bag of tricks…

Part of the idea for the Kusasa blog was to create a space for recording ideas and insights that are linked to the Kusasa approach. Kusasa is more that just the content we are creating, it represents a kind of head space. Last night while watching Cameroon trounce Ghana in the African Cup of Nations semi-final I started teasing out the following thoughts:

I am still trying to beat this into shape…

Get kids to solicit and record testimony (text/audio/video?) from people (neighbors, relatives or community members?) who have participated in historical events and use this to augment existing content (Wikipedia?). There is nothing tremendously novel about the interview process, nor the recording process, but what I think might be interesting would be to see how kids react to putting their content out into a space where it adds value - my hope is that kids would be able to add a interesting perspective and a contextual authenticity to information that exists already by interviewing ordinary people whose views and memories may not have been recorded or articulated.

In the South African context, obvious examples would be to interview people who experienced important events first hand or have specific local insight. The 1976 Soweto uprising and the 1994 elections as well as perhaps less visible and more likely to be forgotten events come to mind. The picture of of one of Joburg’s landmarks, was just too cool for me to leave out - here again though it makes one think about the people who live in Hillbrow - their insight and local knowledge are essentially unrecorded in our web2.0 world. I prefer to use existing technology if possible and was wondering if MXit would lend itself to the interview process …

MXit, a cell phone instant messaging client with over 6 000 000 active users, is a phenomenon in South Africa. While discussing the idea outlined above with Steve Vosloo a moment ago it dawned on us that we could an existing MXit service, the “Viewing Room” to allow kids to talk to interesting guests. At present it would seem that this service has been used to talk to local celebrities. Steve and I thought that this platform would be great for interviewing “higher value” guests who would appreciate the ability to talk straight to the MXit user base (mainly youngsters).

With the sheer numbers of MXit users, one should be able host a broad range of guests and cover some fairly esoteric topics. Off the top of my head; Zola and Stephen Otter feel like they could generate some lively debate.

As luck would have it Steven Otter is speaking next week at the Penguin Book Lounge in Cape Town which could be worth attending.