4D.at which will shortly be available as web-form, we are working on that.

We also looked at the resources we would need in the future and the competences we currently have - and identified some skills we are lacking and are searching members to cover those. If you are interested in helping out, please look at our “Jobs” site in the wiki.

So far so good, as all of us are currently working on their ToDos from the vision meeting, I’m sure you’ll hear from us more often again soon.

After a two months summer-break where we were working mostly behind the scenes, we would like to announce our next Stammtisch meeting.

The meeting is for curious people in Vienna to find out about ICT4D in general, what we do, how to help and generally just to have a nice evening. We’d be happy to get to know a lot of new people.

We’ll hold it on a Tuesday this time - that’s easier as our internal jour fix is just before.

What: ICT4D.at Stammtisch

Where: Cafe Benno, Alser Straße 67, Wien

When: Tuesday, 17. August 2010, 20:30

If you intend to come it would be great if you could notify us via mail.

The last month not much happened here on the blog - which was due to a combination of summer, internal work and us not attending ICT4D events I guess.

There’s one thing I wanted to share with you for a while already though, and now seems a good moment for that.

The platform ICT4D.at was created in April 2008 and almost since the first setup we have been using Google Analytics to analyze the page traffic.

As we are planning to give other researchers the possibility to post here (more on that soon) and as I personally like data and think it’s interesting to look through, here some facts on our traffic in the last - well - 2 years.

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Below there’s the overall traffic for daily page views from 2 April 2008 to today, 27 July 2010. Click on it to see a bigger version. In total 20 241 unique visitors had 59 110 page views, spending an average of 1:56 time on the site.

What can be seen is that we started slow, “taking off” with the beginning of 2009 and stabilizing from late 2009, early 2010 on at a range of about 20 to 70 views (slightly less unique views) daily - with pikes here and there.

The countries where our visitors come from are very diverse with Austria, the US, Germany, the UK, India and South Africa as the top six. Google tells us we’ve had visitors from 181 countries/regions so far, which means that there’s almost no country on earth where nobody looked on our website yet - quite cool, isn’t it?

The reason for that may of course be our Google search rank which has been on between 3 and 5 when searching for the term “ICT4D” for some time already.

The spikes are actually always event-related, such as:

• the launch of our movie Hello Africa in May 2009
• the eDevelopment thematic group workshop on mobile innovation in September 2009
• the World Bank Day @ mHealth Summit in October 2009
• Roman’s notes on the MSR Summer School on Computing for Socie-Economic Development just last month

What we’ll have to improve in my opinion is the navigation on the site - referring from our blog content to the projects, wiki, calendar and so forth. Our bounce rate is currently quite high (about 70%), especially for our entry page, so it’s really time to implement our newest redesign.

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So these were in general my insights from the gathered data, if you want to know more, have an idea how to improve our online presence, want to help in implementing the new design or have general suggestions on this post you’re of course welcome to comment.

At ICTD2010, the biggest ICT4D/ICTD conference this year, just recently the accepted papers and posters have been publicized. The topics cover the most exciting and current topics in ICT4D today, and we are proud to announce that the paper we handed in  - “A Qualitative Study of the Impact of Mobile Phone Usage on the Social Life in East Africa” was also accepted as a poster.

Registration for the conference has also opened already - so make sure you get a ticket before it’s too late. There’s also the possibility to apply for a scholarship for people to participate in the conference who might not otherwise be able to do so. Just as a reminder once again the dates:

What: ICTD2010 conference

Where: Royal Holloway University, London

When: 12. to 16. December 2010

ICT4D.at is partnering with Roayal Holloway for this event. Currently we are working with various other people of ICTD2010 to get the pre-conference platform up soon. We will host it here on our server. Furthermore we are working on a media strategy, as we are providing our video and radio skills to the conference organizers.

A lot is happening - and ICTD2010 promises to be a really exciting event. So make sure you check it out!