On the African Diaspora and Cloud Intelligence [ updated ]

Diaspora and the Cloud – Cloud Intelligence Symposium at Ars Electronica from TMS Ruge on Vimeo.

No longer is Africa’s rich cultural heritage, development and identity championed and hijacked by those from outside and treated as a footnote to human history.

Social Media tools are allowing Africa’s Neo Diaspora an opportunity to tell their stories, share their culture, collaborate, and engage in Africa’s development.

For the first time, Africa is contributing it’s collective intelligence to the collective human cloud of knowledge.

Africa’s story is increasingly being told by Africans.

This past week I was in Linz, Austria for Ars Electronica Festival. The theme of this year’s festival was ‘Human Nature.’ As such the Cloud Intelligence Symposium explored mankind’s collective human intelligence and it’s migration to the cloud the subsequent benefits and consequences of this impending migration. More in-depth primers on ‘Cloud Intelligence’ and ‘cloud computing’ can be perused here.

Along with other far more accomplished luminaries and thinkers than myself, we spent a day exploring various aspects of human nature and mankind’s collective intelligence through the use of tools that deliver location independent collaborative solutions and services. In particular, we wanted to explore the use of social media as the new platform for collaboration, integration and communication from various perspectives that ranged from the cloud and Environmentalism the the effects of the cloud and scientific study.

If you were to look at the list of speakers, you will no doubt agree that I was there mainly to learn from their extensive knowledge and perspectives. And learn I did.

Within my capacity of understanding, I shared a bit of knowledge on how the African diaspora is using modern communication tools—web 2.0 tools—like blogs, Twitter, and social networks as a platform for spurring development in Africa. Social Media tools are allowing Africa’s Neo Diaspora an opportunity to tell their stories, share their culture, collaborate, and engage in Africa’s development. No longer is Africa’s rich cultural heritage, development and identity championed and hijacked by those from outside and treated as a footnote to human history. For the first time, Africa is contributing it’s intelligence to the collective human cloud of knowledge. Africa’s story is increasingly being told by Africans. A look at the growing number of Africans that are connected to the internet, albeit nascent by global standards, paints a promising picture that soon a large part of the 900,000,000 Africans on the continent will be online. Until that happens however, a lion’s share of Africa’s cloud participation will be led by it’s very connected and vocal diaspora.

I published my slides to Slideshare if you’d like to take a look at the slide decks.

Update:
There was a round table discussion after the afternoon speakers had finished their individual talks.

A photo gallery of all the shots I took while in Linz is also available here: