Reconstructed Living Lab » admin

Exciting Week awaiting RLabs

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 19:22:05 +0000

This coming week is one with so many exciting things happening at RLabs. Expecting many new innovative events happening this week:
- Monday the Social Media Factory will be doing training with a national non-profit SCAT implementing their Social Media Strategy.
- Tuesday the team will be running a Social Media training session for Small Businesses as well as the long awaited launch of JamiiX one the first commercial products incubated in RLabs. Read story here.
- Wednesday is the arrival of our partners from Namibia who will be spending two days with us.
- Thursday hosting our Namibia partners with the possibility of launch a RLabs in Namibia.
- Friday is Mom 2.0 training and ofcourse a World Cup opening event at RLabs
- Saturday is the Mobile Journalism programme in collaboration with Cape Community Newspapers.

With such a packed week ahead, the RLabs team is looking forward to new partnerships and exploring further how we will use innovation and technology to Reconstruct communities.

Social Media in Khayelitsha with our partners Silulo

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:24:25 +0000

Today the RLabs team was at Silulo Ulutho Technologies out in Khayelitsha (Cape Town’s largest township). The RLabs team was divided into two groups to co-facilitate with the Silulo Ulutho Technologies staff at two of their training centres. This was the follow-up of last week’s session.

The trainers did their first Socail Media session with their clients today (35 people per session). The sessions focused various Social Media activities such as blogging, social networks and micro-blogging. The Silulo staff did exceptionally well with the various training sessions and it seems that they are all good to go to do the training in Khayelitsha in partnership with Rlabs to ensure the Reconstruction of Communities. Well done to the RLabs team.

Source; Inspired by Craig “King” Ross

Social Media Surgery with iGeek

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 21:38:24 +0000

Last week Saturday the RLabs team had the privilege of hosting Gerhard Potgieter from iGeek fame who workshopped monetizing your blog. The Social Media Surgery took a slightly different structure to our last one as it was more focussed on developing the team to develop a sustainable Social Media model for Communities in Tension. Some of the key points during Gerhard’s talk were:

1. focus you blog (niche)
2. be passionate about your subject
3. be obsessed about your topic
4. build a following
5. when you combine all of these you will build a following easily

Over the next few weeks the team will be training a number of community members on how they can maximise the use of their blogs in a self-sustainable way.

World Bank Global Youth Forum

admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 22:21:41 +0000

Yesterday I had the opportunity to share with other global pioneers at the ongoing Global Anti-Corruption Youth Forum in Brussels, Belgium, and to the 5th eLearning Africa conference in Lusaka, Zambia. The three-hour interactive discussion focused on the issue of education, governance and youth. Participants from Malawi, Kenya, Burundi, London and Zambia exchanged ideas on innovative ways of tackling the issue of corruption by educating people using ICT in their respective countries. I was fortunate to travel to Lusaka, Zambia, a beautiful country (See sunrise above) with friendly people. The talk titled Use of Social Media and Innovation to reconstruct Communities in Tension was a great opportunity to share more about the Reconstructed Living Lab(RLabs) and learn from other innovators who participated in the forum.

Social Media for Reconstructing Communities in Tension

View more presentations from Marlon Parker.

The key points identified for Community projects using ICT for education, governance and youth are:

1) Identify Champions on the ground who are able to drive initiatives in the local community
2) Build Capacity and develop the Champions
3) Understand the context and use what you have at hand.
4) Use appropriate technologies and do not push technologies on communities.
5) Collaborations and partnerships with other stakeholders are important for expansion and sustainability of projects
6) Ensure the projects are sustainable by developing business and sustainable models for the community projects.

Overall I really had a wonderful experience meeting great minds from other countries and looking forward to the future partnerships that will emerge through these ongoing World Bank initiatives to reconstruct Fragile Nations.

Source: http://marlonparker.co.za

RLabs training trainers in Khayelitsha

admin — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:15:19 +0000

Below is an extract from Clinton Liederman’s post who is one of the RLabs trainers at Khayelitsha:

Today team RLabs were out once again doing what they do best, “Reconstructing Communities through Innovation.” The team went out to Khayelitsha at Silulo Ulutho Technologies doing Social Media training with their facilitators. The topics covered on Day 1 are listed below:

* Introduction to Social Media by Marlon Parker
* Blogging for Trainers by Craig Ross
* Facebook for Trainers by Clive-Marcus Evertse

Mom3.0 sharing experience

admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:48:48 +0000

Above one of our Mom3.0 participants Gail Gelderbloem shares her experiences with the RLabs team and what she enjoys most of her Cafe sessions at RLabs.

Kujali wins at IST Africa Conference

admin — Sun, 23 May 2010 19:45:45 +0000

After a very productive week at the conference with the Socio-Tech team presenting 3 papers and participating in the e-Health Forum, more exciting news were to follow at the end of one of Africa’s leading Technology Conferences. The SAFIPA sponsored Kujali (means “Care” in Swahili) stand won the “Best Demonstration” award at this leading conference. It was also one of the few selected projects that were demonstrated to the Minister of the Department of Science and Technology, Minister Naledi Pandor (See Image Above). The interest by the minister was very overwhelming and the potential for other areas other than just home-based healthcare was sugguested to be explored.

Throughout the conference the Kujali stand were buzzing with participants of IST Africa who wanted to explore the possibilities of the Home-base Healthcare innovation in various developing contexts. Congratulations and well done to all of the team who attended the conference and those who were working at the Hub taking care of things behind the scenes.

Source: Technology for Community Empowerment

New Media Landscape

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:12:35 +0000

Twitter: what’s all the fuss about?

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:13:32 +0000

Twitter… what's all the fuss about?

View more documents from madebymany.

Crowdsourcing Mobile Solutions for Social Change

admin — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:49:57 +0000

It has been just over a week since the launch of the Betavine Social Exchange crowdsourcing platform for mobile developers addressing challenges by non-profits and organisations for social change. Betavine is a Vodafone programme that is the brainchild of Stephen Wolak, who also refers to this innovative initiative as a “match making” platform linking solutions with problems. With the launch being in South Africa and with the focus on Web and Mobile technology RLabs will be actively involved with the Betavine activities as we explore the use of innovation to reconstruct communities acros our beautiful nation.