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

*Repost from tech.culture.matters site. Originally posted October 27, 2016 The Designers of Interactive, Intelligent, Internet of Things (DoIIIT) is a group of faculty and students at the University of Michigan who are “passionate about interactive, intelligent and Internet of things (IoT)”. Two members of the tcm research collective are founding members of this group (Silvia Lindnter is one of the faculty sponsors, Cindy Lin is on the programing board of PhD students). Last

*Repost from the tech.culture.matters page. First posted March 1, 2016 ^This is an edited version of a short talk (less than 10 minutes if I remember correctly) that I gave at a joint University of Michigan and Michigan State University mini-symposium on ICTD on October 30, 2015 about the upcoming ICTD conference to be held in June in Ann Arbor (I’m the program committee). I wanted to talk about bringing more of what tech industries in developing countries are doing into con

*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

Last year I joined an MCubed* project titled 'The unintended consequences of technology' led by Joyojeet Pal, Omolade Adunbi, and Bilal Butt. Today i happened on this…Jon Gosier... TED the question about unequal access... ICT4D or ICTiD #video #technology #ICTD #unequalaccess