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I find many of my clients want to do the same thing that's happening elsewhere in the world on the Internet, but add value with "local content". It makes sense - there are some part of African / East African / Tanzanian / inter-Tanzanian cultures that play into the way we do things, like business, education, behaviour change communication, retail, engineering, etc.  But to what extent? We can't be so different that even best practice is unique.  The "local" in local content only goes as far as language, law of the land and loyalty to certain norms. Outside of these areas, I'm not sure what else makes local content so special. 

"We explore creation as we sense it, but there is no known example of a creature in the world that has the mind of a human. For some, it is the ability to choose destiny, to forge past what is right versus what is wrong. For others, it is the ability to love, to care for another in the most unique of ways. But, we cannot fathom a uniform definition of humanity except in the face of each other. To be human is to be the same as one another."  Rajabu glanced at his phone. 3 minutes left. The old man was small, sitting on a chair with his back to the campus wall. His diction was clear, like Rajabu's great grandfather. Rajabu knew the English those men spoke was immaculate and came from a very systematic and colonial education. He had never seen this old man... Read more of my submission to the 2016 NUHA Blogging Prize here.

Sometimes I think we are extremely loud online but only a fraction of it is valid, true, logical and factual, the rest is spam. What if every once in a while, we all agreed to stay quiet on all social networks? Or what if there was a rule that, unless you were licensed, you could only publish a maximum of 3 sentences on any digital platform?

I've been pushing my company to run digital comms from within our organization for more than a year now, and so far it has worked really well for us. However, third-party providers haven't stopped asking us to give them that work, and the question of whether to run it internally or externally has occasionally continued to arise at meetings. Of course, it's more costly to run it from the outside, but also less of a burden on the organization. The most important benefit that I see as running digital comms internally is substance . If content - the very voice of an organization - is being generated from the outside, there is simply no way it can provide 100% of the fabric and turnaround that people and firms who really care about their digital voice/appearance require. I may need to develop this more fully and say something out loud. I see the tendency to run digital comms externally, and I think it defeats the purpose of saying/doing anything online. 

"Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you... its yours to take, rearrange and re use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head." - Banksy

"Students may find their own ways of assessing quality by applying the approach they might take when shopping online for shoes or mobile phones to selecting a university course." Full article here . User-centric design or just fast-food school?

Many clients I build websites for seem to think a website is like a press release; that once it's first iteration is complete, no further work is needed. But digital communication is becoming more adaptive to every-minute interactions, similar to how we change our voices' volume level, tone and pitch depending on where we are talking. In other words, digital forms of communication need to be adaptive, which changes the one-version-works-forever way of thinking. Particularly, more effort needs to go into watching peoples' responses to your deployment and having conversations with them. Out of this, new tweaks need to be made as you progress over time, creating space for new conversations at every turn. 

Text is only as good as people who read it. I have such a hard time finding the right kind of help on design projects, not because it is not available, but because 80% of people's comments are useless. It feels like just because they had the facility to contribute to the discussion (ie: open commenting), they did in the most bland way possible, thus increasing scroll time, shortening patience and serving no value to the reader whatsoever. #21stCenturyProblems #TooMuch(Little)Help

Human development is not just about what people need , but what you can do for them. 

Today I observed a discussed on Facebook prompted by one of my friends on whether or not books should be delivered to Tanzanians' doorsteps. On one hand, my friend and his supporters (myself included) contended that not all books can be delivered to one's doorstep given scarcity, and following this logic, the people who will come to view a book at a store in person are most deserving of the purchase. On the other hand, people argued that we live in an age where home delivery is a premium service, and only those service providers who will deliver will survive. The rest, those who demand a customer to come to them, will lose out in the long run. OK, so let's assume that every product and service was brought home to you. In this state of affairs, you need to be prepared to make wise choices, otherwise one of two things will happen, assuming that our need for stuff is never satiated: Either you will run out of money and into debt, or you will have too much shit lying aro...

If technology is a tool to get things done more efficiently, then there are two prerequisites to any implementation of technology: First, there needs to be a thing to be done. Second, this doing could happen in more efficient ways. With these these two prerequisites, the implementation of technology seems to be appropriate. Without them, the implementation is likely to face trouble, if not failure. However, if technology is not a tool to get things done, then we need to think further about prerequisites. In what cases do technological artefacts and the habits they involve manifest a unique culture? Who is involved with this culture and what are their motives? What is "the start" of this culture and what is "the end"? References: Revision Rinsed Revision Rinsed II Revision Rinsed III Revision Rinsed IV

Words are tools with which we can express ideas. But when words are abused to shy away from a solid idea, one of two things needs to be done: Either the idea does not need to be expressed and nothing needs to be said, or proper words are used. Sentences such as "Like you know what I mean?" or "a thoughtful way to think about" or "let's plan to try and go" or "I'm almost uncertain about this" are misconstruing the point or are simply unnecessary. 

Stories have been told throughout humanity. Sometimes they were told through cave paintings, and other times through paper documents created on Microsoft Word. Fact or fiction, they are stories, and are all ready with the same instruments. The situation in which they are read may change, but the principal of telling the story for another person, group or even generation to ready does not change. What, then, should be expected of the number of stories? Is it proportional to the human population? Does it depend on the ability of storage devices (from caves to disks) to stand the test of space and/or time? And can some stories last forever?

Met MG Vassanji at Moto last night. Should have reread The Gunnysack before showing up, but it may have been difficult to bring up specific questions anyway. He had read some of the groups' work and mostly advised on writing logically. For example: No need to describe every detail and context as the story happens because that's not how humans typically live. The story should unfold just as our senses observe life unfolding. Tenses also need to be consistent... but I didn't quite understand that, and asked if all these "rules" around the logic of writing apply to poetry. He said some rules do but not all. He did also say that if you cannot live without writing, don't write. I'll be thinking about that one for a while. 

Two more Economist articles. This one suggests that academic journals are likely to lock down their clients' sharing tendencies (including asking their clients' to remove published content from their own websites). One journal, Elsevier, has already started asking people to take stuff that belongs to their journal down. I appreciated this quote from Thomas Hickerson, chief librarian at the University of Calgary: “Requesting such removals…seems at odds with the nature of an academic enterprise, in which the sharing of research information is an essential element.” Another article discusses the skew of research itself; that it is mostly based on the US, where there is an abundance of data available. It's a sad situation for the world's poor, who ironically need the implementation of all the cool things that academia finds out: "The world’s poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession. From 1985 to 2005 Burundi was the subject of just four ...

Processes were never defined without people. Many processes are made completely by humans (procurement processes, roadworks, negotiations, etc). Natural processes that do not seem to originate from human actions, such as tidal waves or earthquakes, are attributed to bigger powers that humans disassociate from themselves. But even in the case of these natural processes, the language in which you understand the process is was a human creation and, subsequently, the form of that thought is as well. When do processes take over people's lives? Are these processes really "taking over" people's lives or only their decision-making power? To what end will processes be more important than people?

On our 24-hour clocks, we say there are 24 hours, with 12-midnight being 00:00. But why does this clock never actually hit 24:00? And since it is impossible for it to ever get to 24:00, does it make sense that we call it a 24-hour clock?

When do we think most efficiently? A joke with one of my managers at work today got me started on this (thanks, VL). My guess is that boundaries, such as an office with all the objects and activities it involves, focus thinking. That is why we institutionalize great ideas. And when one needs an "open" mind, they tend to leave the confined set of objects and activities in order to "think outside the box". In short, leaving boundaries helps thinking. But what about other, bigger boundaries. Such as our households, education systems and nation states? Surely, we come to point where we can't actually leave because we've been brought up in those boundaries. To step outside those would be to go insane, to lose touch of what we know and hold as truth. So, can we ever think outside boundaries? I believe we can, and this is what makes religion and/or metaphysics interesting. There are concepts in religious values, ethics and morals that cannot be described in ...

I just came by this NYTimes article which is a somber reflection on the progress of MOOCs. One example (from a few): "Much of the hope - and hype - surrounding MOOCs has focused on the promise of courses for students in poor countries with little access to higher education. But a separate survey from the University of Pennsylvania released last month found that about 80 percent of those taking the university’s MOOCs had already earned a degree of some kind."  The first opinion on the article posted here agrees with this reflection. For me, the power of MOOCs lies in the ability to (1) disseminate content in a smartly moderated way, and (2) to collect feedback directly from any number of students. Perhaps I am blurring the lines too much between MOOCs and VLEs, but the ways in which a "stranger"-student would be able to contribute to the content that will be taught next time around seems powerful to me. Why, then, do we busy ourselves in worrying about h...

About 300 years ago, the scientific method was developed as a way to find new knowledge while making room to discredit faulty knowledge. This Economist article brings this method into question today. It discusses how the new knowledge we read in journals today could be unverified. It could be unverified because experiments are seldom repeated, when they once were to test the authenticity of findings across different contexts. What's the implication of this? It means that "new" knowledge is spreading uncontested, meaning it could be totally baseless. And if this is what ends up shaping how we educate the young, from primary to secondary to higher education systems, then what will they really know in 50 years? 100 years?