Web Adoption Strategy
The African continent has benefited from a tremendous adoption rate and record breaking in the Mobile realm. The question becomes: will the same rules apply for web and the Internet. Of course not, the number of people using personal computers in Africa in proportion to its population is insignificant at the moment. We know the mobile phone has become in some sense the PC of any average African citizen.
Looking for some comments about the different approaches from an infrastructure and capacity perspective as well as from a Value added service context (applications targeted for the Internet)
As to infrastructure and capacity: historically, there has been a huge gap in the ability of most systems to accept African textual data. The same can be said for non-roman scripts in other parts of the world, but whereas industrial standards for typewriters were available and implemented for, say, Burmese, there has not typically been the same level of hardware support for content in African languages (i.e., not just fonts and encoding support, but critically, input and UI display). So workarounds abound, in turn affecting orthographies and data integrity.
Within the context of libraries–and I’d like to know Uche’s thoughts on this–there is a growing recognition of a need to support the exchange of bibliographic data in African languages. Yet it is ironic that systems available to African libraries might be the least likely to be able to accept the data.
Thoughts?
Hi All,
How about a meetup! We will get to know each other and discuss some of the ideas we may have about Wed Adoption. Heck we can start something disruptive !