Last week, a few colleagues and I started a medium.com publication called Tech + Africa. We did this to have a dedicated channel focused on publishing original content from African techies, makers, DIY-ers, and researchers about tech entrepreneurship and making in/from Africa. I talk more about why we did this here. I encourage you to read the first series of posts by a Ghanaian maker-entrepreneur about his visit to the 'Silicon Valley of hardware' - Shenzhen, China. He refle

tl;dr: The public discourse on innovation in Ghana is currently somewhat lopsided, favoring a rigid interpretation of intellectual property rights and fixing commercialization as the measure of impact. I recommend a more flexible approach that includes open source and open access to encouraging collaboration and research. I’m back in Ghana for fieldwork, in part to continue previous work, but mainly to begin working on my new(ish) grant with Silvia Lindtner.. When I was last

*Originally posted on Dec 22, 2016. Repost from the tech.culture.matters site. I’m back in Ghana to continue fieldwork I started in 2012 – documenting & making sense of technology and new media production [see here, here, and herefor published work on this]. This is the end of my third week, and in that time, I’ve (briefly) visited two co-working spaces in the city, attended a couple of industry events, and spoken to some tech entrepreneurs. Given the limited time and data s