FACTCHAStop Spam, Advocate for the MDGs!

Presentation done at BitMagic, iHub Nairobi, by Athman Mohamed30th April 2011

Honorable Mention Award

THE COMPETITION…

CONSIDER THIS…

What is it? Annoying little thing isn’t it? What’s its purpose? What can we take away from such a simple

application? How long would it take any of the coders in this

room take to code it? And at what cost?

THE NOT SO-OBVIOUS LESSONS…

Stops Spam, digitizes books. Time, Effort as a human resource used to do two

useful things at a time (150k hours of work/ day). Simple solutions can solve complex problems. One solution could have two totally un-related uses.

APPLYING THE LESSONS LEARNT TO DATA…

Advocacy = dissemination. Stop Spam, disseminate data. Stop spam, create/collect data? Stop spam, re-purpose data?

EXTENDING THIS TO FACTCHA…

Drag highlighted icon to grey circle. Stop Spam. Advocate for the MDGs. 10 second attention span spent by user completing

FACTCHA used to advocate/disseminate data. How?

HOW FACTCHA ADVOCATES MDGS…

Complete enough online forms as a user and the MDGs are literally etched into your mind.

Interesting facts about the MDGs from the World Bank database served to you on completion.

HOW FACTCHA ADVOCATES MDGS…

Use it on a high-traffic site and you have a direct distribution channel of MDG data to millions of users.

Owners of a high-traffic site stop spam and do good at the same time.

FACTCHA TECHNICAL STUFF… http://demo.modernization.co.ke/factcha/rgstr/ Complete PHP/mySQL toolkit for download and

implementation. Other platforms to be considered. Online tutorial and video tutorials as well. JQuery front-end for now. Encrypted public/secret key client-server exchange. Data by default served off of centralized database at

http://demo.modernization.co.ke Can be implemented using your own local data server.

WHAT NEXT?… Serve online advertisements. Advocate NGO data. Dissemination method for data-visualization site to be

hosted at www.charts.co.ke (currently under development). Dissemination method to www.ubwete.com, an experiment

in a platform for user-driven, targeted online/offline advertisement (currently under development).

Push the opportunity to implement this on key WorldBank websites for the WorldBank data set as a start.

Drupal, Wordpress and other plugins under consideration. Not yet free and open source, but plans to release it under

one of the open source licensing options soon.

FACTCHA FURTHER INFO…

http://demo.modernization.co.ke/factcha/rgstr/ Complete PHP/mySQL toolkit for download and

implementation. Online tutorial and video tutorials as well.

For Further Information, Contact

Athman Mohamed, amohamed@modernization.co.ke

Thanking you for your kind attention.