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.

Although we haven’t announced any news during the summer, we were not only travelling and relaxing but we were also working behind the scenes.

One major outcome is a proposal for a new project in Ghana with exciting local and Austrian partners, which we want to start later this year.  The main objective of this project

“is to equip teachers in public schools with skills in internet research and presentation to support their teaching and learning process” [quote from our proposal]

By assisting teachers to use the internet, we think several aspects in education can be improved. This in turn makes not only the teachers, but the students and other stakeholders benefit. By teaching teachers, we are aiming for a multiplier effect and replication across the country.

We will publish more about the project and our partners (Ghana: Worlali Senyo, Charles Amega Selrom, Gameli Adzaho;Austria: Prof. Emerita Maragete Grimus) as soon as we’re finished planning and have concrete dates.

However, we will present the proposal on 1. September in Linz at the event “Mein Beitrag zum Wandel” at the “Create Your World” subfestival of “Festival Ars Electronica”.

Check here for the exact time and date of the “Create Your World” event.

We’re proud to get the chance to present there and I’m sure we’ll get to know many interested and interesting people.

After all the new years celebrations and post-ICTD2010 work, here’s some news on our Zanzicode projects.

Since the end of last year the new course with twelve new students is running. They are introduced on the Zanzicode blog with a picture and a statement. My favourite one here by Aboud:

I hope to be able to learn this technology that moves the world to another stage.

Well, let’s hope it moves at least the career possibilities of our students to another stage. Of course we are looking forward to learn about their progress and wish Salum, our teacher the best of luck.

Also our second course in Zanzibar, the Zanzicode Business Incubator which we have initiated together with Chembe Ventures has started with five participants. Martin and Salum are both teaching (and learning by doing) about web entrepreneurship in Zanzibar. After the course ideally the students will have created a business themselves and will be operating it. We’re curious how this will turn out.

If there’s an interested organisation out there which is active in Zanzibar and might achieve their goals better with IT we’d be happy to know more and maybe collaborate. Contact info can be found 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.

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.

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:

• Internal #Q4 2009
• Internal #Q3 2009
• Internal #Q2 2009
• Internal #Q1 2009

January was already covered in #Q4 2009, so I’ll start with February. We announced our calendar of ICT4D conferences and events, had our fourth monthly Stammtisch, our Flickr group Images FOR Africa hit 10.000 pieces and I joined the course Pioneers of Change to learn about how to carry out projects in a holistic and sustainable way - also learning lessons for ICT4D.at.

In March the conference LIFT@Austria about innovation took place in Vienna (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) and Hello Africa was shown in Barcelona at the NOW festival. Furthermore Stan Karanasios joined us for some posts.

In April we became partner of the biggest ICT4D event this year - ICTD2010 (website). Of course we had our monthly Stammtisch again and announced ICT4D sessions at CHI 2010, TedX Accra - Youthinspire and an ICT4D.at and OLPC Austria presentation for which I posted the slides in May.

Our project Zanzicode got sponsored by the Austria Development Cooperation also in May - we’re very happy about that. Furthermore Anders announced DIY Kenya commission at Maker Faire Africa 2010 and Johan Uhle from Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany had a guest post about the innovative open source software project to help in rural health care - Sendinel.

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.

Late as always, I hereby provide you with the resumé of the final quarter of 2009 - from November 2009 to January 2010.

The preceding quarterly reviews can be read here:

• Internal #Q3 2009
• Internal #Q2 2009
• Internal #Q1 2009

The first event after the last quarterly review was a really significant one - the World Bank Day @ mHealth Summit at 26 October 2009 - another event organized by our partners from the eDevelopment Thematic Group (eTG) of the World Bank. We blogged about it very detailed - with six posts - and covered it on Twitter.

In November Hello Africa continued to tour the world with a screening in Wales at the May You Live in Interesting Times festival. Later that month we covered the Development Marketplace 2009 event, where “100 ideas to save the planet” were presented, with roughly a quarter of them being funded by the Global Environment Facility, the foreign ministry of Denmark, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Bank Group. Oliver, our man in Germany took part in the World Social Web Dialogue in Berlin, which aims to create a standard for exchanging data between NGOs. Furthermore I attended events of the Austrian NGO Südwind - Clean IT - the way to a fair trade PC and one monthly meeting of theirs, focusing on Web 2.0 and new technologies. That was already in December though.

December also started with a very nice present of Oliver Ruhm, designer at Zeughaus Brand Identity Desig, who rebrushed our page design. Except the Donate-button on the top it’s not implemented yet as we all are very busy, but if somebody would be willing to volunteer for that, we’d be grateful!

Thanks to Fritz who was as a teacher in Zanzibar, later that month the homepage and blog for our web application programmers school in Zanzibar - Zanzicode - went online. You can read about the progress of our pupils there - though we’ll update you here on the blog as well.

The eTG organized an event in December focusing on free and open source software, with Brazil as example. Another event we attended was 26c3, the hacker’s conference of the Chaos Communication Club.

January does not seem so stressful on the blog - with only a review of Bamboo, Tin and Callabashes, an exhibition in the Leopold museum in Vienna and the eTG event on climate smart development - but actually it was a very stressful month with many things happening internally.

We had a big meeting with Martin T, Martin K, Paul, Oliver, Fritz, me (Florian) and even two new members - Thomas and Isabella - taking part. Also, we are working on grant applications, scientific papers, new events and our internal structure - more details to be announced when the time is ripe.

February has just started - but we are looking forward to our next Stammtisch next Thursday - and hope to see a lot of interested people there!

A lot of things to come, and we are still motivated and eager for new challenges.

In the mean time there was not too much going on with ICT4D.at - everybody was busy with something else. I am looking forward to an internal meeting in the beginning of December though, where we will set the path for the coming weeks and months.

One main thing we are currently working on is the preparation for the second round of our Zanzibits support project. Our representative Fritz Grabo in Zanzibar is having rehearsals to choose future students and is working on improving the infrastructure on the ground - repairing stuff, improving furniture and several other things. Here in Austria we are looking for sponsors for the project - so if you want to support a small-scale project for capacity building in Zanzibar, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Some events which we are looking forward to are the launch of the eDevelopment Thematic group Flagship Report and an Open Source workshop, also by the eTG group. Furthermore we will be present in Berlin at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in December.

One past event we will write about soon is the World Social Web Dialogue - there is still some planning and internal coordination on the way.

So - quiet times, but there’s more to come soon!

Again it’s time to make a resumé what has happened in the last three months - same as the last two times:

• Internal #Q2 2009
• Internal #Q1 2009

While Martin Konzett was in Zanzibar, he screened our movie Hello Africa at ZIFF (Summary of ZIFF by Dan Hamm), made some valuable contacts and set up our Zanzibits Support project which is now running with Dan Hamm and Fritz Grabo as teachers.

Our volunteer Wambura Kimunyu attended M4Change Nairobi and wrote a blopost about it - Thoughts from M4Change Nairobi.

I, Florian Sturm, went to Ghana and visited some interesting projects there - for example the Don Bosco school in Sunyani, Suame magazine & SMIDO in Kumasi (SMIDO official website) and the OneVillageFoundation Ghana in Winneba. Furthermore I was lucky that two really exciting events just took place at the time I was around:

• IDDS - International Development Design Summit at Kumasi, Ghana- Summary of final presentations of IDDS
• Maker Faire Africa at Accra, Ghana

Especially Maker Faire was a unique possibility to show our movie Hello Africa and to make a lot of great contacts. I met and talked to many people from the IT scene in Ghana, several makers from around Africa, the organizers from Butterfly Works, Erik Hersman, Nii Simmonds, people from Inveneo, Nairobits, and lots more. Recap of Maker Faire on ICT4D.at

Later in august Martin Tomitsch and Martin Konzett attended the INTERACT2009 workshop Ethics, Roles and Relationships in Interaction Design in Developing Regions which took place in Uppsala, Sweden and online. They presented a paper on Designing an SMS-based application for seaweed farmers in Zanzibar (and why it failed for now). Notes on INTERACT2009 on ICT4D.at

Worlali Senyo, our volunteer from Accra helped us cover the efforts in Ghana towards more broadband for everybody - with posts on AfNOG EO Localiazation Workshop and Ghana to Develop a National Broadband Strategy.

In October we were already present at two events - Africa Gathering in London, and May You Live In Interesting Times in Cardiff, where our movie Hello Africa was screened - once again. Concerning Hello Africa there’s more great news - it made it to archive.org.

Also our partnership with the World Bank eTG group moved forward, we covered two workshops.

• Mobile Innovations for Social and Economic Transformation
• The Singapore Experience: Ingredients for Successful Nationwide eTransformation

Now we are preparing the next interesting event focusing on the potentials of mHealth - “World Bank Day @ mHealth Summit” on 28. October.

For the future we are planning to collaborate more with OLPC Austria in our efforts to create an ICT4D scene in Austria and some ICT4D-related events.

So, a lot of things are happening in ICT4D and we are excited to be a part of the whole scene. Looking forward to the next months.