#afrilabs

I/O Spaces partners with AfriLabs to provide African startups with US office space

Silver Spring, Maryland, and Abuja, Nigeria, April 27, 2018.

Today, I/O Spaces and AfriLabs announced a strategic partnership to provide AfriLabs Hub Startups access to I/O’s Creator Community, Events, Classes and Office Space at I/O Spaces US Workspaces in the Washington DC Metropolitan region.  

 The companies will collaborate to deliver a unique cross-continental membership focused on…

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“Apply for the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge 2018! For startups with plans to combat climate change. Sign up by June 1st to participate and stand the chance to win £500,000. Visit: https://t.co/G7pHfuLLhH #PLGC2018 #DPL2018 #Innovation #AfriLabs”

https://plus.google.com/109743855329169559104/posts/FtN1sF62xpM

AfriLabs, le plus grand réseau panafricain de centres de technologie et d’innovation avec près de 60 membres répartis dans 27 pays en Afrique, organise son Assemblée Générale du 18 au 20 Octobre 2017 au Caire en Égypte en partenariat avec l’organisation Hivos, membre d’AfriLabs.

C’est le nouveau visage d’une Afrique qui bouge à travers l’innovation numérique, zoom sur la conférencesur « L’Avenir…

11 Hubs Join AfriLabs Pan-African Network

A total of 11 hubs from across the continent have joined AfriLabs pan-African network.

The new members are: nHub, iBridge and Startpreneurs from Nigeria; Sote Hub and BitHub, Kenya; inCUBE8 Malawi; Lumumba Labs Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); Wenak Labs Chad; The Innovation Village Kampala Uganda; The Tech Village Zimbabwe; and dLab Tanzania.

Welcoming them to the network, Anna…

We just came back from an amazing first day at the annual re:publica conference in Berlin. This year's edition is a special one as it hosts the 'Global Innovation Lounge', a gathering of 20+ TechHubs from all over the world, that is mostly from Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines and mainly Africa: Being a world-premiere, this is the first physical get-together of the AfriLabs network, linking 19 TechHubs from all over Africa. It was actually made possible by the support of the GIZ. 

The past days have been packed with incredibly insightful working sessions already, and today's first public day followed that path. For us at knowable, this year's re:public is somewhat special as well. We had the chance to once again discuss with and listen to Hubs, facilitators and co-working spaces 'on the ground' who openly shared their experiences, challenges, and ideas on Tech, Makers, innovation and collaboration - including activspaces from Cameroon, the iLab from Liberia, a Hackerbus from Brazil and - most prominently perhaps - the iHub from Kenya, whose co-founder Eric Hersman is joining the GIL as well. As you know, Eric and his initiatives like AfriGadget, Ushahidi, etc. sparked the very first ideas to start knowable, so it was a great and special pleasure to finally meet him in person and have the chance to discuss some of our ideas with him.

In addition to all the mingling and talking, we actually had some work to do as well: We held a workshop on 'Nodes and Tools for collaboration: Documenting the Maker Movement'. With 20+ hubs that deal with the challenges of collaboration everyday, we had the perfect participantes to join us. Even though time was scarce we managed to follow up on some discussion we've had before, dealing with the question of how Hubs and facilitators can promote documentation as the basis and prerequisite for collaboration in the field of hardware and practical innovations. We of course linked this back to our findings from the Open Source Hardware Documentation Jam - but we also had some quite interesting and new ideas to build upon form the Hubs themselves: Al Banda from the activspaces brought up the phrase of an 'Open Innovation Library' showcasing successful and failed ideas and projects, and we thought about how this could actually look like. We basically focused on two questions:

1. Why should we document? What are incentives and constraints today?

Competition: By fostering mutual competition and even offering a reward for the most innovative, successful, or interesting ideas, documentation and story telling can be promoted. We also discussed the potential of gamification in this regard - although we did not identify any best-practices where gamification led to more / better documentation of hardware products, there might be some worthwhile potential to it.

Visibility: Through narration, story telling and sharing specific examples, documentation and adaption could be incetivised. The idea of showcasing existing projects and activities, could thereby not only hold positive effects for innovators and makers themselves, but also for Hubs and facilitators in terms of publicity, PR and general attractiveness.

Constrains

Quite obviously, more work: Documentation means additional work, on top of the actual production and manufacturing itself. if there is no direct return in sight that makes this work worthwhile this is likely to lead to no documentation at all - feedback-loops or even monetary returns might bridge this.

Another very interesting thing that came up was the fear of their work not being "good enough" to be documented. Even though documentation does open the way for iteration and collaborative improvement, the perception of their own work not meeting certain standard might often lead to Makers to sharing their ideas in the first place.

2. How do we document? What are requirement for tools for documentation?

Accessibile: The mandatory need for tools, platforms, or files to be highly and openly accessible from everywhere, regardless of location and technical devices.

Shareable: Extensive functionality in embedding, sharing, importing, and exporting data cross networks and platforms

Inclusive: In addition to technical accessibility this points at the fact of inclusion in terms of language, skills, and didactic communication

And eventually fun and an appealing layout and story-telling that is exciting and parks interest and motivation.

Again, these are the condensed results of a brief discussion we had on an extensive topic. However, what was highly valuable was the voice of people on the ground who actually face these issues everyday. We really appreciated their stories and listening to their experiences and we will definitely take this very serious for the further steps of knowable itself.