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.
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:
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:
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!
This Thursday, 10.6. our monthly Stammtisch takes place again. 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.
As I’m again late for the quarterly report and it’s already May, I switched to a division of the year into thirds - this being the resumé of our activities from February to now. Here are the links to the reports from last year:
For the future we are planning to open up our blog for guest authors - but more on that soon. Also we are currently working on some videos and a short series on ICT4D.
It’s been more than two years that we started blogging for ICT4D.at here on this platform with a definition of ICT4D. A lot has happened since, but we are still here, active in ICT4D and still convinced about the concept.
Here you can see and download my presentation. It’s in German and CC-licensed (attribution, share-alike) so you can reuse it - you just have to mention our organization and the following Flickr-users whose pictures I used:
It’s time again for our monthly Stammtisch meeting. It’s not the second Thursday in May though, but the third one - due to various reasons. So not this week, but next one.
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.
Our project Zanzicode is a course on web application programming for the urban youth of Stone Town, Zanzibar. Our aim is to strengthen the local IT capacities and provide young people who might not be able to afford it otherwise with additional education.
It is the successor of our Zanzibits Support project, which four motivated young finished successfully at the end of last year.
One of these alumni - Salum - already had some additional experience and showed so much talent in teaching himself that we decided that we would hand over the teaching to him and concentrate on organizational issues and applications for funding. Furthermore we searched for organizations in the area to improve the project and better adapt it to local conditions, and have found a promising partner with Aidnet Zanzibar.
Now we have started the course with twelve new students and are happy to announce the first funding we received - the Austria Development Agency (ADA) is taking over more than half of the project costs for the first year.
We are very happy and we’ll do our best to make this project a success.
For Zanzicode itself, we are always looking for partnerships and collaborations with NGOs and the private and public sector - so if you happen to reside in the area, our project description sounds interesting for you and you think you can contribute something, just contact us!
Also, if you too want to support the project financially, please donate here. Thank you!
Next Thursday, our monthly Stammtisch meeting takes place at Cafe Benno. 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 are very pleased to announce that our documentary received an invitation to be showed at the NOW festival in Barcelona, at the CCCB (Centre de Cultura e Contemporània de Barcelona).
The festival is going on between 26-27/3, and Hello Africa is to be screened on Saturday 27 March, 19:00 in the main foyer, listed under the New Activism category.
The festival describes itself like this:
NOW is a reflection on the present based on the scientific, technological, artistic, social and spiritual transformations that are taking place at the start of the 21st century. It is a process of research, creation and dissemination that aims to bring together different local and international agents involved in the actions that are promoting a change of paradigm in the information and knowledge society and in globalised cultures.
If you want to follow the event on Twitter, the hashtag is #now10. There is also a live streaming of the ongoing events on their webpage.