Video interviews with Makers and organisers by Ulrike Reinhard

Fast Company article – Gadgets dominate at Maker Faire Africa

Huffington Post article on Pat Delany

Kenya Standard article Kenyas innovation Fair kicks off

One World Netherlands article

Bike Uju blog post covering the Boda Boda makers

Popular Mechanics on Africa Tinkerers

and of course our Flickr set with loads of good images of Makers and events

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mak erfaireafrica/pool/

the Match a Maker website – www.matchamaker.info (this will be filled up in the coming few days)

Lamp made at the Faire in workshop

Emeka is pointing out some very interesting facts on Makers Faire among others:

• create awareness for African innovation
• building a “productive class” whose foundation is laid on building problems solving systems
• celebrating existing knowledge Africa already has and connect it to knowledge outside
• building a community is a basis for business
• African makers focus on things for which there seems to be an immediate need (= market)
• the biggest market is the indigenous

After the first day I have to say that I love the spirit I have felt at the event. The same like last year … very vibrant community, expiriencing that they do have omething to give, to show and then – indeed – to celebrate!

A Village telco is a community based telephone network. It is based on a suite of open source applications that enable entrepreneurs to set up and operate a telephone service in a specific area or supporting the needs of a specific community [1].

The first village telco has been established by Dabba at Orange Farm, a township near Johannesburg, South Africa. Users can make free local calls to other Dabba subscribers, as well as use pay-as-you-go vouchers to make calls to ‘phones on other networks [2].

Technically, a village telco consists of:

• a mesh network made up of Wi-Fi mini-routers combined with an analogue telephone adaptor (aka ‘Mesh Potato’)
• SIP phones
• a pay-as-you-go billing and management system
• a SIP/VOIP server
• least cost routing equipment

These components together comprise an easy-to-use, standards-based, wireless, local, do-it-yourself, telephone company toolkit. The goal of bringing these together is to make local telephony in developing countries to be so cheap as to be virtually free. This has become possible thanks to advances in open source telephony software and the dramatic decrease in the cost of wireless broadband technology.

A sample of many of the ‘makers’ found at the 2010 Maker Faire Africa held in Nairobi.

Registration

Briefing on house keeping issues.

Sites have been set up and more are being done.