253 – Pan-African Community-Owned Digital Futures Workshop

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m an anthropologist and social impact scientist, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi, David.

[00:00:10] David: Hi, Lucie.

Looking forward to another discussion. We’re discussing this workshop, aren’t we? 

[00:00:17] Lucie: Yeah, so a lot of what we’ve been doing recently is organising and setting things up for this workshop, a Pan-African community tech. This isn’t an official title. Wait, let me just look it up. Do you remember? 

[00:00:32] David: I suppose the title is less important. What’s exciting about this is that it came out of this Pan-African declaration on biodigital technologies. And in the event, which I was very privileged to be part of last November, there was a definite desire to see locally grown technologies, digital technologies, taking a form which is different to what’s currently happening internationally.

And this idea that actually communities could be more at the heart of the technology that’s built. And this is something, of course, we’re very interested in, we recognise it is hard, this is not something that can just happen. And I think that’s part of where I then got very interested in saying, “okay, great, if we’re wanting to achieve that, if we’re wanting to do that, well, we need to bring people together to actually figure this out, to understand that this is hard”.

Because I think there’s an assumption of people who are not building technology that, oh, you just give it to the tech people and they’ll build it. But what they build is built on models which tend to serve, well, to be extractive and to be about sort of scale in a way which often doesn’t serve communities. Whereas, there was this very strong emphasis at the meeting of building technology which serves communities.

And so I’m really excited about the fact that here’s a set of people, and we’ve now got applications from all over for this. And it really is exciting, it’s a small group, we don’t have capacity for a larger group, we’ve got more participants or more people have applied than we have capacity to take. 

[00:02:11] Lucie: And when you’re talking about capacity, I mean, it’s literally the size of the room that we’re using. So I have been wondering how everyone’s gonna fit in.

[00:02:18] David: There is of course the roundhouse, which is where we’ll probably be based, but there is also another room of course.

[00:02:23] Lucie: But it looks less nice.

[00:02:26] David: You are right. So there is a genuine capacity issue at the venue at Manor House, which is this wonderful agroecology centre. And the desire of having these tech based participants in the agroecology centre is also really exciting to me. Of course, this is tech for agroecology or agriculture, but even so, most people tend to hold these things in, you know, nice hotels, in urban environments, and actually holding this in an agroecology centre is something I’m really excited about.

[00:03:01] Lucie: And when you say agroecology centre, it’s a working farm basically. So there’s many animals and a huge amount of space for crops. And it’s a research farm too, so it’s quite interesting.

[00:03:11] David: Yeah, and so I believe it’s the right environment to really challenge people to think about how what we are developing is built differently. 

[00:03:21] Lucie: And what does it mean for the people using it, what really are their needs, focusing it around their needs and the risks around other existing tech and ways of developing tech.

[00:03:30] David: Which is exactly what came out at this meeting last year with the Pan-African declaration, really trying to sort of focus people’s attention. And here we are getting a mixture of developers, we’re getting people in from West Africa, we’ve talked before about Fuma and their app and so I’m really delighted that they’re going to be there and they’re going to be present. And they’ve been quite isolated. And so have them now exposing their work to other people and other people then sharing what they’ve been doing. We’ve got this very interesting group from Canada who are developing an open source system, but they haven’t done that much work in Africa. And so this is wonderful to now be bringing them in to interact with this community and for them to start seeing that for many years they’d had people using their LiteFarm who had been saying, we really need an offline version. And through the interactions on Float, we’ve highlighted this as something which we can’t really even suggest the use of LiteFarm with our partners unless this offline feature is developed. And so they’ve done it, they’ve developed it, which is great, that responsiveness. It’s an open source project, but they’ve really been responsive to that.

And so there’s this interesting set of people, and we just mentioned two groups, but there are so many groups coming together, in a way which is gonna be very practical. 

[00:04:51] Lucie: Well, it’s called Pan-African Workshop because there are representatives from different community organisations from quite a few different countries across Africa, which is really exciting. Of course, more of an emphasis on Kenya because it’s being held in Kenya. But it’s going to raise interesting conversations.

[00:05:08] David: Yes, exactly. Cost constraints mean it is sort of easier to have Kenyan participants, that was a factor. But the other thing which I’m really excited about is the way that we are working with the facilitators from Kenya, from Ghana, from Niger. And the conception of how the workshop’s going to be facilitated is learning from how the farmer workshops are facilitated in terms of balancing power dynamics.

In the case of the farmer workshops, what happens is that every day starts with the farmers sharing their knowledge on the topic of the day. And it’s only really in the afternoon that the researchers are able to come in and bring the research knowledge and the research evidence to then complement and reinforce elements that have come out from the farmers themselves.

[00:05:59] Lucie: And this is something that Beth Medvecky has been really strong about. We’re doing loads of reading up about adult education and what really works. So it’s definitely something that we’re aware of, that we’re interested in, and is very important in this context too, because we are bringing together international tech experts and tech developers and smaller community organisations from across Africa who have created amazing, I’m gonna say, solutions to their communities’ digital needs, but who are not perhaps used to… 

[00:06:33] David: This is the thing, it’s power dynamics. They don’t have the same experience, knowledge, so respecting that differentiation is the same.

[00:06:42] Lucie: Yeah, and especially some of them are even francophone, so they’ll have an additional difficulty there. Although we have many people in the room who will be able to support them on that, and they themselves speak English as well, I know. 

[00:06:53] David: Yeah, but it’s a wonderful set of people, even the final decisions on who can be invited and who can’t be invited, we need to have sort of final discussions with some of the co-organisers because our list of people we would like to be in the room is considerably longer than the list of people who can possibly be hosted at the venue, let alone those that we can afford to bring in. 

[00:07:17] Lucie: This is going to be one of the challenges though, of how to make the discussions, or how to record the discussions, or how to convert those discussions into something which can be shared in a productive way with people who weren’t able to attend. 

[00:07:30] David: And how important is that in this particular instance? What’s the priority of that? I don’t know at this point, do we prioritise, at this point, the people who are in the room, or do we prioritise the broader impact of this on people beyond the room? These are choices to be made and it is not for us to make these choices ourselves, but we of course, have influence on this.

And so thinking about this and trying to think what is it, what do we really want to come out of this? And one of the things which I’m very hopeful of is that, if nothing else, I expect that there will be discussions which will challenge preconceptions of people in the room in ways that I think will be very interesting.

Everybody who I know who’s going to be there is going to be challenged by somebody else in the room. There’s going to be a perspective and sort of specific pairwise interactions I can imagine already, where I really hope that will lead to interesting new thinking to emerge, where one perspective will challenge somebody’s established thinking. 

[00:08:51] Lucie: Which you are quite famous within IDEMS for liking to put people outside of their comfort zones. Whereas here, I think people will be in their comfort zone, but they will be challenged to think differently as you’re saying.

[00:09:03] David: I don’t know that anyone’s going to be in their comfort zone here.For the nature of the event, I cannot think of anyone for whom this event is going to be in their comfort zone, which is wonderful. Everybody has a reason to be there. Everybody who has been selected, who’s been invited, even the people who we don’t know, their application has highlighted that they have added value to bring to the conversation and they have value which they’re going to take out.

But I don’t know of any space like this. I’ve certainly not heard of it, let alone being in a space like this, which is trying to both be as practical in terms of what’s presented and discussed, but also to have the mix of people where everybody is going to be challenged. I’m looking forward to that. 

[00:09:55] Lucie: That sort of brings me to some of the aims of the workshops. So we started off talking about this Pan-African declaration on the development of tech. And so one of the aims is, I think, to try and identify principles that developers can use to guide their thinking in developing technology for communities.

So that’s one idea. And one of the other ideas is, I think, as you were just mentioning, something quite practical in the sense that, if people are sharing the tools that they’ve developed, then they’re gonna get feedback on those tools. They’re gonna get really interesting questions and be pushed into different directions, as you were saying.

[00:10:34] David: Yeah, and most of the tools that are presented are open source, they’re things which are very visible. And there are, as I say, these pairwise interactions that I’m so excited to see happen, in many cases. Digital Green’s going to be there, and I’m really looking forward to the interaction between Digital Green and Fuma, because I feel that there’s going to be interesting co-learning either way on, where if that gels, I expect a collaboration to emerge.

This is something where it would just be mind blowing to me. If that does gel and that collaboration emerges, then I have a feeling that both sides are going to gain something and contribute something which will be transformative in terms of how these things move forward and how technology moves forward over the next few years. So yeah, we shall see, it’s an exciting space and it’s nice to discuss this before the actual event.

[00:11:33] Lucie: And also tied to this event is that we’ve also received funding to support three different projects who are currently already developing their technologies for their communities. Those projects will be represented as well. Fuma is one of them, then one is called the CEF-M app, based in Mali, and then there is this Kenyan one for the agroecology hub too.

[00:11:53] David: This is something where, you know, tech development is expensive, but in particular, this was $7,000, which just created these sort of small internship opportunities. This isn’t huge, what’s been created, but this is a real example of where small amounts of money can be leveraged in the right way to make what could be quite a big difference in these different contexts.

Now, unfortunately, of course, none of those interns are going to be present at the meeting, it was not possible, the budget wasn’t there, and so on. They’re going to be able to share those experiences, but the things that they’re developing, the people they’re developing for and with, they will be there. Yeah, it’s really exciting, it feels like the beginning of something which could take on a whole life of its own. That’s one of the things I’m really excited about here.

[00:12:44] Lucie: But we’re sort of hoping that it’ll not just take on one life, but it’ll take on many lives, if you think of it in terms of lots of different strands.

[00:12:50] David: Yes. But I hope there’s going to be coordination and collaboration across them. My hope is that while there are those many different strands, this might be the beginning of a community of practice where actually this co-learning sort of happens and a community does grow around this. So I guess I don’t know that this is what’s gonna happen.

[00:13:10] Lucie: This is a big ask. Yeah. I’m just thinking, I’m gonna need to discuss this with the organiser to make sure that she’s aware of your dream.

[00:13:17] David: You know, communities sometimes they’re born from a simple event like this, and they can take on a life of their own and really evolve into something. I do wonder whether this is going to be the seed which germs into a new community and sort of grows and becomes something.

[00:13:36] Lucie: Well, that would be amazing. Even if it isn’t all of the organisations who are being represented, then it would still have a lot of value. 

[00:13:45] David: Exactly. I’m not expecting everybody, it never is. But sometimes an event like this can be the catalyst which sort of just creates something which didn’t exist before.

So if I come back to the meeting, the Ethiopian meeting, which was such a privilege to be part of, the thing that was missing there was this space for people actually building the technologies to form that community, because there was a lot, there were too many people, it was too big. An advantage of it being small, is that there’s enough time potentially to form real connections and bonds.

[00:14:25] Lucie: Exactly. So this sort of space limit, funding limit is actually necessary as well in terms of really having a successful workshop where people are able to talk to everyone in the room, are able to go in depth in their conversations.

[00:14:39] David: Exactly. And it’s a big ask of the facilitators to try and enable and support that and create that. But I think they are up to the task. 

[00:14:47] Lucie: So it’s coming up in May, we will no doubt do another episode about it either once we finalise everything or just after it.

[00:14:55] David: Yeah. Let’s see. And we might even find that this might be an excuse to do an episode with Ateamate herself, so we’ll see, let’s see what the next episode on this is. 

[00:15:06] Lucie: And Ateamate is one of the lead organisers based in Kenya.

All right, well, thank you very much David.

[00:15:11] David: No, thank you.