Q&A
What projects are you working on now that are most meaningful to you?
I am fortunate to be working on two projects that are both very meaningful to me. For Global Voices Online I spearhead the environmental coverage, tracking and writing about what bloggers are saying about topics related to the environment, energy and technology. I focus on sub-Saharan Africa, though not exclusively. I am also proud of contributing to the Reuters Environment blog, which has a partnership with Global Voices.
I am the Program Director for Ushahidi, where I manage the pilot testing of the Ushahidi crowd-sourcing software with NGOs and partners. Ushahidi is a truly global project, with a development team from Kenya, Ghana, Malawi, Netherlands, USA and members of various Diaspora. I am fortunate to work with this fantastic team of brilliant Africans to bring the next generation of software for crisis information management to the world. A platform that brings together geo-location of data, and mobile phone and web reporting has the potential to revolutionize how we use technology during crisis.
Besides your work, what issues/ideas/pursuits are you passionate about?
I am passionate about the environment. I am deeply concerned about the deforestation happening in various parts of the world. Closer to home, I am worried about the loss of water catchment areas and indigenous forests in Kenya. Encouraging others to plant trees is my mission this year. I am borrowing an idea from Joi Ito, who tags photos on his flickr stream with "freesouls." This year, I began a tag of "greensouls." The ideas is to take a picture of someone/ yourself planting a tree, upload to flickr, tag it, and if you can, geo-tag it as 'greensoul.' For all the talk about climate change, I am energized when I see people doing something about the environment, be it recycling, riding to work or planting trees.
What do you do for fun?
I love to read, blog, and travel. I do have to confess that I like to play with gadgets and try out new web services. one of my goals is to blog from Samburu, Kenya, a remote, semi-arid part of Kenya that is largely undeveloped. How, you might ask? By tethering a mobile phone to a Netbook and using the GPRs connection to the Internet. It is relatively difficult to get there, but the natural beauty of Mt. Nyiru and the hospitality of the Samburu people calls out to me. I enjoy world music and attend concerts whenever I can find African artists performing in the U.S., or anywhere, for that matter.
Recount a surprising anecdote about yourself that few people know.
I was at the Mobile Active conference in Johannesburg, and was tweeting with a Twitter acquaintance, asking him whether he was at the same event. After a few messages, we realized that we were sitting right next to each other. Nic Haralambous is no longer just my Twitter acquaintance now; he is a good friend who filled me in on his exciting Web 2.0 companies like Zoopy in south Africa (a YouTube-like website for the African content).
