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I just blogged about the Global Voices Summit and the importance of community for bloggers on Techleader. What an awesome event.

Pic: by nehavish on Flickr, CC BY-NC

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This awesome video produced by David Sasaki introduces the Rising Voices project of Global Voices which ‘aims to help bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities.’

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I just wrote this as my letter in the iCommons Lab Report (to subscribe go here):

Dear friends,

Last week, the iCommons team had a short workshop session to practice the ‘Checklist on openness’ that we’re hoping to work with participants to develop at this year’s iSummit. We practiced by using an equally slippery concept that we’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is the question: ‘What makes an organisation ‘international’?’

After an initial brainstorm to capture the key characteristics that we should be looking at (including things like staff, community, beneficiaries, mission and funding) we started looking more deeply at what boxes needed to be checked in order for an organisation to validly call itself ‘global’.

What we came up with probably posed a lot more questions than answers. For example, ‘Do you need an internationally representative staff to be an international organisation – or is it enough for the staff to be aware of diversity?’ And ‘Can any small non-profit organisation claim to have beneficiaries all around the world – and does it matter if most beneficiaries are in developed countries?’ And perhaps most importantly, ‘What does it mean if most of your funding comes from one part of the world, and goes to another part of the world?’

We did, however, come up with a few answers – all of which were incredibly illuminating.

If a global organisation is only as global as the respect that it has around the world, then we need to develop mechanisms to ensure that we are accountable to our beneficiaries, as well as to our funders. Peer assessment, in other words, should be built into everything that we do. This also means that we cannot claim to have too diverse a range of beneficiaries because we will not be able to serve them all, and we will therefore suffer from their negative assessment as a result.

The exercise also showed me how important the distribution of funds is in the development of a validly international organisation. If we accept that an international organisation must serve a wide variety of local beneficiaries, then the organisation should necessarily have more than one physical location. This means that the organisation should spend its money in more than one physical location, thus empowering the network to serve its beneficiaries more effectively.

This doesn’t mean that money is the only way to empower local communities, but it’s absolutely essential that the wide distribution of funds is part of the question of how global, really, is a particular organisation.

I did this very basic graph of where iCommons spends its money, and I feel that, although we’re doing pretty well, we can do more to distribute funds outside of HQ.

This is not an easy thing to say because it seems so hard sometimes just to keep the core economically sustainable. But I do think that it’s a conversation worth having – a conversation about the shifting identity of a global organisation in a shifting world.

What do you think?

Best wishes,

Heather.

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I know that there are probably a lot of requests for help going around, but I received a message from IkamvaYouth based in Khayelitsha that , as a result of the xenophobic violence, they have between 400 and 900 people in their hall and they don’t have enough food to feed them. Says Susan Godlonton, ‘There are 20 infants, 3 pregnant women (one in severe pain), and people are beginning to get sick. They are all sleeping on the concrete floor, and we are struggling to ensure that everyone gets fed. Although TAC and other organisations are doing an INCREDIBLE job at coordinating civil society’s response to the crisis, and ensuring that donations reach those in need across the country, more help is needed.’

You can email me if you’d like to help or ‘To find out what’s most needed at the time of your donation, please contact Bongani on 0726483278, or IkamvaYouth on 021-3626799. Their bank details are:

Bank: Standard Bank
Branch: Cape Town
Name of the account: Ikamva Lisezandleni Zethu
Account Number: 070188009
Swift Code: SBZAZAJJ’

Pic: Volunteers from the TAC’s helpnow website

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There was no cake, no champagne - not even a speech. And it’s only now that I’ve been able to take a breath, that I can say this about my decision to hand over the public leadership of Creative Commons South Africa to Dave Duarte.

In 2004, I came back to South Africa after an incredible 9 months at Stanford working with Creative Commons as part of my Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship programme, supported by Benetech. Benetech had funded my fellowship because I had originally pitched to the digital society entrepreneurship programme a project to use GIS systems to predict conflict in the African Great Lakes region. But a few months into the project, having been volunteering for Creative Commons, I realised that my passion was with this young organisation. Benetech supported my decision, even though it would have no direct contribution to their work in conflict management. For that, I cannot be more grateful.

After coming home in 2004, so many people need to be thanked for their help in growing this fledgling cause. I remember feeling like a bible salesman when I first started making appointments to go and see people I thought might be able to support, since at that stage, Creative Commons was only a year old and very unknown: a crazy idea by some funny-looking white American man that I believed South Africans should take ownership of.

My parents funded Creative Commons for the first few months. After that, the incredible Anriette Esterhuysen from the Association for Progressive Communications agreed to allow me to host an awareness-raising programme funded by Osisa with the APC, and then two amazing women, Luci Abrahams and Alison Gillwald agreed for the LINK Center at Wits University to host a two-year programme funded by the IDRC called ‘Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons’ which supported Creative Commons in South Africa as part of its mandate. Two years ago, I started with iCommons - a new international organisation, incubated by Creative Commons, with HQ firmly on African soil. Since then, the team at iCommons has done an incredible job flying the CC flag with the fabulous CC Salons and consultation work that we’ve done to help organisations, communities, companies and individuals to understand the application of Creative Commons.

There are so many more people to thank - everyone who volunteered and supported Creative Commons when it was unknown but offered just the kind of vision they were looking for, everyone who listened to my continuous sales pitch about why CC was so great, and my dear friends who came to listen to me speak about Creative Commons when they made up 70% of the audience.

I decided to hand over my public leadership mainly because iCommons is now separate from Creative Commons in the sense that Creative Commons is no longer the sole member of iCommons - still a member but now one of four. At this very critical stage of iCommons’ independence, it is important for us to forge a new identity, separate from Creative Commons but still tied to the broad, common vision that we both share.

Handing over to Dave was an incredibly easy task. Dave is already a passionate volunteer. He has done some incredible things already in his teaching and community work to raise awareness of Creative Commons and its potential for innovation and sharing. Most of all, Dave fundamentally ‘gets it’ and he’s also a bit crazy in his own way which makes him exactly the right person to carry on the Creative Commons South Africa story.

I’m certain that we’ll still be working together in the many, many areas of mutual concern, and I can’t wait to see the great things that will happen to CCSA in the next few months.

Good luck, dear Dave. May the force be with you.

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Last weekend, at Lou and Mike’s wedding at Gwahumbe in KZN, I reconnected with old friends, the Takis brothers from Swaziland who I last saw about eight years ago on one of my very best holidays to Kariba and Sodwana. My cousin, Tash and I were planning on going to Mbabane but the Takis’s were going to be at their game farm bordering the Kruger Park just outside of Phalaborwa, so we packed up our khaki and headed off on what became a 7.5 hour drive to the farm on Friday night.

You will know how incredible it was when I say that driving 15 hours for a weekend was totally worth it. We arrived at about 3am to the sound of lions mating just outside the house. We saw giraffe, elephant, kudu, klipspringer and a very inspired dung beetle. But the best sighting from the weekend was what we later called a ‘bushy-tailed-mongoose-shaped-sheep’ but which I’m sure was actually a spotted hyena. We were almost at the farm with Tash driving when she slowed down as a shadow crossed the road. The animal was locked in the headlights as we stared each other down and he then ran off.

Life in Africa sure is good.

More pics on Flickr here.

‘Sunset’ by H Ford CC BY-SA and ‘Spotted hyena’ by Eva Hejda CC BY-SA on Wikipedia.

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7pm, Elton Place: Anna B, me, Lara and Steph

10pm: Melrose Arch, The Venue (which venue? the venue)

midnight:

4am: The Bohemian

10am the next day:

I’ve never felt so special. Thank you to all my dear friends for making it a night to remember! Especially to my brother Quinton, my new friend, AnnaB and to my dearest friend in the whole world, Kerryn.

Pics: by Anna Berthold on flickr CC BY-NC-SA

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Where else can you get the most beautiful, geeky stuff to hang on your office wall but at the iCommons Auction. We’re raising money. Help us

Picture: Free Culture Doll by Hannah Upritchard

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Oh, so this is why I had a sore neck when I woke up on Saturday morning.

Picture: Julie Melton on Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

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One of my favorite board members, Jimmy Wales, will be in Johannesburg in exactly 11 sleeps. Jimmy is in the country to launch the African Wikipedia Academies - a series of Wikipedia sprints, workshops and boot camps to encourage the local celebration of Wikipedia as an amazing tool for education, culture and enterprise in Africa.

As I continually say, Wikipedia is not exciting because its the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Its exciting because it gives us the opportunity to write our own history, our own textbooks, our own view of the world. Wikipedia is a practical expression of what makes the Internet special. And practicing contributions to Wikipedia is what makes us realise what the Internet is really for. It’s not just about using, its about being active participants in the creation of meaning about the world around us. It’s about valuing a resource that is powerful because it is in the commons - free for anyone to reuse, remake and remix.

Jimmy is coming to South Africa because he is passionate about his goal of ‘Wikipedias in every major language in the world’ - and this is where he’s starting the experiments. I’ll never forget how kind he was in drumming it into me that the Wikipedia way is not to just translate English articles into Afrikaans articles (even though it might start out that way). The idea is that a local language community can build its own Wikipedia completely separate from the English version. It is this autonomy and the community spirit that has enabled Wikipedia to thrive on the back of volunteer contributions by over 50,000 active users.

A number of schools in South Africa use Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia copyright license enables anyone to freely copy and share the resource in textbooks, lesson plans etc as long as it is attributed. In terms of local language Wikipedias, Afrikaans Wikipedia has an active community of contributors. But contributors are hardly applauded for their work in the local press, and a lot needs to be done to encourage the smaller local language editions of Wikipedia.

This is the goal of the African Wikipedia Academies. iCommons is partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation to bring people like Ndesanjo Macha, considered the Father of Swahili Wikipedia, Ian Gilfillan, a great contributor to the South African local language Wikipedias, as well as Frank Schulenburg who conceptualised the first Wikipedia Academies in Germany.

Better yet, we’re having a fabulous cocktail party during which Jimmy will talk about Wikipedia, Wikia (the business application of wiki software) and a vision for the Academies. Everyone is invited to that one. All you have to do is shell out R500 in aid of the Academies, and join the party at 4pm on Tuesday the 13th of November at the Grace Hotel in Rosebank. Register here. Everyone who is anyone on the SA Internet scene will be there. I promise.

Picture of Jimmy Wales (above) by Chrys on flickr.com, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.

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