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.

We’re very excited to announce that William Kamkwamba, sponsored by his organization Moving Windmills, will be coming to Maker Faire Africa. I first met William at TED Africa two years ago in Arusha, Tanzania. His story, at that time, was only known by a few of us as we had written about him on AfriGadget – but that quickly changed when he got up on the TED stage for his interview.

Last week he was on the TED stage again, this time at TED Global in Oxford. He ends his talk by saying:

“To all the people out there like me — to the Africans, and the poor, and the struggling, maybe one day you’ll watch this on the Internet: Trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens, don’t give up.”

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

Due to my having been involved with TED, and knowing William, I was given an early release of the new biography of William called, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind“. It’s not out yet, but will be released a couple weeks after MFA. It’s an incredibly well-written and poignant story of hope in rural Africa.

The Documentary

There is also a documentary coming out about William later in the year. Below is the trailer for it, and you can tell how good of a film this will be just from this snapshot: