I’m a bit late on giving my final thoughts to the WhereCampAfrica event that happened in the middle of June. Anyone who has ever put on an event like this knows what a thankless job it can be, but it was simply amazing to see over 600 people getting together to talk about technology and mapping in Africa. I was working triple duty updating the barcampnairobi web site, running the twitter feed and resolving last minute issues.
Over the two days I met dozens of great local developers ,several potential business connections, watched two World Cup games, drank plenty of Tusker and had a great time. I would encourage everyone to visit the Barcamp Nairobi web site which has an updated list of bloggers and pictures.

I’m already looking forward to 2011 in Nairobi. We are thinking about ways to get more managers and decision makers out to BarCamp. Maybe a Friday night social might draw out folks who normally would not come out over the weekend. Please comment and add suggestions either here or at the event web site. Looking forward to seeing everyone next year.

Today SpatialDev wrapped up its work with the AGCommons program. For those who aren’t familiar with the program it is an initiative to accelerate farmer productivity in sub-Saharan Africa by delivering more locationally relevant, accurate and timely information to small holder farmers. Essentially delivering location based agricultural information to some of the hardest to reach people on the planet.

Several members of our team has been working on this in conjunction with the CGIAR for over two years. From helping to forming the original concept with the Gates Foundation and ITC to delivering GIS and mapping technology to sub-Saharan Africa. The program direction ended as something completely different from what we started with but our team was still able to deliver a hybrid GeoServer & ArcGIS Server both sitting on PostGIS and hosted in the Amazon cloud. Along the way used Maps-On-A-Stick from the DevelopmentSeed, a GeoNetwork portal and DotGo & FrontlineSMS to build SMS interfaces to the spatial data.  We we’re also able to directly meet hundreds of stakeholders including farmers, agricultural extension agents, NGOs and researchers across both East and West Africa.  We hosted the first ever WhereCamp outside of the United States and had a great time.

The team decided mid way through the project that hosting and running everything from the United States and Europe made little sense and was ultimately not sustainable. Eventually we decided to set up a Kenyan based company to maintain the technology and build the program going forward. I’m happy to say that company is now in place and open for business in Africa as AGCommons.org.