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At a glance

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Submission Name: How might we use open communities support a fight for a fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized¹ internet in Africa
- Contact Leads:
- Serah Rono - @serahrono, serahnjambikiburu@gmail.com
- Lillian Juma - @TheOnlyJuma, lillianadhiambojuma@gmail.com
- Raphael Berchie - @berchie4gh, rberchie@gmail.com
- Region:#Africa
- Issue Area: #OpenAccess, #OpenData, #OpenEducation, #OpenResearch
- Issue Type: #Challenge

Description

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In any field, access is a mandatory precursor to enlightenment, adoption, use, collaboration and change. Where cross-boundary communities are involved, access to the internet is this important first step, and without which other stages of collaboration towards a greater good become slowed down, or hampered altogether.

The goal of our do-a-thon sessions is two-fold:

Identify barriers that often get in the way of guaranteed and safe internet access in different countries around the continent,
Identify resources available to us (communities, infrastructure, expertise) that we can all leverage as we start/continue advocating for fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized¹ internet in our various African countries

How can others contribute?

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Feel free to chime in on this discussion by leaving a comment below (with links to relevant articles and resources where possible), or by coming to our do-a-thon sessions in person at OpenCon on November 2 and 3, 2018. We are particularly keen to hear:

What problems you or others from various African countries have encountered while trying to access internet, or in guaranteeing your security and safety while online.
How you or others are navigating issues pertaining to internet access, steady connectivity, safety online, and hacks that have powered collaboration in your online communities
Any other thoughts that you'd like to contribute towards our broader discussion - How might we use open communities support a fight for a fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized¹ internet in Africa

Your contributions and notes from the do-a-thon sessions will be collated and shared after OpenCon 2018.

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1: Decolonizing the internet: What is it about? https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/decolonizing-the-internet/

This post is part of the OpenCon Do-A-Thon. Not sure what's going on? Head here.

Internet access is so vital in birthing the Africa of our dream and, one of the critical factors that can shape how we view the urgency of the need for internet access is 'framing.' How we frame this dire need is so crucial to how we weigh the problem. I will like to frame the lack of internet access as 'an environmental hazard.' The internet is so essential in the development of the academic environment and most especially the social environment which is a structural determinant of well-being. I believe if we begin to see a lack of access to the internet as an environmental hazard, there might be more pressure and urgency to explore solutions that work.

When speaking about “access”; I think I relate to it in two different ways. Firstly being the internet service itself, with its limitations of being slow, and sometimes with some geopolitical restrictions. Secondly, which I think is more closely related to finding and navigating the internet (accessing). For the second point, I think this is mainly because of the language barrier and the lack of proper search expressions to find the content that we are looking for. It also adds another layer of difficulty when the content is scientific or requires specific jargon. Just to put this challenge into context, I think the entire UX is created for those who can use the language privilege to find content; and that the “search engine” despite being very simple and easy for English speakers, it is not necessarily accommodating for non-English speakers looking for English content.

The Open Access movement has made some progress in the past few years. There is more ground to cover regardless and with this progress comes the unveiling of a number of germane aspects that need to be thought through carefully.

Relative to elsewhere and in terms of purchasing power parity, the cost of internet access in Africa is low. However, it remains expensive for a significant section of the population for who access to basic livelihood is far more pressing. Internet access can easily be seen as an exclusive preserve of the well-to-do. The quality and reach of internet service are also questionable. In several parts, the internet is literally non-existent.

In far-flung poverty-ridden rural areas (and urban areas as well) across Africa, education is the only way out for many and currently available Open Education resources on the internet could easily prove revolutionary. To the extent that there are Open resources available elsewhere that can facilitate education, one could argue that Open Access is not so open in much of Africa.

In the current context, a logical first step for gaining the most momentum for the movement in Africa is addressing the several concerns and constraints with internet access across the continent. For African, Open Access means significantly more than the democratization of knowledge. It begins with facilitating and opening access to Open Access; especially through a fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized internet in Africa.

When speaking about “access”; I think I relate to it in two different ways. Firstly being the internet service itself, with its limitations of being slow, and sometimes with some geopolitical restrictions. Secondly, which I think is more closely related to finding and navigating the internet (accessing). For the second point, I think this is mainly because of the language barrier and the lack of proper search expressions to find the content that we are looking for. It also adds another layer of difficulty when the content is scientific or requires specific jargon. Just to put this challenge into context, I think the entire UX is created for those who can use the language privilege to find content; and that the “search engine” despite being very simple and easy for English speakers, it is not necessarily accommodating for non-English speakers looking for English content.

In addition, language barrier also slow down publication process and affects the quality of papers

One of the "How can we" questions raised in response to some of the personas, specifically Ay who, "wants to use skills to address community issues.":

How can we (from the situated position of open community members in North America and Europe) advocate for the redirection of funding that typically goes to western NGO's & non-profits who bring in and impose education, to instead go to local educators and groups? Said another way: How can the Open community help transform academic discussions of Cognitive Justice into action by re-envisioning ways that money and resources flow from "global north" to "global south" and advocating policy changes.

Can a coalition be formed within OpenCon community including those based in African countries and those based in Europe/U.S./Canada who hold positions of power in institutions and policy making roles? This coalition could form an online subgroup focused on developing strategies for advocating reforms to funding approaches with the goal of redirecting funds from outside NGO's to local groups and educators.

Update from the Africa Workshop at OpenCon 2018

On Friday, November 2, 2018 and Saturday, November 3, 2018, OpenCon participants from Africa got together for a design thinking workshop.

We started with the question How might we use open communities to support a fight for a fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized internet in Africa.

You can find a detailed description and initial call for participation around our workshop in the first comment of this issue.

We had three hours over the two days for elaborate discussion and brainstorming, and what follows below is a summary of the work we did and the ideas we came up with.

Participants

OpenCon 2018 participants at the Africa workshop _from left to right: Anointing Momoh from Nigeria, Rian Hammond from US, Mahadia Ally Tunga from Tanzania, Thomas Mboa from Cameroon, Serah Rono from Kenya, Ayo Olagoke from Nigeria, Fares Belkhiria from Tunisia, Sara Elsharawy from Egypt, and Richie Berchie from Ghana_

Other participants not in frame, but who contributed significantly to the preparation and discussions in this workshop are Lillian Juma from Kenya and Mohamed El-Brolosy from Egypt.

Definitions

We started by deconstructing the five main adjectives in our How Might We, and workshopped their meanings to make sure we were all on in agreement about their use in the context of our question.

Workshopped definitions of the words fast, affordable, decolonized, transparent and safe in the context of internet access in Africa

Here's some of what we came up with:

Word	Workshopped meanings
Fast	Reliable, easy to access, seamless, timely, without delay, readily accessible
Safe	secure, safe from spying and intelligence, safe from "extremist content"
Affordable	can be paid for, within reach, cost effective, competitive, cheap for household usage, free for scholarly / academic usage, affordable infrastructure and alternatives
Transparent	open, easy to navigate, equity, (inclusive of) identity representations
Decolonised	accessible to all, without limit, zero censorship, cultural and discourse constructions, with products developed from/by Africans for the needs of Africans

Personas

The word personas here refers to people affected by aspects of the problem - an unsafe, opaque, expensive, colonised or painstakingly slow, if not non-existent internet. We identified five personas in our workshop:

Name	Age	Occupation	Background	Pain points
Adebayo	late-teens, early 20s	Final year engineering student	Hoping to complete his final undergrad thesis on robotics and computer coding	Limited access to updated resources necessary for his research, slow internet
Ango	50	Teaches in a rural area in Cameroon	Advanced degree in Physics and Technology, living and teaching students in rural French-speaking Cameroon	unstable electricity, no access to the internet
Mahadia	30s	Assistant Lecturer	Teaching computer science, with limited resources available for referencing, needs to access learning materials from external sources	no internet, unstable power supply
Ay	20s	Practitioner	Founder of a not-for-profit social enterprise with a strong focus on community and collaborations	limited connectivity
Amal	-	Student and researcher	writes and speaks Arabic(non-native English speaker)	content accessibility limited by language barriers, difficult to determine apt search expressions when conducting research as content is largely available in English.

For Your Attention

Some important statements were made during the workshop, key among them:

"Lack of internet access is an environmental Hazard" - Ayo Read narrative here.
"Language is a major barrier in open research" - Sara Read narrative here.
"As others make strides in Open Access, most researchers in Africa are still grappling with Access to Open Access" - Anointing. Read narrative here.

Refined How Might We statements

Lots of post-its, questions and anecdotes later, we arrived at three more-specific "How Might We" statements and ideas on ways we could approach them in our local contexts.

How Might We...	Idea / Insight
advocate for Open Access digital tools for research navigation, interpretation and contribution to empower research communities comprised of non-native English speakers?	Create language-specific instances of Open Corpus for different communities across the continent to help build an open database of shared vocabularies and meaningful translations
leverage open communities to share and distribute knowledge in hyper-local contexts?	Create a platform where people facing similar challenges, and local experts can meet and hold discussions and carry out collaborative work specific to their contexts
break down the internet barrier,(for students and other African research communities) to accessing currently available Open Access resources?	Set up community data centres/digital libraries, leverage offline technologies for resource sharing, and consider availing resources easily on mobile

Way forward

The list above is in no way exhaustive, and we believe that we have but scratched the surface. We are very keen to carry on with this discussion, preferably here on this thread.

You are welcome to contribute anecdotes, projects you're working on that address some of the issues, work that has been done that aligns with the ideas above or new ideas you may have, articles / research that we need to pay attention to, or issues / perspectives, communities and approaches we should consider prioritising.

Thank you Serah for putting it together

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 at 16:12, Serah Njambi Rono notifications@github.com wrote:

Update from the Africa Workshop at OpenCon 2018

On Friday, November 2, 2018 and Saturday, November 3, 2018, OpenCon participants from Africa got together for a design thinking workshop.

We started with the question How might we use open communities to support a fight for a fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized internet in Africa.

You can find a detailed description and initial call for participation around our workshop in the first comment of this issue https://github.com/sparcopen/doathon/issues/78#issue-375933152.

We had three hours over the two days for elaborate discussion and brainstorming, and what follows below is a summary of the work we did and the ideas we came up with. Participants

[image: OpenCon 2018 participants at the Africa workshop] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4550385/47967136-39553800-e028-11e8-921b-0ed22129f90c.jpg from left to right: Anointing Momoh https://twitter.com/Anointingogie from Nigeria, Rian Hammond https://github.com/rianciela from US, Mahadia Ally Tunga https://twitter.com/TungaMahadia from Tanzania, Thomas Mboa https://twitter.com/Mboathomas from Cameroon, Serah Rono https://twitter.com/serahrono from Kenya, Ayo Olagoke https://github.com/Dorema from Nigeria, Fares Belkhiria https://twitter.com/FaresBelkhiria from Tunisia, Sara Elsharawy https://twitter.com/sara_elsharawy from Egypt, and Richie Berchie https://twitter.com/berchie4gh from Ghana

Other participants not in frame, but who contributed significantly to the preparation and discussions in this workshop are Lillian Juma https://twitter.com/TheOnlyJuma from Kenya and Mohamed El-Brolosy https://twitter.com/MohamedBrolosy from Egypt. Definitions and Assumptions

We started by deconstructing the five main adjectives in our How Might We, and workshopped their meanings to make sure we were all on in agreement about their use in the context of our question.

[image: Workshopped definitions of the words fast, affordable, decolonized, transparent and safe in the context of internet access in Africa] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/4550385/47968476-8f31dc00-e038-11e8-8da5-bd0540ee82d6.png Workshopped definitions of the words fast, affordable, decolonized, transparent and safe in the context of internet access in Africa

Here's some of what we came up with: Word Workshopped meanings Fast Reliable, easy to access, seamless, timely, without delay, readily accessible Safe secure, safe from spying and intelligence, safe from "extremist content" Affordable can be paid for, within reach, cost effective, competitive, cheap for household usage, free for scholarly / academic usage, affordable infrastructure and alternatives Transparent open, easy to navigate, equity, (inclusive of) identity representations Decolonised accessible to all, without limit, zero censorship, cultural and discourse constructions, with products developed from/by Africans for the needs of Africans Personas

The word personas here refers to people affected by aspects of the problem

an unsafe, opaque, expensive, colonised or painstakingly slow, if not non-existent internet. We identified five personas in our workshop: Name Age Occupation Background Pain points Adebayo late-teens, early 20s Final year engineering student Hoping to complete his final undergrad thesis on robotics and computer coding Limited access to updated resources necessary for his research, slow internet Ango 50 Teaches in a rural area in Cameroon Advanced degree in Physics and Technology, living and teaching students in rural French-speaking Cameroon unstable electricity, no access to the internet Mahadia 30s Assistant Lecturer Teaching computer science, with limited resources available for referencing, needs to access learning materials from external sources no internet, unstable power supply Ay 20s Practitioner Founder of a not-for-profit social enterprise with a strong focus on community and collaborations limited connectivity Amal - Student and researcher writes and speaks Arabic(non-native English speaker) content accessibility limited by language barriers, difficult to determine apt search expressions when conducting research as content is largely available in English. For Your Attention

Some important statements were made during the workshop, key among them:

-

"Lack of internet access is an environmental Hazard" - Ayo Read narrative here https://github.com/sparcopen/doathon/issues/78#issuecomment-435550455 .

"Language is a major barrier in open research" - Sara Read narrative here https://github.com/sparcopen/doathon/issues/78#issuecomment-435590782 .

"As others make strides in Open Access, most researchers in Africa are still grappling with Access to Open Access" - Anointing. Read narrative here https://github.com/sparcopen/doathon/issues/78#issuecomment-435604605 .

Refined _How Might We_s

Lots of post-its, questions and anecdotes later, we arrived at three more-specific "How Might We" statements and ideas on ways we could approach them in our local contexts. How Might We... Idea / Insight advocate for Open Access digital tools for research navigation, interpretation and contribution to empower research communities comprised of non-native English speakers? Create language-specific instances of Open Corpus for different communities across the continent to help build an open database of shared vocabularies and meaningful translations leverage open communities to share and distribute knowledge in hyper-local contexts? Create a platform where people facing similar challenges, and local experts can meet and hold discussions and carry out collaborative work specific to their contexts break down the internet barrier,(for students and other African research communities) to accessing currently available Open Access resources? Set up community data centres/digital libraries, leverage offline technologies for resource sharing, and consider availing resources easily on mobile Way forward

The list above is in no way exhaustive, and we believe that we have but scratched the surface. We are very keen to carry on with this discussion, preferably here on this thread.

You are welcome to contribute anecdotes, projects you're working on that address some of the issues, work that has been done that aligns with the ideas above or new ideas you may have, articles / research that we need to pay attention to, or issues / perspectives, communities and approaches we should consider prioritising.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/sparcopen/doathon/issues/78#issuecomment-435706917, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ATeCB19BrcNOo_trB9GsGvo9WDuSOTvxks5ur1gogaJpZM4YD8ZW .

-- Mahadia Tunga

First, I will commend the group for a great job done already. I am so happy.. I worked on my thesis in Nigeria, and the reoccurring challenge was power, internet connectivity, lack of formidable research support from tutors (this in particular could determine if students will feel motivated enough to go on and research or not), and lack of access to materials.

My one suggestion in this line is The efforts should be directed at student groups more now, they are the real beneficiaries, and I don't understand why all the time they will be left at the mercy of bureaucratic institution/national leaders. Their access to power supply and research facilities and support should be increased. A research network with active blogging about different research field and organising seminars for students is a good way to start. Funds and other things necessary can be arranged later.

Cheers Toochi https://twitter.com/mr_tochukwu

I'm curious about the distribution of packet radio or TV networks for data broadcasting in Africa, and if offline solutions that send encrypted peer to peer traffic through them are being researched.

sparcopen / doathon

How might we use open communities support a fight for a fast, affordable, safe and transparent and decolonized internet in Africa #78