Last week, we shared a recap of the African Regenerative Futures Summit where we briefly touched on a collaboration we’ve started with an incredible local tech and developer community. Today, we’d like to share a bit more about what’s going on there and where we are aiming to head together.
During the summit, some of the team gathered together with some leaders from the Dar Es Salaam tech community to discuss challenges and a unique approach to solving them. Among the topics discussed were access and inclusivity, education and training, collaboration and innovation, data ownership, security, sovereignty, costs, approach to funding, and funding models.
With these topics in mind, @kristof brought forward the concept of Dunia Yetu and the Dunia Yetu Coding Academy. “Dunia Yetu” means “Our World” in Swahili.
- The primary goal of the project is to deliver a set of tools and a platform which allows many thousands of coders in East Africa within two years to create their digital sovereign Internet.
- We first need to deploy local infrastructure across Dar Es Salaam, Zanzibar, and eventually throughout Tanzania, on top of which the local tech and developer community can build and host their solutions – no longer relying on centralized cloud providers and data centers located in Europe or North America.
- In addition, the academy will need its own physical space, an innovation lab for collaboration and where educational / training sessions, workshops, and hackathons will be held.
- The academy and project as a whole are founded with strong values and requirements: people and planet first, open source, authenticity, simplicity, inclusivity, sovereignty, and reliability.
This past weekend, some of the team went to Dar to follow up on the first encounter from the summit. Here are some of the highlights from @marionrvrn:
The Dar meeting on Friday underscored the importance of clearly articulating our identity, purpose, and mission. Community is integral to Tanzanian culture, informing our preliminary steps to foster a strong sense of community around Dunia Yetu in the coming weeks. The deployment of the first 100 nodes depends on communicating the significance of this endeavour for Tanzania and how, through collective efforts, we can build a sovereign internet. On Saturday we attended an AI conference organised by the developer community where Florian presented ThreeFold and OurWorld, and we witnessed how dedicated and eager they are to exchange ideas and collaborate. We believe that this community would be open and excited to help with deploying the first 100 nodes.
The group meets on Friday November 24 to discuss the next steps.
Attending the AI conference in Dar on Saturday November 25.
Together the first tasks and steps were decided on and the group has now gotten started on a website and the plan to deploy the first 100 nodes.
While we have only just gotten started together, we’re all quite excited about this project and the example it shows of what can be possible with other communities around the world.
More to come as the journey unfolds …